This work combines a history of Hollywood with an analysis of how and why the entertainment capital of the world has consistently survived its own limitations to meet changing public tastes with its own brand of vigour and renewal for over 60 years. This illustrated book presents a decade-by-decade study of Hollywood's response to changing times. For the stardust years of the 1930s - where the big studios ground out a movie a week - to the B-movie film noir of the 1940s, the great musical and western eipcs of the 1950s, the permissive movies of the 1960s, a new renaissance in the 1970s, marked by special effects, and in the 1980s a Hollywood that caters to any and every taste - old themes from the post-war decades have come back, recycled, feeding the timeless need for escapism and a happy ending.