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The cinema of the United States, often generally referred to as Hollywood,
has had a profound effect on cinema across the world since the early 20th
century. Its history is sometimes separated into four main periods: the silent
film era, classical Hollywood cinema, New Hollywood, and the contemporary
period. While the French Lumi¨¨re Brothers are generally credited with the birth
of modern cinema, it is indisputably American cinema that soon became the most
dominant force in an emerging industry. Since the 1920s, the American film
industry has grossed more money every year than that of any other country.
In
1878, Eadweard Muybridge demonstrated the power of photography to capture
motion. In 1894, the world's first commercial motion picture exhibition was
given in New York City, using Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope. The United States was
in the forefront of sound film development in the following decades. Since the
early 20th century, the U.S. film industry has largely been based in and around
Hollywood, Los Angeles, California. Picture City, FL was also a planned site for
a movie picture production center in the 1920s, but due to the 1928 Okeechobee
hurricane, the idea collapsed and Picture City returned to its original name of
Hobe Sound. Director D. W. Griffith was central to the development of film
grammar. Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) is frequently cited in critics'
polls as the greatest film of all time.6
American screen actors like John
Wayne and Marilyn Monroe have become iconic figures, while producer/entrepreneur
Walt Disney was a leader in both animated film and movie merchandising. The
major film studios of Hollywood are the primary source of the most commercially
successful movies in the world, such as Gone with the Wind (1939), Star Wars
(1977), Titanic (1997), and Avatar (2009). Today, American film studios
collectively generate several hundred movies every year, making the United
States the third most prolific producer of films in the world, after Indian
Cinema (Hindi Cinema, Tamil Cinema, Telugu Cinema, Malayalam Cinema etc.) and
Nigerian Cinema.
In early 1910, director D. W. Griffith was sent by the
Biograph Company to the west coast with his acting troupe, consisting of actors
Blanche Sweet, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore and others. They
started filming on a vacant lot near Georgia Street in downtown Los Angeles.
While there, the company decided to explore new territories, traveling several
miles north to Hollywood, a little village that was friendly and enjoyed the
movie company filming there. Griffith then filmed the first movie ever shot in
Hollywood, In Old California, a Biograph melodrama about California in the 19th
century, when it belonged to Mexico. Griffith stayed there for months and made
several films before returning to New York. After hearing about Griffith's
success in Hollywood, in 1913, many movie-makers headed west to avoid the fees
imposed by Thomas Edison, who owned patents on the movie-making process.9
In
Los Angeles, the studios and Hollywood grew. Before World War I, movies were
made in several U.S. cities, but filmmakers gravitated to southern California as
the industry developed. They were attracted by the mild climate and reliable
sunlight, which made it possible to film movies outdoors year-round, and by the
varied scenery that was available. There are several starting points for cinema
(particularly American cinema), but it was Griffith's controversial 1915 epic
Birth of a Nation that pioneered the worldwide filming vocabulary that still
dominates celluloid to this day.
In the early 20th century, when the medium
was new, many Jewish immigrants found employment in the U.S. film industry. They
were able to make their mark in a brand-new business: the exhibition of short
films in storefront theaters called nickelodeons, after their admission price of
a nickel (five cents). Within a few years, ambitious men like Samuel Goldwyn,
William Fox, Carl Laemmle, Adolph Zukor, Louis B. Mayer and the Warner Brothers
(Harry, Albert, Samuel, and Jack) had switched to the production side of the
business. Soon they were the heads of a new kind of enterprise: the movie
studio. (It is worth noting that the U.S. had at least one female director,
producer and studio head in these early years, Alice Guy-Blach¨¦.) They also set
the stage for the industry's internationalism; the industry is often accused of
Amero-centric provincialism.
Other moviemakers arrived from Europe after
World War I: directors like Ernst Lubitsch, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang and
Jean Renoir; and actors like Rudolph Valentino, Marlene Dietrich, Ronald Colman
and Charles Boyer. They joined a homegrown supply of actors ¡ª lured west from
the New York City stage after the introduction of sound films ¡ª to form one of
the 20th century's most remarkable growth industries. At motion pictures' height
of popularity in the mid-1940s, the studios were cranking out a total of about
400 movies a year, seen by an audience of 90 million Americans per week.
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