The film industry and urban development in metropolitan Los Angeles, 1920-1975

This dissertation documents the role of film studios, as large landowners, in the shaping of the urban development of metropolitan Los Angeles through two dramatic shifts in the business model of the film industry that defined film companies’ locational and land-use decisions. First, the vertical integration of the film industry in the 1920s created the studio system, which organized production around manufacturing plants that expanded to meet the growing needs of product for company-owned theaters. Second, after a 1948 Supreme Court ruling declared such vertical integration an illegal trust and ordered the sell-off of the theater chains, film companies transformed their physical plants for a post-studio system era. All the while, the studios’ financial dependence on New York constrained the film industry’s influence on Los Angeles. Even as film production migrated to Los Angeles by the third decade of the twentieth century, film companies’ headquarters remained in New York, where all business decisions, including those about land use, were made until the 1970s. ❧ I selected three of the five vertically-integrated studios for analysis: Twentieth Century Fox (Fox) in West Los Angeles, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in Culver City, and Paramount in Hollywood (RKO Pictures and Warner Bros. were the other two). Analyzing these case studies allowed me to develop three typologies of urban development that distinguish among the companies’ reactions to the two shifts in the film industry and their location in different sections of the Los Angeles metropolis. First, Fox relocated its studio from Hollywood to an undeveloped suburban section of Los Angeles in 1928. After the collapse of the studio system, the company hired Los Angeles-based architect-planner Welton Becket’s firm to master plan modernist-styled Century City, which transformed the studio backlot into a node of economic activity surrounded by more conventional low-density suburban residential districts. Second, in contrast, MGM’s once sprawling film plant of seven noncontiguous lots in Culver City was sold and developed piecemeal in single-use redevelopments in the 1970s. Third, while Fox and MGM shrank, Paramount incrementally expanded its smaller, older studio in the urban core of Los Angeles in the 1940s, consuming the urban fabric that had previously contained its growth. Paramount expanded again in the 1960s when it acquired the adjoining lot that had once been RKO. ❧ By tracing the land-use decisions of three private firms, the study illuminates the interface between public and private planning efforts in shaping cities, mirroring the evolution of industries in other American cities. Specifically, a comparison of Los Angeles and its film industry to Pittsburgh’s steel and Detroit’s automobile industries reveals a similar relationship between industrialization and urban development. In each case, the firm’s vision of what to do with its large landholdings interacted with the city’s aspirations for the development of the areas it possessed. Such collaboration indicates a reciprocal role between private industry and urban planning in the urban development of metropolitan America.