7 - 1900-1920 - The Birth Of Hollywood

D.W. Griffith, The Birth Of A Nation (1915)
Image taken from History of Film - David Parkinson
ISBN - 0-500-20277-X

D.W. Griffith, Intolerance (1916)
Image taken from History of Film - David Parkinson
ISBN - 0-500-20277-X

The foundations of Hollywood began around the 1870's, with D.W. Griffith, a producer of a number of successful motion pictures including The Birth Of A Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). Griffith founded the modern technique of the art of motion picture, using a number of innovations introduced by him. These innovations are now used by most professional producers and include a number of different camera angles and expressions. Griffith directed and supervised over 450 films between 1908 and 1913, and set the basic elements of film making that would be used in cinema for over half a Century. However this success only led to failure, as Griffiths films started to become repetitive, old fashioned and conventional. His final film, The Struggle (1931) was such a failure that led him to be exiled from Hollywood for some seventeen years. During Griffiths film making period, a number of other film makers were looking to cash in on American Cinema, even though it had been considered a novelty. These people included Samuel Goldfish, later Goldwyn, and William Fox, who would both lead on to had successful film studios.

With many different studios competing to create great films for the cinema, places to show these motion pictures were on the rise, with the first store front theatre opening in 1905, and around 10,000 other theatres opening by 1910 across the U.S. This boom in film creation along with an easy way to view them, created an audience of around 80 million a week.
This audience caused even more competition amongst film makers, and because of this, George Kleine, a distributor, and several film companies including Vitagraph and Pathé, formed the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), who created a number of patents that narrowed the profits of film to the small group, with the members of the group agreeing not to sell and lease these patents with any independent companies.