The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Consumption and Consumer Studies

Hollywood

LINDEN DALECKI

Kelce College of Business at Pittsburg State University, USA

DOI: 10.1002/9781118989463.wbeccs144

Hollywood – a name coined by real estate developer H. J. Whitley in 1886 – refers both to the Los Angeles, California district developed by Whitley and to a set of evolving motion picture industry firms, players, practices, technologies, and modes of finance, production, and distribution that emerged in and around the district. The heavy concentration of activities in Hollywood (Los Angeles) related to the motion picture industry – and eventually to the mediated entertainment sector more generally – resulted in an economic cluster effect that continues to drive industrial efficiencies and offer access to specialized talent, technology, and other resources. Despite increasingly online workflows, contemporary Hollywood-based entertainment media firms continue to maintain a global competitive advantage over entertainment media firms based elsewhere.

In 1916 the Harvard-based applied psychologist Hugo Münsterberg – a pre-World War I Prussian–Jewish American émigré – published The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, widely recognized as the first serious work in the field of film theory. Münsterberg's text is remarkable for touching on aspects of film aesthetics; film mechanics; the narrative and psychological import of editing transitions; physiological and psychological aspects of human perception; the notion of screenplays as relatively less crucial than stage ...