Cinema was born in Europe but took its industrial shape in a town of orange groves northwest of Los Angeles. From the mid-1910s producers moved to California to escape both Edison's patent trust and the New York winter; cheap land, dependable light and the ability to reach desert or mountain within a day made year-round production possible.

By the 1930s five major studios — MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox and RKO — were vertically integrated: they made the films, distributed them through their own networks, and screened them in theatres they largely owned. Actors were bound by seven-year contracts; the studio decided which pictures they appeared in and often what name they carried. From 1934 scripts passed through the censorship of the Hays Code, and an average feature was shot in about three weeks. This was the first large-scale case of artistic production organised as a schedulable industrial process — and genres (the western, the musical, film noir) are often read as a direct product of that need for repeatability.

The system began to unravel with the U.S. Supreme Court's 1948 Paramount decision, which forced the studios to divest their theatre chains; within a decade television had halved weekly attendance. What remained was film as the first mass cultural good to circulate worldwide: in post-war Europe American pictures took most of the box office, which turned cultural influence into a question of foreign policy. Gone with the Wind, the era's greatest commercial success, is also the contested face of that legacy: its romanticised account of slavery and the antebellum South is now discussed as much as the film itself.