How Edison Hollywood Created Against Their Will

How Edison Hollywood created against their will

The voracity of Thomas Alva Edison to control all types of businesses made throughout his life register more than a thousand patents for inventions and create a number of companies.

But the image of bright and enterprising man conflicted with his other face, the speculator who attempted to take advantage, in more than one occasion, the work done by others, patented inventions endless as their own and creating many control networks to monopolize all sectors economic contexts in which he was involved.

His major contributions to the early film industry served to make it a big business, but also to make, involuntarily, settled in a number of Hollywood producers who fled from extortion to which they were subjected by Edison. He moved to this land with undeveloped film business transforming it into what would a century later known as the ‘Mecca of cinema’.

Since 1894, the Lumière brothers, Auguste and patenting the cinematographer Lois, Edison was interested in getting permits to expand its business operation after having patented the Kinetoscope, developed by William Kennedy Dickson while working for Edison.

The desire of the prolific entrepreneur, having the largest piece of new business, made him a man of doubtful scruples and where he highlighted his desire to tax collection, imposing a levy on all producers who acquired a license to use the movie business and that were created in the cities of New York and New Jersey.

This led to an exodus of film entrepreneurs looking for new places where they can freely exercise their business outside the blackmail blackmailer who were being subjected.

Yankee Film Company of Carl Laemmle in 1909 (Wikimedia Commons)
On more than one occasion, when a businessman did not want to pay the rate of exploitation of the business that Thomas Edison had been imposed, it would send a hit man to solve the problem.

This led to a handful of entrepreneurs to move to the West Coast, where different populations were divided by the sunny state of California.

The population was more entrepreneurs hosted Los Angeles, a city which was then in full expansion and have all the services needed to create a movie studio, but mostly it was a place where they would be safe from the famous “rate Edison “, which could only be applied to the East Coast.

At the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the first commercial films were already being filmed by the Edison Company in the Atlantic Studios and producers who were able to stay afloat in its new location on the Pacific side.

A Los Angeles began to get the first entrepreneurs interested in setting up his studies, so finding the perfect venue sent them a few to the northern district of the city, expanding urbanization and had to sell many land at affordable prices.

One of the first to ride his film studio was Carl Laemmle, the producer who created “Yankee Film Company” which was the precursor to five years later than the Universal City, eventually becoming the famous Universal Studios.

The growing film industry helped build new housing, more and more north of the city of Los Angeles, which led, in 1923, a clever developer called HJ Whitley, placed a huge letters on the hill on the land sale to announce the name of urbanization: Hollywoodland.

Over the years the site had lost the ‘land’, leaving letters for posterity and making the place a mecca of cinema.