How and Why was Hollywood formed? It all started when younger and more curious people began joining the movie industry. They wanted to get away from the big parent companies located on the East Coast that were known to sensor and hold back the creative forward thinkers in the business. A second reason for the big leap across the country was for location in general. There is beautiful weather basically year round and there are so many different aspects of nature all within reach from the coastal beaches, the wooded mountains, to the barren desert. One last major factor for the industry moving out there was, There was cheap land, and I mean a lot of it, because not many people had migrated that way yet. For those reasons it is quite a unique place.

Around this same time and carrying forward a short amount of time we started to see very clearly who were the top dawgs and who fell inline beneath them. The top dawgs at this time are also known as the “Big Five” which consisted of Paramount, Warner Bros.,Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 20th Century Fox, and RKO. The smaller guys who trailed way behind were the “Little Three”; Columbia, United Artists, and Universal. The thing that made the big five so large and powerful was the way they ran their businesses. Each of them produced all their own movies with what goes along with that, as well as owning the theatres that the movies would be screen in. Therefore they were making money on all fronts.

Switching to the more modern times and the struggle over censorship and the organization that was built off of censorship, the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America). In the screening of “This Film is Not Yet Rated” we heard from many people who are in the film industry and their criticisms of the MPAA. The overall feeling I gathered from their statements and the investigation was that the MPAA is not fully truthful not forward with what actually is going on within the walls of the organization. I thought it was very interesting when they revealed that the rating of NC-17 could be placed on something the exact same as something that was rated R other than the fact that one depicts gay interactions while the other shows straight interactions (the image above depicts this). Along with many other instances in the film, I think that it is pretty wild how we allow such a small group of people who are nothing like the rest of the country decide what the rest of the country watches. We need people to ignore the ratings and watch what they think is acceptable for themsleves and children.

-Shane Weber