1913 was a momentous year in Los Angeles. The oil fields were booming, William Mulholland opened the Los Angeles Aqueduct that brought life-giving water to the sleepy hamlet from the faraway Eastern Sierras and in a modest barn-turned-film-studio Hollywood’s first feature-length film was being shot. The story of oil and water have been told in great movies, There Will Be Blood and Chinatown just to mention two of the (Golden Globe winning) best. As for the story of that movie – Squaw Man by Cecil B deMille, – as they’d say in Hollywood, that is the greatest story of all, because it’s the story of storytelling.

Squaw Man was released in 1914, which makes this year the 100th anniversary of feature films. And that is what moved the HFPA’s own Juliette Michaud to write Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. In this beautiful coffee-table volume published in English and French by Flammarion, Juliette (with the collaboration of HFPA colleague Jean-Paul Chaillet) traces the origins of Hollywood movies as a new expressive art form that would spread throughout the world and forever change it.

With 350 classic photographs and priceless original interviews with screen legends like Lillian Gish, Kirk Douglas, Farley Granger, Ernest Borgnine and Tippi Hedrin (and a foreword by The Artists’s Michel Hazanavicius), Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is at once history book and love letter; an homage to movies, the people who invented them and the town that they called home. A fitting tribute to the art of film on its 100th birthday!