Hollywood District within the city of Los Angeles, California, U.S., whose name is synonymous with the American motion picture industry. Lying northwest of downtown Los Angeles, it is bounded by Hyperion Avenue and Riverside Drive (east), Beverly Boulevard (south), the foothills of Santa Monica Mountains (north), and Beverly Hills (west). Since the early 1900s, when movie-making pioneers found in southern California an ideal blend of mild climate, much sunshine, varied terrain, and a large labour market, the image of Hollywood as the fabricator of tinseled cinematic dreams has become worldwide. An adobe was the first house built (1853) on the site near Los Angeles, which was then a small city in the new state of California. Hollywood was laid out as a real-estate subdivision in 1887 by Horace Wilcox, a prohibitionist from Kansas who envisioned a community based on his sober religious principles. His wife, Daeida, named the area after the home of a friend in Chicago. In 1910, because of an inadequate water supply, Hollywood residents voted to consolidate with Los Angeles.

After World War II, film studios began to move outside Hollywood; and location filming around the world emptied many of the famous lots and sound stages or turned them over to television show producers. With the advent of television, Hollywood began to alter its functions. By the early 1960s it had become the source of much of American network television entertainment.

Among the features of Hollywood, aside from its working studios, are the Hollywood Bowl (1919; a natural amphitheatre where the summertime “Symphonies Under the Stars” has taken place since 1922), the Pilgrimage Play Amphitheater and Greek Theatre in Griffith Park, Mann's (formerly Grauman's) Chinese Theater (with footprints and handprints of many stars in its concrete forecourt), and the California Art Club. Many stars, past and present, live in neighbouring communities such as Beverly Hills and Bel Air, and the Hollywood Cemetery contains the crypts of such performers of the gilded past as Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, and John Gilbert. Hollywood Boulevard, however, once a chic thoroughfare, became rather tawdry in the late 20th century, with the demise of old studio Hollywood.