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Tamil Nadu is also home to the Tamil film industry, the
second largest film industry in India after Bollywood (Hindi
films). It is based in Chennai and is a conflation of
Hollywood and Kodambakkam, the
section of Chennai that houses cinema-related facilities.
‘Kollywood’ is the name of the
popular Tamil film Industry cinema based in Chennai. The
name is the portmanteau of Kodambakkam, where Kollywood
films were largely produced. Presently, there is a film city
at Tharamani, Chennai where production takes place. Tamil
language movies are also filmed in Sri Lanka.
Silent movies were produced in Kollywood since 1916 and the
era of talkies dawned in 1931. By the end of the 1930s, the
industry was booming to the extent that the State of Madras
legislature passed the pioneering Entertainment Tax Act 1939
with little opposition.
Early Movie Studios :
During the 1920s, silent Tamil-language movies were shot
at makeshift locations in and around Chennai, and for
technical processing, they were sent to Pune or Calcutta.
Later some movies featuring MKT were shot in Pune and
Calcutta. In the 1930s AVM set up its makeshift studio in
the town of Karaikudi, and during the same decade,
full-fledged movie studios were built in Salem (Modern
Theatres Studio) and Coimbatore (Central Studios, Neptune,
and Pakshiraja). By the mid 1940s, Chennai became the hub of
studio activity with two more movie studios built in
Chennai, Vijaya Vauhini Studios and Gemini Studios. Later,
AVM Studios shifted its operations to Chennai. Thus, with
the undivided Madras Presidency being the Capital to most of
South India, Chennai became the center for Tamil- and
notable Telugu-language movies. Also, most of the
pre-independence era drama and stage actors joined the movie
industry from the 1940s, and Chennai became the hub for
South Indian-Language Cinema.
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