The Los Angeles Motion Picture Studio Centennial Exhibition
Film production in Los Angeles, 1909–1914
Movies! Moguls! Monkeys! and Murder!
In August 1909, the William Selig Company opened the first permanent film studio in the Los Angeles suburb of Edendale, with similar facilities for the New York Motion Picture Company’s Bison division and the Biograph Company arriving shortly thereafter. This rapid westward migration began the build-up of what would result in the legendary motion picture capital of the world, later to be known as “Hollywood.”
The exhibition looked at Selig and other pioneering companies, their early Los Angeles productions, the personnel who made them, and their reasons for creating facilities in Los Angeles. Other highlights will include materials relating to the first film studio murder as well as photographs of the Selig menagerie that would eventually evolve into the Los Angeles Zoo.
Rare photographs, original correspondence, newspaper articles, cutting continuities, promotional materials and posters from the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library illuminated this pioneer era alongside motion picture camera equipment from the period and a fragment from the Selig Zoo entrance statuary.
