After the shooting stops..., Hollywood naturally will go back to the business of making films strictly for profit. But it will also do something else. Now that Hollywood has grown up, it knows that it must play a role in creating the world of tomorrow, just as it helped to destroy the kind of world desired by the enemy.
Robert St. John, Look, January 1945
The American movie industry faced the postwar era with both relief and euphoria. The war boom had been a mixed blessing for the industry with record revenues and profits accompanied by material and manpower shortages, severe operational constraints, and ongoing anxiety about the Allied cause. The movie industry had thrived and played an important role in that cause, and in that sense Hollywood had indeed "grown up" during the war along with the nation at large. Now as the United States emerged from World War II as a leading global power, the industry was generally upbeat about its own postwar prospects particularly in 1946, when Hollywood enjoyed its best year ever.
That postwar optimism faded, however, as Hollywood proved to be singularly ill equipped for "the world of tomorrow." While America's stature as a world power and its economic prosperity continued to grow in the late 1940s, the American movie industry went into an economic tailspin and a sustained fall from social grace.
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