The 1924 book Hollywood As A World Center, by screenwriter and pulp author Perley Poore Sheehan (1875-1943), was an odd mix of movies and metaphysics which helped popularize the generic use of the term "Hollywood" to describe movie making activity in and around Los Angeles.

From encyclopedia.com:
"By 1924, . . . a Hollywood mythos was clearly emerging. Perley Poore Sheehan, a popular screenwriter, issued a bizarre tract called Hollywood As A World Center, which combined elements of small-town boosterism, industry braggadocio, and occult transcendentalism (known locally as "new thought"). For Sheehan, "The rise of Hollywood and its parent city, Los Angeles, has world-wide significance. It is a new and striking development in the history of civilization.… This flooding of population to the Southwest has its origins in the dim past. It is the culmination of ages of preparatory struggle, physical, mental and spiritual. In brief, we are witnessing the last great migration of the Aryan race." Going beyond traditional American disdain for the eastern cities, Sheehan saw the birth of Hollywood as the dawn of the Aquarian age and described a New Jerusalem that would reveal to all mankind the "Universal Subconscious.""

Subjects: Movies; Motion Pictures; Film; Cinema; Hollywood; California; Perley Poore Sheehan; Pulp Writers