By 1940, the major motion picture companies had refined a production system acutely attuned to market conditions and to the industry's vertically integrated structure. This system was the essential feature of Hollywood's "classical" era, the basis for what Tino Balio has called the "grand design" of 1930s American cinema. But as we have seen, the American cinema faced myriad challenges both inside and outside the industry in 1940-1941. These would have enormous impact on the studio production system during the 1940s, forcing Hollywood's major powers to adjust the way they rationalized and organized production, and the way they produced and marketed individual films as well. In the course of the decade, the studio system that had been refined over the previous quarter-century would be steadily, inexorably, and permanently transformed.

That transformation scarcely occurred overnight, and, in fact, Hollywood's studio...