As the entertainment industry has become an increasingly global enterprise in recent years, Hollywood continues to occupy the central role in the production and commercialization of culture. Just as classi- cal Hollywood’s domination of the movie industry a half-century ago induced critic Gilbert Seldes (1978) to say that “the movies come from America,” so might one argue today that “entertainment comes from America”—and, more specifically, from Hollywood. And when one considers the widespread appeal of Hollywood movies and thus the col- onization of cultural consciousness on a global scale, it is worth noting that the term Hollywood becomes increasingly conflated with the notion of “Americanization” (Seldes, 1978)
