When nitrate celluloid film was invented in the mid-1880s to capture still photography, it became possible to capture and store individual component images on a single film reel, which allowed objects in motion to be captured in real time.  Early versions of the motion picture camera, including the first Kinetoscope developed by Thomas Edison in Orange, New Jersey, required the individual viewer to look through a contraption resembling a pair of binoculars that look downward into a box.

These inventions led quickly to the development of motion picture projectors, which were designed to shine light through the processed and printed film and magnify these "moving picture shows" onto a screen for an entire audience.  This phenomenon came to be known as "motion pictures." Early motion pictures were composed of a series of rapidly sequenced static shots depicting an event or action with no editing or other cinematic techniques. With a few exceptions, these first films were documentaries depicting every-day life – also known as actualités.
The first motion picture to be screened in front of a paying audience was a filmed boxing match.  Lasting just eight minutes, it was entitled Young Griffo vs. Battling Charles Barnett.  It was filmed on the roof of Madison Square Garden, and premiered at 153 Broadway in New York City on May 20, 1895.

The first commercial film to be projected on to a screen was premiered on December 28, 1895, by Louis Lumiere and his brother Auguste.  Convinced that motion picture film had mass-appeal and should be viewed by large audiences, the Lumiere brothers had created what they called a Cinematographe machine, which was a camera/projector that could project an image up on large surfaces, thus enabling the film to be shown to a large audience. Using their photographic supplies factory as a motion picture laboratory, the two brothers had painstakingly created a 17-and-a-half minute film entitled La Sortie des Usines Lumiere (Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory).  They showed it for the first time to a paying audience at a Paris café called Salon Indien.

In 1896, using a projecting kinetoscope, Thomas Edison showed the first publicly-projected motion picture on a screen in the United Stages at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall in New York City.  That same year, Edison created a 20-second short entitled The Kiss, depicting May Irwin and John Rice in a lingering smooch.  Although it was the most popular film produced by Edison’s Black Maria film company that year, it also became notorious as the first film to be criticized as scandalous and to bring demands for censorship.

In 1898, the idea of censorship was put into practice when curious camera operators traveled to Cuba in an attempt to capture footage of the Spanish-American War but were turned away by the U.S. Army.  Unable to capture real-time battles on film, many of them went into studios to create battle scenes using models and painted backdrops, thus ushering in the start of scale-model effects for motion pictures.  Taking the idea of created effects a step further, in 1899, French magician Georges Melies produced a film called Cendrillon (Cinderella).  This was the first film to use artificially arranged scenes to construct and tell a narrative story.  Melies went on to write, design, direct, and act in hundreds of his own fairy tale and science fiction films.  He also developed techniques such as stop-motion photography, double-exposures, multiple-exposures, and fades.

Up until this point, motion pictures had been largely considered as either a visual art form or a curiosity – a popular fad that would not stand the test of time.  By the turn of the century, however, as more and more public demonstrations and paid showings took place, public imagination was captured by the possibilities of this innovative form of entertainment.  It was at this time that films began developing a narrative structure by juxtaposing scenes together to tell a story.  Editing was born when the scenes were broken up into multiple shots of varying sizes and angles.  Other techniques such as camera movement were discovered and proved to be more effective ways to capture audience imagination and portray a story on film.

Throughout the early 1900s, film was brought to the masses.  Nickelodeons (a word coming from nickel, as in a five cent coin, and the Greek word Odeion, meaning a roofed-over theatre) in big cities throughout the United States began having peep shows based on Edison's original kinetoscope idea. At the same time, moving pictures became a popular attraction in amusement arcades, music halls, traveling fairs, wax museums, and vaudeville houses across the developed world.

In the first part of the 20th century, the rise of European cinema was interrupted by the start of World War I.  At this point, the United States emerged as the dominant creative and production force in cinema.  Early American films were largely shot on the East Coast, with New York and New Jersey being popular filming locale.  As more and more films were produced, however, film companies were lured west by the year-round moderate temperatures that were ideal for exterior shoots.  Filmmakers also wanted to avoid the close watch of a group called The Trust, the patent-holders of film.  In 1908, Selig Polyscope moved from New York to the Edendale area of Los Angeles and became the first permanent film studio in Southern California.  Shortly thereafter, the New York Motion Picture Company also moved to the area, establishing Edendale as the early ground zero of the west coast film world.

On a trip to Southern California in the early 1900s, filmmaker D.W. Griffith was smitten by the pleasant little village of Hollywood.  Incorporated as a town in 1903, its name had come from the name of a 120-acre ranch northwest of Los Angeles that was owned by Harvey Henderson Wilcox and named by his wife, Daieda.   In 1910, Griffith selected Hollywood as the shooting location for the Biography Company’s silent movie In Old California.  A film about the Mexican era of California, it was the first movie to be filmed in Hollywood.

The first movie studio to be built in Hollywood was Nestor Studios, in 1911.  In that same year, fifteen independent studios also decided to settle in Hollywood, thus putting Hollywood on the map as a film industry location.   Over the next decade, other production companies began to settle in the Los Angeles area in places such as Culver City, Burbank, and Studio City.  In 1915, Carl Laemmle, a German immigrant who relocated from New York City, opened the first movie metropolis and named it Universal City. Assorted luminaries like Buffalo Bill Cody and Thomas Edison came for the tours that were given on opening day.  Meanwhile Hal Roach and Harold Lloyd had colonized Culver City with what began as the Rolin Film Company, which was later renamed Hal Roach Studios when Harold Lloyd eventually left to join forces with John Jasper at what would eventually become Hollywood Center Studios many decades later.

1920s

In 1919, when designer John Jasper quit Charlie Chaplin’s Hollywood-area Chaplin Studios after thirteen years of experience in order to open his own production company.  Jasper built three production stages and a number of bungalows on a 16.5-acre tract of land in Hollywood.  Christened Hollywood Studios, Inc. (also known as Jasper Hollywood Studios), it was operated by Chicago moneyman C.E. Toberman.

The early stages at Hollywood Studios and elsewhere resembled horticulturists' hothouses with their steel frames, cloth walls, glass roofs and clerestory windows. The greenhouse effect was not just aesthetic but practical, as well.  The unusual shape and lighting was necessary in order to illuminate sets in the days of slow film stocks before the technique of arc lighting had been perfected (which did not happen until the early 1930s when Thomas Edison invented industrial-strength incandescent light bulbs). 

By 1920, producers on the Hollywood Studios lot included Marshall Neilan, Albert Kaufman, King Vidor, and Marion Fairfax.  In 1921, a fourth stage was constructed, as well as several exterior sets on the back lot.

By the 1920s, general admission for feature films at movie theaters had climbed to 22 cents, and comedies and westerns were attracting the largest audiences.  Up until this point, because there was no sound in films, theater owners kept their audiences happy by hiring a pianist, organist, or full orchestra to play music that would fit the mood of the film.  Many films even came with a prepared list of sheet music for this purpose, with complete film scores composed for major productions.  In the early 1920s, however, a new technology was developed that allowed filmmakers to attach a soundtrack to a film reel that could contain any combination of speech, music and sound effects that were synchronized with the action on the screen. These sound-added films were referred to as "talking pictures", or talkies.

At first, film studios were unwilling to jump on the sound bandwagon because the technology was not reliable.  The projected film had to be synchronized exactly with the sound recording, and there was still no technology created to amplify it properly.  In addition, the introduction of sound complicated the shooting process, because the action had to take into account the microphones that were nailed to the floor.  In order to get a perfect audio recording, both elaborate action and camera movement had to be drastically limited.  In order to soundproof a set, cameramen and their cameras were encased in stifling booths; and because slower film was required for the processing of optical sound track, brighter, hotter lights had to be used to illuminate sets.  Actors, directors, and crew were all unhappy with these conditions, and short-term chaos broke loose on the stages.

The 1920s also saw a number of changes taking place at Jasper’s Hollywood Studios.  In 1922, comedian Harold Lloyd left Hal Roach Studios and relocated his entourage to Jasper's lot.  That May, Fred Newmeyer directed Lloyd in a popular silent comedy called Grandma's Boys that was shot at Hollywood Studios.   Considered to be one of Lloyd’s best films, it differed from many comedies of that era due to its tight narrative line.

In 1923, Hollywood Studios changed hands when it was purchased by a group of Los Angeles businessmen.  The studio again changed ownership in 1924 when B. P. Schulberg, the producer who discovered Clara Bow, bought a controlling interest in the studio for Preferred Pictures Corp.  In January 1925, both Jasper and Toberman left the studio when it sold for the third time in two years to Al and Charles Christie, producers of the Christie Comedies and owners of the Christies Film Corporation.  In the terms of the sale, Toberman retained the frontage property on Santa Monica Boulevard, moving the studio entrance to the Las Palmas side.  William Sistrom, formerly a production manager in Universal City, became the new manager, and the lot was renamed Hollywood/Metropolitan Studios.  Hollywood was not yet a company town, and the trades still referred to it as a "film colony."

By that time, investing in film production had become popular among successful businessmen.  In 1925, after being talked into making a picture by a movie star acquaintance, the restless millionaire Howard Hughes left the management of his family’s oil drilling business to his financial advisers and appointed himself president of Cado Pictures, which was located on the Hollywood/Metropolitan Studios lot.  Although Hughes’ first film, Swell Hogan, was an expensive disaster that was never released, during its filming he gained invaluable experience on a movie set.

In the mid-1920s, studios began experimenting with adding color to film.  At first, it was used for emphasis in spot sequences.  In 1926, United Artists’ producer Douglas Fairbanks used Two-Strip Technicolor in limited segments in The Black Pirate (although the first complete Technicolor feature, RKO's Becky Sharp, was not distributed until nearly a decade later, in 1935).

The introduction of sound was happening at a faster pace. For two second-string studios, audio gave them a bargaining chip to break out into the front ranks. In 1925 and 1926, Warner’s and Fox both began showing newsreels and vaudeville shorts with sound.  Warner's banked on the Vitaphone synchronized audio playback system, and even nailed down an exclusivity agreement with Western Electric.  Fox aligned with the developer of Movietone (an optical film process), a technology that debuted with an audio newsreel of Charles Lindbergh taking off for Paris.

In these first releases, sound was regarded as a novelty by audiences and critics alike.  Both studios knew that it would take a crowd-pleasing feature to secure sound’s future in the film world.  Warner Brothers hit the nail on the head with The Jazz Singer (1927), starring Al Jolson.  In a film that had about 25% sound, Jolson’s singing voice captivated audiences nationwide.  Often credited as the first “talkie”, it was actually the fourth full-length feature with sound.  John Barrymore had already starred in several sound films, and Charlie Chaplin's brother Syd headlined in The Better 'Ole.  Earlier attempts at “talkies” had failed to thrill audiences, perhaps because studios first used sound to record music as opposed to dialog.

Sound had begun to convert filmmaking to an indoor activity because the controlled environment of a soundstage was better for recording levels and acoustics.  Always apace with the industry curve, during the summer of 1926 Hollywood/Metropolitan Studios' executives began construction of the Metropolitan Sound Stages.  A year later, Lewis Milestone, today most famous for directing the Rat Pack Vegas Caper Ocean’s Eleven, convinced Hughes to back one of his last silent films, the nine-reel Two Arabian Nights, which was filmed at Hollywood/Metropolitan.  Milestone went on to win his first Best Director Academy Award for the film.

Howard Hughes soon went from dilettante producer to director.  After firing two directors due to personality conflicts, he decided to take the helm of the WWI dogfight film Hell's Angels, part of which was shot at Hollywood/Metropolitan.  Hughes was enamored as much with audio as with aviation, and decided to re-shoot many of the sequences using the latest sound technology.  He replaced his leading lady, who was Scandinavian and thus had a accent too pronounced for her to pass as a British aristocrat, and instead hired Jean Harlow in her screen debut.

Over the course of the shoot, Hughes had spared no expense.  He employed 28 cameramen working under two DPs, three stunt pilots were killed, and, during postproduction, a small chunk of Hughes’ fortune was lost when the Depression hit.  After nineteen months and $4 million dollars, the film was released.  With audiences at that time paying only 25 cents a ticket, Hell’s Angels was far from ever making back the money it cost to produce it.  After that financial disaster, Hughes retrenched to more modest budgets.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the lot, Harold Lloyd continued to make popular films when he busy wasn’t playing handball in the lot garage he had converted for that purpose.  By the end of the decade, he wrapped For Heaven's Sake (1926), The Kid Brother (1927), Speedy (1928) and Welcome Danger (1929).

By now, it was evident that sound was around to stay. By spring of 1928, the majors—MGM, Paramount and United Artists—had signed with ERPI, the licensing division of Western Electric that handled the rights to the company’s film-related audio technology. Warner Brothers lead in the technology was short, and they were soon overtaken by the more elegant Movietone, which was capable of putting sound directly onto the film, eliminating the clumsy, out-of-synch, mechanical playback systems. The first total talkie was The Lights of New York, directed by Brian Foy and released in 1928.  Due to audience demand for talking pictures, theater owners began to spend the $23,000 per screen that was necessary to retrofit their theaters for sound.

By 1929, sound had become so synonymous with the wave of the future that Hollywood/Metropolitan Studio was renamed the Metropolitan Sound Studio, and Stages 1 and 2 were outfitted with Vitaphone equipment.   Independent producers present for Metropolitan Sound Studio’s groundbreaking festivities included Howard Hughs, Charles Christie, Al Christie, and Harold Lloyd.  By that same year, 110 million people were going to the movies every week.

1930s

By the beginning of the 1930s, Technicolor was still limited to musicals and westerns, and it took nearly two decades for color to catch on. At the time, no serious director was willing to shoot in color—partly because of habit, and partly because, at the time, black and white stocks, cameras and lenses were more advanced and easier to use.  Color also took longer to become popular because many of film’s leading ladies weren’t too sure how they'd look in color. Seasoned actresses like Greta Garbo preferred to remain in black and white; Katherine Hepburn insisted on black and white only until the release of African Queen two decades later.  However, a new generation of stars, several of them Technicolorgenic redheads, were groomed for the color palette; Rita Hayworth, Maureen O'Hara, and Danny Kaye were among them.

Also a major influence on film during the early part of the decade, the Great Depression had a serious impact on budgets for major productions.  Even at highly solvent “hit factories” such as MGM, the average production budget dropped to around $450,000.  Movie attendance plummeted from its peak of 110 million in 1929 to a yearly average of less than half that number. At Warner Brothers, budgets were so tight that Casablanca co-stars Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman received $36,667 and $25,000 for their roles, respectively.  At the time, Hollywood’s best-paid executives were making just over $1 million; Louis B. Mayer’s reported salary at the time was $1,296,503, excluding benefits.

Meanwhile, Howard Hughes left Metropolitan for United Artists a year after releasing The Front Page.  Harold Lloyd, however, remained at Metropolitan and followed the comedy hit Feet First (released in 1930 in Movietone Sound) with Movie Crazy, widely considered to be one of his best films.  Far from being the hapless victim of circumstance he played on the screen, Lloyd, an independent producer of his own films, was fast becoming one of the wealthiest men in Hollywood.

Also at Metropolitan, producer Trem Carr, who later became head of Monogram Studio, shot a serial called The Chinatown Mystery on existing sets.  Decades later, Roger Corman turned this penny-pinching idea into a low budget production commandment.

In January of 1933, the Christie brothers found themselves in receivership and ceded control of Metropolitan Studios to General Service Studios, which operated several studios on both coasts. Despite the studio’s sale, Charles Christie remained on the General Service Studios lot, supervising Vanity Comedies, the Andy Clyde Comedies, and the Moran and Mack Comedies. 

Looking to position their new acquisition to capture the emerging sound business, General Service Studios’ parent company, Electrical Research Products, Inc., (ERPI) an AT&T holding which had developed Vitaphone sound, turned Stages 1 and 2 into showplaces for shooting “talkies”.  Both stages were built from the ground up with a double-walled thermos style peripheral barrier that created a dead soundproof space. Today, you can still walk entirely around both stages between these peripheral walls.

One of the famous Hollywood personalities to grace the General Service lot during the 1930s was actress Mae West.  Having scandalized the Hays Office (which was in charge of enforcing the Production code) with a movie she wrote and starred in called Belle of the Nineties, a film about an unrepentant "scarlet woman" who was not only good at what she did but fast with the double entendres, West came to the lot under strict orders from Paramount to clean up her act.  The film had been cut after raising the pique of Mr. Hays himself, an ex-Post-Master General who was in charge of guaranteeing that good triumphed over evil in Hollywood pictures.

West’s 1936 movie, Klondike Annie, was not intended to be a "dirty movie," but despite the hygienic efforts of Paramount, Mae retained her sassiness and even tried to sneak out the uncut version, permanently estranging her from Paramount.  By now, West was on the downward slope of her career and the studio exiled her to a handler, Major's Emanuel Cohen.  Cohen produced a string of sanitized West vehicles that were shot at General Service Studios and presented by Adolph Zukor for Paramount, including Go West, Young Man (1936) and Every Day's a Holiday (1938).  Major also produced the Bing Crosby films Pennies from Heaven (1936), featuring Louis Armstrong, and Doctor Rhythm (1938).

During this time, Westerns were riding a wave of popularity. Harry Sherman settled in on the General Service Studios lot to produce the Hopalong Cassidy films for Paramount Pictures, a 21 picture series starring William Boyd.  Westerns weren’t the only movies to win popular approval, however.  Also on the lot during the 1930s were the bungalows and production companies of Bing Crosby and Gary Cooper; and Shirley Temple made her first film on the lot.

Merle Oberon also moved into Bungalow A, joined by her husband, Hungarian expatriate director Alexander Korda, whose office space was leased by United Artists at the height of their creative influence.  Korda came to the US from war-torn Britain, with the reels of The Four Feathers as collateral against which he raised nearly $4 million for the production of six pictures (four to be made in the States). Korda edited The Thief of Baghdad at General Service Studios, and went on to produce Lydia and Jungle Book, and to direct Laurence Olivier and Vivian Leigh in That Hamilton Woman. Writer Gore Vidal remembers the film, a glorification of war, in Palimpsest: “...the film was made...to glorify resistance to a predator-tyrant like Hitler.  British propaganda in the thirties and forties was most effectively deployed in Hollywood films so that the American people would be emotionally ready to fight, yet again, with England against Germany."

Film had been popular in the United States for over a decade by the time television entered the picture. The United States television companies had been beaten to the airwaves by the BBC in the United Kingdom.  At first, television in the United States was little more than an experiment. The first television signal bounced out of New York with NBC's broadcast of the opening of the World's Fair April 30, 1939 from the top of the Empire State building. CBS followed suit by beaming a signal from the top of the next tallest skyscraper in town, the Chrysler Building.   By 1941 NBC and CBS were both broadcasting out of New York, but their experiments were stymied by the war, and they closed down until peace time.

1940s

In 1941, the United States government ordered AT&T to divest its interest in General Service Studios. Two suitors, both independent producers, made a bid for the lot: Eddie Small and Benedict Bogeaus, a member of United Artists’ second-string who rose to the front rank when David Selznick and Alexander Korda left.  Bogeaus won out even though he had the lower bid because he promised to give the government use of the studio facilities for the wartime effort.   As it turned out, the army's propaganda machine didn’t demand much from the studio, and before long Bogeaus was back in the commercial motion picture business with six releases from United Artists and the overflow from Paramount.

From 1941-1942, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Fred Astaire, Carey Grant, Glenn Ford, Frederic March, Erich von Stroheim (in an acting role) and the Artie Shaw Orchestra were all on the General Service Studios lot.  In 1943, United Artists producer David Loew exercised a stock option and bought control of the lot from Benedict Bogeaus. David was the son of Marcus Loew, who'd gone from operating a 23rd Street arcade in Manhattan called the People's Vaudeville Company, to being the owner of one of the United States’ largest film chains.  He was also the man who fashioned MGM out of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn, and Louis B. Mayer's operation.  This peak of the studio era was also the decade of the talented and successful American director, among them John Ford, William Wyler, Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, Frank Capra, John Huston, Ernst Lubitsch, Josef von Sternberg, and King Vidor.

By the mid-1940s, Korda and other high-profile producers had left United Artists, precipitating a downward slide in their slate that continued unchecked until 1950.
For the next four years, there were only a few producers working on the General Service Studios lot.  Among the most active were the very popular RKO actress Constance Bennett, and United Artists.  Also on the lot, expatriate Jean Renoir directed The Southerner for David Loew in 1945; the Marx Brothers filmed A Night in Casablanca the following year.

By March of 1946, Bogeaus was back at General Service Studios. He reorganized the company and acquired the land and all of the buildings owned by the studio. By May, he began a $500,000 construction program of television sound stages.   In July of that same year, William Cagney (brother and partner of Jimmy) purchased a substantial interest in the studio.  Bogeaus aligned his production company with Cagney Productions, which moved into 1040 N. Las Palmas.  Charles was president, Jimmy was vice president, and Edward served as secretary.  Although Blood on the Sun (1945) and The Time of Your Life (1948)  were both made on the lot, it was not a long stay for the Cagney Brothers, who decamped to Warner Bros., their distributor, in 1949.

In the late forties and early fifties the powerful mogul/executives who had built the Hollywood film industry begin to retire and the old studios found themselves on the down slope of the Golden Era. Several events contributed to a crisis in Hollywood--the Red Scare, which silenced some of the industry's most creative minds; the Consent Decree of 1948, which forced studios to divest of their theatre holdings; the rise of unions and their willingness to strike; and the introduction of television.

Growth in the television industry had been almost non-existent through the 1940s--by 1947 there were only 14,000 sets in American homes.  But by the end of the decade, television, buoyed by the strength of the postwar economy, finally started to catch on.

In 1948, the Nasser brothers Jimmy, George, and Ted, who were managers for Bogeaus and Cagney, bought into the studio; and by 1950 they owned it outright. They zeroed in on the new niche created by television.  After being barred from entering the new medium by a monopoly-wary FCC, the majors saw only competition from television and barred it from their lots.  As a result, it left room for smaller players like the Nasser brothers to make an impact.  As television was passing from its live era in New York to its prerecorded form in Los Angeles, the Nassers captured a windfall of new business.  Burns and Allen moved in during the early fifties, and George Burns was a tenant on the lot until March 1996 when he died at 100 years old.

At this time, there was only other place in Los Angeles to produce television shows— Hal Roach Studios.  At the turn-of-the-decade, television was predominantly in the hands of advertising agencies and sponsors, and it wasn’t until the 1950s that the networks took control of programming, which they did largely through deals with independent producers.

1950s

After the end of World War II, television became increasingly popular.  The studios attempted to increase interest in movie theaters by introducing widescreen formats and improved color picture, but between 1946 and 1962 the number of moviegoers tumbled 73.4 percent as the number of households purchasing television sets steadily rose.  In 1947, only 14,000 sets had been sold; just seven years later, in 1954, there were 32 million television sets in homes across the United States.

One factor in television’s rise to popularity was its ability to provide live coverage of news events.  In April 1952, for example, 35 million viewers tuned in to watch the first televised nuclear bomb test.   Viewers were enamored with choice—they could watch everything from Steve Allen's Tonight Show to live teleplays by Gore Vidal and Paddy Chayefsky.  By 1955, more than half of all American homes boasted a television set. 

In 1951, the pilot for one of the most popular shows of the era, I Love Lucy, was shot at General Service Studios.  Lucille Ball and husband Desi Arnaz rented Stage #2 to shoot the pilot after CBS sold its financial stake in the series to Desilu.  CBS backed out because Ball and her sponsor had insisted on filming the series in front of a live audience with three-cameras; the comedienne also wouldn’t back down on the decision to cast her Cuban husband Desi as Ricky, whereas the studios thought conservative American audiences weren’t ready for an interracial couple on television.  It worked out in Ball and Arnaz’ favor, however, as the series that cost between $21-27,000 per episode to shoot became the most profitable 30-minute segment in CBS history. It became clear from America’s reaction that I Love Lucy was here to stay, and Stage 2 was retrofitted for the series.   Lucy and Desi stayed at General Service Studios for two years, and their show remained in the Top Ten for nine seasons.  Desilu also produced the Eve Arden series Our Miss Brooks, and shot commercial spots for Philip Morris and General Foods.

By 1952, CBS had thirteen shows in production at General Service Studios and, ever since, popular television shows have had an important presence on the lot. Ozzie and Harriet, The Bob Cummings Show, The People's Choice and Hennesey all located there.  Due to the rise of the television advertising industry, commercial business also began to thrive on the lot.

Despite the fact that television had undeniably captured America’s interest, a number of successful pictures were produced during the 1950s, such as Lewis R. Foster’s The Last Outpost, starring Ronald Reagan and shot at General Service Studios.  Overall, however, film executives had responded to television by green-lighting gimmicky projects that had to be viewed on the big screen, like the 3D movie Bwana Devil, released in 1952.  The studios also ramped up color and stereo sound, and released a number of exotic location pictures like The African Queen, as well as “big” pictures like The Greatest Show on Earth.

Although some producers were merely reacting to the phenomenon of television, the popularity of the new medium didn't take the Hollywood elite by surprise.  Many of them had in fact been watching the fledgling industry develop and had already invested. Warner Brothers, Loew's, 20th-Century Fox, and Paramount all attempted to buy in to the television industry but were regulated out when it was made clear by the Supreme Court that the studios were already violating antitrust laws by owning theatre chains, which they were forced to divest by the Consent Decree.  A move into television, intimated the Court and the FCC, would be met with the same trust-busting mentality. Toward the end of the decade, studios began to sell off their backlots and invest in related media like publishing.  Eventually they also invested in the production of TV programming.

Professional videotape recorders were invented in the late fifties, which meant that television no longer had to be filmed live.  Even better, independent producers could now syndicate it.

1960s

Despite the television industry’s exponential growth, by the early 1960s movies still had a hold on color technology.  Several television networks had been experimenting with color broadcasting techniques throughout the 1950s, and had even programmed isolated color shows.  But with the sales of black and white television sets still dominating the market, it had been impossible to convince set manufacturers to cooperate in the marketing of color sets.  By 1960, however, black and white sets had reached 90 percent of American homes, effectively saturating the market, and set manufacturers agreed it was time to introduce color television sets.  In 1965, nine years after its first tentative color broadcasts, NBC committed to airing its entire primetime schedule in color.

Meanwhile, studios continued the trend of big-budget films, bankrolling a trend toward 70mm production and rolling the dice on blockbusters that usually didn’t pay off.  Other gimmicks included a forgettable invention called Smell-O-Vision, which was a system that released odors during the projection of a film so that the viewer could smell what was happening in the movie.  Created by Hans Laube, this technique made its only appearance in the 1960 film Scent of Mystery, produced by Mike Todd, Jr., son of film producer Mike Todd. The process injected 30 different smells into a movie theater's seats when triggered by the film's soundtrack. 

Despite all the energy put into gimmicky films, the majors were still trying to get into the television market, and managed to get involved in television production by producing tele-films.  Around the same time, a major milestone in the film industry occurred in 1968, when Jack Valenti took over the MPAA and ended the Hollywood code of censorship by instituting the rating system.  Movies were now labeled from G to X, and directors were free to explore subjects that had been taboo for decades.

By this point, General Service Studios had become a ground zero for popular culture, and was home to many of the TV shows that babysat the baby boomers and decorated their lunchboxes. Many of the series were green-lighted under the watch of CBS head James T. Aubrey, who returned the network to strong ratings and prosperity with shows such as Green Acres, Mr. Ed (which ex-vaudevillian George Burns produced), The Beverly Hillbillies, and Petticoat Junction. Also shooting on the lot during the 1960s were popular shows The Lone Ranger and The Addams Family (and decades later, in 1991, director Barry Sonnenfeld returned to the lot to shoot the movie of the Charles Addams classic).  And in these early, lower-budget days of TV, shows like Burns and Allen and Perry Mason were successfully reworked from radio shows to TV shows as a quick way to generate scripts.

1970s

The film industry, trying to put the gimmicks of the 1960s behind them while still creating a product best viewed on the big screen, introduced a popular new genre in the 1970s--disaster movies.  Films such as The Poseidon Adventure, Airport, Jaws, and The Towering Inferno were popular with movie theater audiences nationwide.  At the same time, a new generation of more artistic filmmakers began to make their mark, including Francis Ford Coppola with The Godfather, and Martin Scorsese with Mean Streets.

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas also emerged as a dynamic duo.  After the failure of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, studios were wary about backing the Star Wars project. Lucas's trilogy went on to prove the studios wrong, pulling in three quarters of a billion dollars and launching the special effects craze that has continued to grow ever since.

Television continued to rise in popularity, and the last movie to be shot on the General Services lot during the 1970s was the me-decade send-up Shampoo, in 1975.  In the television world in the early 1970s, before the onslaught of VCRs changed America's viewing habits, TV shows like Norman Lear's All in the Family could command a 31 rating; after VCR's had became a fact of life, top rated network shows were lucky to grab a 17.5 rating.  The decade's television hits were M*A*S*H, Kojak, The Sonny and Cher Hour, and the first coming of Aaron Spelling, Charlie's Angels. Cable networks like HBO and CNN also started to emerge in the late seventies, further eroding the TV audience.

Production office space was becoming a hot commodity, however, and Hollywood General’s offices were booked up through the 1970s by producers such as James Aubrey, Frank O'Connor, Pat Curtis, Herm Saunders, George Burns, and Irving Fein.

After 27 years of running General Service Studios, the Nasser Brothers sold the lot to a Dallas oil and gas firm called Miles Production Company in the winter of 1976.  New owner Ellison Miles renamed the lot Hollywood General Studios, and started to provide video services to keep up with the trends of the time.  Universal Television also rented nine stages, paying yearly whether or not they were using them.  The studio produced Baretta, The Rockford Files, and the Wheels miniseries on the lot. 

By 1979 the Nasser Brothers appeared on the scene once again and took control of the lot.  Their renaissance was short-lived, however, because producer/director Francis Ford Coppola was waiting in the wings.

1980s

During the 1980s, many of the major studios were bought out and folded into different Fortune 100 corporations--Paramount went to Gulf & Western, United Artists to Transamerican, and Columbia to Coca-Cola.  Agents became the pivots in the movie making process, and packaging became the way movies got made. Mid-decade, a handful of young directors countered the "high-concept" equation of the studios and reanimated independent production, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, and Steven Soderberg among them.

Meanwhile, major changes were also taking place in the commercial industry.  Advertising agencies, forced to work harder for attention, outgrew what was likened to the "Dagwood Bumstead school of advertising," and began producing filmic, art-directed tours-de-force that often exceeded the $ 1 million mark.

In the television world, cable’s popularity continued to rise.  In order to recapture audience interest, broadcast networks began producing opulent primetime soaps such as Dynasty and Dallas. Bill Cosby also resuscitated the evening sit-com with The Cosby Show, which was shot at Hollywood General Studios. 

On March 14, 1980, Francis Ford Coppola took over the Hollywood General lot, intending to film a slate of his own pictures there. His company Zoetrope produced a number of films during the eighties, including Hammett, One From the Heart, The Outsiders, The Black Stallion Returns, Rumblefish, and The Escape Artist.  One From the Heart, an elaborate modern musical, ended up with a rapidly escalating budget, due largely to the creation of lush period sets on the lot’s soundstages. In 1984, after Zoetrope was driven into irrecoverable financial difficulty, the studio was acquired by the Singer family, who up until that time had been Canadian real estate developers.  The lot changed names for a final time, becoming Hollywood Center Studios.

Studio Management Services, headed by Tim Mahoney, quickly renovated the entire facility.  Within a year, all eight sound stages were revitalized and the production office space was redone to house a community of new tenants.  Apace with the changing times, Hollywood Center had a different business model from its predecessors on the lot, and the stages were marketed more widely to commercial spot producers, independent feature film producers, and the music industry, which used the stages for rehearsals.  A new rock & roll client base started shooting music videos and specials, including artists Stevie Wonder, Lionel Richie, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Jackson Browne, Michael Jackson, Prince, and Ray Charles.  Also during this period, the eighties classics Body Heat and When Harry Met Sally shot on the lot.

1990s

The 1990s began with stock-hyping visions of a 500-channel interactive TV environment, but instead ended up enamored with the Internet.  By 1995, 24 million North Americans were using the World Wide Web, and new empires were being built from the ground up on this network of tens of thousands of computers.

Hollywood Center Studios tapped into the digital revolution in 1995, when Alan Singer and Tim Mahoney started to lay the infrastructure for the most advanced sound stage facilities in Hollywood by wiring the studios with the bandwidth necessary to carry high-quality digital images and sound around the lot.  The lot was now officially “wired," allowing clients to jack into the vanguard of new digital production services.   The many new options included the ability to review storyboards, do edits, or hold casting sessions from other cities, and it also became possible to set up digital video conferences.

Hollywood Center also completed construction of two new stages, three new control rooms, three new office buildings, and new dressing and makeup rooms. 

Productions shot on the lot during the 1990s included movies such as Robert Altman's instant classic Hollywood satire The Player, The Addams Family, Scream 2, Home Alone 3, and What Dreams May Come; TV shows such as The Man Show, Mad TV, and MTV Unplugged, and hundreds of commercials.

21st Century

Today the lot is a creative neighborhood that is home to TV series, commercial production companies, production support, new media companies, special effects and post-production outfits.