Which US state is famous for Hollywood?

California, and the film industry went there partly to escape a patent enforcer. Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company controlled the patents on cameras and projectors on the east coast and pursued independents aggressively; southern California was about as far away as it was possible to get within the country, with the Mexican border close enough to cross if agents turned up.

The weather was the other half. Early film needed sunlight to expose, so a place with reliable light for most of the year meant year-round shooting, and the region happened to offer mountains, desert, ocean, forest and city within a short drive - which is why a studio could shoot a western in the morning and a shipwreck in the afternoon.

The famous sign was an advertisement for a housing development and read HOLLYWOODLAND when it went up in 1923. It was meant to last about eighteen months, was left to rot, lost its last four letters in a 1949 refurbishment, and by the 1970s had collapsed into an embarrassment - the current version was paid for in 1978 by nine donors at $27,700 a letter, among them Hugh Hefner and Alice Cooper.