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The silent era
In film history, the first movies were without synchronized sound, but that didn’t stop them from being widely popular. Cinema was a new and inexpensive form of entertainment. Unlike the theater, which required live actors, played to an audience of one at any time. -
The rise of the horror movie
Horror movies existed very early on in film history, but they had a renaissance in the 1930s where “Dracula,” “Frankenstein,” “The Mummy,” “The Invisible Man,” “King Kong,” “The Bride of Frankenstein” and “The Werewolf of London” were all produced within four years of one another. -
The studio system
Typically when we say “the Golden Age of Hollywood” people are talking about the time between 1910 and 1969 when the big studios ruled motion pictures. Studio’s like MGM, Paramount, RKO, Columbia and Warner Brothers made careers with the snap of a finger and controlled almost the entire film industry. In the late 1940s, antitrust lawsuits broke up much of the centralized power. -
The new Hollywood
Lately, in retrospect, some film critics argue that Hollywood’s actual Golden Age was in the 1970s when truly spectacular films like “The Godfather,” “The Exorcist,” “Jaws,” “Apocalypse Now,” and even 1977s “Star Wars” came out. The New Hollywood saw a shift from studios to directors in the vision behind films with stars like Stanley Kubrik, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and others coming into significant power and influence in the industry -
Bollywood
While Americans and maybe even some Europeans think of Hollywood as the center of the film universe, in terms of production and revenue, Tinseltown is buried by the Indian film industry which sells twice the number of tickets every year and produces three times as many movies. Indian cinema has been around for a long time, with a Golden Age in the 1940s, but what’s called “New Bollywood” gained worldwide recognition outside of India in the late 1990s and early 2000s.