The history of motion pictures is all tangled up with the history of rebellion. The industry began in the early 20th century as a rebellion of outsiders—a generational rebellion against live theater, against 19th- century technology, against the dominant cultural establishment, and against conventional ways of profiting from entertainment.
Today, a century after that initial rebellion, those outsiders have become insiders. A hundred years after its generational rebellion, the motion picture industry has established an orthodox economic method for the making, distribution and selling of movies. Its manifold accomplishments include building a highly profitable business model by charging consumers to watch presentations of the same movie and transforming the idea of a mass audience and, last but certainly not least, globalizing culture....
