How Thomas Edison Built Hollywood
And why celebrities today do not live in West Orange, New Jersey
Perhaps one of the most amazing pieces of Hollywood lore isn’t mythology at all, but the unlikely story of how a famous inventor let his greed push the movie industry to find a new home. This is how West Orange, New Jersey, lost its claim to being the epicenter of the American film business and how Hollywood emerged.
Thomas Edison patented the many inventions that made moving pictures possible. His first movie-related inventions were made in the 1890s. We all know Edison as the genius inventor who gave us the incandescent light blub, but few of us ever learned in school that Edison was a cut-throat businessmen. He generally sold his inventions to the highest bidder, even reneging on deals if he got a better offer later on. He once invented a super telegraph device that could send four telegrams simultaneously. He sold it to Western Union in 1874, but when another company offered more for the invention Western Union just purchased, he took that deal back and tried to sell to the higher bidder. In this case, years of litigation brought the four-plex telegraph invention back to Western Union, the rightful owner, but not until Edison had dragged everyone through court a few times.
The Edison Labs were prolific invention factories. Edison and his assistant, William Kennedy Dickson, invented the kinetoscope which allowed them to create motion pictures without sound (synching sound to images would turn out to be tricky work and would come later). Using his kinetoscope camera, Edison could make short motion pictures, which he offered to the public for the price of a ticket in an ominous-looking movie house he named the Black Maria. The Black Maria opened in 1893. All of this was near Edison Labs in West Orange, New Jersey. Edison owned the rights to the technology needed to make movies. He assembled small crews to shoot the films, which he screened at the Black Maria in his home town. He had created a closed-loop system for cinema.
Thus, long before Hollywood was Hollywood, West Orange was Hollywood. It was a smaller, cheaper, and sadder version of Hollywood, but it was still the epicenter of the American film industry. Demand for this new form of entertainment was overwhelming; Edison and Dickson along with their patchwork assemblies of actors and cameramen and crews could hardly keep up. Movies turned out to be a business more profitable than anyone had expected.
Naturally, many creative types and business types wanted to join the gold rush of making movies… but Edison held most of the patents and he knew the other people who held the other patents. Together they formed the Motion Picture Patents Company or the MPPC in 1908. The MPPC had a lock on practically all of the intellectual property for this hot new industry.
The MPPC was also known as the Edison Trust, since Edison was the force that held it together. MPPC owned Biograph, a motion picture production company, patents on the camera, and patents on the projector. Eastman Kodak was part of MPPC since they held patents on the film stock. It got to the point that nobody could make a movie without having to pay homage and a boatload of cash to MPPC. Just about all of the technology needed to making a moving picture was owned by MPCC and even if you could make a movie without their equipment, the MPCC also owned patents for projectors and it had a stranglehold on film distribution. Edison owned the industry.
This did not stop competition, but it slowed it down. Some of his competitors tried to figure out how to make movies without Edison devices. Others tried to figure out how to use Edison devices without Edison’s finding out about it.
Among his many other interests, Edison loved suing people. He sued Universal Studies 289 times alone. And like a lot of businessmen, Edison had a pugilistic nature. There are reports that he sometimes hired thugs to rough up people who tried to make films without paying him for the rights to use the patented equipment and products. Edison created such a legal quagmire that independent filmmakers were ready to get out of Dodge, or, in this case, New Jersey.
But the film industry was too lucrative for them to give up. Instead, they moved to California. Why California? First of all, California was about as far away as you could get from New Jersey and still be in the United States. Second, property at that time was affordable in Hollywoodland, as it was originally know, and Southern California offered year-round pleasant weather and an eager local workforce. Importantly, California judges were less cowed by Edison than judges on the East Coast. And even in that rare case where a California court decided in favor of Edison, cross-country judgments were expensive and difficult to enforce. Some say that filmmakers also liked Hollywood’s proximity to Mexico since if Edison decided to send out a gang of thugs or attorneys to chase down the patent infringers, they figured they could always make a run for the border, taking their illegal cameras and projectors with them.
The first guy who set up shop in Hollywood was likely William Selig of Chicago in 1909. By 1910, the California Motion Picture Manufacturing Company was in business and in 1911, Christie-Nestor Studios was opened by Daivd Horsely, who was straight out of West Orange. By 1915, there was a colony of independent producers in Hollywood, driving Edison nuts and making his lawyers rich. Pretty soon more than half of all motion pictures were coming out of California, eclipsing New Jersey. The population of Hollywood was something like 5,000 in the year 1910 and had gone up seven-fold by 1920 to 35,000. The movie business had moved.
And while Edison was better at inventing the technology to make movies than the independent filmmakers, the California independent filmmakers turned out to be better at making actual movies. Technology matters, but content is king.
Pretty soon, the independents were all in Hollywood and Edison was running out of ways to blunt the competition. Fledgling studios Paramount and Universal filed a federal complaint and said that the MPCC violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The court correctly agreed and said the MPCC had gone far beyond protecting Edison’s intellectual property, it was forcing his competitors out of business. This happened in 1915 and it allowed Hollywood to keep on doing legally what it had already been doing.
Of course, if you know anything about patents, you know that they have temporal limits, at that time just 17 years. So by the time that feds busted up the MPCC, the patents were expiring anyway. But the movie business never returned to New Jersey.