Movie studio
A Movie studio is a location, room, building, or group of buildings and/or sound stages, offices and storage facilities, which may include a backlot, where movies are made. It is also the company that produces, promotes and distributes movies.
In 1893, Thomas Edison built the first movie studio in the USA when he constructed a small, tarpaper-covered structure near his laboratories in West Orange, New Jersey, and asked circus, vaudeville and dramatic actors to perform for the camera. He distributed these movies at vaudeville theatres, penny arcades, wax museums and fairgrounds. Other studio operations followed in New Jersey, New York City and Chicago, Illinois.
But in the early 1900s, companies started moving to Los Angeles, California, because of the good weather and longer days. Although electric lights existed at that time, none were powerful enough to adequately expose film; the best source of illumination for motion picture production was natural sunlight. Some movies were shot on the roofs of buildings in Downtown Los Angeles. Another reason that early movie producers located in Southern California was to escape Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company, as he owned almost all the patents relevant to movie production at the time. The distance from New Jersey made it more difficult for Edison to enforce his patents.
The first movie studio in the Hollywood area was Nestor Studios, which was opened in 1911 by Al Christie for David Horsley. In the same year, another fifteen Independents settled in Hollywood. Other studios eventually settled in such towns and districts in the Los Angeles area as Culver City, Burbank and Studio City in the Valley.
The advent of the talkies in the late 1920s launched a round of mergers in the movie industry, reshaping the Hollywood studio system. Five large companies, Fox (later 20th Century Fox), Loew’s Incorporated (later Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), Paramount Pictures, RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) and Warner Bros., functioned as producers, promoters, distributors and exhibitors. Universal Studios, Columbia Pictures and United Artists were also important, but exerted less control since they did not own their own theaters to play only the movies of their own studio and movie stars.
The Big Five's studio owned theaters were opposed by eight independent producers, which included Samuel Goldwyn, David O. Selznick, Walt Disney and Walter Wanger, and in 1948 the U.S. government won a case against Paramount in the Supreme Court, the ruling being that this high level of power constituted a monopoly and was therefore against the law, which effectively ended the studio system.
With the collapse of the Hollywood studio system because of antitrust, movie production was taken over by companies that put together teams on a project-to-project basis, usually renting space from some of the great studios of the Golden Age, which is still the norm today.
By the mid-1950s, when television proved a profitable enterprise that was here to stay, movie studios started also being used for the production of programming in that medium. Some studios established their own TV production units, such as Columbia with Screen Gems.
Some early movie studios
See also
