Yes, a lot silent movies are lost. But the good news is that there are shitloads of them still out there and most people alive today have never seen nor heard of them and that's a damn shame. I saw "Squaw Man" recently. That's the first full length movie to come out of Hollywood and directed by Cecil B. DeMille who was just coming up. Not the king of spectacles yet. In fact, D. W. Griffith was really the first spectacle-maker with "Intolerance" if that can be called a spectacle. A bit more cerebral but it still qualifies. Many of the film genres in existence today came out of Griffith. "The Birth of a Nation" was the first epic. "Intolerance" was the first spectacle. "Broken Blossoms" gave birth to film noir. He was a true 20th century visionary.

What's also cool about silent movies is that I like to look at what company made them and look at the credits and you'll see the big dogs of early Hollywood--the guys who made it what it is. Guys like Joseph Schenk, Marcus Loew and Adolph Zukor. And companies these guys started that we only know after their mergers. Like in 1920 when "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" was made it was put out by Metro Pictures. Marcus Loew owned that. Three years later, he bought up Goldwyn Pictures (founded by Sam Goldfish and the Selwyn Bros. who combined their surnames together although many thought they should have called themselves "Sel-Fish") and formed Metro-Goldwyn in 1924. But Loew needed someone with managerial expertise to run it. He knew he couldn't. He wanted Nicholas Schenk (Joseph's brother) to do it but Schenk was involved in other vital business for Loew's company. Finally, Loew decided to make an overture to a small-time studio owner who was actually one of the founders of Metro when it was still in New York--Lazar Meir who went by the name Louis B. Mayer. He made the first "chick flicks" at his little studio is an LA ghetto. But Loew offered him Metro-Goldwyn and Mayer took it after ensuring that Loew hired his right hand man, Irving Thalberg. So that was how Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or MGM was formed. Their first talkie filmed in 1928 was also the first musical and was directed by Thalberg who reshot scenes and had the actors mouth the words already recorded--the first instance of lip-syncing.

"The Squaw Man" was put together by Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company in 1914. Two years earlier, Adolph Zukor founded the Famous Players Company. Both were making films for the same film exchange and exhibition company which Zukor was quietly buying up all the stock in until he became its president. Then he merged Famous Players with Lasky's Feature Play Co. and became Famous Players-Lasky Corporation. Cecil B. DeMille and Sam Goldfish were also partners in the deal. In 1916, Famous Players-Lasky were made part of the Zukor's company and became Paramount Pictures--the first studio to combine production, distribution and exhibition in one company.

Griffith's first company that he filmed for in Hollywood was Biograph. Biograph was founded because of the Mutascope--a 70 mm film projector invented by W. K. L. Dickson who had worked for Edison and built the 35 mm kinetoscope which was not a projector but a peepshow using film and a shutter. But the Mutascope enabled Dickson to found Biograph. Biograph's early artists were Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish who were both discovered by Griffith and who promptly made stars of them. Mary Pickford, known as "America's sweetheart," was a huge star--the first mega-star.

Years later, in 1919, Mary Pickford and D. W. Griffith--along with Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks--founded United Artists which was run by Joseph Schenk and Lewis Selnick. Selznick's son, David, directed "Gone With the Wind" for UA in 1939.

Carl Laemmle bought the old Nestor studio in 1915. Nestor was the studio Griffith and Biograph shot their films for. Laemmle turned it into a huge complex and named it after the street it was located on--Universal. His first protoge was Irving Thalberg before Thalberg split to partner up with Mayer. Thalberg's secretary was a guy name Harry Cohn. He split from Universal in 1919 and formed a partnership with his brother, Jack, and Joe Brandt. They called it CBC in 1920. It was small-time and the other studio maguls mocked it by calling it "Corned Beef and Cabbage." So in 1924, CBC changed its name to Columbia Pictures.

Warner Bros were Jack, Harry, Albert and Sam who founded their company in 1923 after buying Vitagraph--the major New York movie studio at the time. Warner Bros. gave us talkies. Western Electric came up with a sound-on-disc system that synced up with the movie. A guy named Nathan Levinson of Western Electric persuaded Sam Warner to buy it in 1926. Sam called the system Vitaphone. They made the first talking movie--"Don Juan." The following year, Warner Bros. made "The Jazz Singer" which they showcased at their theatre in New York with a Vitaphone system installed and the public response was so exceptional that theatres across the US started installing electric sound systems.

The sound system that eventually won out was judged inferior to Vitaphone, which it was for some time, it was called Movietone and had been around since 1919. It was bought up by William Fried in 1926, whose company had fled New York in 1915 for Hollywood. Fried used his mother's maiden name Fuchs but anglicized it to Fox and named his company the Fox Film Corporation. Movietone recorded sound directly on the film but it was crude and needed work. As the Depression struck, Fox was in a bad car accident and was laid up in the hospital. An executive rose up to replace him, Sydney Kent. Fox tried to prevent it but, being bedridden, there wasn't much he could do and Fox was forced out. He went bankrupt being unable to tend to his fortune while laid up.

In 1933, Daryl F. Zanuck founded 20th Century Films with the help of Joseph Schenk at UA. They decided to merge with Sydney Kent at financially-teetering Fox and formed 20th Century-Fox, which would cease to be hyphenated after 1985.

And there, in a nutshell, is how your major Hollywood studios formed.