This extensively revised second edition offers a comprehensive introduction to Hollywood cinema, providing a fascinating account of the cultural and aesthetic significance of the world’s most powerful film industry.

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• Provides a fascinating account of Hollywood history.
  
• Examines the cultural and aesthetic significance of the world's most powerful film industry.
  
• Explores and interprets Hollywood cinema in history and in the present, in theory and in practice.
  
• Extensively revised and updated with new chapter features including box sections, further reading lists, Notes and Queries, and chapter summaries.

Richard Maltby is Professor of Screen Studies and Head of the School of Humanities at Flinders University. At the University of Exeter he established the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture. He is the author of Harmless Entertainment: Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus (1983), and editor of Identifying Hollywood's Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies (with Melvyn Stokes, 1999) and Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences (2001).