ABSTRACT
Among the more curious and confounding terms in media studies is “the New Hollywood.” In its broadest historical sense the term applies to the American cinema after World War II, when Hollywood’s entrenched “studio system” collapsed and commercial television began to sweep the newly suburbanized national landscape. That marked the end of Hollywood’s “classical” era of the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s, when movies were mass produced by a cartel of studios for a virtually guaranteed market. All that changed in the postwar decade, as motion pictures came to be produced and sold on a film-by-film basis and as “watching TV” rapidly replaced “going to the movies” as America’s preferred ritual of habituated, mass-mediated narrative entertainment. 1
