Now that movies theaters and companies and studios are continuing to grow, we're having more people getting into the films industry, however Thomas Edison didn't like the idea of competition in a business and he was doing anything he can to make sure there was no competition by making people either go out of business or controlling their business, and in some cases the lawsuits he would filed did work for him, but both he and Biograph realize that if they keep arguing no work was going to get done, so they established a company that would lend future directors equipment to make a film if they would follow some rules they have for the directors.
The company that was founded in 1908 was called the Motion Picture Patents Company, also known as Edison Trust. One of the new rules that the company put out was charging exhibitors $2 a week for using one of their movie equipment, and they were not allow to show any films that was not part of the trust like they were not allow to show any films made by independent people and for those that wanted to work for any of the film companies that were part of the Edison Trust, they were limited to one or two reel films, which meant that films had to be 10 to 20 minutes long, because they thought that people's eyes will go bad if they sat still and looked at movie for an hour. They also refuse to give any actors credit for the films they were a part of and they basically wanted to control the film market with the equipment and the studios and the theaters.
From the beginning the company started, people started to fight against the rules by making their own cameras and filming in secret. One of people that started the fight against the MPPC was Carl Laemmle, who made in own company in 1909 called the Independent Moving Picture. The company would do the exact opposite on what the Motion Picture Company set up, they would make more than two reel films, and they would also starting giving actor and actress especially the leading ones screen credit for each film and give them promotion and higher pay. The first two people that would become the first movie stars was Florence Lawrence and King Baggot. Now Florence's case is a interesting one, because she got famous when Carl made up a lie about her being involved in a streetcar accident which was not true.
Anyway, The Motion Picture and Independent Picture kept going head to head with a lot of legal battles to the get away from it all, most of the directors decided to move out west to Los Angeles, California to set their own film studios and own sets. Los Angeles was the perfect place to shoot films, as there were tons of landscapes and the land was cheap to buy and there's was lot of sunshine as well. At the start of 1910 about 5,000 people lived in Hollywood, Los Angeles and new companies started to rise from Fox Corporation, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros, and by 1912 Carl Laemmle moved from New Jersey to California and formed Universal Pictures.
Now we have not only independent filmmakers making feature films, but we also have feature films from other countries, mostly France, England, and Germany coming to the United States as well. Eventually by 1918, the Motion Picture Patents Company just left after losing many lawsuits from courts.
So now as we get into a new decade, we'll have new actors and actress getting credit and recognition they deserve, new and longer feature films, and more importantly a new filming location in the U.S. that's going to stay forever.