Interesting facts about Hollywood

 

• Hollywood was originally an area called Hollywood land and the sign was put up by Harry Chandler, in 1923, to advertise.
• It cost him $21,000 to put it up and he thought it would be temporary and it was built to last 18 months or so.
• There were 4000 20-watt light bulbs installed to illuminate the sign in 1939 and a caretaker was hired to maintain the sign.
• The letters L, A, N, and D, were removed in 1949 and the sign has stayed that way ever since.
• When the sign started showing its age in 1978, Hugh Hefner held an auction for people to sponsor a letter.

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• Some famous people who sponsored a letter include Gene Autry who sponsored the L, Paul Williams who sponsored the W, and Alice Cooper who sponsored the O.
• The Hollywood Sign Trust was set up in 1995 to take care of the Hollywood sign.
• The official borders were set in 2006 and on the south it is bordered by Melrose Avenue and Las Palmas on the north.
• To the east is Western Avenue and to the west is West Hollywood and Beverly Hills.
• The first movie ever made was In Old California in 1910 and the first one that was made in a permanent Hollywood studio was The Squaw Man in 1914.
• By 1935, Columbia Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, 20th-Century Fox, and Warner Brothers were all in full production as was the Golden Age of Hollywood.
• Some of the famous movie stars of the Golden Age included Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Clark Gable, Judy Garland, Cary Grant, and Spencer Tracy.
• Some of the best movies were Casablanca, Citizen Kane, and It’s a Wonderful Life.
• The motion picture studios owned theatres all over the country and showed their movies with their stars in them.
• The end of the Golden Age came when the Supreme Court said they could no longer own theatres that showed only their films.
• The 1950s saw the introduction of 3-D but it was a passing fad.
• In the 1960s, television made its way into homes and movie attendance dropped off sharply.
• The blockbuster movie was born in the 1970s and the studios started increasing revenue with related products, national advertising, releasing movies at many theatres at the same time, and sequels.
• The biggest blockbusters of this time were Star Wars and Jaws.
• Innovative movie producers included Steven Spielburg, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, and William Friedkin.
• From the 1980s and forward, the biggest changes in movie making has been digital and computer technology and of course, they make fantastic special effects.