Hollywood The Movie Lover's Guide The Ultimate Insider Tour To Movie Los Angeles

Hollywood: Birth of a Boulevard Hollywood Boulevardfrom Vista to Vine In the 1880s, there were ranches, bean fields, orange and lemon groves. It was a peaceful, pastoral placea far cry from the big city called Los Angeles that was growing up just five miles to the southeast. Staunchly conservative, early Hollywood was populated mostly with transplanted Midwesterners. One of these, a prohibitionist from Kansas named Harvey Wilcox, had some 120 acres that his wife had christened "Hollywood" because, so the story goes, she had met a woman on a train who had spoken in glowing terms of her summer home back East called Hollywood. When the Wilcoxes subdivided their property in 1887, the name that Mrs. Wilcox had so fancied was printed on the map advertising the lots the couple was selling for $150 an acre. Hollywoodlike so many communities in Southern Californiawas officially launched as a real estate development. The little community grew steadily, if not dramatically. By 1897, Hollywood had its own post office, and in 1903, the citizens (the population was now close to 700) voted to be incorporated as a city. One of the first things that the officials of this new little "sixth-class" city did was to enact a number of ordinances. Ranging from limiting the hours that billiard and pool rooms could be open to banning the sale of alcoholic beverages, Hollywood's laws rei'ected the essential conservatism of its citizens. When this same citizenry voted in 1910 to have Hollywood annexed by the city of Los Angeles, it wasn't out of any particular fondness for their worldly metropolitan neighbor; it was simply because they needed L.A.'s water and sewer system. Needless to say, when the first movie folk came to town in 1911, these Eastern outsiders of questionable moral character were not exactly welcomed with open arms by Hollywood's straitlaced locals. Indeed, in many ways, this Midwestern town that happened to be in Southern California was, except for the weather, an unlikely candidate to become the movie capital of the world. Ironically, it was Hollywood's conservatism that was indirectly responsible for its first movie studio. For when the Centaur Film Co. of Bayonne, New Jersey, arrived in California in 1911, they found a perfect setup for moviemaking in a former Hollywood tavern that had fallen on hard times owing to the town's tough liquor laws. Besides its main building, the tavern property offered a barn and corral that would facilitate the shooting of Westerns, a group of small outbuildings that could be used as dressing rooms, and a bungalow for additional office space. Within a matter of days, the company was turning out three films a week from what they called the Nestor studio. Universal's founder, Carl Laemmle, was next on the Hollywood scene. Arriving in 1912, Laemmle set up his first West Coast base of operations on the southwest corner of Gower and Sunset, just across the street from the Nestor studio. A year later, a trio made up of Cecil B. DeMille, Jesse Lasky, and Samuel Goldfish (later Goldwyn) also settled in Hollywood and shot the town's first feature-length film, The Squaw Man, based in a barn at the corner of Vine and Selma. As more and more movie people came, the locals who had at first looked down on the film business suddenly found themselves either directly in its employ or involved in businessesfrom rooming houses to restaurantsthat were making money thanks to motion pictures. In a word, Hollywood was boomingand the little Midwestern town in Southern California would never be the same again. By 1920, Hollywood's population had grown to 36,000. By the end of the twenties it would swell to over 150,000. As Hollywood made tAlleman, Richard is the author of 'Hollywood The Movie Lover's Guide The Ultimate Insider Tour To Movie Los Angeles', published 2005 under ISBN 9780767916356 and ISBN 0767916352.