Cinema of the United States that was friendly and enjoyed the movie company filming there. Griffith then filmed the first movie ever shot in Hollywood, "In Old California", a Biograph melodrama about California in the 19th century, when it belonged to Mexico. Griffith stayed there for months and made several films before returning to New York. After hearing about Griffith's success in Hollywood, in 1913, many movie-makers headed west to avoid the fees imposed by Thomas Edison, who owned patents on the movie-making process. Nestor Studios of Bayonne, New Jersey, built the first studio in Hollywood in 1911. Nestor Studios, owned by David and William
D. W. Griffith MacDonald and Spencer Tracy, it was the top-grossing film of the year. In 1939, the producer Hal Roach hired Griffith to produce "Of Mice and Men" (1939) and "One Million B.C." (1940). He wrote to Griffith: "I need help from the production side to select the proper writers, cast, etc. and to help me generally in the supervision of these pictures." Although Griffith eventually disagreed with Roach over the production and parted, Roach later insisted that some of the scenes in the completed film were directed by Griffith. This would make the film the final production in which Griffith was