"In the early 1910s through the 1930s, as developing studios embodied the cinema landscape, distribution played a significant role in defining the structure of the American film industry. Playing the Percentages addresses the material history of distribution from the early days of short films to the sound features that dominated the silver screen. While many histories of this time period account for the ascent of the studio system and the Golden Age of film, there is a tendency to encourage a teleological view of an oligopolistic studio system as inevitable. Studying the material history of distribution in the growth of Hollywood, Long makes a case for the domination of the studio system as the unforeseen result of multiple battling distribution practices. He argues that distribution, with roots in other methods of media production, was a complex and diverse system of ever-shifting wrangling between distributors and exhibitors that allowed for, but did not determine, the domination of the studio system"--