3. Where is Hollywood? (Chapter2: Making Movies)

Movies were a new thing and just starting to become popular. (p. 22)


    This book has ten chapters covering how Hollywood was founded and some fun facts about the best known film industry.

    There was a great migration to Los Angeles in the early 1900s, and some filmmakers in the East wanted to move there. At that time, an action-packed thriller film titled The Great Train Robbery of 1903 was released, and it was a landmark although it lasted for only 12 minutes. Some directors in New York and New Jersey were after a better spacious place for filming where there was no weather-related problem so that filmmakers could do a lot of filming outdoors. No other place could not be epitomized except for Los Angeles. The weather was great even in winter, and LA had various kinds of scenery: mountains, canyons, deserts, The Pacific Ocean. In 1877, Thomas Edison, one of the most famous inventors, invented the phonograph. By the late 1880s, he was inventing a camera which could take moving pictures as well as a projector to display them on a large screen. Moviemakers were desperate for the new camera, and theatre owners wanted to use the movie projector so that a lot of people could watch a movie at the same time. However, Edison ensured nobody could not use those inventions without paying him a  fee. Against his order about his inventions, some sneaky movie directors headed to LA, where Edison's lawyers would have difficulty finding them, and started to filming with the new camera. 

    An American film producer, Cecil B. DeMille, was looking for a place which had many outdoor locations and was suitable for filming. Like the abovementioned directors, he moved to the area around LA, where he would not have to cease production due to rain or snow. On December 29th, 1913, they started filming. DeMille was adequate to creating interesting characters, settings, and plots. His codirector, Oscar Apfel, was well versed in filming faraway shots, medium shots and eye-level shots. At that time, every movie was in black and white and were silent as well. That means no actors had to spoke lines and audiences in theatres had to read important parts of the story on cards which appear on the screen. That being said, it does not mean there was no sound. Filmmakers usually wrote music scores, and piano players or small orchestras sometimes played the music as the film was shown. They created a seventy-four-minute-long film entitled The Squaw Man, which was considered Hollywood's first feature (full-length) film.



Anastasio, Dina. (2019). Where is Hollywood?. New York, NY: Penguin Workshop.

(Illustrated by Tim Foley)

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