How Hollywood was formed by independent filmmakers who hated Thomas Edison
For over a century, Hollywood has endured as the most famous hub in the world of cinema, the glitzy and glamorous location where every aspiring actor wants to make their name and forge their reputation.
It’s become synonymous with major studios, blockbuster epics, and A-lister superstars, which makes it easy to overlook the fact it became such a prominent hotspot for filmmakers in the first place because they fled from New Jersey in an attempt to escape the clutches of the person who was trying to monopolise the entire industry.
He may be viewed as one of the medium’s founding fathers, but in the broadest sense, Thomas Edison was a bit of a bastard. During the formative years when exhibitors would copy each other’s films and show them to an audience, Edison went out of his way to protect his copyrights and try to gain a stranglehold on all of cinema.
Despite copyrighting his own films, though, Edison had no issues running his competitors into the ground if they tried to encroach on his turf. He played a huge part in bankrupting the influential Georges Méliès, and after an unsuccessful legal challenge against producer Siegmund Lubin, the legislation in the United States was changed so that motion pictures could be subject to copyright claims.
He founded the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908 and secured the backing of nine major studios to form the Edison Trust. As part of its attempt to rule with an iron fist, the trust would try and stop filmmakers from shooting movies without express approval, and Universal alone were hit with almost 300 complaints.
When cinema first gained prominence, New Jersey was viewed as the base of operations, similar to what Hollywood has been for what feels like forever. However, that only happened because an intrepid band of independent filmmakers wanted to stretch their artistic wings without having to deal with any issues stemming from the Edison Trust, so they built their own cameras and headed off to California.
There were still limitations placed on smaller productions due to the patents on raw film and the nationwide reach of Edison’s MPPC, which in turn spurred the growing band of filmmakers who’d decided to chase their dreams in California to lay the foundations for what would eventually become the studio system that dictated Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’.
D.W. Griffith’s In Old California was the first traditional feature to be shot in Hollywood, and thanks to the constant threat of legal action and red tape favoured by Edison and his cohorts, many founding figures of Tinseltown – including Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, and the four Warner brothers – set up shop in California to escape the MPPC’s shadow.
Today, the gap between the biggest and smallest productions has become so vast and cavernous that ‘Hollywood’ and ‘independent cinema’ feel like two diametrically opposed terms, but it wouldn’t have become the place to be if it weren’t for a hardy band of up-and-comers deciding the best way to explore the new format would be to get the hell away from Edison.
