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EntertainmentIndustry.name
Though Southern California’s locale and aura have become synonymous with show business, Hollywood is by no means the birthplace of the entertainment industry. Our fascination with moving pictures actually started on the East Coast at the end of 19th century with Thomas Edison’s projecting kinetoscope.
Much to Edison’s chagrin, he lost control of his precious intellectual property when the Midwest jumped on the bandwagon and popularized Nickelodeons. As the public’s appetite for these “nickel theaters” grew, Edison began a begrudging but proactive campaign to protect his patents. He united the ten biggest operations into “The Trust” to control distribution, exhibition and pricing.
Independent moviemakers fled to the Wild West to get as far away as they could from the monopoly back east. Southern California, with its ubiquitous sunshine and buffet of landscapes, turned out to be a perfect new capital for filmmaking. Panoramic outdoor shooting became a mainstay — and the fact that they could see enforcers coming for miles away — and beat them to the Mexican border with all their equipment in tow — was just an added benefit.
Edison’s “Trust” lost more ground when German-born Carl Laemmle turned the anonymous performers of his films into movie “Stars,” essentially launching the cult of celebrity as we know it today. Capitalizing on their fame and newfound power, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin took the star system one step further by banding together with D.W. Griffith to form United Artists, essentially the first real studio.
The first screenwriters were “scenarists” for silent movies. Motion picture companies developed internal story departments and hired (and fired) writers. As the silent film era bowed to “talkies,” studios sought writers who had established themselves in other media. They turned to New York to lure novelists, journalists — and especially playwrights for their expertise in dialogue. Many of these professionals proficient in other literary disciplines failed miserably as it became clear that screenwriting was its own unique craft.
In 1933, a Screen Writers Guild was formed but they lacked any real power until they merged with The Authors' League’s radio and television groups in 1954 to create the Writers Guild of America, as we know it today.
Screenwriters’ perpetual struggle for respect and power worsened with the decline of the studio system, the black-listings of The House Committee on Un-American Activities and the raging debate over whether the writer or the director was the auteur of the film. In an effort to protect their original vision, the integrity of their work, and undeniably their profit participation, the era of the multi-hyphenate (writer-director or writer-producer) was ushered in.
See: Evolution of the Independent Producer
See: New Distribution Strategies
See: The Hollywood Power Grid
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