city, Broward county, southeastern Florida, U.S. It lies along the Atlantic Ocean, about 15 miles (25 km) north of Miami. The site was covered with pine forests and palmetto with a few tomato farms until 1921, when Joseph Wesley Young, a developer from California (hence the name Hollywood), laid out the town, which was incorporated in 1925. The city was rebuilt after a devastating hurricane in 1926. The city grew slowly until after World War II, when its population rapidly increased, especially in the period 1960–75.

Hollywood is now primarily a resort-residential city with some diversified industry, including printing and light manufacturing, and is a retirement centre. Services (notably health care) are also important. It shares the ownership and benefits of Port Everglades with nearby Dania and Fort Lauderdale. A Seminole Indian reservation is just to the northwest. The Anne Kolb Nature Center is located in a wetland mangrove forest habitat. Pop. (1990) 121,697; (2000) 139,357.

In 1908 one of the first storytelling movies, The Count of Monte Cristo, was completed in Hollywood after its filming had begun in Chicago. In 1911 a site on Sunset Boulevard was turned into Hollywood's first studio, and soon about 20 companies were producing films in the area. In 1913 Cecil B. DeMille (DeMille, Cecil B.), Jesse Lasky, Arthur Freed (Freed, Arthur), and Samuel Goldwyn (Goldwyn, Samuel) formed Jesse Lasky Feature Play Company (later Paramount Pictures). DeMille produced The Squaw Man in a barn one block from present-day Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, and more box-office successes soon followed. Hollywood had become the centre of the American film industry by 1915 as more independent filmmakers relocated there from the East Coast. For more than three decades, from early silent films through the advent of “talkies,” figures such as D.W. Griffith (Griffith, D W), Goldwyn, Adolph Zukor (Zukor, Adolph), William Fox (Fox, William), Louis B. Mayer (Mayer, Louis B), Darryl F. Zanuck (Zanuck, Darryl F.), and Harry Cohn (Cohn, Harry) served as overlords of the great film studios—Twentieth Century-Fox (Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc.), Paramount Pictures (Paramount Pictures Corporation), Columbia Pictures (Columbia Pictures Entertainment, Inc.), Warner Brothers, and others. Among the writers who were fascinated by Hollywood in its “golden age” were F. Scott Fitzgerald (Fitzgerald, F. Scott), Aldous Huxley (Huxley, Aldous), Evelyn Waugh (Waugh, Evelyn), and Nathanael West (West, Nathanael).

After World War II, film studios began to move outside Hollywood, and the practice of filming “on location” emptied many of the famous lots and sound stages or turned them over to television show producers. With the growth of the television industry, Hollywood began to change, and by the early 1960s it had become the home of much of American network television entertainment.

Among the features of Hollywood, aside from its working studios, are the Hollywood Bowl (1919; a natural amphitheatre used since 1922 for summertime concerts under the stars), the Greek Theatre in Griffith Park (also a concert venue), Mann's (formerly Grauman's) Chinese Theatre (with footprints and handprints of many stars in its concrete forecourt), and the Hollywood Wax Museum (with more than 350 wax figures of celebrities). The Hollywood Walk of Fame pays tribute to many celebrities of the entertainment industry. The most visible symbol of the district is the Hollywood sign that overlooks the area. First built in 1923 (a new sign was erected in 1978), the sign originally said “Hollywoodland” (to advertise new homes being developed in the area), but the sign fell into disrepair, and the “land” section was removed in the 1940s when the sign was refurbished.

Many stars, past and present, live in neighbouring communities such as Beverly Hills and Bel Air, and the Hollywood Forever Cemetery contains the crypts of such performers as Rudolph Valentino (Valentino, Rudolph), Douglas Fairbanks (Fairbanks, Douglas), and Tyrone Power (Power, Tyrone). Hollywood Boulevard, long a chic thoroughfare, became rather tawdry with the demise of old studio Hollywood, but it underwent regeneration beginning in the late 20th century; the Egyptian Theatre (built in 1922), for example, was fully restored in the 1990s and became the home of the American Cinematheque, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the presentation of the motion picture.