Hollywood and the motion picture

The famous Hollywood Sign originally read "Hollywoodland". It was erected in 1923 to advertise a new housing development in the hills above Hollywood. For several years, the sign was left to deteriorate. In 1949, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce stepped in and offered to remove the last four letters and repair the rest. The shape of the text on the sign, which is located near the top of Mount Lee, has been registered as a trademark by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce for certain uses, including cosmetics, clothing, and souvenirs. The same organization also manages the venerable Walk of Fame.In the early 1900s, motion picture production companies from New York and New Jersey started moving to California because of the reliable weather. Although electric lights existed at that time, none were powerful enough to adequately expose film; the best source of illumination for movie production was natural sunlight. Besides the moderate, dry climate, they were also drawn to the state because of its open spaces and wide variety of natural scenery which could, of course, come in handy during film-making. Another factor in Hollywood's development was its great distance from New Jersey, which made it more difficult for Thomas Edison to enforce his motion picture patents.

At the time, Edison owned almost all of the patents relevant to motion picture production and, in the East, movie producers acting independently of Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company were often sued or enjoined by Edison and his agents. Thus, movie makers working on the West Coast could work unencumbered by Edison's control. If Edison sent agents to California, word would usually reach Los Angeles before the agents' arrival and the movie makers could simply escape to nearby Mexico.In early 1910, director D. W. Griffith was sent by the Biograph Company to the west coast with his acting troop consisting of actors Blanche Sweet, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, and others. They started filming on a vacant lot near Georgia Street in Downtown Los Angeles. The Company decided to explore new territories and traveled several miles north to a little village that was friendly and enjoyed the movie company filming there. This place was called "Hollywood".

D. W. Griffith then filmed the first movie ever shot in Hollywood called In Old California, a Biograph melodrama about Latino/Mexican-occupied California in the 1800s. Biograph stayed there for months and made several films before returning to New York. After hearing about this wonderful place, in 1913 many movie-makers headed west. With this film, the movie industry was "born" in Hollywood which soon became the movie capital of the world.The first motion picture studio in the region was built in 1909 by the Selig Polyscope Company. The Selig studio was located in Edendale, just east of Hollywood. The first studio in Hollywood proper was Nestor Studios, founded in 1911 by Al Christie for David Horsley in an old building on the southeast corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street. The first motion picture to be filmed in Hollywood was filmed at the Whitley home located on the corner of Prospect (now Hollywood Blvd) and Wilcox. In the same year, another fifteen Independents settled in Hollywood.

Creators of dreams began arriving by the thousands; cameras cranked away, capturing images of custard pies, bathing beauties, comedy and tragedy, villains leering, heroines with long curls and heroes to save the day; and they built a new world to replace the lemon groves. Thus, the fame of Hollywood came from its identity with the movies and movie stars; and the word "Hollywood," a word that, when spoken in any country on Earth, evokes worlds, even galaxies of memories, came to be colloquially used to refer to the motion picture industry.In 1913, Cecil B. DeMille, in association with Jesse Lasky, leased a barn with studio facilities on the southeast corner of Selma and Vine Streets from the Burns and Revier Studio and Laboratory, which had been established there. DeMille then began production of The Squaw Man (1914). It became known as the Lasky-DeMille Barn and is currently the location of the Hollywood Heritage Museum.The Charlie Chaplin Studios, on the northeast corner of La Brea and De Longpre avenues just south of Sunset Boulevard, was built in 1917. It has had many owners after 1953, including Kling Studios, who produced the Superman TV series with George Reeves; by Red Skelton, who used the sound stages for his CBS TV variety show; and by CBS, which filmed the TV series Perry Mason with Raymond Burr there. It has also been owned by Herb Alpert's A&M Records and Tijuana Brass Enterprises. It is currently The Jim Henson Company, home of the Muppets. In 1969, The Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Board named the studio an historical cultural monument.The first Academy Awards presentation ceremony took place on May 16, 1929 during a banquet held in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. Tickets were $10.00 and there were 250 people in attendance.

Hollywood and the movie industry of the 1930s are described in P. G. Wodehouse's novel Laughing Gas (1936) and in Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run? (1941), and is parodied in Terry Pratchett's novel Moving Pictures (1990), which is a takeoff of Singin' in the Rain.From about 1930, five major "Hollywood" movie studios from all over the Los Angeles area, Paramount, RKO, 20th Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Warner Bros., owned large, grand theaters throughout the country for the exhibition of their movies. The period between the years 1927 (the effective end of the silent era) to 1948 is considered the age of the "Hollywood studio system", or, in a more common term, the Golden Age of Hollywood. In a landmark 1948 court decision, the United States Supreme Court ruled that movie studios could not own theaters and play only the movies produced by their studios and only with their movie stars. With that, an era of Hollywood history had unofficially ended. By the mid-1950s, when television proved a profitable enterprise that was here to stay, movie studios started to produce programming in that TV, which is still the norm today.

Bollywood

Bollywood is the informal name given to the popular Mumbai-based Hindustani language film industry in India. The term is often incorrectly used to refer to the whole of Indian cinema.
The name is a portmanteau of Bombay (the former name for Mumbai) and Hollywood, the center of the American film industry. Though some purists deplore the name, arguing that it makes the industry look like a poor cousin to Hollywood, it seems likely to persist and now has its own entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The term Bollywood is so popular that most articles talking about the cultural, social and economical impact of Hindi movies, use the term Bollywood instead of Hindi film industry based in Mumbai. The word is used in almost all entertainment magazines in India and abroad, television, newspapers and even scholarly articles written about Hindi entertainment industry. Do we have some person, individual, publication who owns the credit to introduce this term to Indian popular culture?

Tanya Palta tells us about the origin of the term Bollywood. According to Tanya, Amit Khanna was the person who first used the term Bollywood in mid seventies. Which is not entirely true. In an e-mail to the literary review’s wordspeak Bevinda Collaco claimed that she is the person who first used the term for his gossip column ‘On the Bollywood Beat. In her email she wrote:
Bollywood was not by accident. It was very much by design… I got into film journalism by pure accident and knew nothing about Hindi films… I was given a studio beat to do. I was not happy with the name of the column Studio Roundup and thought of `Flipping around Follywood’, but it sounded too harsh. I settled for `On the Bollywood Beat’ instead. From a studio roundup column I began commenting on what was happening off the sets too and it turned into a gossip column. In no time at all the stars were calling up to find out why they were mentioned in Bollywood and others to find out why they were not mentioned in Bollywood. I guess they were responsible for giving my word longevity.

So far there seems an agreement that the term first appeared in a magazine column. We don’t know for sure who first used it Amit or Bevinda but we do know that Bevinda’s column gave the word popularity among the film stars who then started referring the industry as Bollywood. So I think that more credit goes to Bevinda who popularized the term that she claims that she designed to sound different.

Kollywood

History

The making of Nepali films is said to have begun with D. B. Pariyar's Satya Harishchandra, which was the first Nepali language film to be shot. It was produced from Kolkata, India, and was released on September 14, 1951. Aama (meaning mother) was the first film produced in Nepal, and was released on October 7, 1964. It was produced by the Information Department of His Majesty's Government Of Nepal (now Government of Nepal). It was directed by Hira Singh Khatri and the lead actors were Shiva Shankar Manandhar and Bhuwan Thapa, who are regarded as the first actors in the history of the Nepali film industry. The first film to be produced under a private banner was Maitighar (meaning the birth home of a girl), which was released at the end of 1966 by Sumonanjali Films Pvt. Ltd. Although it was a Nepali movie, it had many Indians contributing toward the making of the film. Mala Sinha had the lead role, along with C P Lohani, whom she later married. It had special appearances of Sunil Dutt and comedian Rajendra Nath. Directed by B S Thapa and music scored by Jaidev, a veteran music maestro, it had Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle, Usha Mangeshkar, and Manna Dey, all of them established Indian singers, doing the playback-singing along with the household names of Nepali music, like Narayan Gopal, Prem Dhoj Pradhan, C P Lohani, and Aruna Lama.
Then the government established the Royal Nepal Film Corporation in 1971. Mann Ko Bandh was the first film produced by the Corporation. Prakesh Thapa was the director of the film. Nati Kaji and Shiva Shankar were the music composers of the songs. Amber Gurung scored the background music. The film premiered in 1973 in Kathmandu. Mann Ko Bandh was followed by Kumari (the first Eastman color Nepali film) in 1977, Sindoor in 1980, and Jeevan Rekha in series. The success of these films opened up avenue for private parties to enter into filmmaking as industrial endeavor.

Golden era

After the introduction of private companies in the Nepali film industry, the time came when more films were being made and they were much more accepted by Nepali audiences. Films such as Kusume Rumal, Lahure, Kaanchi, Samjhana, Basudev, Saino and Koseli, which were released between 1984 and 1993, were very popular. Leading actors at the time included Bhuwan K.C. and Tripti Naadkar, whose on-screen chemistry saw them being dubbed the golden couple of the Nepali film industry. In the later years of the decade, the industry saw the rise of Rajesh Hamal and Karishma Manandhar.

Conflict era

The start of the Maoist revolution was the start of the downfall of the Nepali film industry. In the era of war and conflict, only a very small number of films were made, and audiences fell sharply. That resulted in lower budgets and even lower performances, which resulted in even smaller audiences. In the later years of the conflict, the production and release of Nepali films had come to a standstill. Many actors and filmmakers left the country in search for work because there were no films being made.

Present situation

By 2006, as the situation in Nepal calmed down and with Maoists coming into mainstream politics, the Nepali film industry started to return to its previous state. Now, more and more films are being made and released. The production companies and those in the industry are enthusiastic about the country's new situation. The return of peace in the country has opened more venues for the shooting of the films, and the industry is seen to be making good use of this time to revive the image of the industry.