Silent Age of Hollywood

The Silent Age of Hollywood is one of the shorter ones, lasting less than twenty years, yet it would lay the foundation for everything that would follow. It began in 1911, when a number of filmmakers from New York City, seething at the restrictions placed on the industry by Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company, set out for the small town of Hollywood, California to escape the reach of his lawyers. Hollywood was attractive to these filmmakers for several reasons: its perpetually warm and sunny climate allowing for constant film production with little regard to seasonal shifts in the weather, a relative abundance of cheap labor due to its proximity to Mexico, and a favorable court ruling from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (which covered the West Coast) that restricted Edison's ability to enforce patent law there. Another popular early destination, for many of the same reasons, was Hobe Sound, Florida, which was built up into the motion picture production center of "Picture City" during the Florida land boom in The Roaring Twenties. However, the busting of the Florida real estate bubble in 1926, coupled with the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane, derailed these plans.

As early as 1915, the Los Angeles area had outpaced New York in terms of motion picture output, and by the end of the decade, the United States had claimed the title once held by France and Italy (whose film industries had been devastated by World War I) as the film capital of the world. During the Silent Era, Hollywood's "Big Eight" studios emerged -- Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., RKO Radio Pictures, Fox Film Corporation, Universal Pictures, Columbia Pictures, and United Artists. It was also in this era that the "studio system" and the "star system" began to develop, forming the bedrock of Hollywood until the mid-20th century. More information on these systems can be found in the section on the Golden Age of Hollywood, which is when they reached their zenith.

In this era, film truly began to take off as a form of popular entertainment. The 1915 Epic Movie The Birth of a Nation pioneered a long list of filmmaking techniques and tropes, proved that cinema was commercially viable, and stirred a whole pot of controversy with its heavy-duty Unfortunate Implications (which reportedly horrified its director, D. W. Griffith, who directly criticized racism with his follow-up film). Unfortunately, there was also the case of Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio in 1917 that had the US Supreme Court say that film as a medium was not a legitimate form of speech, but merely a product of a business, which made it open season for censorship for decades until the Supreme Court finally corrected this misjudgment in 1952 in the Miracle Decision.

In the 1920s, Hollywood reached a level of film output that has only been matched since then by Bollywood, with over eight hundred feature films being made per year. Notable stars of the silent era included Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Clara Bow and Douglas Fairbanks. The main competition that Hollywood had during this time came from Vaudeville, a popular type of theater show consisting of acts by musicians, dancers, comedians, trained animals, magicians and acrobats. During this era, vaudeville had the chief advantage of having sound to back up what was going on on stage, which film didn't. But not for long...

The Silent Age of Hollywood is generally held to have lasted from 1911, with the opening of the first Hollywood studios, to 1927, with the release of The Jazz Singer, the first "talkie."