His life had all the twists and turns of a cinema blockbuster, yet he is all but forgotten in his native North-East.

Tony Kearney looks back at the life of movie pioneer David Horsley - who left Stanley penniless and became the man who founded Hollywood.

HE is responsible for the very existence of Hollywood, is remembered as the founder of the American film industry, yet he is virtually unheard of in his homeland.

David Horsley began his journey from Stanley to Tinseltown, the day he lost his arm. On January 18, 1884, the 11-year-old blacksmith's son was sent to the shop to buy meal for the family pig, a journey that sent him across one of the dozens of railway lines which criss-crossed the Victorian mining town of Stanley, County Durham.

As he crossed the rails, he was knocked over by a coal wagon and fell with his left hand on the rails which was run over by the train.

Despite his mangled arm, the boy popped his three severed fingers in a bag and ran home, reportedly telling his screaming mother: "Never mind mother, there's only one wheel went over it." The boy's arm was amputated two inches below the elbow.

Recognising that there was little future for a one-armed boy in a North-East pit town, his resourceful mother sold the family furniture to buy tickets for an Atlantic crossing and, exactly nine months after the accident, the family arrived in New York to start a new life.

The family set up home in New Jersey, where times were hard. The young Dave sold newspapers and acted as a Western Union messenger boy, where a kindly boss paid for the amputee to go to night school. David Horsley was not the sort of man to allow a disability to stand in his way. At the tender age of 19, he started his own bicycle business, buying the parts and building them himself to cash in on the craze for cycling then sweeping the States.

It was so successful that in 1903, when he was aged 30, he was able to buy a tiny plot of land in Bayonne, New Jersey, where he built a wooden shack, installed six pool tables and opened the Horsley Pool Parlour.

It did very well for four years but went bust in the Great Panic of 1907, a forerunner of the Wall Street Crash.

However, for a second time, the determined Horsley turned adversity into triumph. One of his regular customers at the pool parlour, who lost his job in the Panic, was Charles Gorman - a scenic artist with the Biograph Motion Picture Company in New York.

The pair joined David's elder brother, William, in setting up the Centaur Film Company, using waste timber to turn the rear yard into a stage and filming set with a camera built by Horsley using spare parts from an old projector. It is here they made their first one-reel film - The Cowboy's Escape. By 1910, Centaur was turning out films at the rate of three a week, including the Mutt and Jeff comedies, based on the hugely popular newspaper comic strip of their day. Popular as they may have been, the technology used to produce these silent movies was primitive beyond belief.

The cameras on which early movies were shot relied solely on sunshine and during the dreadful summer and autumn of 1911, Centaur's film-making ground to a weather-induced halt.

David Horsley then hit upon the idea which changed the world. Despite almost all of Americas infant film industry being based in New York, he gambled every dollar he had and decamped to California where, he reasoned, year-round sunshine meant year-round film production.

HORSLEY set up his office at a little residential community just outside Los Angeles - named Hollywood, a small town founded just 24 years earlier and made up of fruit plantations and prestigious homes where wealthy Midwesterners would winter in California.

In October 1911, he set up the headquarters of his Nestor Film Company in the old Blondeau Tavern on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street, the first motion picture company in a town which would become synonymous with the industry within a decade.

Here his studio knocked out a western, a comedy and a drama each week to feed the insatiable appetite of Edwardian cinema-goers.

Within months, the rest of the industry was beating a path to Hollywood, with studios opening and closing at breakneck speed.The biggest of the new arrivals was Universal, run by Carl Laemmle, which systematically swallowed up the independents.

By the summer of 1913, Horsley could resist the pressure no longer. He agreed to sell up to Laemmle in a deal which valued the company the one-armed blacksmith's son had built up at $379,000, roughly the equivalent of £4.1m today, and was appointed treasurer of Universal Films, the studio which went on to make countless cinema epics, from Spartacus to Jaws, the Hunchback of Notre Dame to ET. Not a man to trust a cheque, when he was paid the first $197,000 instalment of his payment, he drove a car to the bank and took the payment in bills of $20 or less. It took every employee at the bank five full hours to count the cash.

Now aged 40, David Horsley was rich beyond his wildest dreams. He embarked on a grant tour of Europe, during which he made a nostalgic return to Stanley, a trip cut short by the outbreak of the First Wor ld War.

He returned to the US so wealthy that, rather than make the eight-mile round trip to New York to pick up the $200 a week payable to him from his post as Universal treasurer, roughly £2,200 by today's reckoning, he resigned the post.

But he remained restless for a challenge. On a whim, he spent $40,000 buying The Bostock Animal and Jungle Show - a touring menagerie of 58 lions, two elephants and countless other exotic creatures - and transported the lot to Los Angeles. His plan was to charge the public to see the show and provide animal extras for Hollywood films, but it proved a disaster. The show lost money at a rate of anything up to $200 a day and, when the show closed in 1919, his fortune had evaporated and he was almost $40,000 in debt.

THE losses left him a broken man. He died in Los Angeles in February 1933 and is buried in the Hollywood Forever cemetery, alongside the likes of Cecil B DeMille, Rudolph Valentino, John Huston and Douglas Fairbanks.

His son, David Stanley Horsley (19061976), trained as a cinematographer and became an expert in special effects photography, working in the film industry for nearly 30 years. His brother and business partner, William Horsley, said of Horsley senior: "Hollywood owes to the memory of Dave Horsley more than it can ever repay.

"Cameramen, directors and every art and craft connected with motion pictures owe more to David Horsley than to any other man connected with the motion picture business.

"His everlasting grit and fighting spirit overcame odds that would have defeated an army of ordinary mortals."