The movie industry began its move from New York/New Jersey in the mid-1910s, and at that point, Los Angeles was already an up and coming city. It was essentially a beach resort for its first decades, with an economy largely based on tourism, kind of like Miami, Florida, today. In 1912, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce boasted of the city's rise thusly:

The rapid growth of Los Angeles, from an insignificant semi-Mexican town to a metropolitan city, has been told and retold, until it is familiar to millions of Americans, while the attractions offered by the city to health-seekers, pleasure-seekers, and tourists have been spread abroad to hundreds of thousands of visitors, who, after one trip to this section, are usually anxious to return, frequently becoming permanent residents.

During the past thirty years, Los Angeles has grown from a population of 11,000 in 1880 to...a present population [in 1912] of 409,000. There are three leading factors that have contributed to such growth. These are climate, soil, and location.

"Health-seekers" relocating to Los Angeles were no joke. Whole books have been written about the topic. Richard Nixon's father, for example, moved his family out there circa 1910 partly for health reasons. In the 1939 movie industry-centric novel, The Day of The Locust, one of the main characters (named Homer Simpson, interestingly enough) had moved out there because he had breathing issues. It might be difficult to grasp now, but up until about the 1970s, Los Angeles/Southern California was known as a major retirement destination for senior citizens the same way that Florida and Arizona are today.

The city also had infrastructural advantages as compared to other West Coast cities of the time. Specifically, it had a seaport used for West Coast and trans-Pacific shipping and travel (this was pre-airline days). Its streets were largely paved, and it had begun to build out a streetcar system. It was also the terminus of the transcontinental Southern Pacific Railroad, and had connections to several other rail lines. From the same Chamber of Commerce publication:

[O]n November 9, 1885, the last spike was driven in the Atlantic and Pacific Railway...thus completing a new overland route from the Atlantic to the Pacific. From that time the growth of the city was wonderfully rapid...Los Angeles possesses the advantages of four transcontinental lines...Half a dozen steamship lines now run large and commodius steamers between Los Angeles Harbor and San Francisco and Puget Sound points...Already several steamship lines have been established to run between Los Angeles Harbor and Mexco and Central America on the south, and Hawaii on the west. Most of the leading steamship lines of the world have arranged to make Los Angeles harbor a port of call as soon as the Panama Canal is open.

Aside from transportation, shipping, climate, and location, the city had a growing manufacturing industry, and had an ongoing real estate boom.

This is the Los Angeles that the motion picture industry relocated to. It wasn't some backwater town that the movie industry put on the map. It was already on the map, which is why many of the major players in the movie industry at the time considered a move there.

In 1910, director D.W. Griffith, then working for the New York-based Biograph Film Company, began filming a two-reel adaptation of Ramona, a novel set in southern California during the Mexican-American War. Wanting the film to look authentic, he and his team shot it on location in the Los Angeles area. This was the first movie filmed in the L.A. area.

The experience went well and Griffith and team decided to set up a permanent studio out there as their New York studio was inadequate and the weather was uncooperative half the year for exterior shooting. The January 29, 1910, edition of The Moving Picture World trade magazine ran an article under the headline "Biograph Company Migrates To the Land of Sunshine and Flowers":

Having exhausted all the facilities of their cramped but well utilized studio on Fourteenth Street [in New York City] they realized that they were handicapped in futher progress, therefore another site was looked for. After careful study of the advantages of several locations a plot of land in the Bronx was selected as the ideal spot...

But this is not all. Acute minds perceived that the march of progress must not await the new habitation; the rural settings around this section had been well nigh exhausted: the inclemency of the season made journeys into the country a severe task. So on Wednesday, January 19, [1910,] the entire Biograph stock company, with [D.W.] Griffith, director-in-chief, was dispatched on fast trains to the sunny and picturesque lands of Southern California. With headquarters in Los Angeles, where a developing plant has already been installed, with a careful selection of scenarios suitable for that region and with the inspiring influence which a delightful climate must exert on the artistic temperament, we may look forward to seeing on the screen, pictures that will yet more and more maintain the Biograph name for quality.

Shortly thereafter, D.W. Griffith filmed another two-reel short called In Old California actually shot within the borders of what's now known as "Hollywood", the first motion picture filmed there.

Biograph seasonally shot films out in Los Angeles at rented locations the next few years before deciding to buy up a permanent location.

They were not alone. Another Biograph employee, actor and director Mack Sennett, wanted more creative control and left the company to form a partnership with the guys who owned the New York Motion Picture Company, Adam Kessel and Charles Baumann. They had had some trouble with the Edison Trust--another factor in the move West, though probably not the deciding one. (See: the Motion Picture Patents Co. v. Universal Film Manufacturing Co., a 1917 U.S. Supreme Court decision.) As such, when setting up a studio for their new filmmaker Mack Sennett in 1912, they decided to buy land out in L.A. instead of New York, which resulted in the Keystone Studio, of "the Keystone Cops" fame:

Charles Kessel...has scratched out the words "of New York," which used to follow his name, and hereafter the identifying tag will be "of Los Angeles," for he has come to stay. Even now the real estate agents are hot on his trail...

Kessel came here to take charge of all the Kessel Baumann properties, which include the plants formerly of the Bison and New York Motion Picture Company at Edendale and Santa Monica, and the properties of the Keystone, Broncho and Kaybee (formerly Bison-101) motion picture companies.

His first concern will be to launch the second weekly release of the Keystone company. This will mean hiring new actors and providing new accommodations.

The Motion Picture World began publishing a regular column that year under the title "Doings At Los Angeles" (1, 2). Evidently, less than two years after major studio Biograph had started seasonal shooting in Los Angeles, several other major studios followed suit, including Vitagraph and Universal.

At the end of 1913, Cecil B. de Mille and Jesse L. Lasky had just formed their own motion picture company to make feature-length movies, still a novelty at the time. De Mille went to Flagstaff, Arizona, to make The Squaw Man, but didn't like the locations, and legendarily, asked a train porter where he should go instead, and the porter suggested Los Angeles. De Mille took the advice and finished the film there, the first feature-length movie shot in Los Angeles. The Cecil B. de Mille Studio Barn where the film was finished still exists and is designated an historical landmark.

And while Lasky continued with headquarters in New York for a while, de Mille decided to stay permanently in L.A. for these feature-length projects. Lasky's company soon merged with Famous Players, and became better known as Paramount Pictures within a few years, probably the first motion picture company with a unit devoted entirely to feature-length production.

(To be continued...)