California (Los Angeles Area)

Hollywood

If a single place-name encapsulates the LA dream of glamour, money and overnight success, it’s Hollywood. Millions of tourists arrive on pilgrimages; millions more flock here in pursuit of riches and glory. Hollywood is a weird combination of insatiable optimism and total despair.

It really does blur the edges of fact and fiction, simply because so much seems possible – and yet so little, for most people, actually is. Those who do strike it rich here get out as soon as they can, just as they always have; the big film companies, too, long ago relocated well away, leaving Hollywood in isolation, with prostitution, drug dealing and seedy bookstores as the reality behind the fantasy.

A brief history of Hollywood

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Hollywood started life as a temperance colony in 1887, intended to provide a sober, God-fearing alternative to raunchy downtown LA, eight miles away by rough country road. The film industry was drawn here from the East Coast by the guaranteed sunshine, low taxes, cheap labor and diverse assortment of natural locations, and as a way of dodging restrictive patent laws. Although nearby Silverlake was the first – temporary – location for the movie business, the first permanent studio opened in Hollywood in 1911, and within three years the place was packed with filmmakers – such as Cecil B DeMille, who shared his barn-converted office space with a horse.

The ramshackle industry expanded fast, and eager new arrivals soon swamped the original inhabitants, outraging them with their hedonistic lifestyles. Once movie-making had proved itself to be a financially secure business – with the success of D W Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation in 1915 – film production became highly specialized. Small companies either went bust or were incorporated into big studios.

Hollywood’s enduring success is in making slick, pleasurable movies that sell – from the hard-bitten film noir of the 1940s to the new creativity of filmmakers such as Francis Ford Coppola and Quentin Tarantino. Ultimately, though, it’s been big names, big bucks and conservatism that have kept Hollywood alive, and with a careful eye trained on the box office, the modern American film industry rarely even thinks about taking artistic risks – even though financial ones are constant and often foolhardy.
 

UNIVERSAL CITY
The city is named after the film studio, sections of which have been converted into the theme park Universal Studios Hollywood and the recently created retail, dining, and entertainment center, Universal CityWalk.

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