Golden Age of Hollywood
During the so-called Golden age of Hollywood , which lasted from the end of the silent era in American cinema in the late 1920s to the late 1950s, movies were issued from the Hollywood studios like the cars rolling off Henry Ford's assembly lines; the start of the Golden Age was arguably when The Jazz Singer was released in 1927 and increased box-office profits for films as sound was introduced to feature films. Most Hollywood pictures adhered closely to a formula—Western, slapstick comedy, musical, animated cartoon, biopic (biographical picture)—and the same creative teams often worked on films made by the same studio. After The Jazz Singer was released in 1927, Warner Bros. gained huge success and was able to acquire their own string of movie theaters, after purchasing Stanley Theaters and First National Productions in 1928; MGM had also owned a string of theaters since forming in 1924, know through Loews Theaters, and the Fox film Corporation owned the Fox theatre strings as well. Also, RKO- another company that owned theaters-had formed in 1928 from a merger between Keith-Orpheum Theaters and the Radio Corporation of America RKO formed in response to the monopoly Western Electric's ERPI had over sound in films as well, and began to use sound in films through their own method known as Photophone. Paramount, who already acquired Balaban and Katz in 1926, would answer to the success of Warner Bros. and RKO, and buy a number of theaters in the late 1920's as well, before making their final purchase in 1929, through acquiring all the individual theaters belonging to the Cooperative Box Office, located in Detroit, and dominate the Detroit theaters. For instance, Cedric Gibbons and Herbert stothart always worked on MGM, Alfred Newman worked at Twentieth Century Fox for twenty years, Cecil B. De Mille's films were almost all made at Paramount, director Henry King's films were mostly made for Twentieth-Century Fox, etc. And one could usually guess which studio made which film, largely because of the actors who appeared in it; MGM, for example, claimed it had contracted "more stars than there are in heaven." Each studio had its own style and characteristic touches which made it possible to know this - a trait that does not exist today. Yet each movie was a little different, and, unlike the craftsmen who made cars, many of the people who made movies were artists. For example, To Have and Have Not (1944) is famous not only for the first pairing of actors Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957) and Lauren Bacall (1924- ) but also for being written by two future winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature: Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), author of the novel on which the script was nominally based, and William Faulkner (1897-1962), who worked on the screen adaptation.

Moviemaking was still a business, however, and motion picture companies made money by operating under the studio system. The major studios kept thousands of people on salary—actors, producers, directors, writers, stuntmen, craftspersons, and technicians. And they owned hundreds of theaters in cities and towns across the nation, theaters that showed their films and that were always in need of fresh material.
Many film historians have remarked upon the many great works of cinema that emerged from this period of highly regimented filmmaking. One reason this was possible is that, with so many movies being made, not every one had to be a big hit. A studio could gamble on a medium-budget feature with a good script and relatively unknown actors: Citizen Kane, directed by Orson Welles (1915-1985) and often regarded as the greatest film of all time, fits that description. In other cases, strong-willed directors like Howard Hawks (1896-1977) and Frank Capra (1897-1991) battled the studios in order to achieve their artistic visions. The apogee of the studio system may have been the year 1939, which saw the release of such classics as The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Wuthering Heights, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Only Angels Have Wings, Ninotchka, and Midnight. Among the other films from the Golden Age period that are now considered to be classics: Casablanca, It's a Wonderful Life, the original King Kong, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.