What was the first Hollywood movie?
When you hear the word ‘movies’, likely the place that immediately springs to mind is Hollywood. While thousands of brilliant films are produced every year entirely independent from Hollywood, the Los Angeles neighbourhood known as Tinseltown has become synonymous with the cinema industry.
Hollywood and its surrounding area host all five major American film studios: Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros, Disney and Sony. And the place has been hosting more cinematic productions than anywhere else for over a century.
But that wasn’t always the case. Following the invention of prototype motion picture cameras in the 1890s, the first developments in narrative filmmaking happened in Paris, France. The leading exponent of this work, Georges Méliès, has been cited by Martin Scorsese as one of the inventors of cinema. Scorsese’s 2011 movie Hugo includes Méliès and his most famous narrative film Le voyage dans la lune in its plot.
Meanwhile, the first narrative films in the United States, such as 1903’s The Great Train Robbery, were typically made in New York. It was in the city of New York that the first American film producer, Edison Manufacturing Company, started by the father of US motion pictures, Thomas Edison, was based.
Edison later created a corporate trust involving all the major American motion picture companies, which arose in the 1900s. One of these companies, Biograph, was founded by William Kennedy Dickson, an assistant-turned-rival to Edison who had helped pioneer moving images during the previous decade.
Dickson’s main cameraman, Billy Bitzer, met a 33-year-old jobbing actor by the name of David Wark Griffith in 1908. Through a series of happy accidents, Griffith found himself directing 48 short movies for Biograph by the end of the year. It was Bitzer who ascribed to Griffith the famous quote, “A film without a message is just a waste of time.”
How pictures headed out west
The following year, while travelling around southern California, Griffith fell in love with a tiny village called Hollywood. He decided to shoot his 17-minute western film In Old California there in 1910.
The movie, which depicts colonial-era Spanish California, was thought lost for almost a century until it was rediscovered in the early 2000s. This discovery helped put the spotlight on In Old California as the first film shot entirely in Hollywood.
Previously, a legend had perpetuated that Cecile B. DeMille’s first film as director, 1914’s feature-length western The Squaw Man, was the first Hollywood movie. While it can lay claim to the title of the first Hollywood feature, In Old California precedes it by four years.
Following Griffith’s decision to shoot a film in Hollywood, independent filmmakers began moving there to get around the cartel of major studios Edison had created on the East Coast of the US. Film studios began opening there between 1911 and 1914. Griffith returned there to shoot his controversial epic The Birth of a Nation, infamous for its racist portrayal of the Southern Slave States, in nearby San Fernando Valley.
By the 1920s, American filmmaking irrefutably belonged to Hollywood. Alongside Méliès, Scorsese would go on to name Griffith as the other director he considered one of the two inventors of cinema. Although that title might be up for debate, there’s no question about the central role DW Griffith played in making an insignificant township on the outskirts of Los Angeles the global epicentre of movie-making.
