What has happened to the movies, once the American family’s favourite entertainment? I remember when those families actually went to their favourite movie house twice a week. The Hollywood Dream Factories were grinding them out, but they were not as mechanically or cynically made as you may think.

The big studio moguls of what we now call the Golden Age, back in theTwenties, Thirties and Forties, were almost all immigrant Jews who came over in steerage and grew up on the Lower East Side of New York. They were young, smart, ambitious men whose marriage to silent movies, the new art form of the 20th century, was a natural.

The movies were not yet respectable and so conventional American businessmen wouldn’t lower themselves to deal with them. That left the field wide open to the outsiders, some of whom had never read a book or seen a play but were quick to recognise the entertainment value of a comic’s pratfall or a hero hunting down the heavy.

I’m thinking of Hollywood pioneers such as Louis B. Mayer, the junk man who became the mighty lord of MGM, Sam Goldfish (Goldwyn), the glove salesman who carried on a running battle with the English language all his life and still made literate classics like Dodsworth, Wuthering Heights and The Best Years of our Lives, or my own father, B. P., born in poverty to parents who could barely speak English, but who became one of the earliest photoplay writers (as screenwriters were called then).

He loved to read the classics to us children aloud and, as the head of Paramount Studios for many years, produced Crime and Punishment, Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, An American Tragedy, Jenny Gerhardt and other classics while completing the programme of 50 films a year with less ambitious comedies, mysteries and romances. But even those got a lot of personal attention.

Here’s what I’m trying to say: these men, some of whom I took on in my time for their arrogant and authoritarian ways, all had one thing in common. They may have moved way up on the social scale, but there was a part of them that never lost their connection to the common people, their great American public. Mayer may have become grandiose, socialising with Winston Churchill, but when his story editor read him a story (he never read the actual scripts), he really had a sense of what would touch “Mr and Mrs America”, as the showbiz reporter Walter Winchell called the public.

The most foul-mouthed of these founding fathers, the roughneck Harry Cohn, who used to boast of his local mob connections, had his own way of expressing himself at screenings of his movies. “If my ass begins to itch, I know something’s wrong with it. It’s boring me. The people won’t buy it.”

Which prompted the witty, wasted screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz (Citizen Kane) to quip: “Harry thinks his ass is wired to the taste of the American public.”

In his own crude way, though, Cohn was saying something. It was no accident that he gave the peerless Frank Capra (and his neglected screenwriter Robert Riskin) the creative room to make the classic Mr Deeds Goes to Town, and another film celebrating the Common Man (so much in vogue in those Depression days), Mr Smith Goes to Washington. Columbia films had the common touch. Maybe Cohn couldn’t articulate it but he knew how to hire people who could say it for him.

What all these original moguls had in common was a genuine love of making movies. They loved the story conferences, the production meetings, watching the dailies, taking their newly minted movies into the sticks to preview them, holding sidewalk conferences after the preview to discuss editing problems, and then watching their own finished product — or that of their rivals — in their home projection rooms at weekends. With each of the half-dozen Hollywood studios turning out their 50 or more movies a year, there was a round-the-clock fever to movie-making.

In 2005 Hollywood, the generic name for our American film culture, has fallen on its darkest days since the inroads of television in the Fifties put an end to the Golden Age. This time it’s another technological revolution, the internet, along with the distraction of mobile phones and iPods, that has done the damage. The big companies are in big trouble. Disney has reported a $313 million fourth-quarter loss. Sony is looking at a miserable year, with costly flop after flop.

DreamWorks is helplessly watching its once vaunted company shares in freefall.

Alas, the movies are losing their audience, as more and more families are giving up on spending $7 to $10 a ticket, which means 70 bucks or more for a night out by the time they’ve bought their overpriced popcorn and maybe had to pay a babysitter. For 20 bucks everybody can watch the same movie at home on DVD. People are buying king-sized home screens, but that’s just a one-shot deal that begins to pay for itself once they stay away from the multiplexes.

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