Before La La Land, there was Fort Lee, New Jersey

Summary

Summary of "Before La La Land, there was Fort Lee, New Jersey"

The Indicator from Planet Money released its episode titled "Before La La Land, there was Fort Lee, New Jersey" on July 14, 2025. Hosted by Darian Woods and Alexi Horowitz Ghazi, the episode delves into the origins of American filmmaking, exploring how the industry transitioned from Fort Lee, New Jersey, to the iconic Hollywood of today. This summary captures the key discussions, insights, and conclusions presented in the episode, enriched with notable quotes and structured into clear sections for ease of understanding.

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1. Introduction to Fort Lee as the Birthplace of American Filmmaking

The episode begins with Darian Woods and Alexi Horowitz Ghazi setting the scene in Fort Lee, New Jersey—a place that once stood as the epicenter of the American film industry before Hollywood rose to prominence.

Darian Woods introduces the topic:
"We're climbing up a steep path in Fort Lee, New Jersey to tell the origin story of American filmmaking." [00:19]

The hosts illustrate the geographical advantage of Fort Lee, highlighting its proximity to Broadway and Thomas Edison's innovations, which provided a competitive edge in the burgeoning film industry.

2. The Early Foundations: Broadway and Thomas Edison

The duo explains that the Northeast's success in early filmmaking was largely due to two pivotal elements: the theatrical expertise from Broadway and the technological advancements spearheaded by Thomas Edison.

Richard Kozarski, a historian, elaborates on Edison's contribution:
"Edison is doing two things. First of all, he's making the hardware, but now he's in the entertainment business. So he has to keep supplying films for this machine because nobody else has camera equipment." [02:05]

Edison's invention of the Kinetoscope and his establishment of a film production studio in West Orange, New Jersey, laid the groundwork for the movie industry's initial growth in the region.

3. Fort Lee's Rise as a Filmmaking Hub

Fort Lee's advantageous location, nestled between Edison's innovation hub and Broadway, fostered an environment ripe for film production. The area became home to numerous film companies, each establishing studio facilities that contributed to Fort Lee's status as the heart of American cinema.

Darian Woods notes:
"A predecessor to Universal Studios constructs the first permanent building, soon followed by others." [04:08]

This concentration of resources and expertise created an industrial agglomeration, where the proximity of related businesses and talents led to increased efficiency and innovation.

William Strange, an urban economics professor, provides insight into this phenomenon:
"Produce things more cheaply in a big city like New York, in part because there is expertise in New York that you're not going to find in a smaller city." [04:30]

4. Challenges and the Shift Towards Hollywood

Despite its initial success, Fort Lee faced significant challenges that ultimately led filmmakers to seek greener pastures in California.

Patent Issues:
Thomas Edison's aggressive patent strategies posed a major hurdle. By pooling numerous filmmaking patents and enforcing strict licensing fees, Edison controlled much of the industry's technological landscape.

Darian Woods highlights the tension:
"Edison has to start making films for the Kinetoscopes that he is selling to people." [02:19]

Richard Kozarski further explains:
"He was the king of using patents and he using lawyers to enforce his patent control." [05:39]

Weather Constraints:
Filmmakers were also constrained by the Northeast's harsh winters, which impeded year-round production. Attempts to relocate seasonal shoots to places like Florida, Cuba, and Jamaica were met with their own set of challenges, including lack of infrastructure and high costs for artificial lighting.

Richard Kozarski comments:
"If they had to build the interior of somebody's home, quite often they would create that on an open air stage." [05:56]

5. The Migration to Los Angeles

The persistent issues in Fort Lee led filmmakers to explore other locations, with California emerging as the new hotspot for several compelling reasons:

• Better Landscapes: California offered diverse and picturesque environments that were more conducive to creative filmmaking.

• Cost Advantages: Land and labor were cheaper, and Los Angeles was known as the "biggest open shop city in the country," meaning there were no strong unions to drive up wages.

• Ease of Operation: The geographical spread in California made it more difficult for Edison to enforce his patents, reducing the control he previously held in Fort Lee.

Richard Kozarski summarizes:
"California's varied landscapes and cheaper cost of land and labor were the bigger drivers of the shift." [07:26]

By 1921, Los Angeles had captured 80% of the world's movie market, cementing its dominance with landmark productions like The Jazz Singer ([07:52]).

6. The Enduring Legacy of Hollywood

Despite the initial reasons for Hollywood's prominence becoming obsolete—such as the need for natural light and proximity to Broadway—the city maintained its status as the filmmaking capital.

William Strange uses a historical analogy to explain this phenomenon:
"In the 1800s, factories were powered by water wheels... history still really matters." [08:08]

This highlights how foundational decisions and infrastructures can have long-lasting impacts, ensuring Hollywood's continued dominance even as economic and technological landscapes evolve.

7. Economic Insights and Future Considerations

The episode concludes by reflecting on the nature of economic clusters and their sustainability. While Hollywood remains a powerhouse, the transition from Fort Lee underscores that economic hubs can shift due to various pressures and opportunities.

Darian Woods remarks:
"The transition from Fort Lee to Hollywood shows that economic clusters may not last forever." [08:57]

Looking ahead, the hosts suggest that similar dynamics could affect current economic hubs, a topic slated for exploration in future episodes.

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Notable Quotes:

• "We're climbing up a steep path in Fort Lee, New Jersey to tell the origin story of American filmmaking." – Darian Woods [00:19]

• "Edison is doing two things. First of all, he's making the hardware, but now he's in the entertainment business." – Richard Kozarski [02:05]

• "Produce things more cheaply in a big city like New York, in part because there is expertise in New York that you're not going to find in a smaller city." – William Strange [04:30]

• "California's varied landscapes and cheaper cost of land and labor were the bigger drivers of the shift." – Richard Kozarski [07:26]

• "In the 1800s, factories were powered by water wheels... history still really matters." – William Strange [08:08]

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Conclusion

This episode of The Indicator from Planet Money meticulously charts the evolution of the American film industry from its Fort Lee origins to its establishment in Hollywood. Through expert insights and historical analysis, Darian Woods and Alexi Horowitz Ghazi provide a comprehensive understanding of how economic factors, technological advancements, and geographical advantages interplay to shape industry hubs. The story of Fort Lee serves as a compelling case study on the dynamics of economic clusters, offering lessons that remain relevant for today's economic landscapes.

Transcript

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Npr. All right, Darian's taking us on a little hike through pre Hollywood history.

[Darian Woods]

Nice work, everybody. Alexei and I are climbing up a steep path in Fort Lee, New Jersey to tell the origin story of American filmmaking. We're kicking off our week long series on the economics of movies here. Because before Hollywood, there was Fort Lee.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

New Jersey, overlooking the Hudson River. You can see Manhattan on the other side.

[Darian Woods]

Yeah. The center of the moviemaking world was filmed here. This is where the term cliffhanger was popularized on these very cliffs.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Wow. And you can kind of tell why. They're really stark, jagged, very tall cliffs. We're right at the edge here.

[Darian Woods]

And Alexi, I brought this rope here.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

I don't know if that looks, is that strong enough to support human body weight?

[Darian Woods]

I was like, who thought we could reenact one of these silent films with you dangling off the cliff?

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Well, I still do have a lot of questions that we need to answer. In this show. There's only one way to make people stick around to find out.

[Darian Woods]

This is the indie guider from Planet Money. I'm Darian Woods.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

And I'm Alexi Horowitz Ghazi. Today on the show the birth of Hollywood. How movie makers traded the steep cliffs of Northeast for the temperate valleys of Los Angeles and what this teaches us about economic hubs. Okay, Darian, can you, can you pull me up now?

[Darian Woods]

Stay tuned to find out.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Darian?

[William Strange]

No.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

We wanted to uncover how the film industry started in the New Jersey New York region and why it then moved all the way to Hollywood.

[Darian Woods]

In the early days, the Northeast had two main special ingredients, Broadway and Thomas Edison. They gave the region a huge advantage.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Richard Kozarski is a historian focused on that period. And he starts the New Jersey story with one of those main Edison. In the late 1800s, Thomas Edison's team invents the first motion picture camera and viewer.

[Richard Kozarski]

They have this Kinetoscope machine as a less than one minute of moving image and you look into a little box like a peep show and it's fine. He thinks, well, I can put these in amusement parks and arcades and they start production. So Edison is doing two things. First of all, he's making the hardware, but now he's in the entertainment business. So he has to keep supplying films for this machine because nobody else has camera equipment. So Edison has to start making films for the Kinetoscopes that he is selling to people. They build a little studio at the factory site in West Orange.

[Darian Woods]

That is West Orange, New Jersey, a complex where Thomas Edison has brought Together engineers and chemists to invent. But it's a bit far from our second ingredient. You know, the performers on Broadway. But then in 1907, Edison's company shoots rescued from an eagle's nest in Fort Lee. That's right across the Hudson river from New York.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

The movie's about an eagle that abducts a baby and takes it to its nest on a cliffside. The hero is played by an actor by the name of D.W. griffith. And of course, he tries to save that baby by dangling from a rope over that cliff.

[Darian Woods]

It wasn't a cliche.

[Richard Kozarski]

At this stage, many of the film companies, and by now there are a lot of them, say, this is pretty good. All we have to do is get on the ferry. We can go here and we can plant the camera and film in any direction. In that direction it looks like and urban tenements. But if I turn in another direction, there are farmhouses or there are fields and then there is cliffs.

[Darian Woods]

A predecessor to Universal Studios constructs the first permanent building, soon followed by others.

[Richard Kozarski]

There are dozens of different companies that establish what we would think of as a studio facility.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

So filmmaking is centered in Fort Lee, wedged in between Thomas Edison's innovation campus to the west and Broadway just over the river. The New Jersey New York area becomes this hotbed of movie making, forming what is known as an industrial agglomeration. William Strange is an urban economics professor at the University of Toronto. He explains agglomeration like this, you can.

[William Strange]

Produce things more cheaply in a big city like New York, in part because there is expertise in New York that you're not going to find in a smaller city, because a smaller city just doesn't have the scale that will support this.

[Darian Woods]

People were making movies in New York and New Jersey because people were making movies in New York and New Jersey. Williams says because of this scale effect and this kind of density of knowledge, the cards were initially stacked against LA as becoming a movie making hub.

[William Strange]

The obstacle to starting an agglomeration is almost always that the existing center of activity in the industry is going to be really attractive to participants in the industry.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

There are growing frustrations among filmmakers, like Thomas Edison's innovations are not free. Around 1908, Edison pools together as many patents relating to filmmaking as he can. If you want to buy rolls of film, you have to buy it from Edison, who tries to gatekeep which studios can make movies. And he forces filmmakers in cinemas to pay him licensing fees. Richard Kozarski says Edison actually sends out detectives to bust filmmakers Using his equipment without paying those fees.

[Richard Kozarski]

He was the king of using patents and he using lawyers to enforce his patent control.

[Darian Woods]

Another obstacle for filmmakers is how dependent the film cameras are on sunlight. Artificial lighting exists, yes, thanks again, Thomas Edison. But it is expensive.

[Richard Kozarski]

If they had to build the interior of somebody's home, quite often they would create that on an open air stage. You look at some films from 1912 or 1915 and you see it looks like somebody's home or but the tablecloths are blowing back and forth.

[Darian Woods]

The sense at the first big reason why the New York, New Jersey area didn't stay the moviemaking capital Winter.

[Richard Kozarski]

So they said, okay, in the winter we're, you know, we'll still stay in New York. Let's send company out to Florida. They tried Florida, they tried Cuba, they tried the island of Jamaica. A lot of the same problems there, you know, there's no infrastructure, it's hard to get to. No air conditioning. So then they begin going further afield. Production in Texas. They go to Arizona.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Some movie makers like D.W. griffith, who's now become a director and soon becomes famous for his notoriously racist Birth of a Nation. People like him start to try out California for their winter shoots.

[Richard Kozarski]

And then after a couple of years of that, he prefers working in California because there are better landscapes. The mountains are better, the ocean is better, you know, more artistically interesting.

[Darian Woods]

For him, land is cheaper and so are labor costs.

[Richard Kozarski]

Los Angeles was famous as the biggest open shop city in the country. That is no unions to worry about.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Without unions, the electricians and carpenters and tailors have less bargaining power to negotiate higher wages.

[Darian Woods]

Another thing to worry about less in California. Thomas Edison in California. Edison still has his people to serve lawsuits. But being a more spread out place, it might have been more cumbersome for him to enforce monopoly against independent movie makers. Richard Gazorski ultimately thinks California's varied landscapes and cheaper cost of land and labor were the bigger drivers of the shift.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Though by 1921, 80% of the world's movie market is shot in LA. And a few years later, the first feature with dialogue has key parts filmed on Sunset Boulevard. The Jazz Singer.

[Darian Woods]

And even as Los Angeles labor and land costs rise through the years, and even as more indoor shooting becomes possible, Hollywood maintains its dominance. Urban economist William Strange uses an analogy to explain why. He says, in the 1800s, factories were powered by water wheels. And so cities grew up around fall lines, you know, where the rivers plunged forming waterfalls and you could harness more of that water power. Water wheels have not mattered for a century, and yet we still see really.

[William Strange]

Big cities existing at the fall line in a bunch of places. So history still really matters.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Even after much of the original reasons for Hollywood being Hollywood were taken away, it still thrived.

[Darian Woods]

That said, the transition from Fort Lee to Hollywood shows that economic clusters may not last forever. That's what people in LA are worried about today. We'll investigate that on tomorrow's episode. Check out our Instagram for a silent film Alexei and I made with the expert direction of our summer fellow Ella feldman. We are PlanetMoney. This episode was produced by Angel Carreras with engineering by Robert Rodriguez. It was fact checked by Ciel Juarez. Cake and Cannon edits the show and the Indicator is a production of NPR.