NPR.

All right.

Daryan's taking us on a little hike through pre-Hollywood history.

Nice work, everybody.

Alexia and I are climbing up a steep path in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

To tell the origin story of American filmmaking,

we're kicking off our week-long series on the economics of movies here.

Because before Hollywood, there was Fort Lee, New Jersey overlooking the Hudson River.

You can see Manhattan on the other side.

Yeah, the center of the movie-making world was filmed here.

This is where the term cliffhanger was popularized on these very cliffs.

Wow, and you can kind of tell why.

They're really stark, jagged, very tall cliffs.

We're right at the edge here. And Alexi, I brought this rope here.

I don't know if that looks... Is that strong enough to support human body weight?

I thought we could reenact one of these silent films with you dangling off the cliff.

Well, I still do have a lot of questions that we need to answer in this show. There's only one way

to make people stick around to find out. This is the Indicator from Planet Money. I'm

Derrym Woods. And I'm Alexie Horowitz-Gazi. Today on the show, the birth of Hollywood, how

moviemakers traded the steep cliffs of the

northeast for the temperate valleys

of Los Angeles. And what

...