Hollywood's beginnings were inauspicious. The city was a farm town of 5,000 people when Francis Boggs of the Selig Polyscope Company shot several scenes in Southern California for The Count Of Monte Crisco in 1908. He had decided Chicago's climate was inhospitable for his filming.

Cecil B. DeMille, one of the early Hollywood powerhouses, was so determined to take advantage of Hollywood's favorable climate that in 1913 he filmed The Squaw Man in a rented Hollywood barn.

Soon a steady stream of producers, actors and technicians was flowing into town, swelling the size of Hollywood. Carl Laemmle, Marcus Leow, William Fox and Adolph Zucker founded the four companies that have dominated the industry for 75 years: Paramount, Universal, Leow's-MGM and Fox.

The movie industry certainly was never without controversy. As early as 1903 the Chicago Tribune complained that movies were "without a redeeming feature to warrant their existence."

Nevertheless, by 1919 Hollywood was the world capital of film making; the location of four out of every five movies. Salaries for actors were rising as they became famous. Still, Lillian Gish rented a 5 room apartment in Hollywood on Hope street because she said it was cheap and she could ride the streetcar back and forth to the studio where she worked.

By the mid 1910's, known actors and actresses were demanding and getting $250 - $500 a week. They had to have definite personalities and no amount of technique or even physical beauty could compensate for its absence.

With the advent of the 1920's came the Jazz Age with films like Our Dancing Daughters starring Joan Crawford. It capitalized on the phenomenom of short skirts, short hair, country clubs, nightclubs, speakeasies, cocktail parties and new social rules.

In the 1920's, Warner Brothers made a risky, but critical leap to shore up their shoestring budget. They gambled on sound. The risk paid off. By 1928 three hundred theaters were wired to show the first so-called talkies. The stars proceeded into them cautiously, with some like Marlene Dietrich making the change easily and others like John Gilbert made a target by frustrated studios.

In the early 1930's, gangster films dominated the screen. Later that decade, as hopes for the nation's recovery from the Depression grew, images of the Old West came into vogue.

As the 1940's, musicals became popular, so Hollywood saw a vast migration of musical talent from Broadway, including George and Ira Gershwin and Cole Porter. This migration of starry-eyed movie wannabe's would continue from around the country unabated to the present day.

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