← Analysis
LA's First Aircraft Company Rented Space in an Abandoned Movie Studio
Los Angeles didn't build two unrelated industries by coincidence. The film industry fled there starting in the 1900s specifically to escape Thomas Edison's East Coast patent monopoly on movie cameras -- warm weather, cheap land, and distance from federal marshals. A decade later, Donald Douglas founded Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica in 1921 by literally renting space in an abandoned movie studio, for close to identical reasons; Howard Hughes, a Hollywood film producer first, founded Hughes Aircraft in 1932. A century later, technology has hit the film half of that founding story in three escalating waves: streaming revenue that now outpaces the entire global box office, ray tracing's two-step arrival (Pixar's own 2014-16 RenderMan rewrite, then NVIDIA's 2018 real-time GPU breakthrough), and generative AI -- fought over in the 2023 WGA/SAG-AFTRA strikes, now arriving as real tools whose adoption still lags the announcements. This site's own graph already made the deeper connection: LA's aerospace descendants (SpaceX, Anduril, JPL) run the same category of render-compute infrastructure Pixar pioneered, for entirely different reasons.

Start with the sentence that sounds like a coincidence until you check the year. In July 1921, Donald Douglas founded Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica -- and its first home was a rented space inside an abandoned movie studio.[1] That wasn't an accident of available real estate. Both industries came to Los Angeles for almost exactly the same reason, one after the other, on the same ground.

The film industry got there first, fleeing a monopoly. Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company -- the "Edison Trust" -- controlled the patents on movie cameras and film stock so completely that independent filmmakers on the East Coast faced constant lawsuits just for operating.[2] Los Angeles offered everything the Trust couldn't reach: warm, reliable light for outdoor shooting year-round, cheap land, and enough distance from New York and New Jersey that California judges were far less friendly to Edison's claims -- with the Mexican border close enough to move equipment across if a marshal showed up anyway.[2] The Supreme Court broke the Trust outright in 1915, but by then the geography had already done its work: the studio system that followed was built on land chosen to escape a patent monopoly, not chosen for the movies themselves.

Aerospace followed for the identical reasons, recruited by name. Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler used his own newspaper's reach to actively recruit aviation companies to the region, selling them on the same moderate climate, low construction costs, and available labor that had already pulled in the film industry.[1] Douglas Aircraft's DC series went on to carry 90% of US airline passengers by the golden age of 1930s aviation.[1] Howard Hughes -- a Hollywood film producer before he was an aviation man -- founded Hughes Aircraft in 1932, and North American Aviation was headquartered in Los Angeles from 1928.[1] Two industries, one reason, a decade apart.

1921the year Douglas Aircraft was founded in Santa Monica, in a rented former movie studio
90%of US airline passengers Douglas's own DC series carried by the 1930s
24,000processor cores Pixar's render farm runs today, up from 117 for the original Toy Story
The same shape this site already found in San Diego A city picks up a founding industry, then builds a second, genuinely different one on the same ground -- not a copy of the first, a separate bet. San Diego did it with the Navy and a deliberate 1965 zoning choice; Los Angeles did it with film and aerospace, both drawn by the identical weather-and-cheap-land logic a decade apart. The San Diego piece is here.

A century later, technology has hit the film half of that founding story in three separate, escalating waves. The first wave was distribution, and it was the clearest: Netflix's revenue for the fiscal year ending September 2024 reached $37.5 billion -- 25% more than the entire global theatrical box office that year, which totaled $30 billion.[3] Streaming didn't just add a second channel to the studio system Edison's lawsuits inadvertently built; for the first time, it took in more money than the thing the whole system was built around.

The second wave hit the render pipeline itself, and it happened in two separate steps a few years apart. Pixar rebuilt RenderMan from the ground up starting with version 19 in 2014, replacing its original Reyes rendering algorithm -- which faked lighting -- with RIS, a full Monte Carlo path tracer that calculates every bounce of light, shadow, and reflection with real physics; Finding Dory (2016) and Coco (2017) were the first films to run on it at scale, and Reyes support was removed entirely in 2016.[4] That version of ray tracing was accurate but slow, limited to CPUs and offline server farms. The second step arrived in 2018, when NVIDIA announced RTX -- ten years of GPU and ray-tracing algorithm research condensed into real-time hardware -- and ILMxLAB, Epic Games, and NVIDIA demonstrated it with "Star Wars: Reflections," a cinematic with ray-traced reflections and shadows rendered live on a single four-GPU workstation, the kind of fidelity that had previously required a render farm running overnight.[5] Rob Legato, VFX supervisor on Disney's 2019 Lion King remake, called real-time GPU rendering the future of the craft -- the same shift that made virtual production possible on set rather than months later in post.[5] The concrete payoff arrived the same year RTX did: ILM built "the Volume" for The Mandalorian, a 20-foot-high, 270-degree LED wall wrapped around a 75-foot circular stage, driving photoreal backgrounds rendered live by Unreal Engine -- Epic Games' video game engine, not a film tool at all originally.[6] More than half of the show's first season was shot on it, eliminating location shoots almost entirely -- not a fancier green screen, but the thing that made most green screen unnecessary, because the actors were lit by and reacting to a real rendered environment instead of a blank void filled in months later.[6]

The third wave hit the workforce directly, and it is still running. The Writers Guild of America struck from May to September 2023, and SAG-AFTRA joined from July to November -- the first joint writers-actors strike in 63 years -- driven centrally by generative AI's ability to produce scripts and synthetic performances without paying the writers and actors whose work trained it.[7] Both unions ratified contracts that fall requiring studios to notify and bargain with them before deploying wholly synthetic performers -- the first real, negotiated boundary between a creative workforce and the technology capable of replacing it.[7] That boundary is already being tested: OpenAI's Sora2, released in late 2025, triggered real industry conflict over training on copyrighted footage and its stated ability to replace entire post-production departments, while Runway's Gen-4 models -- built specifically for filmmakers, with granular camera control -- have become the professional default for narrative work Sora was aimed at.[8] The honest read as of this writing: the theoretical disruption is real and immediate; actual production-line adoption is running behind the announcements, the same gap this site keeps finding between what a technology can do and what an industry has actually integrated.[8]

And this site's own graph already drew the compute line, before this piece did. The entry for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, managed by Caltech in Pasadena, already reads: "the same region that renders Hollywood's films processes the solar system's data." Disney and DreamWorks are already tagged in this graph as part of "LA's render/compute spine" -- DreamWorks built and open-sourced its own MoonRay production renderer; Disney's Imagineering arm runs the same engineering muscle into robotics. A hundred years after one industry rented the other's abandoned building, LA's film and aerospace lineages are running the identical infrastructure again, for the first time since Douglas moved into that old movie studio in 1921.

The takeaway Los Angeles built two founding industries on the exact same logic, a decade apart. Film fled there to escape Thomas Edison's East Coast patent monopoly -- warm weather, cheap land, distance from federal marshals. Aerospace followed for identical reasons: Douglas Aircraft (1921) rented space in an abandoned movie studio, Harry Chandler's LA Times actively recruited aviation firms with the same climate pitch, and Howard Hughes -- a Hollywood producer first -- founded Hughes Aircraft in 1932. A century later, technology has hit the film half of that story in three escalating waves: Netflix's FY2024 revenue ($37.5B) topping the entire global box office by 25%; ray tracing moving from Pixar's own 2014-16 RenderMan rewrite to NVIDIA's 2018 real-time GPU breakthrough; and generative AI, first fought over in the 2023 WGA/SAG-AFTRA strikes and now arriving as real production tools (Sora2, Runway) whose actual adoption still lags the hype. The render-compute lineage that built Pixar's original 117-processor Toy Story farm now runs the identical category of infrastructure LA's aerospace descendants (SpaceX, Anduril, JPL) use for entirely different reasons -- a connection this site's own graph had already made, tagging Disney, DreamWorks, and JPL as one "render/compute spine" before this piece ever traced why.
Sources
  1. Boeing, 3 California Companies That Helped Shape Boeing
  2. History Facts, Hollywood Was Established in Los Angeles to Get Away From Thomas Edison
  3. The Hollywood Reporter, Streaming Profit Report: Netflix Leads, Disney Rises, Warner Grows
  4. VFX Voice, RenderMan at 30: A Visual History
  5. NVIDIA, Real-Time Ray Tracing Realized: RTX Brings the Future of Graphics to Millions
  6. Industrial Light & Magic, Groundbreaking LED Stage Production Technology Created for The Mandalorian
  7. Wikipedia, 2023 SAG-AFTRA Strike
  8. SmythOS, AI Video Generators: A Hollywood Disruption Guide