Once upon a time Hollywood was a free-wheeling, almost laissez faire place, not a golden goose to be impaled by California’s state and local governments. Now Hollywood is fleeing Hollywood. From Simon Black at sovereignman.com:
When Charlie Chaplin first arrived to Los Angeles in December 1913, the city was still a fairly small oil town… just a fraction of the size of San Francisco.
LA was so underdeveloped that, as Chaplin wrote in his autobiography, wild coyotes frequently roamed around Hollywood and Beverly Hills.
But within a few years the city was booming, and Chaplin had become one of the most famous people in the world.
This is obviously in large part due to the development of the motion picture industry– the most revolutionary technology of its era.
But what’s interesting is that the motion picture industry didn’t actually start in LA. The technology was originally developed in the late 1800s in part by Thomas Edison, who was based in New Jersey.
Edison’s east coast film studio produced over 1,000 movies (including a bizarre snuff film called Electrocuting an Elephant). And he notoriously threatened to sue anyone who attempted to make movies.
In 1902, a US Appeals Court ruled that Edison did NOT invent the motion picture camera… but his lawsuits continued regardless.
This constant threat of legal action was a huge disincentive to entrepreneurs. And so, in the early 1900s, several young studio executives packed up and left the east coast for Southern California where they were much better protected from Edison’s frivolous lawsuits.
This is the primary reason why the motion picture industry grew up in LA; sure, the region’s ample sunshine was a nice benefit, allowing for year-round outdoor production.
But the chief benefit was the city’s free-wheeling, pro-business culture. It was like Hong Kong in its heyday– anything goes– which attracted talented artists and entrepreneurs from all over the world who were free to build their dreams.
