Hollywood, The Dream Factory as California Industry

The movie business did not begin in California. It began in New Jersey, in the studios of Thomas Edison and the early independents who licensed his patents. They came west partly to escape his enforcers, and partly because southern California offered something New Jersey could not: three hundred days of sunshine a year, varied terrain, and cheap land.

The first permanent studio in Hollywood was established in nineteen eleven. By nineteen fifteen, eighty percent of all American films were made in California. The industry that grew up around Los Angeles was a statewide phenomenon.

Exterior location shooting ran from the redwood coast to the desert to the Sierra Nevada. The studio system of the nineteen thirties and forties employed hundreds of thousands of Californians in construction, technical, and support roles. At its wartime peak, the industry was the third-largest industry in Los Angeles by employment.

Hollywood both reflected and manufactured the California myth. The dream it sold was often the California dream: sun, reinvention, the possibility of becoming someone new. It attracted waves of migration, from the Midwest, from the South, from Europe.

Many of the studio founders were themselves immigrants, mostly Jewish men from Eastern Europe, who built their empires in a new industry because the established industries were largely closed to them. The political culture of Hollywood was never simple. In the late nineteen forties, the House Un-American Activities Committee targeted the film industry.

Ten screenwriters and directors, the Hollywood Ten, refused to answer the committee's questions and were blacklisted, some serving prison time. The blacklist lasted into the nineteen sixties and destroyed hundreds of careers. The screenwriter Dalton Trumbo was eventually restored to credit on the films Spartacus and Exodus in nineteen sixty, a turning point in the blacklist's collapse.

The industry is still here. The dream factory still runs.