Why go
Hollywood in Los Angeles carries associations with both studio-era stars and large-scale productions, but American film history begins elsewhere too. Connecting New York’s early exhibitions with John Ford’s Westerns and the films of Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola helps distinguish the periods behind familiar screen images.
The full story
New York hosted early commercial motion-picture exhibitions in the 1890s, including presentations using Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope. During the early twentieth century, much of the American film industry became established in and around Hollywood, Los Angeles. The move helps explain why the district’s name became shorthand for a much wider industry. Silent filmmaking developed a visual language before sound transformed cinema. Walt Disney became a major figure in animation, while John Ford’s films reshaped screen images of the American West. From the early sound era into the early 1960s, the period often called Hollywood’s Golden Age established stars including John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe. In the 1970s, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Robert Altman helped define New Hollywood, influenced partly by postwar French and Italian realism. Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and James Cameron later became associated with blockbuster filmmaking. These successive approaches explain why Hollywood can evoke very different kinds of movies.