Hollywood is a district of the city of Los Angeles, California, located northwest of the city center.
The population is estimated at 300,000 units (the Los Angeles districts have no official borders). Although it is not a city, but a district, it is called "The city of V.I.P." or "Tinseltown" and the first of the majority of American films take place in his cinemas. In addition, the Oscars are presented in the namesake annual ceremony. It is in fact also called "The Mecca of cinema".
It consists of low buildings and wide streets and avenues at the edge of the two famous streets, Sunset Boulevard and Wilshire Boulevard; inside it collects the great stages of installation (21 in the period of maximum prosperity) and the homes of actors, directors and producers, usually located on the slopes of the nearby hill of Beverly Hills.
HISTORY
The name Hollywood (which literally means "holly wood") would have been coined in 1886 by the entrepreneur Hobart Johnstone Whitley, called the "father of Hollywood" for the great works he created like the Hollywood Hotel and the Bank of Hollywood. The name was then used officially for the first time on a notarial deed by H.H. Wilcox, when he set up his 160-hectare farm in 1887.
Starting in the 1920s, the history of Hollywood came to intertwine with the history of American cinema: at the end of the nineteenth century Hollywood still had to be a ranch, which became a village only at the beginning of the next century.
The demographic increase and the fame of "cinema mecca" arrived not much later, in 1910, more or less thanks to the struggle for the film patents, unleashed in the United States in those years (exactly in 1907): the one that then it represented the most powerful company, the Motion Picture Patents Company, monopolized all patents, preventing competitors from making films; from New York and more from Chicago (which was then the center of film production) independent producers began to relocate with their troupe in California, a state where the MPPC monopoly was not legally valid, and that was how they came to Hollywood. The village was chosen both for its favorable climatic conditions and for its proximity to the sea, to the mountains and to the desert (that of Mojave), environments that lent themselves clearly as excellent natural backgrounds to shoot the "exterior" for the various cinematic strands.
Already in 1920 Hollywood had become the center of the American film industry par excellence, and here the phenomenon of divism was born and developed on a large scale, but not without some negative consequences. Although it was sought after for the luxury and popularity that the largest production machine for the big screen could offer, all fueled by the worldly news and advertising press offices, we should not forget the immense crowd of beggars who, coming from all parts of America but also from Europe, waiting in vain for the right opportunity to enter the world of cinema: even famous writers, called Hollywood, adapted to the lives of subject writers and screenwriters and often the work was not even used (it is the case by Scott Fitzgerald). The producers reigned over everything, before the artistic reasons evaluated the commercial qualities of a work. Since the 1930s Hollywood studios have developed a way of making films that is still a reference point all over the world: classic narrative cinema.
The history of Hollywood is marked by a gradual but almost unstoppable decline of his fortune after World War II. There were multiple reasons for this decadence, including an antitrust law that, by preventing the concentration of numerous economic activities related to the cinema in the hands of a few industries, caused a crisis of the big film companies; to this was added the competition of the television and the separation of the youth audience. As a result, the reduction in the number of films produced, the shift of numerous productions to New York or Europe, the closure of numerous studies were inevitable.
In the seventies there was an improvement in the situation; the film producers, in fact, managed to overcome the crisis at all the different levels listed. The productions were followed by policies of decentralization of activities, with extensive appeals to television productions (many TV series that we see today on our television screens are produced by the great Hollywood houses). Hollywood remains, however, the dream of hundreds of those who wish to make a career "on the big screen", the largest center of film production in the past and present, the home of the film par excellence.
