Hollywood

Hollywood was a nineteenth-century agricultural district in Los Angeles, California, that entrepreneur H. H. Wilcox transformed into America's cinematic heartland. For some, it is synonymous with the Americanization of the culture industry—that is, the production and distribution of cultural works, such as movies and television shows. Wilcox bought the district (initially named Rancho La Brea and inhabited by Amerindians) in 1886 and, together with his wife, converted newly christened “Hollywood” into a village. Within a few years, the Wilcoxes had devised a grid plan to turn the area into a flourishing community with a paved Prospect Avenue (today known as Hollywood Boulevard) and lots that were marketed primarily to Midwesterners to build residential properties. The community became part of the city of Los Angeles in 1910, and a year later, Centaur Film Co. moved in to establish the first studio. Other corporate businesses followed, gradually turning Hollywood into Los Angeles' artistic commercial hub. Banks, clubs, restaurants, and movie studios completed this process, catering to the demands of a growing film industry (Paramount Pictures [1912], Columbia Pictures [1920], Warner Brothers [1923], Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer [1924], 20th Century Fox [1935]) that by the 1930s had acquired a global reputation. The area has since developed into a global tourist attraction, and in 1985, Hollywood Boulevard's commercial district was listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Although some studios have always been situated outside Hollywood, the name itself came to signify the entire U.S. film industry with its satellite commerce. By the 1960s, Hollywood had embraced the music industry, too, with recording studios migrating to Sunset Boulevard to complement the nightclubs of the district. Hollywood's power extends beyond the history of cinema and into that of a cultural communications complex that has become integral to post-1880s capitalist exchange. Its emergence coincided with the decade in which social historians locate the economic origins of World War I and the neoimperialist booming. The U.S. film industry established itself internationally on the eve of the totalitarian slide in Europe (1920s–1930s), something that almost coincided with the ideological use of mass communications by the Nazi regime. The first systematic theorization of media industries originates in the radical critique of mass consumption pioneered by the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute of Social Research, Frankfurt University) whose members fled Nazi Germany in 1933 to relocate in the United States. There, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer developed the culture industry thesis, casting American new communication technologies as demagogic tools that divert collective consciousness from sociopolitical problems. In a Marxist vein, popular culture (music, film, magazines) was seen as a force that destroys the potential for a social revolution. Especially in the light of the increasing success of Hollywood musicals from the 1930s, Adorno [Page 739]and Horkheimer expressed the fear that the recipients of cinematic messages may become consumers in abstracto—that is, consumers who have lost their particularity and become interchangeable and quantifiable entities (Kellner 1989).

This interpretive model formed the basis on which third world activists, artists, and critical political economists developed the theoretical complex known as cultural imperialism. The appropriation of a vast array of culturally significant machines by the United States (airplane, typewriter, electric light, and telephone) and their use to consolidate military domination from the 1960s (in Philippines, Thailand, Cuba) turned the United States into a global political player. Hollywood narratives reflected this technological triumph, developing simultaneously other ideological devices that endorsed American sociocultural supremacy. Racist agendas found an unhappy continuation in cinematic representations of African and Asian cultures as inferior and backward, whereas practices of boycotting foreign films (through introduction of patent and distribution or copyright restrictions) further ensured America's ideological insularity. Hollywood and its multiple production companies spread their control globally by absorbing smaller companies with less capital to finance expensive cinematic enterprises.

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