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Filmmaking has passed through several stages on its way to mass medium status. In the following pages, we trace those stages—including development (when inventors first made pictures move), entrepreneurship (when experimenters conducted movie demonstrations for a small number of paid viewers), and finally true mass media (when movies began telling coherent stories with specific meanings for viewers and became widely accessible). Throughout all these stages, creative and bold innovators have worked together to constantly advance the medium—revealing the strongly collaborative nature of this industry.