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Information about Movie Studio

A film studio is a controlled environment for the making of a film. This environment may be interior (sound stage), exterior (backlot), or both. In general parlance, the term is synonymous with "major film production company," due largely to the fact that the leading production companies of Hollywood's "Golden Age"—stretching from the late 1920s to the late 1940s—owned their own studio facilities, as do a few today. However, worldwide (and even in the United States) the majority of production companies have never owned their own studios, but have had to rent space at independently owned facilities that, in many cases, never produce a film of their own.

Beginnings

In 1893, Thomas Edison built the first movie studio in the United States when he constructed the Black Maria, a tarpaper-covered structure near his laboratories in West Orange, New Jersey, and asked circus, vaudeville, and dramatic actors to perform for the camera. He distributed these movies at vaudeville theaters, penny arcades, wax museums, and fairgrounds. Other studio operations followed in New Jersey, New York City, and Chicago.

In the early 1900s, companies started moving to Los Angeles, California, because of the good weather and longer days. Although electric lights were by then widely available, none were yet powerful enough to adequately expose film; the best source of illumination for motion picture production was natural sunlight. Some movies were shot on the roofs of buildings in downtown Los Angeles. Early movie producers also relocated to Southern California to escape Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company, which controlled almost all the patents relevant to movie production at the time. The distance from New Jersey made it more difficult for Edison to enforce his patents.

The first movie studio in the Hollywood area was Nestor Studios, opened in 1911 by Al Christie for David Horsley. In the same year, another fifteen independents settled in Hollywood. Other production companies eventually settled in the Los Angeles area in places such as Culver City, Burbank, and what would soon become known as Studio City in the San Fernando Valley.

The "majors"

For more details on this topic, see Major film studio.
The Big 5
By the mid-1920s, the evolution of a handful of American production companies into wealthy film industry conglomerates that owned their own studios, distribution divisions, and theaters, and contracted with performers and other filmmaking personnel, led to the sometimes confusing equation of "studio" with "production company" in industry slang. Five large companies, 20th Century-Fox, MGM, Paramount, RKO, and Warner Bros., came to be known as the "Big Five," the "majors," or "the Studios" in trade publications such as Variety, and their management structures and practices collectively came to be known as the "studio system."

The Little 3
Although they owned few or no theaters to guarantee sales of their films, Universal Pictures, Columbia Pictures, and United Artists also fell under these rubrics, making a total of eight generally recognized "major studios". United Artists, although its controlling partners owned not one but two production studios during the Golden Age, had an often tenuous hold on the title of "major" and operated mainly as a backer and distributor of independently produced films.

The minors

Smaller studios operated simultaneously with "the majors." These included operations such as Republic Pictures, active from 1935, which produced films that occasionally matched the scale and ambition of the larger studio, and Monogram Pictures, which specialized in series and genre releases. Together with smaller outfits such as PRC and Grand National, the minor studios filled the demand for B-movies and are sometimes collectively referred to as Poverty Row.

The independents

The Big Five's ownership of movie theaters was eventually opposed by eight independent producers, including Samuel Goldwyn, David O. Selznick, Walt Disney, and Walter Wanger. In 1948 the federal government won a case against Paramount in the Supreme Court, which ruled that the vertically integrated structure of the movie industry constituted an illegal monopoly. This decision, reached after twelve years of litigation, hastened the end of the studio system and Hollywood's "Golden Age".

Film to television

Midway through the 1950s, with television proving to be a profitable enterprise not destined to disappear any time soon -- as many in the film industry had once hoped -- movie studios were increasingly being used to produce programming for the burgeoning medium. Some midsized film companies, such as Republic Pictures, eventually sold their studios to TV production concerns.

Today

With the breakup of domination by "the Studios" and the continued incursion of television into the cinematic audience, the major production companies gradually transformed into management structures that simply put together artistic teams on a project-by-project basis and made what studio spaces they retained available for rental, which remains the norm today.

Notable movie studios

See also

Film is a term that encompasses individual motion pictures, the field of film as an art form, and the motion picture industry. Films are produced by recording images from the world with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or special effects.
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sound stage is a hangar-like structure, building or room, that is soundproof for the production of theatrical motion pictures and television, usually inside a movie studio.
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backlot is an area behind or adjoining a movie studio with space to build or with permanent exterior sets for outdoor scenes in motion picture and/or television productions.
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Production company refers to a company responsible for the development and physical production of performing arts, film, radio or a television program. The company may also be directly responsible for the raising of funding for the production or may do so through an intermediary.
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18th century - 19th century - 20th century
1860s  1870s  1880s  - 1890s -  1900s  1910s  1920s
1890 1891 1892 - 1893 - 1894 1895 1896

:
Subjects:     Archaeology - Architecture -
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Thomas Alva Edison (February 11 1847 – October 18 1931) was an American inventor and businessman who developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph and a long lasting light bulb.
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The Black Maria (pronounced ma-RYE-uh) was Thomas Edison's movie production studio in West Orange, New Jersey. It is widely referred to as "America's First Movie Studio."
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West Orange, New Jersey

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Motto:
Map of West Orange Township in Essex County
Coordinates:
Country United States
State New Jersey
County Essex
Area
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State of New Jersey

Flag of New Jersey Seal
Nickname(s): Garden State[1]
Motto(s): Liberty and prosperity

Official language(s) English de facto

Capital Trenton

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Film is a term that encompasses individual motion pictures, the field of film as an art form, and the motion picture industry. Films are produced by recording images from the world with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or special effects.
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City of Los Angeles

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Nickname: The City of Angels, L.A.
Location within Los Angeles County in the state of California
Coordinates:
State
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Most of the industrialized world is lit by electric lights, which are used both at night and to provide additional light during the daytime. These lights are normally powered by the electric grid, but some run on local generators, and emergency generators serve as backups in
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Downtown Los Angeles is the central business district of Los Angeles, California, located close to the geographic center of the metropolitan area. The sprawling, multi-centered megacity is such that its downtown core is often considered just another district like Hollywood
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Southern California, also colloquially known as SoCal, is the southern portion of the U.S. state of California. Centered on the cities of Los Angeles and San Diego, Southern California is home to nearly 24 million people and is the nation's second most populated region,
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MPPC can refer to:
  • Motion Picture Patents Company
  • Microsoft Point-to-Point Compression
  • Milk Sphingomyelin (1-Myristoyl,2-Palmitoyl-sn-Glycero 3-PhosphoCholine)

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patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to a patentee for a fixed period of time in exchange for a disclosure of an invention.

The procedure for granting patents, the requirements placed on the patentee and the extent of the exclusive rights vary widely
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Hollywood is a district in Los Angeles, California, situated west-northwest of Downtown Los Angeles. Due to its fame and cultural identity as the historical center of movie studios and movie stars, the word "Hollywood" is often used as a metonym for the Cinema of the United States.
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Nestor Motion Picture Company of Bayonne, New Jersey, owned by David Horsley and his brother William, opened the first motion picture studio in Hollywood in the Blondeau Tavern building at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street in the fall of 1911.
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20th century - 21st century
1880s  1890s  1900s  - 1910s -  1920s  1930s  1940s
1908 1909 1910 - 1911 - 1912 1913 1914

Year 1911 (MCMXI
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Al Christie, (October 23, 1881 – April 14, 1951) was a Canadian-born motion picture director, producer and screenwriter.

Born Alfred Ernest Christie, in London, Ontario, Canada, he was one of a number of Canadian pioneers in early Hollywood who made their way
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David Horsley (March 11, 1873 – February 23, 1933) was English born pioneer of the movie industry who built the first movie studio in Hollywood.

Born in West Stanley, Durham, England, a small coal mining village where his entire family worked in the mines.
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An independent film, or indie film, is usually a low-budget film that is produced by a small movie studio. Additionally, the term is used to describe less commercially-driven art films which differ markedly from the norms of plot-driven, mainstream classical Hollywood cinema.
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City of Culver City

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Motto: The Heart of Screenland
Location of Culver City in Los Angeles County, California
Coordinates:
Country United States
State
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Burbank, California
Location of Burbank in Los Angeles County, California
Coordinates:
Country United States
State California
County Los Angeles
Founded May 1 1887
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Studio City is a four-square-mile district in the San Fernando Valley region of the City of Los Angeles, California. It is bounded roughly by Ethel Avenue to the west, Highway 101 to the north and east, and Mulholland Drive and the Santa Monica Mountains to the south.
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San Fernando Valley or The Valley is an urbanized valley located in the north-western section of the city of Los Angeles, California, United States.

History


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A major film studio is a movie production and distribution company that releases a substantial number of films annually and consistently commands a significant share of box-office revenues in a given market.
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A film distributor is an independent company, a subsidiary company or occasionally an individual, which acts as the final agent between a film production company or some intermediary agent, and a film exhibitor, to the end of securing placement of the producer's film on the
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movie theater (North America), also known as a cinema (Australia, United Kingdom and Ireland, as well as North America), a movie house, or the pictures, is a venue, usually a building, for viewing motion pictures ("movies" or "films").
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