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Today, the Culver City, California intersection of La Cienega and Venice Boulevards is relatively nondescript, packed with vast lanes of traffic and various mostly small businesses nearby. But nearly a century ago in that same spot, rising amidst farmlands and other undeveloped lots, stood an enormous, ephemeral, chariot-racing arena, created to stand in for the ancient Roman Empire’s largest and most famous stadium.

Today, one way to bear witness to the achievements of silent film era auteur Lois Weber is to visit her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Just over a century ago, though, Weber was far more than an oft-overlooked name on a pedestrian pathway. From 1917 through 1921, Lois Weber Productions, located at 4634 Santa Monica Boulevard near Vermont Avenue, was the eponymous five-acre independent film studio of the director-writer-producer-actor.

Mabel Ethelreid Normand was born in 1892 in Staten Island, New York. She did some modeling but no stage acting, and her so-called naturalistic film performances differentiated her from veteran Broadway scene-chewers. The American Film Institute notes Normand’s “doe-eyed beauty, innocent playfulness, and gamin-like charisma.” Turner Classic Movies calls her “rambunctious and non-conformist while exuding an ineffable charm and gentleness on screen.” Encyclopedia Britannica weighs in that Normand “pioneered a new type of comic character: a pretty girl who could take a pratfall.”

In an industry—and a metropolis—not always synonymous with permanence and longevity, Paramount Studios has been a continuous home for film production in Hollywood, both the neighborhood and the industry, for over one hundred years.

A rooster has always been the logo—or part of the logo—of the pioneering, persevering, powerhouse French film company formed in 1896 as ‘Pathé Frères’ and now simply known as ‘Pathé.’  That bird’s morning cry signals a new day has dawned, and that’s what the brothers Pathé did for North American film production when they opened a studio in New Jersey in 1904, and then in the Edendale neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1910. Pathé’s LA space launched one year later than (and was located one block south of) Selig-Polyscope, LA’s first permanent film studio.

The union between legendary Hollywood actors Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks produced many things: A 15-year marriage; co-starring roles in The Taming of the Shrew (1929); the founding of United Artists with D. W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin; the creation, along with 34 others, of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; and, from 1922 through 1927, Pickford-Fairbanks Studios. 

William Nicholas Selig, often called “Colonel” Selig, was an early film pioneer known for his combination of technological, entrepreneurial, and storytelling prowess. Born in 1864 in Chicago, Selig worked as a magician and minstrel show producer. Three decades later, he saw Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope in action and set about engineering something similar—and avoiding paying a patent fee. In 1896, still in Chicago, he founded the Selig Polyscope Company, one of the nation’s first film studios

Today, it’s a Gelson’s grocery store and a parking lot. But just about a century ago, some of the most iconic and enduring entertainment and intellectual property in the world was created right here at 2719 Hyperion Avenue.

Developer Harry Culver had the land; filmmaker Thomas Ince, the dream. When the pair met, local history—and entertainment history—was made.

From the moment it opened on March 15, 1915, Universal City Studios set out to live up to the ambition and grandeur of its name. Universal City was built to be a classic ‘company town,’ but for the most thoroughly modern of industries: filmmaking. The studio––at the time, the world’s largest––was located on 230 acres in mostly unincorporated Los Angeles County, north of Hollywood Hills and far from LA’s civic and commercial epicenter. Universal City had its own fire and police departments, hospital, and housing for 500 people working on the many films being shot concurrently.

In 1903, Jewish immigrant brothers Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack set up a tent in an Ohio yard and exhibited a short film. Cut to 25 years later when these Warner brothers behind Warner Bros. purchased a 62-acre film studio that had recently been built on Burbank farmland, nestled near the Verdugo Hills and the Los Angeles River, just northeast of LA.

In the early decades of the 20th Century, there were many reasons for a film aficionado to visit South Broadway Street in Downtown Los Angeles. Named after the drama-centric New York thoroughfare, LA’s Broadway was home to a dozen stunning theaters in styles such as Beaux Arts, Churrigueresque, and Art Deco—all in a six-block stretch and constructed between 1910 and 1931. Collective capacity was approximately 15,000 seats. These movie-and-more palaces had names such as The Palace, Million Dollar Theater, the Orpheum, the Roxie, the Tower, and United Artists Theater (rehabilitated this millennium as The Theater at the Ace Hotel). Adding to the boulevard’s urban bustle: Pacific Electric Red Cars and Los Angeles Railway trolleys, automobile traffic jams (of which LA would come to see many more), retail shops, utility offices, neon signs, and pedestrians galore

William Fox was a film industry juggernaut. On the long list of this movie mogul’s lifetime achievements, the one year that the William Fox Studio was located at 1845 Allesandro Street doesn’t particularly stand out. 

Like many of the leading early Hollywood Jewish film executives, the Wilshire Boulevard Temple was born out east, headed west, and Anglicized its name. The resulting palatial new house of worship represented a move towards assimilation that paralleled the desires and efforts of many of the Jews of the era shaping the American entertainment industry.

Hidden behind the mirrored-glass front of 8949 Wilshire Boulevard sits the headquarters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, an organization that has celebrated and chronicled the art of filmmaking for almost a century. Although the Academy’s operations are dispersed across many locations, the headquarters oversees the Academy Awards, the Academy’s membership program, marketing and communications, and hosts the Academy Governors when they meet to steer the organization’s future. The building also features the Academy’s 1,010-seat Samuel Goldwyn Theater, which holds screenings of nominated films, among others, for Academy Members. Additionally, the headquarters has served as the primary location for each year’s Oscar nominations announcement.

The Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study is the home of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive, which holds over 230,000 items. Located in Hollywood, it has one of the most diverse and extensive motion picture collections in the world, including all Academy Award–winning films in the Best Picture and Documentary categories as well as many other Oscar-nominated films. As one of the Academy’s research and preservation arms, the Pickford also plays an important role in the pre-production of every Academy Awards ceremony. 

Hollywood’s historic Taft Building, LA’s first high-rise office tower, served as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ headquarters from 1935 to 1946. During the movie industry’s Golden Age, this 12-story structure at the famous corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street included the offices of such luminaries as Charles Chaplin and Will Rogers, as well as those of many influential agents, casting companies, publicists, and entertainment lawyers. A Los Angeles landmark since 1923, the brick-and-concrete structure was renovated in 2014, restoring many of its original features.

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is the largest museum in the United States devoted to the art, science, and craft of moviemaking. The culmination of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ decades-long ambition to build the world’s premier film museum, the Academy Museum’s building had an equally long first act as the May Company building. The Los Angeles Conservancy has called the 1939 retail landmark “the grandest example of Streamline Moderne architecture remaining in Los Angeles.” The building is also an officially designated City of Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument.

When the iconic, 12-story Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel opened in 1927, the film business was about to undergo the historic shift from silent cinema to sound. The resulting boom would create a new industry elite, and the Roosevelt Hotel would soon become one of their key stomping grounds.

The Ambassador Hotel had many incarnations between its opening in 1921 and its demolition in 2005. It established Wilshire Boulevard as the hub of an expanding Los Angeles, and its Cocoanut Grove nightclub served as a playground for the rich, famous, and influential, including America’s biggest film stars. The venue also hosted six Academy Awards ceremonies between 1930 and 1943 in its Fiesta Room. In 1968 however, the Ambassador Hotel made headlines as the site of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, a trauma from which it never fully recovered. In the 2000s, after a battle over the fate of the historic building, the site became the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools. This $578 million construction project made it the most expensive American public school ever built.

The Millennium Biltmore Hotel—originally the Los Angeles Biltmore—has been a downtown LA landmark for nearly a century. When it opened in 1923, it was the largest hotel west of Chicago and helped establish downtown Los Angeles as an entertainment hub in the 1920s and ‘30s. The Biltmore’s ornate exterior—with gold details, fountains, and marble columns—concealed a semi-secret speakeasy for much of Prohibition. In addition to being the site of several notable film shoots, the hotel’s massive ballroom, the Biltmore Bowl, made it an ideal Academy Awards venue. The Biltmore hosted the ceremony eight times from 1932 to 1942, during which the Awards grew from an intimate dinner to the elaborate, public event we know today.

For almost a century, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, now the TCL Chinese Theatre, has been the beating heart of Hollywood tourism. The venue, named for its giant Chinese pagoda structure, hosted the Academy Awards from 1944 to 1946. The Chinese Theatre is still a working cinema, long known for its larger-than-life film premieres and uniquely extravagant moviegoing experience. Additionally, the Chinese Theatre offers a personal encounter with film history through the iconic hand- and footprints left by Hollywood stars in the cement out front from the 1920s to today.

The ten Academy Award ceremonies held at the Shrine Auditorium and Expo Center span seven decades, making this USC-adjacent venue the longest-tenured Oscars site, if not the most frequently used—that honor currently goes to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The first Oscar ceremony held at the Shrine—officially called the Al Malaikah Shriners Ancients Arabic Order Nobles of Mystic Shrine—took place in 1947, and the last in 2001, with intervening stops in 1948, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1995, 1997, 1998, and 2000.

In 1946, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences purchased the Marquis Theatre on Melrose Avenue, renaming it the Academy Awards Theatre. In 1949, the name became all the more apt when the Academy moved the ceremony there at the last minute. Accused of trying to influence the outcome of the Academy Awards, the major studios had pulled their funding. This left the Academy scrambling to find a cheaper venue just days before the ceremony. Though the 950-seat Academy Awards Theatre’s reduced capacity was not ideal, the show went on, with Hamlet (UK, 1948) winning Best Picture and stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Ava Gardner gracing the—slightly smaller—stage. This was the only year the Academy Awards Theatre hosted the ceremony.

The Hollywood Pantages, the last theater Alexander Pantages built as part of his vaudeville empire, opened for business in 1930. Initially it was a venue for live events, but theater had become increasingly expensive to stage during the Great Depression. Movie screenings were a cheaper alternative and a prime business opportunity. After a period under Fox’s theater group, the venue was purchased by Howard Hughes’s RKO Pictures in 1949. The Pantages then made history, hosting the Academy Awards from 1950 to 1960, including the first televised ceremony in 1953. In the 1970s, the Theatre returned to hosting live productions. After a major renovation in 2000 restored the Theatre’s original Art Deco architecture, the Pantages became the hub for traveling Broadway shows, including Hamilton, The Lion King, and Wicked. 

The Santa Monica Civic Auditorium was designed by Welton Becket along with the city hall and courthouse, but the distinctive, mid-century modern structure also played home to the Academy Awards through the tumultuous and transformative ‘60s. In 1962, it was the site of the ceremony’s first protest, as Black actors picketed in response to mistreatment by the film industry. The 1968 ceremony was postponed due to Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. The Civic Auditorium was also the site of more celebratory milestones for people of color, including Sidney Poitier’s Best Actor win for Lilies of the Field (USA, 1963) and Rita Moreno’s win for Best Supporting Actress for West Side Story (USA, 1961). The venue also hosted the first broadcast of the ceremony in color in 1966.

For three decades, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion was the principal home of the Academy Awards, with 25 ceremonies—including every show from 1969 to 1987—taking place in the opulent, 3,156-seat auditorium. The building witnessed many landmark Hollywood moments. Under the Pavilion’s roof, Midnight Cowboy (USA, 1969), The French Connection (USA, 1971), The Godfather (USA, 1972), Rocky (USA, 1976), and Schindler’s List (USA, 1993) won their Oscars for Best Picture. Many screen legends also received their Honorary Oscars here, including Charles Chaplin, Kirk Douglas, Henry Fonda, Lillian Gish, Cary Grant, Laurence Olivier, Mary Pickford, Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, Jean Renoir, and Orson Welles.

The Capitol Records Building is one of the most recognizable landmarks in all of Southern California. Completed in 1956, the unusual round structure, with its curved awnings on each level and a tall spike emerging from the roof, was designed by architect Louis Naidorf to resemble a stack of records on a turntable spindle. Nicknamed “The House That Nat Built”—referencing Nat King Cole, the star of the Capitol Records label—the building has long been a popular backdrop for films set in Los Angeles. From 2013 to 2015, it also played a key role in Hollywood’s most important event: the orchestra for the Academy Awards performed live in the Capitol Records studios while the Dolby Theatre hosted the ceremony a few blocks away.

From 1929 to 2001, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences staged 73 award ceremonies at nine different venues. The range of sites reflects the diverse eras and ceremony formats of the Academy Awards, as well as the ever-changing demands of putting on an industry event with a global audience. However, on March 24, 2002, film’s most important night found a bespoke home in the then brand-new Kodak Theatre, now the Dolby Theatre.

Anchoring the retail complex at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue, the venue sits adjacent to the TCL Chinese Theatre, also an Oscars venue back when it was Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. The Dolby was built with two mediums in mind, film and television, and has been the permanent home of the Academy Awards since 2002, with the ceremony only venturing afield again during the pandemic year of 2021.

A train station might seem like an unlikely Academy Awards venue, but in the case of the Oscars ceremony held at Union Station on April 25, 2021, the unusual setting was a shrewd solution to a complex problem. For over a year, event planners across the globe had faced the immense challenges of staging live shows during a deadly pandemic.

While many award ceremonies canceled their COVID-era dates or mounted virtual programs, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decided to stage the 93rd Oscars show as a live event. After briefly considering the Biltmore and Roosevelt Hotels, the Academy selected Union Station to accommodate the 170 nominees and their guests, plus almost two dozen presenters and several hundred production staffers for Oscars night in 2021.

The Academy Awards ceremony isn’t just a state-of-the-art, high-stakes television production or Hollywood’s biggest night. The annual event is also a collection of rigorously researched names, dates, credits, archival photographs, and other film data and materials. The staff of the Margaret Herrick Library does much of the assembling and fact-checking of these details. Originally established in 1928, just a year after the Academy was founded, the Academy Library was housed in various temporary locations before 1991, when it finally settled in its current home at the Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study in Beverly Hills.