In Hollywood's High Noon, Thomas Cripps brings together both the insights of recent scholarship in the field of film studies and the results of his own extensive research to trace the history of Hollywood, from its turn-of-the-century beginnings through the invention and development of the studio system to its heyday in the 1950s, just before television eclipsed the movies as America's dominant entertainment medium.

Cripps explores the movie-going experience; the struggle for social control over the movies through censorship; the impact of sound on the style and content of films; alternatives to Hollywood's oligopoly, including "race" films and documentaries; the paradoxical predictability and subversive creativity of genre pictures; and Hollywood's self-proclaimed "shining moment" during World War II.

He concludes with a discussion of the collapse of the studio system after the war, due in equal parts to suburbanization, the emergence of television, and government antitrust action.