John Fredrick Parker
Donor
Here's the scenario:
Does this work, given the PoD? And if so, how else would cinema (both American and, ultimately, World) be different? And what are the larger cultural effects therein?
In 1907, as in OTL, Edison Studios begins negotiations with Vitagraph, Essanay, Selig, Lubin, Kalem, American Star, and American Pathé to form a licensing agreement to Edison's patents on film technology. Unlike OTL, however, Eastman Kodak refuses to play ball. They have no problems selling stock to the consortium, but they're not about to cut off their revenue by refusing to deal with their competitors. If Edison and company want to take it to the courts, so be it, but Kodak decides to stay neutral.
Biograph Studios, who were deliberately left out of the licensing negotiations, still buys out the patent on the Latham film loop in retaliation. But without Eastman Kodak in on the deal, they don't have much interest when the trust invites them in. Part of it is sour grapes at being excluded initially, to be sure, but, more to the point, Biograph's executives don't believe that the trust will be able to enforce its monopoly solely through patent cases. Without the film stock monopoly, it's doomed to failure.
As it turns out, Biograph's defiance of the trust is the straw the breaks the camel's back. Smaller studios find their nerve in Biograph's cover, and soon some of the more powerful partners in the trust start to sour on the deal. What starts as a few rumblings of discontent among some of the more powerful members of the cabal (particularly Vitagraph), turns into a seismic shock when the trust's first big test, a trial against Biograph in the fall of 1908 into the winter of 1909 for violation of trust-held patents, effectively blows up in their face. The courts hold that Biograph was indeed in violation of Edison patents, but issues little more than a token fine. At the same time, the court rules that the trust's actions went "far beyond what was necessary to protect the use of patents or the monopoly which went with them" (the same words used in the OTL case that dismantled the trust in 1915) and finds them in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
The companies that can disentangle themselves from Edison's Folly (as the trust came to be known) do so post haste. Those that don't go down with the ship. Edison Studios itself survives, but no longer has the legal or economic power to dominate the industry as it once did.
So, really, things work out much like they did in OTL, only about a decade earlier. But that decade makes a huge amount of difference: it was in the years of Motion Picture Patents Company-domination of the business that the modern film industry emerged. Hundreds of independent students moved out west, hoping not only to get as far away from Edison's home base in New Jersey as possible, but to find a environment more conducive to their illicit, patent-violating work. They found an ideal location in a small suburb of Los Angeles. Not only was it under the jurisdiction of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (which was hesitant to prosecute patent cases), but it was close enough to the Mexican border that crews could flee the country until any heat died down. The town, of course, was Hollywood, and it was there that the major studios of the American movie industry were forged, including Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Fox, Universal, and so on.
With the MPPC basically crippled at its infancy, there's no migration west, and the business of making movies stays much closer to the financiers in New York. Since the first generation of studios is still damaged by the dissolution of the trust, a lot of them probably don't survive. Those that do may or may not be any more inclined to track trends in the business, such as the shift to feature-length productions. I suspect that companies like Biograph might well be better positioned to adapt then they were OTL, but other than that, it's hard to say who will dominate the industry in ten years time.
I suspect that the people exercising the strongest influence over the movie industry will not be moviemakers at all, with production being closer to, and therefore much more under the thumb of, the folks holding the purse strings. The movies probably never attract the same kind of wild west, "anyone can be a star" appeal that they had in OTL.
Does this work, given the PoD? And if so, how else would cinema (both American and, ultimately, World) be different? And what are the larger cultural effects therein?