Hollywood in the 1930s.

Movie critics are nearly unanimous in declaring the Depression era to be the most important in the history of film. Technical advances, the seemingly limitless amount of available money, and a pool of talent fed by writers and actors from New York, as well as directors and technicians from overseas, all contributed to make the 1930s the golden era in Hollywood cinema. In 1932 the improvement of three-color Technicolor from the two-color process invented in 1926 enabled studios to create "A pictures" that looked markedly different from the B movies churned out in quantity and helped to stratify the production system, though black-and-white movies were still common throughout the 1930s. Many of the decade's most talented writers, including such noted fiction writers as William Faulkner, Samuel Ornitz, Dalton Trumbo, Dorothy Parker, and Dashiell Hammett, and playwrights Lillian Hellman and Clifford Odets, headed west...