MUMBAI: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will celebrate the centennial of the establishment of the first permanent film studio in Los Angeles with Movies! Moguls! Monkeys! and Murder!, a screening event showcasing early motion pictures filmed in Los Angeles between 1909 and 1914.

This will be held on 20 May at the Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood. The event also kicks off a three-month exhibition illuminating the pioneering companies, filmmakers and locations that quickly made filmmaking in Los Angeles such a boom industry.

Movies! Moguls! Monkeys! and Murder! will feature archival prints representing the earliest surviving glimpses of Los Angeles as a filming location. The accompanying exhibition, includes rare photographs, original correspondence, vintage camera equipment and other artifacts, is highlighted by materials relating to the first film studio murder as well as the Selig menagerie, a forerunner of the Los Angeles Zoo.

After shooting some location footage at a Los Angeles-area beach to insert into an otherwise stagebound Monte Cristo (1908), producer William Selig and director Francis Boggs realized the city’s filmmaking potential and opened the first permanent film studio in the suburb of Edendale in 1909. Their pioneering works, along with those of several other companies that moved westward shortly thereafter, culminated in the 1914 releases of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Squaw Man and Selig’s The Spoilers, early feature-length productions that launched the Hollywood legend.

The exhibition is free and open to the public through 30 August.