History
It began in 1911, when a number of filmmakers from New York City, seething at the restrictions placed on the industry by Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company, moved west to California to escape the reach of his lawyers and set up the first film studio in Hollywood, a trolley suburb of Los Angeles that the fast-growing city had annexed a year previously. In 1924, to promote a new subdivision named Hollywoodland, a certain now-famous sign was erected (the "LAND" part was removed in 1949).The Los Angeles area attracted filmmakers for several reasons: its perpetually warm and sunny climate allowing for constant film production with little regard to seasonal shifts in the weather, a relative abundance of cheap labor due to its proximity to Mexico, and a favorable court ruling from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (which covers the West Coast) that restricted Edison's ability to enforce patent law there. Another popular early destination, for many of the same reasons, was Hobe Sound, Florida, which was built up into the motion picture production center of "Picture City" during the Florida land boom in The Roaring '20s. However, the busting of the Florida real estate bubble in 1926, coupled with the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane, derailed these plans.
As early as 1915, the Los Angeles area had outpaced New York in terms of motion picture output, and by the end of the decade, the United States had claimed the title once held by France and Italy (whose film industries had been devastated by World War I) as the film capital of the world. During the Silent Era, seven of Hollywood's "Big Eight" studios emerged — Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (the product of a 1924 merger of three companies), Paramount Pictures, First National Pictures (acquired by Warner Bros. in 1928), Fox Film Corporation (merged with Twentieth Century Pictures in 1935), Universal Pictures, Columbia Pictures, and United Artists. (The eighth, RKO Pictures, was a very minor studio in the silent era called Film Booking Offices of America.) It was also in this era that the "studio system" and the "star system" began to develop, forming the bedrock of Hollywood until the mid-20th century. More information on these systems can be found in the section on The Golden Age of Hollywood, which is when they reached their zenith.
In this era, film truly began to take off as a form of popular entertainment. The 1915 Epic Movie The Birth of a Nation pioneered a long list of filmmaking techniques and tropes, proved that cinema was commercially viable, and stirred a whole pot of controversy with its heavy-duty Unfortunate Implications. Unfortunately, there was also the case of Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio in 1917 that had the US Supreme Court say that film as a medium was not a legitimate form of speech, but merely a product of a business, which made it open season for censorship for decades until the Supreme Court finally corrected this misjudgment in 1952 in Joseph Burstyn, Inc v Wilson aka the Miracle Decision.
In the 1920s, Hollywood reached a level of film output that has only been matched since then by Bollywood, with over eight hundred feature films being made per year. Initially, the studios tried to keep their actors anonymous to prevent them from becoming stars and demanding more money with their popularity, but ultimately proved impossible with a moviegoing public too curious to be denied knowing about the players. Notable stars of the silent era included Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Lillian Gish, John Gilbert, Clara Bow, Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford and child stars Jackie Coogan and Baby Peggy. The main competition that Hollywood had during this time came from vaudeville, a popular type of theater show consisting of acts by musicians, dancers, comedians, trained animals, magicians and acrobats. During this era, vaudeville had the chief advantage of having sound to back up what was going on on stage, which film didn't. But not for long...
The Silent Age of Hollywood is generally held to have lasted from 1911, with the opening of the first Hollywood studios, to 1927, with the release of The Jazz Singer, the first movie to include scenes with synchronized speech, and 1928, when Lights of New York, the first full-length 100% "talkie", came out. See Rise of the Talkies for what happened then.
Mechanics
Before movies had synchronized soundtracks, they had no real standard framerate. Indeed, the framerate of silent movies could depend on the projectionist. This is why silent movie buffs talk about the number of reels or total print length, rather than length in minutes. The average speed of silent film was 16 frames per second, although the fact that cameras were hand cranked meant the actual speed could vary greatly, even within individual films. In some cases, even when the director released a recommended frame per second (fps) rate, exhibitors screened the films at a faster rate, to fit more screenings into a day.With the coming of sound, it was discovered that 16fps was too slow for accurate sound recording and playback, so the speed was standardized to the current 24 fps. note
When projected using modern equipment running at this standard sound speed, silent films usually appear to run faster than normal. Because people have become accustomed to seeing silent films run at this incorrect speed, fake silent film footage appearing in TV shows will probably be highly Undercranked (and Deliberately Monochrome, though that's another story).
The early assumption that all silent films were shot at 16 fps led to further complications. In practice, some films were shot at as few as 14 or as many as 26-30 fps. It is believed, for example, that Metropolis was shot at around 20 fps, and there is still much debate
about its correct projection speed.
Today, the variation of the silent frame rate is better understood, and is carefully adjusted for modern restorations so that the action onscreen appears natural.
Preservation
The Library of Congress estimates that 75% of silent films produced in the United States have been lost. The Film Foundation (Marty Scorsese's outfit) asserts that 90% of the released films from this period have been lost, mostly to a few spectacular fires in studio film vaults. The film stock in use at the time was based on cellulose nitrate, aka "gun cotton", which is highly flammable (and safer cellulose acetate film stock was not developed until decades later). Thus film preservation was liable to such fires for decades, and since film was usually not considered to have much long-term value anyway, simply disposing of it was often considered the best thing to do for economic and safety reasons.
There is one major exception: Dawson City, in the Yukon Territory in Canada, was the last destination for film distribution and returning the reels was often not considered worth the trouble. So it was stored indefinately, which resulted in a number of fires, until hundreds of films, when not just thrown into the river, were buried under an ice hockey rink and largely forgotten. Since those buried reels were stored in the area's permafrost, they were largely preserved until they were dug up in 1978. By that time, the archival value of such film was recognised and arrangements were made to deliver them south, although the assistance of the Canadian Armed Forces was necessary as no civilian delivery company wanted to transport such chemically volatile and flammable materials on their vehicles. Eventually, the reels were divided between Archives Canada and the US Library of Congress for preservation on safety stock and you can see selections of the films in the documentary, Dawson City: Frozen Time.
For what was going on in animation of the time, see The Silent Age of Animation.
