The United States produced the world’s first sync-sound musical film, The Jazz Singer, in 1927, and was at the forefront of sound-film development in the following decades. Since the early 20th century, the U.S. film industry has largely been based in and around the thirty-mile zone in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California. Director D.W. Griffith was central to the development of a film grammar. Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) is frequently cited in critics’ polls as the greatest film of all time.
