This book intoduces the reader to basic issues related to the phenomenon of American cinema. It look at American film history from the 1890s through the summer of 2003, but it does not always explore this history in purely chronological way. In fact, it is not (strickly speaking) a history. Rather, it is a "cultural" history, which focuses more on topics and issues than on what happen when.
It begins with a profile of classical Hollywod cinema as a unique economic, industrial, aesthetic, and cultural institution. It considers the experience of moviegoing; the nature of Hollywood story-telling; and the roles played by the studio system, the star system, and film genres in creation of a body of work that function not only as entertainment but as a potrait of the relationship between an American national identity and an industrialized mass culture that has slowly evolved over the past century. (cited from the preface)