ABSTRACT
This chapter-length prologue to the book provides an overview of the relationship between film and television in the US from the 1950s till the mid-1990s and the arrival of the internet. It revisits the author's two introductory chapters in the volume that inspired this collection, Hollywood in the Age of Television (1990, also edited by Balio), and with the addition of some new material it provides a summary of the broad historical context within which the film and television industries in the US developed in parallel. This context ranges from the Hollywood studios’ evolving relationship to the Big three networks and the Fox Network that was established in the late 1980s to the studios’ and smaller companies’ engagement with new technologies such as cable and video that helped expand the definition of television in the 1970s and 1980s and facilitated the first steps of the intersection between independent film and television that the two main chapters of Part 1 investigate in detail.
