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A 'film studio' is a controlled environment for the making of a film. This environment may be interior (sound stage), exterior (backlot), or both. In general parlance, the term is synonymous with "major film production company," due largely to the fact that the leading production companies of Hollywood's "Golden Age"—stretching from the late 1920s to the late 1940s—owned their own studio facilities, as do a few today. However, worldwide (and even in the United States) the majority of production companies have never owned their own studios, but have had to rent space at independently owned facilities that, in many cases, never produce a film of their own.

Contents

Beginnings

The "majors"

The minors

The independents

Film to television

Today

Notable movie studios

See also

Beginnings

In 1893, Thomas Edison built the first movie studio in the United States when he constructed the Black Maria, a 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 theaters, penny arcades, wax museums, and fairgrounds. Other studio operations followed in New Jersey, New York City, and Chicago.
The Saint Petersburg film studio facilities "Lenfilm" were founded in 1896.
In the early 1900s, companies started moving to Los Angeles, California, because of the good weather and longer days. Although electric lights were by then widely available, none were yet powerful enough to adequately expose film; the best source of illumination for motion picture production was natural sunlight. Some movies were shot on the roofs of buildings in downtown Los Angeles. Early movie producers also relocated to Southern California to escape Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company, which controlled almost all the patents 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 Hollywood area was Nestor Studios, opened in 1911 by Al Christie for David Horsley. In the same year, another fifteen independents settled in Hollywood. Other production companies eventually settled in the Los Angeles area in places such as Culver City, Burbank, and what would soon become known as Studio City in the San Fernando Valley.

The "majors"

'The Big 5'

By the mid-1920s, the evolution of a handful of American production companies into wealthy film industry conglomerates that owned their own studios, distribution divisions, and theaters, and contracted with performers and other filmmaking personnel, led to the sometimes confusing equation of "studio" with "production company" in industry slang. Five large companies, 20th Century-Fox, MGM, Paramount, RKO, and Warner Bros., came to be known as the "Big Five," the "majors," or "the Studios" in trade publications such as ''Variety'', and their management structures and practices collectively came to be known as the "studio system."
'The Little 3'

Although they owned few or no theaters to guarantee sales of their films, Universal Pictures, Columbia Pictures, and United Artists also fell under these rubrics, making a total of eight generally recognized "major studios". United Artists, although its controlling partners owned not one but two production studios during the Golden Age, had an often tenuous hold on the title of "major" and operated mainly as a backer and distributor of independently produced films.

The minors

Smaller studios operated simultaneously with "the majors." These included operations such as Republic Pictures, active from 1935, which produced films that occasionally matched the scale and ambition of the larger studio, and Monogram Pictures, which specialized in series and genre releases. Together with smaller outfits such as PRC and Grand National, the minor studios filled the demand for B-movies and are sometimes collectively referred to as Poverty Row.

The independents

The Big Five's ownership of movie theaters was eventually opposed by eight independent producers, including Samuel Goldwyn, David O. Selznick, Walt Disney, and Walter Wanger. In 1948 the federal government won a case against Paramount in the Supreme Court, which ruled that the vertically integrated structure of the movie industry constituted an illegal monopoly. This decision, reached after twelve years of litigation, hastened the end of the studio system and Hollywood's "Golden Age".

Film to television

Midway through the 1950s, with television proving to be a profitable enterprise not destined to disappear any time soon -- as many in the film industry had once hoped -- movie studios were increasingly being used to produce programming for the burgeoning medium. Some midsized film companies, such as Republic Pictures, eventually sold their studios to TV production concerns.

Today

With the breakup of domination by "the Studios" and the continued incursion of television into the cinematic audience, the major production companies gradually transformed into management structures that simply put together artistic teams on a project-by-project basis and made what studio spaces they retained available for rental, which remains the norm today.

Notable movie studios

★ AB Svensk Filmindustri (Sweden)

★ Babelsberg Studios (Germany)

★ Barrandov Studios (Czech Republic)

★ Biograph Studios (USA)

★ Buena Vista Pictures (USA) ''See 'Disney Pictures' below.''

★ Christie Film Company (USA)

★ Edison Studios (USA)

★ Edison's Black Maria (USA)

★ Famous Players Film Company (USA)

★ Fox Film Corporation (USA)

★ Fox Studios Australia (Australia)

★ Gaumont Pictures (France)

★ Goldwyn Picture Corporation (USA)

★ Gorky Film Studio ( Russia)

★ Kanteerava Studios (Bangalore, India)

★ Kalem Company (USA)

★ Keystone Studios (USA)

★ Lenfilm (Russia)

★ Lubin Studios (USA)

★ Marwah Films & Video Studio (India)

★ Méliès Films (France)

★ Melnitsa Animation Studio (Russia)

★ Mosfilm (Soviet Union [now Russia])

★ Mutual Film Corporation (USA)

★ Nestor Studios (USA)

★ Nordisk Film (Denmark)

★ Pathé Frères (France)

★ Pinewood Studios (England)

★ Premium Picture Productions (USA)

★ Ramoji Film City (Hyderabad, India)

★ Selig Polyscope Company (USA)

★ Solax Studios (USA)

★ Soyuzmultfilm (Russia)

★ Sverdlovsk Film Studio (Russia)

★ Thanhouser Company (USA)

★ Toho Co., Ltd. (Japan)

★ Touchstone Pictures (USA)

★ Triangle Film Corporation (USA)

★ Universal Studios (USA)

★ Victor Studios (USA)

★ The Vitagraph Company (USA)

★ Walt Disney Pictures (USA & England)

See also

★ Production company

★ Major film studio

★ Film release

★ Film

★ History of film

★ List of cities containing film studios