NPR.

This is the indicator from Planet Money.

I'm Adrienne Ma.

Americans love their movies.

Historically, no country can even approach the amount

Americans spend at the box

office each year. That is until China came along. The U.S. and Chinese film industries actually

have a long intertwined history. Today on the show, we continue our week-long look at the movie

biz with a tale that melds art, commerce, and geopolitics.

A three-act saga about the symbiotic and, at times, tumultuous relationship between Hollywood and China.

Act 1, China Goes to the Movies.

The romance between Hollywood and China begins way back in the early 1900s, the silent movie era.

The foundation of early Chinese film industry was actually built by emulating the American-style studio model.

That's Ying Zhu, a professor at Columbia University and author of the book, Hollywood

in China. Although movies were being made in Shanghai, Ying says audiences were most drawn to the

American imports, which tended to be flashier and more sophisticated. But this early romance

with Hollywood came to an abrupt end in 1950.

That's the year after Mao Zedong's Communist Party came into power in China.

A massive campaign was launched to discredit Hollywood films,

and watching American films was then deemed unpatriotic.

The government took over the movie industry,

and for decades, the only films being made

...