The film industry defines the United States and the American people as does no other medium. The movies demonstrate to global audiences all the strengths, weaknesses, and contradictions of the nation—art versus commerce, economic opulence versus squalor, and heroes versus villains. Even the variety of words that are used to describe the product of the industry—"movies," "motion pictures," "film," and "cinema"—illustrates the contradictions and strengths. Indeed, the entire history of motion pictures is a series of seeming contradictions, from the development of a mass entertainment industry by a small group of mainly Eastern European, Jewish immigrants, to the early failure to come to terms with television (a natural ally), to the fluid transition this old-line industry appears to be making in a new era of on-demand home-based media and entertainment.

The simple fact is that for most people, the motion picture business is...