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Hollywood premieres

Dec 23rd 1999

From The Economist print edition

AND to think it might have been Brighton. Movies and Hollywood have become so synonymous that it is tempting to believe it had to be so. No. Well before outsiders from America’s east coast lit upon (偶然遇见，碰见，发现) Hollywood as a suitable base, a film industry was flourishing （繁茂的，欣欣向荣的）in Britain, in Sussex by the sea. 个人觉得这是一篇按时间顺序写的文艺类说明文，首段介绍的其实是个时代背景

James Williamson set it up, churning out jolly little crowd-pleasers with such titles as “Two Naughty Boys Upsetting the Spoons”.（看不懂） In 1900, two rivals, George Smith and Charles Urban, inventor of a colour system, Kinemacolor（彩色电影）, joined forces and also set up in Brighton. Till not long ago, one could still see the warehouse, its roof emblazoned (用纹章装饰) with the word Kinemacolor, where they filmed such epics as “Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes”.　这段还是在讲H繁荣前的B是啥样的，为后来H出现的必然性埋下了伏笔

But the Brighton school lacked stamina（持久力，毅力）. By 1909, it was gone. Stamina its American rivals had aplenty. But Hollywood was not their first choice. The industry was born in the east, where companies such as Vitagraph set up soon after 1900. Another such, American Mutoscope and Biograph (早期的电影放映机), developed a cine-camera, to the grief of Thomas Edison, who had patented one. Courts ruled that no patent had been infringed. So Edison linked with Biograph and eight other companies, which pooled（合伙经营） their patents, setting up the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908. Each member had a licence to make films, using any member’s equipment. Exhibitors paid $2 a week to rent films and use projectors (放映机) from members. But if they showed films made by outsiders, the projectors were repossessed and the supply of films cut off. In plain English, a suppliers’cartel (企业联合). It became a worse one when Eastman Kodak, the biggest supplier of film stock, agreed to sell only to cartel members. Many competitors were driven out of business. But the strongest survived, including Carl Laemmle and William Fox, founders of what were to become Universal and 20th Century Fox.（这段关于Hollywood发展史的介绍，谈到了Thomas Edison早期的电影器材发明专利以及联合其它8大公司创立了MPPC，逼得很多竞争对手倒闭，不过还是有强悍的生存了下来。关于这部分的背景知识链接在后面。大概可以作为issue的一个例子，至于用在何时还不知。）

New York, where many of the trust’s foes operated, was riskily near it. Canada was far to the north, Mexico too far south. Searching for a safer bolt-hole, they came upon a suburb of Los Angeles: Hollywood. It offered a stable climate, 350 sunny days a year, and had only a few hundred inhabitants. The movie makers could settle there and, they hoped, hardly be noticed. If lookouts hollered（大声叫喊） “the trust is coming”, even the cars of the time could manage a dash to the Mexican border. The Selig company moved west from Chicago in 1907, Mack Sennett‟s Keystone company in 1911. Others followed. By 1918, four-fifths of the film-making capacity of the world had relocated to Hollywood. 这段讲了Hollywood得天独厚的地理环境以及其真正繁荣的开始

Angelenos disapproved, seeing their suburb infected by these new vulgarians. Locals took steps（同 take actions，采取措施/采取行动） to make movie folk feel as unwanted as Jews (which many were) and negroes（黑人）. They were excluded from country clubs and as late as 1918 were refused tenancies（租赁） in the ritzy（豪华的） Garden Court Apartments. But in the end snobbery yielded to the true American value, success. Success? It’s the box-office（票房）gross, stupid. The mogul David O. Selznick is a Hollywood legend because his “Gone with the Wind” was, for a quarter of a century, the highest-grossing film ever made. World-beaters since then have included “Jaws”, “Star Wars”, “ET” and the current champ, “Titanic”. Hollywood knows a good movie when it sees one: one that may make a star, but must make somebody’s fortune. （David O. Selznick ，汗，查了资料我才知道该君为gone with the wind　的制片人，怪不得不知道。注意力全在Vivien leigh无与伦比的美丽上鸟。。。有眼不识泰山）

Hollywood in less than a century has grown from a toffee-nosed（势利的，虚荣的）village to a town as famous as New York, Rome or Paris. And physically, of course, it has changed beyond recognition: a century ago, you would walk through orange groves to the village store. Yet in a way it is still a village—small-minded, with narrow boundaries, just a little bit of LA. For all who live and work in it, there is one topic of conversation—movies: how much they have made, who concerned is knifing or sleeping with whom, who is “attached” to which project. Those who have been successful often try to get away: to work there, but live somewhere else. Yet it is still the one place in the world to which almost everyone who is anyone in show-business (and plenty who aren’t) eventually gravitates. 最后一段给Hollywood下了个评论，纵观全文我认为作者还是持中立态度的，不知道理解对没

知识扩充：

1. Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes：鹅妈妈童谣，nursery rhymes为童谣，原本并不是英国人的创意，事实上在它出版的一百年前，也就是1697年，法国人Perrault写出了一本由八个民间故事组成的小册子，并将它命名为Contes de ma mère l'Oye（Tales of Mother Goose）。这些故事于1729年被翻译成英文。在这之后，英国人John Newbery 发现出版类似的面向儿童市场的小册子利润可观，于是他和同伴决定合作整理并出版一本民间流传的童谣合辑。于是在1791年，Mother Goose's Melody在英国正式出版，收录了52首小诗，每一首都配有寓意和木版画的插图。这一版本现在已经是非常难得的珍品了。

2. 纽约和新泽西的电影公司迁向加州的原因主要有几点。首先这里的天气好，日照时间长。虽然电灯已经发明了，但还不够亮，最好的光源是阳光。除此之外，加州视野宽广，有各种不同的自然风景，对电影拍摄有利。除自然条件外，在主观原因方面，好莱坞成名的最主要因素是来自发明大师爱迪生所创办的电影托拉斯公司的强大压力。爱迪生是著名的发明家。他在电影器材方面也有许多的发明设计革新，并拥有相应的专利权。1897年至1918年，爱迪生在美国挑起电影专利权之争，和众多电影制造商对簿公堂。同时，他看准了电影事业的发展远景，利用手中的电影器材王牌，将当时在美国东部的九大电影公司合并成为他的电影专利公司，由此控制了电影市场。那些不甘从命的制片人，纷纷寻找新的出路，以摆脱爱迪生的垄断，另起炉灶。这时候，在爱迪生成立电影专利公司之前已到好莱坞拍片的一家小制片厂（长老电影公司）提供了好莱坞的信息。这家原在美国东部新泽西州的电影厂，在好莱坞廉价租得厂房，快速地拍出了第一部好莱坞电影《她的印第安英雄》，这部片子给好莱坞扩大了知名度，那些欲寻自己出路的电影制片人，为好莱坞优越的自然外景和发达的交通条件所吸引，纷纷来到好莱坞开创基业。另外加州距离新泽西州非常遥远，爱迪生很难在这里控制他的专利权。加州没有那么多爱迪生的手下，即使他派人过来，往往消息早已走漏，这样一来好莱坞的电影制造商就可以及时躲到附近的墨西哥去了。爱迪生的死对头卡尔·雷穆也在好莱坞大兴土木，并创建了环球公司，成为新的影业大王。与此相反，作为好莱坞催生剂的爱迪生的电影专利公司，仅仅风光了10年，就被美国法庭宣判为非法的托拉斯而破产倒闭。