Where Hollywood took over the world
Hollywood came to Los Angeles partly to get away from Thomas Edison. His patent trust controlled film equipment on the East Coast and enforced it aggressively, so independent producers moved 3,000 miles west, where the sunlight was constant and the Mexican border was close enough to run for. By the 1920s the studios here were setting the terms for what the rest of the world watched. The city sprawls across a coastal basin between the Santa Monica Mountains and the Pacific, and still reads as a collection of towns rather than one place — Hollywood, Koreatown, Boyle Heights, Venice, Silver Lake, each with a separate story. Its water arrived by aqueduct in 1913 from a valley 200 miles north that has never forgiven it.
