10 Fascinating Hollywood Stories You Didn't Know

The first theatre that charged the public for viewing filmed entertainment opened in April 1896 in New York, and the location was not incidental. Thomas Edison, who filed his first patent on a motion picture camera in 1891, lived in nearby New Jersey.

Attended by immigrants and the poor, who wanted cheap entertainment, movies were perceived as a fad by everyone else, but proved so popular that by 1910 there were 9000 theatres operating across America.

For the right to make movies, studios paid a fee to Edison, but such was the demand for product that pirate companies, who sought to avoid reimbursing the inventor, sprang up. In order to escape detectives hired by Edison, these companies moved as far away as possible.

Not only did Hollywood enjoy terrific weather, it was more than three thousand miles away, which made movies easier to steal.