The three words that had more to do with bringing movies to the San Fernando Valley than any others, were: The Edison Trust.Sure, Southern California’s untrammeled spaces and months of sunshine played a large role in the migration of moviemakers from the East Coast to north of Mulholland, but it was fear of the trust, its monopoly on filmmaking and the thugs who enforced it, that provided the impetus for the move west.
Thomas Edison had already been given credit for the phonograph (1877) and the incandescent electric light bulb (1879); it was natural that he would expect the same with his 1891 claim of having created the kinetograph motion picture camera, and the kinetoscope that allowed people to see the film through a peep hole machine.
In the first decade of the 20th century, motion pictures were still a novelty – short reels flickering in nickelodeons from New York to Chicago. Entrepreneurs such as the four Warner brothers, Carl Laemmle, Louis B. Mayer, D.W. Griffith, and others, saw nitrate gold in the burgeoning movie business.
But behind the rapidly growing business was a struggle over who would control it…those who made the films, the distributors who would provide them to the theaters, or the owners of the theaters themselves? From that struggle emerged an organization that sought to control the entire motion picture industry: the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), better known as the Edison Trust.
Formed in September 1908 in New York City, the trust was led by the inventor’s Edison Manufacturing Company, which held critical patents on motion picture cameras, projection systems, and film technology.
Their goal was simple: regulate the world of filmmaking by pooling their various patents and then licensing only approved producers and exhibitors. The trust became a powerful gatekeeper that dictated who could make films, what equipment they could use, and how those films could be shown. Only approved cameras and projectors could be used, and film stock itself was tightly controlled through exclusive agreements.
To enforce their monopoly, the trust relied not only on lawsuits but also on aggressive enforcement. Their private investigators and hired agents went to filming locations, post-production facilities, and corporate offices, to shut down unlicensed film operations, seize equipment, and intimidate exhibitors who operated outside the trust’s authority.
The result was predictable: the members of the trust moved toward control of the whole industry while independent filmmakers found themselves under constant threat of raids or confiscation of their equipment.
This situation led to an unintended consequence that would reshape cinema. Many independent producers began looking for places where enforcement was weaker and the legal reach of the Edison patents was harder to sustain. Their solution lay thousands of miles away…the West Coast.
The Los Angeles region offered several advantages. It was distant from the Trust’s headquarters in New York, making legal enforcement more difficult, and the reliable year -round dry climate was ideal for outdoor filming using the natural light required by early cameras.
By the 1910s, filmmakers began migrating westward in increasing numbers. Small production companies quietly set up shop in and around Los Angeles. As the trust’s legal pressure intensified in the east, the west became a refuge. The distance from Edison’s enforcement network allowed a more open production culture to develop.
D.W. Griffith made the first film in the San Fernando Valley, Over Silent Paths, in 1910, and the floodgates through the Cahuenga Pass opened.Within the next 25 years, the Valley saw the opening of Universal, Warner Bros., and Mack Sennett Studios, and the businesses and people who followed them into the Valley.
What began as a patent enforcement scheme in New York ultimately helped give rise to the San Fernando Valley as the global capital of motion pictures.
The antitrust case that destroyed the trust was the 1915 suit, United States v. Motion Picture Patents Co. The federal government sued the MPPC under the Sherman Antitrust Act, arguing that the trust illegally monopolized the motion picture industry through patent control, licensing restrictions, exclusive agreements, and coordinated control over film production, distribution, and exhibition. The court ruled that the trust’s actions went: “far beyond what was necessary to protect the use of patents” and constituted an illegal monopoly.
Ironically, the Edison Trust, which was created to centralize and control filmmaking, actually helped accelerate its decentralization. It pushed entrepreneurs westward, where they laid the foundations of what would become the San Fernando Valley’s preeminence in motion pictures.
Martin Cooper supervised public relations for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences for 10 years; held executive positions with Disney and Universal Studios; and was Board Chairman of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. He is a member of the Board of the British Film Institute in America. Cooper is a Fernando Award Honoree and Past Chairman of VICA. An award-winning author, he has written five books, three of them on the San Fernando Valley.
His fifth book, The ‘Reel’ Hollywood: The San Fernando Valley, the history of motion pictures in the Valley, was published last month and is available on Amazon and in book stores.
