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Owning the Audience: The Birth of the Studio System (1893-1948)
Paperback
Series: The Myths and the Machine, Book 1
Business General20th Century United States History
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Oct 30 2025
Pages: 448
Weight: 1.31
Height: 0.91 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
And how the Paramount Decrees of 1948-the most aggressive antitrust intervention in entertainment history-ended vertical integration's legal structure while leaving its economic logic untouched. By 1955, the five major studios were still the majors. Theater ownership was gone. Block booking had ended. Exhibition monopolies were broken. But distribution control-the capacity to deliver annual slates, coordinate national releases, and dominate international markets-survived intact. The oligopoly adapted faster than law could confine it.
Structure is not function. The mechanism can be banned while the logic endures. Owning the Audience: The Birth of the Studio System traces Hollywood's first monopoly across five decades of industrial evolution-from Edison's failed patent empire through the Big Five's golden age to the Paramount Decrees' paradoxical aftermath-revealing why controlling distribution has remained the key to controlling cinema, regardless of what courts, technologies, or competitors attempt.
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