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 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