Hollywoods embassies : how movie theaters projected American power around the world Beginning in the 1920s audiences around the globe were seduced not only by Hollywood films but also by lavish movie theaters that were owned and operated by the major American film companies. These theaters aimed to provide a quintessentially American experience. Outfitted with American technology and accoutrements they allowed local audiences to watch American films in an American owned cinema in a distinctly American way. In a history that stretches from Buenos Aires and Tokyo to Johannesburg and Cairo Ross Melnick considers these movie houses as cultural embassies. He examines how the exhibition of Hollywood films became a constant flow of political and consumerist messaging selling American ideas products and power especially during fractious eras. Melnick demonstrates that while Hollywoods marketing of luxury and consumption often struck a chord with local audiences it was also frequently tone deaf to new social cultural racial and political movements. He argues that the story of Hollywoods global cinemas is not a simple narrative of cultural and industrial indoctrination and colonization. Instead it is one of negotiation booms and busts successes and failures adoptions and rejections and a precursor to later conflicts over the spread of American consumer culture. A truly global account Hollywoods Embassies shows how the entanglement of worldwide movie theaters with American empire offers a new way of understanding film history and the history of U.S. soft power