Cinema of the United States

• 1. Introduction

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  Cinema of the United States began with a coin-operated peephole machine in New York City in 1894. Thomas Edison's kinetoscope drew paying customers to watch short films through a viewfinder, one person at a time. Nobody watching those flickers in 1894 could have imagined that within a few decades, 90 million Americans would be going to the movies every single week.

  How did a nation that did not invent cinema come to dominate it so thoroughly? Why did the industry pick up and move from New Jersey to a quiet Los Angeles neighborhood called Hollywood? What forces shaped the stories that hundreds of millions of people around the world have watched, and who got to tell them? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Fort Lee to Hollywood

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  Eadweard Muybridge took a series of photographs of a running horse in Palo Alto, California, using a row of still cameras, and that experiment set off a race among inventors to build moving-picture devices. In the United States, Thomas Edison won that race with the kinetoscope. His first motion-picture studio, the so-called Black Maria, went up in West Orange, New Jersey.

  The East Coast dominated early American film. Fort Lee, New Jersey, served as the motion-picture capital of the country, with companies like the Independent Moving Pictures Company, Biograph Studios, Fox Film Corporation, and Georges Méliès's Star Film all shooting there. The Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens hosted the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields. Mary Pickford got her start at Biograph Studios.

  The journey west happened partly by accident and partly by design. Edison owned nearly all the relevant patents on movie-making equipment, and his agents would seize cameras from filmmakers who worked outside his licensing system. New York was too close to Edison's headquarters for comfort. Los Angeles offered mild winters, outdoor shooting year-round, and something the East could not match: it sat only 90 miles from the Mexican border, providing a quick escape route if Edison's enforcement agents showed up.

  By 1912, most major film companies had production facilities in Southern California. In early 1910, director D. W. Griffith traveled west with a troupe of actors including Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, and Blanche Sweet. They started filming on a vacant lot near Georgia Street in downtown Los Angeles, then ventured a few miles north to a small, friendly village called Hollywood. Griffith filmed In Old California there, a Biograph melodrama set when California was still under Mexican rule, making it the first movie ever shot in Hollywood. Nestor Studios of Bayonne, New Jersey, built the first permanent studio in the Hollywood neighborhood in 1911.

• 3. The Golden Age Machine

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  Classical Hollywood cinema is defined as a technical and narrative style that ran from 1913 to 1962, during which thousands of movies came out of the studios. At its mid-1940s height, the studios produced roughly 400 films a year, watched by 90 million Americans per week.

  The studios ran like vertically integrated factories. They kept thousands of people on salary, from actors and directors to stuntmen, craftspeople, and technicians. They owned their own theater chains, which meant they could control what audiences saw and when. By the 1930s, almost every first-run metropolitan theater in the country was owned by one of the Big Five studios: MGM, Paramount Pictures, RKO, Warner Bros., and 20th Century Fox.

  Each studio had its own distinct personality. Cedric Gibbons and Herbert Stothart always worked on MGM films. Alfred Newman spent twenty years at 20th Century Fox. Cecil B. DeMille made nearly all his pictures at Paramount. MGM famously claimed it had contracted "more stars than there are in heaven." Clark Gable was billed the "King of Hollywood," and the studio also kept Lionel Barrymore, Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Spencer Tracy, Judy Garland, and Gene Kelly under contract.

  In 1937, Walt Disney created the most successful film of its time with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, an independently produced animated film that contained no studio-employed stars. Two years later, 1939 proved to be perhaps the single greatest year in Hollywood history: Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Wuthering Heights, Only Angels Have Wings, Ninotchka, and Midnight all appeared that year. Gone with the Wind, produced by Selznick International, remains, when adjusted for inflation, the highest-grossing film of all time.

  Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, released in 1941 and made as a relatively modest, medium-budget gamble on a new director with unknown actors, is frequently cited in critics' polls as the greatest film ever made.

• 4. Breaking the Studio System

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  Snow White's success in 1938 arrived during a run of weak studio films and stoked frustration with block-booking, the practice under which studios sold an entire year's film schedule to theaters at once, bundling mediocre releases with the hits. Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold, a trust-buster in the Roosevelt administration, took the opportunity to initiate proceedings against the eight largest Hollywood studios in July 1938 for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act.

  Five of the eight studios reached a compromise with Arnold in October 1940 and signed a consent decree. They agreed to eliminate block-booking of short films, limit block-booking of features to no more than five, and create an administration board in each of the 31 US theater districts to monitor compliance. The so-called Little Three, Universal Studios, United Artists, and Columbia Pictures, refused to sign because they owned no theaters and saw no benefit.

  The major studios did not actually meet the terms of the consent decree during World War II, facing little consequence at the time. After the war, the United States Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. that studio ownership of both production and theater chains violated antitrust law. Studios began releasing actors and technical staff from their contracts. The distinctive house styles that had made an MGM or a Fox film instantly recognizable began to dissolve. Each production now might have an entirely different cast and crew assembled from scratch.

  Television arrived at the same moment, drawing audiences away from cinemas. The two forces together ended the classical era, though individual filmmakers like Cecil B. DeMille continued to work with the same creative teams and maintained a recognizable personal style right through the 1950s.

• 5. New Hollywood Rewrites the Rules

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  Rebel Without a Cause in 1955, and Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho shortly after, planted early seeds of what critics would later call post-classical cinema: scrambled chronology, twist endings, and the blurred line between hero and villain. The full flowering came in 1967 with Bonnie and Clyde, which marked a turning point as a generation of film-school-trained directors who had absorbed techniques from the French New Wave brought those methods to American screens.

  Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Brian De Palma, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, and William Friedkin made films in the 1970s that were both critically praised and commercially dominant. The enormous success of The Exorcist, Jaws, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Chinatown, American Graffiti, and Star Wars gave rise to the modern blockbuster model and pushed studios toward chasing enormous hits rather than broad slates.

  At his peak in the early 1970s, Charles Bronson was the world's number one box office draw and commanded one million dollars per film. The early New Hollywood pictures, Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider among them, had been relatively low-budget with morally ambiguous protagonists. By the late 1970s, the economics had tilted decisively toward the spectacular.

  Technological change accelerated through the 1980s and 1990s. The PG-13 rating arrived in 1984, prompted by controversy over the violent content of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Gremlins. Dick Tracy in 1990 became the first 35 mm feature with a digital soundtrack. Batman Returns in 1992 introduced Dolby Digital six-channel stereo sound, which became the industry standard. James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991 made the potential of computer-generated imagery unmistakable through the shape-changing T-1000 character. Jurassic Park in 1993 extended that capability to photorealistic animals, and Jackpot in 2001 became the first film shot entirely in digital.

• 6. Women, Race, and the Celluloid Ceiling

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  In the early days of Hollywood, two women stood as notable exceptions to male dominance behind the camera: Lois Weber and French-born Alice Guy-Blaché both worked as directors, producers, and studio heads. Their presence did not set a lasting pattern. By 2012, according to the Celluloid Ceiling Report from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, women accounted for just 9 percent of all directors on the 250 top-grossing domestic films, a figure unchanged from 1998.

  The same 2012 study found women made up 2 percent of cinematographers and 15 percent of writers. The percentage of female speaking roles, the study noted, had not meaningfully shifted since the 1940s, when it hovered between 25 and 28 percent. In 2013, a report found that top-paid male actors made substantially more than their female counterparts, and that female movie stars earned the most per film on average at age 34, while male stars peaked at 51.

  Representation of racial and ethnic minorities followed a long, uneven arc. In old Hollywood it was not uncommon for white actors to wear blackface. Russians, Italians, Arab Americans, Hispanic and Latino Americans, and Asian Americans were all channeled into narrow, often demeaning character types for decades. Filmmakers like Edward James Olmos and Robert Rodriguez brought the Hispanic and Latino American experience to the screen in ways that earlier Hollywood had not attempted. Asian American creators built audiences on YouTube in the early 21st century before gaining wider mainstream recognition, though films like Crazy Rich Asians drew criticism for casting biracial and non-Chinese actors as ethnically Chinese characters.

  In 2021, NBC announced it would not broadcast the 79th Golden Globe Awards in 2022 to support a boycott of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association over inadequate diversity within its membership. The HFPA was ultimately disbanded two years later as a result of that controversy and related scandals.

• 7. Hollywood and the World

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  Vitagraph Studios became the first American company to open its own distribution office in Europe, establishing a London branch in 1906 and a Paris branch shortly after. By 1911, roughly 60 to 70 percent of films imported into Great Britain were American. Many British companies profited by acting as agents for US films, a role that simultaneously weakened British domestic production by ceding a large share of the UK market to Hollywood.

  The earliest sound films created a different kind of global problem. Dubbing technology was too primitive to be convincing, so around 1930 American studios opened a production facility in Joinville-le-Pont, France, where the same sets, wardrobes, and crowd scenes were reused by different crews shooting in different languages. Spanish-language crews at Joinville included Luis Buñuel, Xavier Cugat, and Edgar Neville. The parallel versions generally failed: budgets were visibly lower, many of the actors had no film experience, and the mix of regional accents in a single Spanish-language film struck audiences as odd.

  By the late 20th century, Hollywood had become, according to researcher Tanner Mirles, a transnational enterprise relying on four strategies to draw non-US producers and audiences into its orbit: ownership, cross-border co-productions with local service providers, content licensing deals, and blockbusters designed to travel globally.

  Access to the Chinese market, the world's second-largest box office as of 2016, has led Hollywood to self-censor in ways that echo the industry's earlier accommodations to other powerful interests. Studios have altered villains' nationalities, avoided topics forbidden by Chinese regulators, and prioritized sympathetic portrayals of Chinese characters. As of 2017, the United States released more than 600 English-language films annually, making it the fourth-largest film-producing country, behind India, Japan, and China.

• 8. Streaming, Strikes, and What Comes Next

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  The COVID-19 pandemic collapsed US box office revenue to just $2.02 billion in 2020, down from $11.21 billion in 2019. NBCUniversal's decision to release Trolls World Tour directly to video-on-demand on the 10th of April 2020, while the film also played in drive-in cinemas, pulled in nearly $100 million in revenue within three weeks according to CEO Jeff Shell. AMC Theatres responded by announcing it would stop showing Universal films, though the two companies eventually settled on a two-week theatrical window. Warner Bros. went further, announcing in December 2020 that its entire 2021 film slate would release simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max for one month.

  Netflix, Disney+, Paramount+, and Apple TV+ rose through this period to rival traditional cinema. Critic Matt Zoller Seitz described the 2019 release of Avengers: Endgame as representing the decisive defeat of cinema by what he called "content": a piece of entertainment defined by the Marvel brand that culminated a series of blockbuster films sharing traits with serial television. A $200 million Netflix heist film called Red Notice was described by some critics as feeling "processed by a machine" rather than driven by artistic intent.

  In 2023, the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild launched strikes over streaming residuals, the use of artificial intelligence in writing and acting, and fair compensation. The contracts that followed offered more money and formal protections against AI, but the strikes also caused a significant production slowdown and layoffs across the industry.

  Martin Scorsese has warned that cinema as an art form is "being systematically devalued, sidelined, demeaned, and reduced" to content. At the 2023 Sarajevo Film Festival, Charlie Kaufman told industry professionals to "make movies outside of the studio system as much as possible." Director James Gray suggested that studios willing to lose money for a couple of years on art film divisions would ultimately be better off for it, a proposal that echoes the same tension between commerce and craft that has run through Hollywood since the days when Thomas Edison's agents were chasing filmmakers to the California border.