Hollywood fled west to escape Edison's patent police
America's movie capital did not begin in California. Early studios clustered in Fort Lee, New Jersey, until inventors' patents made filming near New York risky. Mild winters, varied scenery, and a short hop to the Mexican border pulled production west—and war-weakened Europe left the field open.
By the early twentieth century, the United States film business—soon nicknamed Hollywood—was already bending global taste. Classical studio style born in the 1910s still shapes many American pictures. France's Lumière brothers often get credit for launching modern cinema, yet American production scaled fast. In 2024 the country made 544 national features, ranking fourth worldwide behind India, Japan, and China. English-language industries in Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand sit outside the Hollywood studio system even when they share a language.
Commerce concentrates in five conglomerate majors—Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros., Disney, and Sony—that dominate domestic box office. Adjusted for inflation, Gone with the Wind (1939) remains the top earner. Sound arrived early: The Jazz Singer (1927) was the first sync-sound musical. Critics still put Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) near the top of all-time lists. D. W. Griffith helped codify film grammar, and the thirty-mile Los Angeles zone became the industry's long-term home.
Geography was strategy. Commercial exhibition began in New York in 1894 with Edison's kinetoscope. Edison's Black Maria in West Orange was an early studio; Fort Lee thrived once Kalem shot there in 1907 and Champion built a plant in 1909. Patent enforcement near Edison's base pushed independents west. Los Angeles offered year-round sun and escape routes; by 1912 most majors had Southern California facilities. Griffith filmed In Old California in Hollywood in 1910; Nestor opened a Hollywood neighborhood studio in 1911. World War I damage in Europe and a stronger 1918 flu response in Los Angeles further tipped the balance. At mid-1940s peak, studios released about four hundred films a year to roughly ninety million weekly American viewers.
Source: Cinema of the United States
