Most fundamentally, the term Hollywood refers to three interrelated aspects of American cinema: the industrial, the institutional, and the formal-aesthetic. As an industry, Hollywood is a vast, integrated com- mercial enterprise with specific business practices and standard operat- ing procedures geared primarily to producing and distributing feature-length films (“Hollywood movies”). The film industry, like most capital-intensive entertainment and media enterprises, has always tended toward an oligopoly structure—that is, a system whereby a few compa- nies control a particular industry. This invokes the institutional aspect, in that the film industry has been dominated from the outset by a hand- ful of movie studios—Paramount, Fox, Warner Bros.—many of which still operate and still.
