Producers in Hollywood c. 1919

At the beginning of the 20th century Hollywood was an idyllic, unincorporated backwater in which movie theatres were banned. This changed with its merger with Los Angeles in 1910. Thereafter, it became an unwitting beneficiary of an exodus of the nascent film industry from its original hub in New York/New Jersey. This was prompted by the monopolistic powers exercised there by Thomas Edison, who held patents for the original movie camera, the Kinetoscope, and other technology required by the film industry. In what was then a small world, many of Hollywood’s ‘founding fathers’ had worked together back east. Vitagraph Studios migrated from Brooklyn. Robert Brunton (whose studio would eventually by acquired by Paramount Pictures) was originally art director for Thomas Ince (whose studio would be inherited by Cecil B DeMille). The Lasky Feature Play Company, founded 1913, made the first all-Hollywood movie, The Squaw Man in 1914. D. W. Griffith made Birth of a Nation in 1915, before joining Charley Chaplin and others to form United Artists (1919).