Hollywood Faces
New Challenges

Hollywood's great and golden era was the two decades between the advent of synchronous sound motion-picture production in 1927 and the peak years for movie theater attendance in the United States, 1946-1948.¹ After 1948, the movie industry faced increasing challenges from many directions. Federal antitrust regulators successfully sued the major Hollywood companies on the grounds that their control of the production, distribution, and exhibition of American feature films constituted illicit collusion in restraint of trade and competition. Television, based on a technology invented in the late 1920s, began to be exploited commercially in the United States after World War II; as the medium grew pervasive, it drew much of the mass audience, especially the family audience, from the habit of moviegoing. Demographics and the social mobility of the growing American middle-class population further hampered the prospects for regaining the mass...