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In 1893, Thomas Edison built the first movie studio in the USA when he constructed a small, tarpaper-covered structure near his laboratories in West Orange, New Jersey, and asked circus, vaudeville and dramatic actors to perform for the camera. He distributed these movies at vaudeville theatres, penny arcades, wax museums and fairgrounds. Other studio operations followed in New Jersey, New York City and Chicago, Illinois.

But in the early 1900s, companies started moving to Los Angeles, California, because of the good weatherWeather comprises all the various phenomena that occur in the atmosphere of a planet. On Earth the regular events include wind, storms, rain, and snow, which occur in the troposphere or the lower part of the atmosphere. Weather is driven by energy from th and longer days. Although electric lightsMost of the industrialized world is lit by electric lights which are used both at night and to provide additional light during the daytime. These lights are normally powered by the electric grid, but some run on local generators, and emergency generators existed at that time, none were powerful enough to adequately expose film; the best source of illumination for motion picture production was natural sunlightSunlight in the broad sense is the total spectrum of electromagnetic radiation given off by the Sun. On Earth, solar radiation is obvious as daylight when the Sun is above the horizon. This is usually during the hours known as day''. Near the poles in sum. Some movies were shot on the roofs of buildings in Downtown Los AngelesDowntown Los Angeles is the center of the metropolis of Los Angeles, California, if not necessarily its heart. The sprawling mega-city is so large that its downtown is, in many ways, a district like Hollywood, as much as the leading area of the city.. Another reason that early movie producers located in Southern CaliforniaSouthern California sometimes called SoCal is the southern portion of the state of California. Geographically, the division between central and southern California is customarily at the Tehachapi Mountains. Politically, the region is defined roughly by th was to escape Edison's Motion Picture Patents CompanyMPPC stands for Motion Picture Patents Company also known as the Edison Trust, also known as the First Oligopoly. The MPPC was a trust of all the major film companies ( Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph, Essanay, Selig, Lubin, Kalem, American Star, American Pat, as he owned almost all the patentsA patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a government to an inventor or applicant for a limited amount of time (normally 20 years from the filing date). The term "patent" originates from the term patere which means to lay open (to public inspectio relevant to movie production at the time. The distance from New Jersey made it more difficult for Edison to enforce his patents.

The first movie studio in the HollywoodFor other uses, see Hollywood (disambiguation Hollywood is a district of the City of Los Angeles, California, U. that runs from about Vermont Avenue on the east to just beyond Laurel Canyon Boulevard above Sunset and Crescent Heights Boulevards on the wes area was Nestor Studios, which was opened in 1911 by Al Christie for David Horsley. In the same year, another fifteen Independents settled in Hollywood. Other studios eventually settled in such towns and districts in the Los Angeles area as Culver City, Burbank and Studio City in the Valley.

The advent of the talkies in the late 1920s launched a round of mergers in the movie industry, reshaping the Hollywood studio system. Five large companies, Fox (later 20th Century Fox), Loew’s Incorporated (later Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), Paramount Pictures, RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) and Warner Bros., functioned as producers, promoters, distributors and exhibitors. Universal Studios, Columbia Pictures and United Artists were also important, but exerted less control since they did not own their own theaters to play only the movies of their own studio and movie stars.

The Big Five's studio owned theaters were opposed by eight independent producers, which included Samuel Goldwyn, David O. Selznick, Walt Disney and Walter Wanger , and in 1948 the U.S. government won a case against Paramount in the Supreme Court, the ruling being that this high level of power constituted a monopoly and was therefore against the law, which effectively ended the studio system.

With the collapse of the Hollywood studio system because of antitrust, movie production was taken over by companies that put together teams on a project-to-project basis, usually renting space from some of the great studios of the Golden Age, which is still the norm today.

By the mid- 1950s, when television proved a profitable enterprise that was here to stay, movie studios started also being used for the production of programming in that medium. Some studios established their own TV production units, such as Columbia with Screen Gems.