Film Noir's heyday was the 1940s and 50s. Almost all film production had moved to Hollywood by the early 1930s with most having moved well before then. Some of the classics of American Film Noir are actually set in LA.
Even before the move to Hollywood the center of the US film industry wasn't New York, but just across the river in Fort Lee, NJ.
The movie industry in the US was originally based around New York City. Various studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey and Kaufman Astoria studios in Queens were where a lot of motion pictures were made (some still are in Kaufman Astoria).
Intellectual property issues around patents were one of the reasons the movie business moved to LA. Edison was thought to be less able (or willing) to successfully sue non-client film companies operating in California.
I believe weather is why the industry moved south to the then minor city of Los Angeles, but many early films were filmed on stage sets anyway. Plus NYC had financing, actors, culture, etc unlike the boondocks of California
There's a new book out [1] that examines the role of technology in the early film industry. One of the tensions is between the camera, sound, and lighting technologies mainly based in East Coast cities such as Rochester (home to Kodak, which basically had a monopoly on film production until DuPont entered the fray) and the production studios in Hollywood. Rival technical societies (including the organization that now hosts the Oscars) developed that mostly catered to an East Coast or West Coast audience. In an era before jet travel, attending a technical conference in New York was a much bigger commitment for a cameraman based in California.
The movie business was also for quite some time a niche audience. There wasn't much of a market in developing specialty cameras for Hollywood--the real money was in home movies. A few firms such as Technicolor emerged to cater directly to the movie picture industry. Eventually, a tech cluster developed in Los Angeles.
And regarding Fort Lee, my understanding is that it remained a center of the animation industry until around the 1940s when Walt Disney moved to California.
“Hollywood, after all, was just a dusty desert town that became the hub of the movie business because it was easier to move there and start a new one than dealing with Edison's lawyers back East…”
Yes, but also no. Keep in mind the popularity of Westerns in the 1930’s-1950’s and the ease with which you can get to desert/mountain/beach/city/forest/etc settings within a relatively short drive from L.A.
> Similarly, Rochester was the original Hollywood.
I searched for this and couldn't find anything. According to wikipedia:
> In the early 20th century, before Hollywood, the motion picture industry was based in Fort Lee, New Jersey across the Hudson River from New York City.[75][76][77] In need of a winter headquarters, moviemakers were attracted to Jacksonville, Florida due to its warm climate, exotic locations, excellent rail access, and cheaper labor, earning the city the title of "The Winter Film Capital of the World.
Even domestically, the reason Hollywood is the center of the film industry is because California was too far from the East coast for patents on moving picture cameras to be effectively enforced.
How is it any different than Hollywood becoming a centerpoint for making movies, even though most decisions are made in New York? At least, that was how the first several decades of Hollywood worked. And still, some studios or their executives who approve projects are headquartered actually in New York.
And Hollywood was nothing more than orange groves outside of Los Angeles before Lumiere invented the motion picture camera. Was that a one-off? So far that does seem to be the case. Lots of places will compete for the title of being the second-best version of "the center of the universe" for industry X, Y, or Z but there are very few examples of the center actually moving once it has established itself.
People forget or don't know that Hollywood is the Silicon Valley of films. You need a special effect? There's a guy down the street who can do that. You need a special lens or lighting? You can rent that, today, for a hundred bucks at the shop around the corner.
That's why films, and the people who make them, congregate in Hollywood.
Filmmakers fled the east coast to Los Angeles, where it was easier to evade motion-pictures patents held by Edison. This is how Hollywood was born. Piracy definitely helped create the biggest movie industry.
You'd probably get different answers for which city is associated with film, just like you'd get different answers for music. Lots of locations have risen up over the years, including Vancouver, and New York (which itself alone has about 1/3rd the productions of LA).
Lots of the major production companies have actually moved out of Hollywood itself, and are scattered around Los Angeles (and the broader US).
Hollywood as a term has evolved a bit to just mean anything associated with the USA film industry, including Netflix, which itself has very little to do with traditional "Hollywood" beyond using some studios in California.
"Hollywood" is a gold standard, like "the Rolls Royce of X" is a phrase - it has captured the brand of movies, but it's current state today like you say is very similar to Silicon Valley - a name mostly (and it's used in a similar way, 'Silicon Valley North' for Canada, 'Silicon Alley' for New York, 'Silicon Beach' for Los Angeles, etc.).
Edit: Just checked and the production volume ratio between LA and New York is similar to the # of unicorns ratio between Silicon Valley and the next highest city. Really interesting comparison, as Silicon Valley has spread to the greater bay area and Hollywood film production has spread to the greater LA area as well.
I just did a studio tour in Hollywood and the tour guide mentioned that a lot of their most famous productions were done elsewhere because high brow directors hate the backlot. I gather most of the usage nowadays is for TV. Big budget films are either on location or just done on completely fabricated soundstages and/or CGI.
The claim that Hollywood was created to evade Edison's patents is dubious.
According to "A history of narrative film" by David A. Cook "The reason why a full-scale Eastern-based industry moved its entire operation to southern California during these years has never been completely clear, but the general contours of the phenomenon are obvious enough". He then lists these reasons:
- the type of temperate climate required for year-round production (most shooting was done outdoors at the time)
- a wide range of topography within a 50 mile radius
- the status of Los Angeles as a professional theatrical center
Even before the move to Hollywood the center of the US film industry wasn't New York, but just across the river in Fort Lee, NJ.
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