This is a short history of Hollywood from the pre-Hollywood days of Thomas Edison to the world of ubiquitous online video. It discusses many films and filmmakers, but the main focus is on the big picture: the adoption of new technologies, responses to competition from independent filmmakers, and the impact of the political and cultural tumult of Hollywood’s first century. One advantage of a short history is that readers can get an overview before delving more deeply into specific periods or questions. Another advantage is that compressing the history allows us to see patterns that might be lost in a longer work.
Trying to give a complete and up-to-the-minute history, I have synthesized the latest academic research and theories about Hollywood into what I hope is a readable text. I have also drawn on my own books, class lectures, and thinking about film and media history. So even readers who are familiar with the names, films, and events of Hollywood’s history should find much that is new in this book. I begin with five briefly stated observations about how and why Hollywood has developed before launching into the history.
Why did 35mm become the standard width of Hollywood film? Why are feature films usually 90–120 minutes long? Why are movie stars used to sell films and television shows? The earliest histories of Hollywood relayed stories of pioneers uncovering essential filmmaking techniques through experimentation and discovery. But there is nothing natural or inevitable about the way moving images are used to tell stories. No individual or group of people discovered filmmaking. Historical, cultural, economic, and political forces all came together to shape the art and industry of Hollywood.
Making movies is an inherently risky business. Once Procter & Gamble developed Pringles potato chips, the company could keep stamping them out forever. But film is neither a commodity nor a stable enterprise. Research and development rarely pay off, and the success of one film does not ensure the success of the next one. Much of the design of Hollywood’s studio system can be explained as strategies for managing the risks entailed in creating expensive, collaborative, and unique products. Hollywood’s reliance on movie stars and genre films are only the most obvious attempts to build some predictability into moviemaking and the moviegoing experience. Most elements of the studio system have been developed to minimize risk and ensure predictability, including the creation of an organization to police the morality of films, the concentration of ownership through mergers and acquisitions, the cultivation of media franchises, and the leveraging of audience data.
Hollywood has always been a global business based in Los Angeles. After World War I, Hollywood established a worldwide distribution network that has only grown more complete during the past century. And other countries’ attempts to place limits on the circulation of Hollywood films through quotas or financial regulation have rarely been effective. From very early on, Hollywood made films to appeal to a global audience, and its talent magnet has consistently brought the world’s best actors, directors, and writers to Los Angeles. Since the 1910s, the US government has devoted significant resources to helping Hollywood succeed as a global industry, and Hollywood is sometimes seen as a mechanism for Americanizing the world. But the studio system has always been both a receptacle for and a disseminator of global culture, equally Hollywoodizing America and the rest of the world.
Movies have also always been one medium in a chain of “transmedia” storytelling and consumption. The earliest films were adapted from news stories, cartoons, and popular theater. They were shown in vaudeville houses and at fairgrounds, and they were used to sell cigarettes, clothing, and other merchandise. To take one perfect example, when Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) premiered, the company had merchandising agreements with more than seventy different companies, including makers of dinnerware, toys, and storybooks. In the 1960s, studios became part of multimedia conglomerates intent on producing what have come to be called “tent-pole franchises:” stories and characters that unfold across all of a company’s divisions. The internet has drawn media consumers into the transmedia process as well, and fans create and share their own remixes and mashups as an essential part of the Hollywood ecosystem. Warner Bros. profits come from advertising placed next to feminist retellings of the Harry Potter series as well as from theater ticket sales and television licensing.
Hollywood is in a state of constant change and perpetual crisis. There is always a new technology, an independent film movement, or a global financial crisis on the horizon. And yet for over a century the studio system has not only remained intact; it has grown more powerful and pervasive. To be sure, some studios have gone under and others are relatively young, but since the 1910s eight or so companies have controlled the vast majority of the media consumed around the world. Competition from independent companies, new media platforms, and even piracy have been a constant part of Hollywood’s history, always challenging the system to change and grow. And despite the alarmist rhetoric that has been a staple of Hollywood culture, the studio system has long been and is likely to remain at the top of the global media economy.