Hello, I would need an audio version of this text to help my French 9th grade students listen and understand a little bit more about Hollywood. It is one part of a five-part lesson, so if you feel courageous... Please speak naturally and do enunciate as my students are lower-intermediate English learners... Thank you so much.
PART 2: The Origins of Hollywood
In 1908 one of the first movies, The Count of Monte Cristo, was completed in Hollywood. Hollywood had become the centre of the American film industry by 1915 as more independent filmmakers relocated there from the East Coast. Cinema went from silent films like Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin to the talking pictures, also called “talkies”, in the late 1920s. This “Golden Age of Hollywood Cinema” started with the release of the first long talkie film The Jazz Singer in 1927.
Jewish immigrants such as D.W. Griffith, Samuel Goldwyn, Adolph Zukor, William Fox, Louis B. Mayer, Darryl F. Zanuck, and Harry Cohn became great film producers in Hollywood and the lords of the biggest film studios, called the big Six, —Twentieth Century-Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, Columbia Pictures, Warner Brothers, and now Disney Studios.
All film studios continued to develop even during the Great Depression, a big economic crisis from 1929 to 1939. More and more people were looking for entertainment on big screens, and the adventures of their favorite film stars, especially the very first child star: Shirley Temple.
After World War II, film studios began to move outside Hollywood because they were expensive, and the practice of filming “on location” developed. In 1949, the Golden Age of Hollywood was over and the post-WW2 consumers and the rise of Television forced Hollywood to reinvent itself.
*began to move outside of Hollywood.