Short answers, pulled from the story.
The world's first commercial motion-picture exhibition in the United States took place in New York City in 1894, using Thomas Edison's kinetoscope and kinetograph. Thomas Edison's first motion-picture studio, known as the Black Maria, was built in West Orange, New Jersey, at the end of the 19th century.
Filmmakers moved from the East Coast to Los Angeles primarily to escape Thomas Edison's patent enforcement agents, who could seize cameras from unlicensed filmmakers near Edison's New Jersey headquarters. Los Angeles offered mild year-round weather suited to outdoor shooting and was only 90 miles from the Mexican border, providing an escape route if needed. By 1912, most major film companies had established production facilities in Southern California.
Under the studio system, the major Hollywood studios kept thousands of actors, directors, writers, and crew members on permanent salary and owned hundreds of movie theaters, controlling both production and exhibition. The system ended after the United States Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. that studio ownership of theaters violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, forcing studios to divest their theater chains and release talent from long-term contracts.
New Hollywood refers to a generation of film-school-trained directors who emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s, influenced by the French New Wave, and produced work that was both critically acclaimed and commercially successful. The 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde is considered a starting point, and filmmakers including Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Stanley Kubrick defined the era. Their successes gave rise to the modern blockbuster model.
Women remain significantly underrepresented in creative roles in Hollywood, a phenomenon researchers have called the "celluloid ceiling." According to the 2013 Celluloid Ceiling Report from San Diego State University, women directed only 9 percent of the 250 top-grossing domestic films of 2012, a figure identical to their share in 1998. Women accounted for just 2 percent of cinematographers and 15 percent of writers on those films.
Streaming platforms including Netflix, Disney+, Paramount+, and Apple TV+ have risen since 2019 to rival traditional cinema, contributing to a blurring of boundaries between films and television. US box office revenue dropped to $2.02 billion in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, compared to $11.21 billion in 2019. By 2023, disputes over streaming residuals and AI led to strikes by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild.