There was once a time in Hollywood when the stars were truly "larger than life" both on the screen and off. An era where the greatest dramas, comedies, and tragedies were best performed behind the scenes. It is a time when the studios controlled all of Hollywood. The "Golden Era" is when the faces on the screen became icons. This was the "Golden Era" of Hollywood and it is best lived through The MGM Story by John Douglas, Hollywood Hoopla by Robert Sennet, When the Stars went to War by Roy Hopes and Merchant of Dreams by Charles Higham. These four books are the ones that help to provide facts and not tales on how Hollywood before was really all about. Hollywood itself began with a man named D.W. Griffith. He created a Hollywood masterpiece in 1915 with Hollywood's first motion picture, "The Birth of a Nation." This movie completely stunned audiences around the world and assisted in creating a completely new world: The world of Motion Pictures. "The Birth of Nation," as described in Merchant of Dreams stated that the film helped to establish the Motion Pictures Industry as an art form for the world (Higham, "Merchant of Dreams," 12). With the emergence of Motion Pictures, five major studios: Twentieth Century Fox, MGM, Paramount, RKO, and Warner Brothers would in little time come to own Hollywood and combined, help to create the "Golden Era." Out of the five studios, MGM was the most magnificent and powerful studio of them all. In the "Silent Era" of films, it produced two of the biggest films in the 1920s. "The Big Parade" and "Ben Hur" placed MGM at the top in 1925. During the mid to late twenties, the studios released about a dozen films per week for the public's enjoyment.
             Eventually, as described in The MGM Story, the public began to pick out faces that they saw on screen, which became their favorites to watch. These "favorites" soon became the most essential thing in Hollywood: The Stars. Such as Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Cha...