194 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
If the last map captured the geographical
imagination of New Yorkers, this one reveals a view
of the world from Hollywood. This Sunday insert
in the Los Angeles Sunday Times promoted the film
industry by showing readers how California’s
landscapes enabled producers to simulate any
conceivable geography without leaving the state.
The film industry is so inextricably associated
with Hollywood that we might be forgiven for
assuming that it began there. In fact, the earliest
American motion pictures were produced and
financed in New York in the 1890s before studios
began to migrate to Southern California after 1900.
By the 1920s, Hollywood dominated the film industry
in the same way that Pittsburgh cornered steel and
Chicago dominated meatpacking. Motion pictures
had become the most popular form of American
entertainment, with box office revenues of
$750 million by 1927. Hollywood accounted for
88 percent of the films created each year in the 1920s.
By 1927 weekly attendance had reached 100 million,
nearly the population of the entire country.
Hollywood gained control over motion pictures
in several ways. In the early years, studios were
lured to Southern California by the capacity for
growth, as shown on page 186. Los Angeles was also
a non-union city, which was highly appealing for a
labor-intensive industry. Just as compelling was the
region’s climate. Perennial sunshine meant there
was more time available for filming, which in turn
accelerated production schedules just as the
industry was becoming more competitive.
California’s physical landscape also gave
Hollywood a tremendous advantage. The state’s
THE GEOGRAPHY OF HOLLYWOOD
“Around the World in California in
4 Days,” Los Angeles Sunday Times,
March 4, 1934
geographical diversity meant that almost any type
of film could be produced there, which minimized
travel costs. Even geographically specific and exotic
locales could be approximated in its wide variety
of topography and landscapes. As the Los Angeles
Sunday Times explained here, everything imaginable
was right in California’s backyard. The Gobi
Desert could be found in Barstow, Siberia in
Truckee, the Swiss Alps near Lake Tahoe, and
the Dead Sea in the inland Salton Sea. From
the Kentucky backcountry to the deserts of
Arabia, California could conjure up any possible
geographical illusion.
In the late 1920s Hollywood released its first
talking pictures, which raised hopes even further
for the new medium. Boosters argued that films
could be used not just for entertainment, but also
as a tool of education and commerce. To some
degree this prediction was realized in the newsreels
that opened feature films from the 1930s through
World War II. Air-conditioning technology also
boosted the industry: a traditional summer slump
caused by overheated theaters was transformed
into a season of profits as patrons sought relief and
escape in these cool, darkened spaces.
The seven major studios constituted a virtual
monopoly by the interwar period. They exerted
enough power to force theaters to buy blocks
of their films together and to charge fixed rates
of admission around the country. But this golden
age of film came to an end with the advent of
television in the 1950s. Between 1946 and 1956
theater attendance fell by half, and it never
recovered. Moreover, the changing economics
of the film industry meant that movie stars were
no longer chained to a single studio, and
independent filmmakers began to draw more
attention after mid-century. But this map captures
Hollywood’s enduring influence, and the way that
it shaped popular understandings of geography
for generations.