Hollywood

Today, Hollywood is the centre for industrial film-making and has been for decades. America was a pioneer in the distribution of films to a wide audience, with some of the first advances into movies with sound.
During the Second World War, America only joined in 1917, three years after the start of conflict. This gave a distinct advantage in the line of cinema production, as those three years could be used to create films, while other European counterparts were occupied in fighting a war. Money also came pouring into the US economy as arms could be sold to other countries, which became apparent when comparing the quality of US films to those from other countries.
Other advantages included the fact that America spoke the more universal language of English, so American films appealed to a wider audience, and didn’t include a mixture of languages and accents.
In the earliest days of the American film industry, New York was the centre of film-making. People began moving west in order to avoid the fees imposed by Thomas Edison, who owned patents on the movie-making process. California was found to be an ideal spot for filming, with better year-round weather, large open spaces and more varied landscape.
Once established as the centre of film production in America, Hollywood could only grow bigger. Studios and offices were built in abundance allowing future production to be made with ease. The use of the studio system technique of film production was dominant in the 1920s through the 1950s. It involved studios producing movies primarily on their own filmmaking lots with creative personnel often under long-term contract and also pursuing ownership or effective control of distributors and movie theaters, guaranteeing additional sales of films through manipulative techniques. They could also sign a star so that they could only act in movies made by a particular studio. However, a 1948 Supreme Court ruling against those distribution and exhibition practices bid the end of the studio system.
The “Big 5” studios were RKO, Warner Bros, Parmount, MGM and 20th Century Fox. There were also the “Little 3” who were Universal Pictures, Columbia Pictures and United Artists.