George Westmore Research Library & Museum

..Makeup has a long theatrical history.. - early film industry naturally looked to traditional stage techniques, but these proved inadequate almost immediately. One of makeup's first problems was with celluloid. Early filmmakers used orthochromatic film stock, which had a limited color-range sensitivity. It reacted to red pigmentation, darkening white skin and nullifying solid reds. To counter the effect, Caucasian actors wore heavy pink greasepaint (Stein's #2) as well as black eyeliner and dark red lipstick (which, if applied too lightly, appeared white on screen), but these masklike cosmetics smeared as actors sweated under the intense lights.

Until the mid-teens, actors applied their own makeup and their image was rarely uniform from scene to scene. As the close-up became more common, makeup focused on the face, which had to be understood from a hugely magnified perspective, making refinements essential. In the pursuit of these radical changes, two names stand out as Hollywood's progenitor artists: George H. Westmore (1879–1931) and Max Factor, Sr.(1877 - August 30, 1938), born Factorowitz or Faktorowicz in Łódź, Poland (then Russian Empire), was a businessman and cosmetician who founded the Max Factor Cosmetics Company. He is known as the father of modern cosmetics. Both started as wigmakers and both recognized that the crucial difference between stage and screen was a lightness of touch. Both invented enduring cosmetics and makeup tricks for cinema and each, at times, took credit for the same invention (such as false eyelashes).

Max Factor, Sr. with a background in barbering, arrived in the United States in 1904 and moved to Los Angeles in 1908 (He would visit the various theaters and sell his makeup to the actors and actresses directly. He also set up a perfume, hair care, and cosmetics business catering to theatrical needs in downtown Los Angeles, distributed well-known greasepaints, which were too thick for screen use and photographed very poorly. By 1910, Factor had begun to divide the theatrical from the cinematic as he experimented to find appropriate cosmetics for film. His Greasepaint was the first makeup used in a screen test, for Cleopatra (1912), and by 1914 Factor had invented a twelve-toned cream version, which applied thinly, allowed for individual skin subtleties, and conformed more comfortably with celluloid.

In the early 1920s panchromatic film began to replace orthochromatic, causing fewer color flaws, and in 1928 Factor completed work on Panchromatic MakeUp, which had a variety of hues. In 1937, the year before he died, he dealt with the new Technicolor problems by adapting theatrical "pancake" into a water-soluble powder, applicable with a sponge, excellent for film's and, eventually, television's needs. It photographed very well, eliminating the shine induced by Technicolor lighting, and its basic translucence imparted a delicate look. Known as Pancake makeup, it was first used in Vogues of 1938 (1937) and Goldwyn's Follies (1938), quickly becoming not only the film industry norm but a public sensation. Once movie stars, delighting in its lightness, began to wear it offscreen, Pancake became de rigueur for fashion-conscious women. After Factor's death, his empire continued to set standards and still covers cinema's cosmetic needs, from fingernails to toupees.

Hollywood Historical Highlights:

....

1826-39 - The invention of photography sets the stage for the development of motion pictures.

1886 - Developer Harvey Wilcox, a transplant from Kansas, buys 160 acres of land west of Los Angeles in order to found a conservative community. His wife Daeida meets a woman on a train who speaks of her summer home called Hollywood. She convinces her husband to names their new ranch “Hollywood.”

1892 - W.K.L. Dickson builds the first movie studio for Thomas A. Edison, the “Black Maria.”

1895 - The Lumière brothers show their films in Paris using the cinématographe.

1896 - The first movie projection in the United States takes place at Koster & Bial’s New York Music Hall.

1903 - The community is incorporated as Hollywood. Wilcox, a prohibitionist, bans the sale of alcohol in the community except by pharmacists.

1902 - Georges Méliès makes the first science fiction film, A Trip to the Moon.

1903-1910 - Hollywood was incorporated as a City in its own right.

1904 - The Jacob Stern family purchased the Northam Citrus farm.

1906-10 Nickelodeons become popular with American working-class and immigrant audiences.

1907 - Chicago-based Selig-Polyscope Company arrives in Los Angeles to scout locations, and later establishes the first-ever studio there.

1910 - D.W. Griffith comes to Los Angeles with Mack Sennett, Mary Pickford and the Biograph Company.

1910 - Hollywood is annexed and officially becomes a part of Los Angeles in order to benefit from the water and sewage systems.

1911 - The first US fan magazine Motion Picture Story Magazine debuted in February. The Moving Picture World and The Motion Picture News also offered interviews and gossipy columns about the personal lives and careers of the stars.

1911 - IMP star Florence Lawrence was interviewed in 1911 in Motion Picture Story Magazine - often considered the first movie star interview.

1911 - David Horsley purchases the Blondeau Tavern on Sunset Boulevard and turns it into the Nestor Film Company, Hollywood's first film studio. As a result of the independents desire to escape the restrictions of the MPPC.

1911 - Credits began to appear regularly at the beginning of motion pictures.

1911 - Pathe's Weekly was the first regularly-released US newsreel.

1912 - Photoplay, the first true movie "fan" magazine, debuted and gave rise to the whole idea of a celebrity and fan culture. By the early 1920's, over a dozen such magazines crowded the news-stands with names like Cinema Art, Film Fun, Motion Picture Journal, Movie Weekly, Picture Play, and Screenland.

1912 - Carl Laemmle merged IMP and other studios to found the Universal Pictures Company. Mutual Film Corporation was formed. Jesse L. Lasky also formed the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company. Significantly, the independents made longer 'feature' films than the short one-reelers produced by the MPPC. By 1912, fifteen film companies were operating in Hollywood.

1912 - Adolph Zukor founded an independent film studio named the Famous Players Film Corporation, with distribution arranged with a new organization named Paramount by 1914. Paramount Pictures is one of the oldest American motion picture studios. Its logo - a majestic mountain peak - still remains recognizable, making it the oldest surviving Hollywood studio film logo.

1912 - Canadian writer and actor Mack Sennett (the "King of Comedy") formed the Keystone Film Company (and Studio) in Edendale, (Now known as Atwater), a suburb of Los Angeles. The first Mack Sennett, Keystone Production was Cohen Collects a Debt. The first Keystone Kop film from the studio, Hoffmeyer's Legacy, was released in late 1912. Nearly every major comic performer in America worked at Keystone during this time, including Fatty Arbuckle, Mabel Normand and Charlie Chaplin, in mostly slapstick comedy films.

1913 - Jesse L. Lasky, film executive, produces the first full-length motion picture The Squaw Man in Hollywood, with C.B. deMille and Oscar C. Apfel directing and his brother-in-law Samuel (Goldwin) Goldfish, General Manager.

1914 - World War I begins, effectively destroying European film production and allowing American films to dominate.

May 8, 1914 - Paramount Pictures Corporation is formed (a distributing company) by W.W. Hodkinson with Jesse L. Lasky, Adolph Zukor, Hobart Bosworth, and other producers in New York.

1915 - Pioneering film-maker D.W. Griffith's technically brilliant, 3-hour Civil War epic, The Birth of a Nation, premiered with a phenomenal ticket price of $2 -- it was based on The Clansman, a novel by Thomas Dixon, Jr. Griffith's film popularized the expressive close-up, naturalistic acting, the flashback and other elements (i.e., exciting cross-cutting, a last minute rescue) that endure today as the structural principles of narrative filmmaking. It introduced the historical epic and period piece as a film genre and defined the language of film. Although it was the most extravagant and expensive film up to that time (at a budget of approximately $110,000), it was also highly controversial because of its racist theme. It was the first US motion picture shown in the White House, where President Woodrow Wilson described it as "writing history with lightning."

1915 - Producer/director Thomas H. Ince introduced a 'factory system' - a method that would be used to mass produce films. Different films in various stages of production would be systematically rotated through his movie studio (Triangle Motion Picture Company). Ince appointed a group of supervisors called producers who each had control over a certain number of pictures. Sometimes, ten or more movies were being produced in his studios at one time.

1915 - Charlie Chaplin's first masterpiece, The Tramp, produced by the Essanay Company in Chicago, showed the early development of his well-known character with baggy pants, bowler hat, walking cane, funny stride, and over-sized shoes.

1915 - The Bell & Howell 2709 movie camera allowed directors to film close-ups without physically moving the camera.

1915 - William Fox led a successful fight against Thomas Edison's Motion Pictures Patents Company (the Edison Trust). A federal court declared the Patents Company (and its subsidiary, the General Film Company) to be an illegal restraint on trade and an illegal monopoly, and fined over $20 million. It was soon officially dissolved and disbanded in the face of anti-trust legislation. The trust's appeal was dismissed in 1918.

1915 - In Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, the Supreme Court ruled that states may censor films, encouraging scrutiny of movies during future decades.

1915 - Theda Bara (an anagram for "Arab Death", but born as Theodosia Goodman) starred in A Fool There Was, personifying the "vamp," the female temptress and sex symbol, and became an overnight sensation. She was one of the first "sex symbols" or stars.

June 1916 - D.W. Griffith's expensive follow-up film to The Birth of a Nation (1915) was the monumental historical and dramatic epic Intolerance, told with parallel cross-cutting between its four stories, symbolically linked by the image of Lillian Gish rocking a child. Each story told of intolerance and injustice in four different historical periods -- a Modern Story, a French story, a Babylonian story (with the largest set in film history up to its time), and a Biblical story. Its filmmaking techniques would be adopted and displayed in the works of future filmmakers, such as Eisenstein and Coppola. With a budget of almost $2 million (the most expensive film of all time), it became the first multi-million dollar box-office 'bomb' in film history.

1916 - The Jesse L. Lasky Company merged with its friendly rival, Adolph Zukor's Famous Players Film Company, to form the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation. The corporation consolidated its production and distribution divisions with Paramount, and audiences began seeing "Paramount Pictures".

1916 - Goldwyn Pictures Established, Samuel (Gelbfisz) Goldfish (later renamed Samuel Goldwyn) born in Warsaw to a Polish Jewish family. At an early age he left Warsaw on foot an penniless, made his way to Birmingham, England, where hen remained with relatives for a few years using the Anglicized name Samuel Goldfish. Goldwyn was married to Blanche Lasky from 1910 to 1915, one daughter, Blanche was the sister of Jesse L. Lasky. Goldwyn Pictures Corporation was an American motion picture production company founded with Broadway producers Edgar and Archibald Selwyn.

1916 - The salary of Charlie Chaplin, filmdom's first major star, went from $125 to $10,000 weekly, when he signed on with the Mutual Film Corporation.

1917 - The Charlie Chaplin Studios are built just south of Sunset.

1917 - George H. Westmore opens the 1st Makeup Department at Selig-Polyscope Studios. Selig pays him $25/wk for part-time work George creates Mary Pickford's curls George promises actress, Billie Burke a new wig at Triangle Studios. He also made the very first pair of false eyelashes for her. After seeing her makeup, Thomas Ince, (1/3 of Triangle Film Corporation a.k.a. Triangle Motion Picture Company), hired him at an unheard of rate of $150/week. George opened the 1st Makeup department at Triangle Motion Picture Company before Samuel Goldwyn absorbed it. George is the first to introduce cutting hair in layers, where he demonstrates this on Douglas Fairbanks.

1917 - William Nicholas Selig (March 14, 1864, Chicago, Illinois - July 15, 1948, Los Angeles) sold the Edendale Selig-Polyscope facility to producer William Fox and moved his movie studio to the zoo in east Los Angeles. This was because by 1913 Mr. Selig had gathered a large collection of animals for his films and spent substantial funds acquiring and developing 32 acres of land in Lincoln Heights northeast of downtown Los Angeles, where he opened a large public zoo. Selig-Polyscope produced more than 1,800 motion pictures.

1917 - Technicolor introduces color film, originally existed in a two-color (red and green) system. In Process 1 (1917), a prism beam-splitter behind the camera lens exposed two adjacent frames of a single strip of black and white negative film simultaneously, one behind a red filter, the other behind a green filter. Because two frames were being exposed at the same time, the film had to be photographed and projected at twice the normal speed. Exhibition required a special projector with two apertures (one with a red filter and the other with a green filter), two lenses, and an adjustable prism that aligned the two images on the screen. Technicolor itself produced the only movie made in Process 1, The Gulf Between, which had a limited tour of Eastern cities, primarily to interest motion picture producers and exhibitors in color. The near-constant need for a technician to adjust the projection alignment doomed this additive color process. Only a few frames of The Gulf Between, showing star Grace Darmond, are known to exist today.

February 1918 - Famous Players-Lasky Corporation absorbs Paramount Pictures, their distributing subsidiary.

1918 - Triangle studios went up for sale, swallowed up by the emerging Hollywood studios. Producer Samuel Goldwyn bought the studios for the Goldwyn Pictures Corporation.

1919 - United Artists Corporation is founded by Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, D.W. Griffith and Charles Chaplin.

1920 - It was the "marriage of the century" when stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks married in late March, after divorcing their spouses. He bought a lodge for his new bride -- named Pickfair, which soon became the social center of movieland, and served as a gathering place for politicians, journalists, artists, and foreign diplomats.

1920 - Douglas Fairbanks starred in the popular swashbuckler adventure film, The Mark of Zorro as the masked hero - the first of many film versions of the 1919 story "The Curse of Capistrano" by Johnston McCulley. It was the first film released through United Artists, recently formed in 1919 by Fairbanks, Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, and Mary Pickford.

1920 -Jesse L. Lasky, film executive, produces the first full-length motion picture in the Alabama Hills, Lone Pine, California, titled The Round-Up (Melford), starring Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle. This historic location would become the most famous location in Film History, for Motion Picture Westerns. It has also been used as a prime location for non-westerns: The Shadow 1994 movie, Gladiator 2000 movie, Star Trek VII (Generations) 1995 movie. Mr. Lasky would continue sending film productions to the location, in order to capture this extremely picturestic valley on film. Over 1,000 films and television shows have been filmed in this area of the Alabama Hills, part of the Eastern Sierra's.

1921 - Director George Melford's and Famous Players-Lasky's The Sheik debuted and established star Rudolph Valentino as cinema's best-known lover. It was one of the first of numerous exotic and erotic (at least for the day) romance/adventure films for men and women alike, designed to stimulate box office success. Valentino reached the peak of his stardom in this year, and also starred in Metro Pictures' The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

1921 - Silent comic star/director Charlie Chaplin's first feature-length film (a six-reeler) and first film as producer, The Kid, was released, with a star-making role for young Jackie Coogan. Both a slapstick comedy and a soap opera tearjerker, it inspired future films such as The Champ (1931) (teaming another popular child star Jackie Cooper with Wallace Beery.) Chaplin's young 13-year old co-star Lita Grey, who portrayed a tempting angel in the film, became his second wife from 1924-1927.

1921 - Heavyweight silent-screen comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle signed a $3 million contract with Paramount and celebrated with a wild party in a San Francisco hotel. There, he was arrested for the alleged rape and murder of 25 year-old bit-player/actress Virginia Rappe. Tabloids sensationalized the crime and made up stories about Arbuckle's 'bottle party.' The multiple manslaughter trials against the innocent actor always ended with the finding of 'not guilty,' but Arbuckle's career was over after two hung juries and a subsequent acquittal. As a result, the public conceived of Hollywood as wild and scandalous -- and pressures were brought to bear on the industry.

1921 - The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued Famous Players-Lasky for violating anti-trust laws by refusing to allow independent films to play in its theaters. This lawsuit by the US Government lead to a landmark decision which forced the motion picture studios ability to produce, distribute and showcase their movies in their own theaters. A major setback in the early development and growing control Hollywood studios had maintained.

1921 - D.W. Griffith's film Dream Street, with experimental sound (in its introductory prologue) using inventor Orland E. Kellum's Photokinema, has been regarded as the first feature film to use sound.

1922 - German Shepherd Rin Tin Tin became cinema's first canine star - and helped save its studio (Warner Bros.) from bankruptcy during the silent era. Rin Tin Tin made almost 30 films for the studio, beginning with The Man From Hell's River.

1922 - The first Walt Disney cartoon was Little Red Riding Hood, one of his Laugh O Grams studio productions that he made at his own animation studio in Kansas City before relocating to Los Angeles shortly thereafter.

1922 - Impresario Sid Grauman opened the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood -- the first 'movie palace' outside of downtown Los Angeles. It had Hollywood's first film premiere on October 18, 1922 showing UA's silent swashbuckler Robin Hood, starring Douglas Fairbanks.

1923 - The four Warner brothers' film distribution and production business was incorporated and called Warner Brothers Pictures Inc. - one of the first large film studios. They released the 6-reel comedy-drama The Gold Diggers.

1923 - At the Rivoli Theatre in New York, Lee De Forest demonstrated a method for recording sound on the edge of the film strip called Phonofilm. He projected a series of short musical films featuring vaudeville performers.

1923 - One of the highest-grossing films of the year was Paramount's and James Cruze's feature-length western The Covered Wagon. It was an expensive effort which cost $800,000 yet brought $4 million at the box-office. The film was the historical drama of a wagon train in the mid-1800s moving westward, encountering harsh environmental and weather conditions (a river crossing and prairie fire), and of course, hostile Indians. Hollywood was encouraged to produce many more westerns in subsequent years.

1923 - Handsome silent era actor Wallace Reid was appearing, on average (over a seven-year period) in as many as one feature film every seven weeks, when he died of influenza at the age of 32. The real cause of his death was a weakened immune system due to his addiction to morphine (allegedly often supplied by the studio to keep him working) and his alcoholism. This was one of many scandals that would rock Hollywood and eventually lead to attempts to clamp down and prompt the implementation of the motion picture production code in the early 1930s.

1923 - Cecil B. deMille's first version of The Ten Commandments was the most expensive film ever made and featured the largest set ever constructed in movie history to that time - the 'City of the Pharoah' (120 feet tall, 720 feet wide, and with massive Egyptian statuary weighing 1,000,000 pounds). Its 'parting of the Red Sea' scene featured state-of-the-art special effects, and some segments were filmed in early Technicolor. After the film, the director ordered the set in San Luis Obispo County (California) buried -- 60 years later, archeologists uncovered it; deMille remade his silent epic in 1956.

1923 - The Hollywoodland development opens with a soon-to-be-iconic sign built for $21,000.

1924 - Erich von Stroheim directed the influential Greed, a 10-hour epic based on Frank Norris' novel McTeague. The movie was edited down into a 2-hour length before theatrical release - an early example of directorial vs. studio conflict, and one of cinedom's 'lost films'.

1924 - Theaters showed the first double features.

1924 - The future MGM studio was formed out of the merger of three US film production companies: Marcus Loew's Metro Pictures (1916), Goldwyn Pictures Corporation (1917) (known as Metro-Goldwyn) and the Louis B. Mayer Pictures Company (1918). MGM was destined to become the dominant studio of Hollywood's Golden Age during the 30s, under Louis B. Mayer's direction.

1924 - The first film produced by the newly-formed studio MGM was He Who Gets Slapped (1924), starring Lon Chaney, although it wasn't their first released film - its release was postponed until the end-of-year holiday season to bring in more profits with increased audiences. He Who Gets Slapped also featured the first appearance of the MGM lion (a lion named Slats). The famous MGM lion roar (from a lion named Jackie) in the studio's opening logo, however, was first recorded and viewed in White Shadows of the South Seas (1928) - via a Gramophone record.

1924 - F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh, with revolutionary camera work by the celebrated German cinematographer Karl Freund, virtually invented a host of new techniques for a mobile camera ("unchained camera").

1924 - C.B.C. Film Sales Company (founded by brothers Jack and Harry Cohn, and Joseph Brandt) officially changed its name to Columbia Pictures Corporation. Mid-to late 1920s Most of the major Hollywood motion-picture studios had been established by this time, including the Big Five (Warner Brothers, Fox (later 20th Century Fox), RKO, Loew's Inc. (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)), Paramount (from Famous Players-Lasky)), and the Little Three (United Artists, Universal, and Columbia). All of these studios used Thomas H. Ince's efficient and profitable filmmaking "factory system".

1926 - The early death of 31 year-old silent screen star Rudolph Valentino, noted for 14 films (including The Sheik (1921) and the sequel The Son of the Sheik (1926)) in a short seven-year career, caused a frenzy among his fans during his very public New York funeral. Valentino is buried at the Hollywood (Forever) Cemetery, directly behind Famous Players-Lasky a.k.a. Paramount Studios.

1926 - In New York, Warner Brothers debuted Don Juan, the first Vitaphone film (developed by Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1926) and the first publicly-shown 'talkie' - starring John Barrymore. It was the first mainstream film that replaced the traditional use of a live orchestra or organ for the soundtrack (a recorded musical score of the New York Philharmonic), and successfully coordinated audio sound on a recorded disc synchronized to play in conjunction with a projected motion picture. The sounds in the film consisted of some sound effects and music, but no dialogue.

1926 - Actor-producer-star Douglas Fairbanks' ultimate pirate film (silent), The Black Pirate, was historically significant - the adventure swashbuckler was the first full-length blockbuster color film. (The two-color process was first introduced in The Toll of the Sea (1922) - see above, and in some sequences of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925) - also, see above.) It boasted the use of an early experimental Technicolor (two-color) process, although it was also filmed in black and white. Technicolor had made a historic deal with Jesse L. Lasky, this is considered the major step which lead to color film being accepted as legitimate production process.

1926 - A newer and better recording system for putting synchronized sound-on-film called Movietone was developed by Theodore W. Case and Earl I. Sponable for William Fox of the Fox Film Corporation. In this system, the sound track was placed onto the actual film next to the picture frames, rather than on a separate synchronized disc as in the Vitaphone system.

1927 - Grauman's Chinese Theatre has its Grand Opening in Hollywood. (May 18) The film shown that evening is Cecil B. deMille's The King of Kings. A riot breaks out as onlookers try to see the stars entering the theater for the premiere.

1927 - The Academy’s first Organizational Banquet is held, The success of The Jazz Singer hastens the demise of silent films.

1927 - Fox released They're Coming to Get Me, a five-minute black and white short that was the first 'talkie' using the Movietone system. The first feature film released using the Fox Movietone system was Sunrise (1927), directed by F. W. Murnau -- the first professionally - produced feature film with an actual soundtrack.

1927 - The effective end of the silent era of films came when Warner Brothers produced and debuted The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length talkie or movie with dialogue. The musical, starring popular vaudevillian Al Jolson, had accompanying audio (with a sound-on-disc technology) which consisted of a few songs by Jolson and a few lines of synchronized dialogue. In his nightclub act in the film, Jolson presented the movie's first spoken ad-libbed words: "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet." The film had about 350 spontaneously ad-libbed words.

Following are films that earned the highest ever gross income in film history, according to Variety magazine in 1932. The dollar amounts are not adjusted for inflation, and the values were calculated in 1932.

..1. The Birth of a Nation (1915) - $10,000,000
2. The Big Parade (1925) - $6,400,000
3. Ben-Hur (1925) - $5,500,000
4. Way Down East (1920) - $5,000,000
5. The Gold Rush (1925) - $4,250,000
6. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) - $4,000,000
7. The Circus (1928) - $3,800,000
8. The Covered Wagon (1923) - $3,800,000
9. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) - $3,500,000
10. The Ten Commandments (1923) - $3,400,000
11. Orphans of the Storm (1921) - $3,000,000
12. For Heaven's Sake (1926) - $2,600,000
13. Seventh Heaven (1926) - $2,400,000
14. Abie's Irish Rose (1928) - $1,500,000 ..

1929 - The first Academy Awards® Ceremony is held banquet takes place in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

1939 - The Museum of Modern Art opens in New York. The releases of such films as Gone with the Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, Stagecoach and The Wizard of Oz highlight what is often referred to as the greatest year in film history. World War II begins, closing the whole of continental Europe to American film distribution.

1940 - Pacific Electric Railway Edendale 5 mile line, "Red Car" ceased, though service continued in the form of local service on the Glendale-Burbank Line. Rail service on that line ended completely in 1955, and the tracks have been abandoned. The Edendale film studios which were mostly concentrated in a four-block stretch of Allesandro Street, between Berkeley Avenue and Duane Street are long gone. Allesandro Street was later renamed to Glendale Boulevard (and a smaller nearby street took on the name Allesandro).

1948 - The “Hollywood Ten” are charged with contempt of Congress and imprisoned.

1949 - The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce takes charge of the Hollywood signing, removing the "land" and repairing the letters that now spell, simply, "Hollywood."

1953 - The first Academy Awards® show to be broadcast on television takes place at the Pantages Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard.

1956 - The now-landmark Capitol Records building is erected on Vine Street.

1960 - The first star on the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame is awarded to Joanne Woodward.

1961 - The first in-flight movie is shown on a commercial airline.

1963 - The Cinerama Dome Theatre opens in Hollywood, featuring the world’s widest screen.

1965 - The Sound of Music surpasses Gone with the Wind as the biggest box office hit of all time.

1982 - Walt Disney releases Tron, marking an important milestone in digital evolution.

1989 - (September 19th) The Library of Congress announced the first 25 of 75 Films named to the new national film registry. The registry was established to get high-quality copies of films to make sure they would be preserved. The first group included Gone With The Wind, The Maltese Falcon and Citizen Kane.

1991 - The Motion Picture Academy celebrates the grand opening of its Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study.

2002 - The Kodak Theatre opens at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue, and becomes the new home of the Oscars®

2007 - Sid Gains, Motion Picture Academy President, announces at the Oscars® the Academy has purchased 4 acres of land in Hollywood at Sunset Blvd. & Vine Street to build a museum and theater complex - This will be the new home of the Academy Awards®. (Completion date 2012)

2008 - August The current owners of the American film studios are:Universal Pictures, Focus Features and Rogue Pictures are owned by NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric Co.; Sony Pictures, Sony Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Classics are units of Sony Corp.; DreamWorks, Paramount and Paramount Vantage are divisions of Viacom Inc.; Disney's parent is The Walt Disney Co.; Miramax is a division of The Walt Disney Co.; 20th Century Fox, Fox Searchlight Pictures and Fox Atomic are owned by News Corp.; Warner Bros., New Line, Warner Independent and Picturehouse are units of Time Warner Inc.; MGM is owned by a consortium of Providence Equity Partners, Texas Pacific Group, Sony Corp., Comcast Corp., DLJ Merchant Banking Partners and Quadrangle Group; Lionsgate is owned by Lionsgate Entertainment Corp.; IFC Films is owned by Rainbow Media Holdings, a subsidiary of Cablevision Systems Corp.

LEARN MORE AT: