In 1913, a glove salesman from Warsaw, a director from Massachusetts, and a Hungarian immigrant who'd changed his name twice got on a train in New York City and headed west to make a movie.
They were Jesse Lasky, Cecil B. DeMille, and Sam Goldfish — who would later become Sam Goldwyn, because America is a place where you can rename yourself and no one checks. Their plan was to shoot The Squaw Man, which they believed would be the first feature-length film made outside the East Coast studio system. Their destination was Flagstaff, Arizona.
They never made it.
DeMille's version of what happened has been retold so many times it's become industry gospel: "When we got off the train in Flagstaff, it was colder than when I left New York." Other accounts say a dust storm hit. The USC film school tells it as an "unexpected dust storm that forced them to continue to Los Angeles." DeMille himself said the landscape simply didn't match the picture in his head.
Whatever the reason — cold, dust, divine intervention, or a hangover from the dining car — the three men got back on the train, rode it to the end of the line, and stepped off in a neighborhood of dirt roads and orange groves called Hollywood. They rented a barn at the corner of Selma and Vine. And they started shooting.
That barn became Paramount Pictures.
The story is almost certainly embellished, possibly apocryphal, and absolutely perfect — because it tells you something true about the movie business. Hollywood didn't happen because of a grand plan. Hollywood happened because of the weather.
The Real Reasons Hollywood Became Hollywood
The Flagstaff myth is better than the truth, but the truth matters if you want to understand what's happening now.
In 1911, Moving Picture World magazine reported that Southern California offered 320 days a year of ideal motion picture photography weather. That was the headline number. But sunshine was just the beginning.
The real pull was economic. Director-historian Steven J. Ross documented that Los Angeles in the 1910s was the capital of open-shop, non-union labor in America. DeMille himself noted that carpenters and service workers on The Squaw Man cost 25 to 50 percent less than on the East Coast. Land was cheap and abundant — the studio builders acquired property from Lincoln Heights to the San Fernando Valley, from Echo Park to Santa Monica, and built their palaces for pennies on the dollar.
There was also the matter of Thomas Edison. His Motion Picture Patents Company — "the Trust" — held patents on processing and projection equipment and enforced them with legal thugs. Independent filmmakers fled west partly because, as the legend goes, they could "beat it across the Mexican border when agents came to serve subpoenas." Film historian Robert Sklar points out that Mexico was a five-hour drive from LA in those days, making that escape plan somewhat impractical. But the distance from New York was real, and it mattered.
And then there was the geography. Mountains, desert, coastline, farmland, urban streets, rural nothing — all within a short drive. One location could play as ten.
So: sunshine, cheap labor, cheap land, distance from the law, and a landscape that could be anything. That's why Hollywood became Hollywood.
Now read that list again, slowly, and tell me what state it sounds like.
The Moguls Who Built It
The men who built Hollywood were not from Hollywood. They were not from California. Most of them were not from America.
Adolph Zukor was born in Ricse, Hungary. He arrived in New York in 1889 with $25. He founded Paramount.
William Fox — born Wilhelm Fried Fuchs in Tolcsva, Hungary — started with a single nickelodeon in Brooklyn. He built Fox Film Corporation, which became 20th Century Fox, which is now part of Disney.
Samuel Goldwyn — born Schmuel Gelbfisz in Warsaw, Poland — changed his name twice on his way to founding the studio that bears his second-to-last name. He helped create MGM.
Louis B. Mayer — born Lazar Meir, somewhere in the Russian Empire that might have been Ukraine or Belarus, depending on which border you respected — co-founded MGM and ran it like a country.
The Warner Brothers — Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack Wonsal — were four of twelve children born to Polish Jewish immigrants. They started a film distribution company in 1904 in Pittsburgh. Twenty years later they were running one of the most powerful studios in the world.
Carl Laemmle came from Laupheim, Germany. He founded Universal Pictures.
Harry Cohn, son of immigrants from Russia, founded Columbia Pictures.
These men came from shtetls and tenement apartments and steerage-class cabins. They came from Hungary, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Germany. They came from places that didn't want them. And they built the most powerful storytelling machine in human history in a place they'd never been to, because the weather was nice and nobody told them they couldn't.
Neal Gabler wrote the book on this. It's called An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. His thesis is simple and devastating: these men didn't just make movies. They created an idealized America on screen — the America they wished existed — and then the real America looked at those movies and said, "Yeah, that's us."
They made the American Dream before the American Dream made itself.
Here's the thing nobody says out loud: if those trains had run south instead of west, if someone had told Zukor or Laemmle or the Wonsals about a place with more sun than Arizona, cheaper land than California, no union shops, and a landscape that stretches from the Gulf of Mexico to the high desert — they'd have built their barns in Texas.
Hollywood Is Leaving Hollywood
In 2021, television productions in Los Angeles logged 18,560 shoot days.
In 2024, that number was 7,716.
That's not a decline. That's a collapse. A 58% drop in three years.
In the first quarter of 2025, on-location production in LA declined another 22.4% from the same period the year before. FilmLA — the nonprofit that tracks permits for the region — recorded 2024 as the second-lowest production year on record, beaten only by 2020, when a pandemic shut down the planet.
The reasons are structural, not seasonal. The streaming boom that powered Peak TV is over. Studios that once greenlit everything with a pulse are now cutting content and staff, chasing profit instead of subscriber counts. AI is reducing post-production headcount. Shorter series formats mean fewer shoot days per order. The 2023 writers' and actors' strikes halted production for months, and some of that work never came back.
But the biggest factor is the one that built Hollywood in the first place: economics. Production goes where the money is best. And the money hasn't been best in California for a long time.
Georgia, New Mexico, the UK, Canada, Hungary — they all built aggressive incentive programs while California dawdled. LA's cost of living pushed crew rates higher. Permitting got harder. Traffic got worse. A CBS News headline from June 2025 asked the question that would have been unthinkable a decade ago: "Can Hollywood's film and TV industry survive in California?"
The industry that was born because a dust storm rerouted a train is now watching its workforce drift away because the economics point somewhere else.
Texas Saw It Coming
On June 22, 2025, Governor Abbott signed Senate Bill 22 into law.
SB 22 created the Texas Moving Image Industry Incentive Fund — a dedicated pool of $500 million every two years, running through 2035. That's $2.5 billion over the next decade, earmarked specifically for film, television, commercial, animation, visual effects, and video game production in Texas.
This is not a modest investment. This is Texas telling the entertainment industry: we're not trying to be Georgia. We're not trying to be a cheaper version of somewhere else. We're building something new.
The existing Texas Moving Image Industry Incentive Program (TMIIIP) had already proven the concept. Since 2007, the program generated $1.9 billion in economic impact. Every dollar invested returned $5.11 in in-state spending. It created over 183,000 production jobs. It supported more than 10,000 small businesses annually. Over 1,700 projects came through the program.
SB 22 took that proof of concept and gave it a rocket engine.
One month before the bill was signed, in May 2025, Congressman Tony Gonzales introduced H.R. 3844 — the Texas is the New Hollywood Act. The federal bill extends bonus depreciation for qualified film and TV productions (which was set to expire at the end of 2026) and aligns the federal incentive thresholds with SB 22's state program. "Made in America is better," Gonzales said. "Made in Texas is the best."
That same month, President Trump announced a 100% tariff on foreign-made films, declaring that "the movie industry in America is dying a very fast death" and that other countries were luring studios away with incentives. By September 2025, the tariff was formalized. Whatever you think of the policy, the message was clear: the federal government wants film production on American soil.
Texas was already standing at the door.
The Infrastructure Is Real
Talk is cheap. Soundstages are not.
In August 2025, Taylor Sheridan, 101 Studios CEO David Glasser, Hillwood Development, and Paramount Television opened SGS Studios at AllianceTexas in Fort Worth — the largest operating film and TV production studio in the state. The campus spans 450,000 square feet across two buildings, houses six soundstages, and can accommodate four large-scale productions simultaneously. It's HVAC-equipped, power-optimized, and built from the ground up for the kind of productions that used to require a flight to Burbank.
Sheridan's Landman — the Paramount+ series starring Billy Bob Thornton, based on the West Texas oil industry — shot its entire second season across North Texas using SGS as its anchor. Fort Worth's Frost Tower doubled for corporate Midland. The Stockyards played themselves. A church parking lot in Springtown stood in for small-town West Texas. The entire production footprint demonstrated what the incentive program was designed to prove: you can make world-class television in Texas without ever leaving the state.
SGS isn't alone. Dallas has South Side Studios — a 75,000-square-foot soundstage that hosted Kenneth Branagh's Atonement. Austin has Troublemaker Studios, Robert Rodriguez's compound, plus the infrastructure ecosystem that's grown up around SXSW. San Antonio has been growing its production capacity with an 18% increase in local film spend in 2023 alone.
Statewide, Texas has more than 150 dedicated soundstages and filming facilities. Over 600 communities are certified as "Film Friendly" through the Texas Film Commission. There are more than 50 film festivals operating across the state annually — from SXSW (which draws 250,000+ attendees) to DIFF in Dallas (30,000+ visitors) to specialized festivals in Houston, San Antonio, Marfa, and everywhere in between.
The University of Texas at Austin ranks in the top 10 film schools globally. Over 12,000 undergraduate students are currently enrolled in film programs across the state. More than 80% of Texas film graduates take their first job in-state.
This isn't aspirational. This is operational.
The Numbers Don't Lie
Texas ranks 4th in the nation for film and television production employment.
Austin was ranked the #1 best city to live and work as a moviemaker in 2024.
The average daily spend of a visiting film production in Texas is $125,000.
Large-scale TV productions create an average of 300 temporary jobs per episode.
90% of film crew members working in Texas already live in Texas.
The film industry contributes $120 million in annual wages in Dallas-Fort Worth alone.
Houston's film industry generates $50 million+ in local economic activity per year.
Texas film industry payroll growth has outpaced the national average by 4%.
And here's the one that should be in every pitch deck in every production office in the country: every $1 invested in TMIIIP yields $5.11 in economic spending within the state. Five-to-one return. Name another government program that delivers that.
The Geography Argument
Remember the reasons Hollywood became Hollywood? Sunshine, cheap land, geographic variety, distance from interference.
Sunshine. El Paso gets 293 days of sun per year. Midland-Odessa: 261. Lubbock: 262. Amarillo: 261. Even rain-prone Houston manages 204. In 1911, Moving Picture World bragged that California offered 320 clear shooting days. Texas matches or approaches that number across most of the state — and in West Texas, exceeds it.
Land. Texas has 268,596 square miles of it. It's the second-largest state in the union, and outside of a handful of metro areas, the cost per acre is a fraction of what you'd pay in LA County. You want to build a studio campus? A backlot the size of a small town? A standing Western set that never needs to come down? Texas has the room and the price tag.
Geographic variety. Deserts in the west. Hill Country in the center. Pine forests in the east. Gulf Coast beaches in the south. Skyline cities in DFW, Houston, Austin, San Antonio. Small towns that look like every small town in every movie you've ever seen. Mountains in Big Bend. The Panhandle plains that look like Montana if Montana had better barbecue. One state, every location.
Distance from interference. Texas has no state income tax. It's a right-to-work state. The regulatory environment is, for better or worse, designed to stay out of your way. If the original moguls wanted distance from Edison's patent agents, today's producers want distance from California's tax burden, permitting delays, and cost of living. Texas offers that and then some.
What This Means
Hollywood was an accident. A beautiful, improbable, century-long accident triggered by weather and economics and a handful of immigrants who had nothing to lose and everything to prove.
The conditions that made that accident possible — reliable sunshine, cheap land, available labor, favorable economics, geographic diversity, and a government that wanted the business — exist today in Texas in a way they no longer exist in Southern California.
This isn't a prediction. The shift is already happening. Landman didn't shoot in LA. It shot in Fort Worth. The Texas Legislature didn't pass a modest incentive bump. It committed $2.5 billion. A sitting member of Congress didn't name his bill the "American Film Production Act." He named it the Texas is the New Hollywood Act. The subtext is becoming text.
The moguls who built Hollywood were outsiders. They came from somewhere else, saw an opportunity that the locals missed, and built an empire in a place most New Yorkers couldn't find on a map. They didn't ask permission. They just got off the train and started building.
Texas is the next stop.
If it's not Texas, it's just movies.
Sources: PBS SoCal / Lost LA; USC Dornsife; Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own (1988); Scott Eyman, Empire of Dreams (2010); Steven J. Ross, "How Hollywood Became Hollywood" (2001); FilmLA permit data; CBS News; CNBC; Texas Comptroller; Texas Film Commission (gov.texas.gov/film); LegiScan TX SB 22; Congress.gov H.R. 3844; Hollywood Reporter; Fort Worth Report; Current Results weather data; MovieMaker Magazine; Variety; State College Magazine; DW; Reuters.