Hollywood the weather was ideal and there was quick access to various settings. Los Angeles became the capital of the film industry in the United States. The mountains, plains and low land prices made Hollywood a good place to establish film studios. Director D. W. Griffith was the first to make a motion picture in Hollywood. His 17-minute short film "In Old California" (1910) was filmed for the Biograph Company. Although Hollywood banned movie theaters—of which it had none—before annexation that year, Los Angeles had no such restriction. The first film by a Hollywood studio, Nestor Motion Picture Company, was shot
D. W. Griffith industry, no profession, no art form owes so much to a single man." Griffith seems to have been the first to understand how certain film techniques could be used to create an expressive language; it gained popular recognition with the release of his "The Birth of a Nation" (1915). His early shorts—such as Biograph's "The Musketeers of Pig Alley" (1912), the first "gangster film"—show that Griffith's attention to camera placement and lighting heightened mood and tension. In making "Intolerance", the director opened up new possibilities for the medium, creating a form that seems to owe more to music than to