Thread by @shrikanth_krish

% of US population going to the movies every week
1930 : 65%
1946 : ~60%
From 1964 till today : ~10% or below

The onset of Television marks the end of Cinema as a part of mass culture - in every country

True in India too

The "Golden age" of Indian cinema is usually placed in the decades of 50s-60s-70s uptil early 80s.

Just as we think of the 30s-40s as the pinnacle of movies in US

TV entered US in the 50s.
It entered Indian homes in mid 80s triggering the decline of cinema

One can make a broader point that the "Golden age" of any medium is determined by that medium's technological dominance and the competition it faces from other media

So the golden age of the novel has to be the Victorian period. As the medium attracted the best and the brightest

It is a tad unfair to expect the novelists of 2010s to hold a candle to the ones of the 1880s

Sure the best of them can, but the median quality as well as the sheer volume of output would be way higher in the 1880s - given that the era represented the high point of the medium

Similarly, at least in a western context, the 30s-40s represented the high point of cinema....No other medium came close....So you had geniuses like Orson Welles who gravitated towards it

Orson Welles might have been a novelist in the 19th cen, or a major TV star in the 1960s...

So I find it odd to see great stars of yesteryear egging their young kids to become movie stars

They are bound to be disappointed

These kids are not going to be anything like their parents, as they operate in a declining medium. Their parents operated at the medium's zenith