The Film Industry
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50 free The Film Industry trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The movie business is a century-old mix of art, engineering and hard-nosed commerce, and its history is full of accidents that became traditions. Patent fights helped decide where the studios settled, a snack-food deal changed product placement, and plenty of familiar movie words began life a long way from any screen. This quiz collects fun facts about the film industry across its whole story: the pioneers of the 1890s, the rise of the Hollywood studios, the arrival of talking pictures and colour, censorship and ratings, the Oscars and the big festivals, crew jargon heard on set, and film-making hubs well beyond California. It is written for movie lovers, pub-quiz regulars and anyone who has sat through the credits wondering what all those job titles mean. Every question comes with a short explanation, so you leave with a story to retell even when you guess wrong.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Hollywood Sign went up in 1923 as a temporary billboard advertising what in the hills above Los Angeles?
A housing development
A housing development called Hollywoodland was the product on sale. The sign was only meant to be temporary, and its last four letters stayed up until 1949.
Q 02Movie previews are called trailers because early cinemas originally screened them at which point in the programme?
After the main film
After the main film was the original slot, so the adverts literally trailed the feature. Audiences walked out before they played, so they moved to the front and kept the name.
Q 03Which candy saw sales soar after E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial used it as alien bait when the maker of M&M's declined?
Reese's Pieces
Reese's Pieces were a fairly new product when Mars turned the film down, reportedly fearing that the alien would frighten children.
Q 04Whose star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame hangs on a wall because he did not want his name walked on?
Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali shares his name with the Islamic prophet, so his star was mounted upright. The committee had decided that boxing counted as a form of live performance.
Q 05What stood in for blood in the black-and-white shower scene of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 thriller Psycho?
Chocolate syrup
Chocolate syrup photographed better in black and white than stage blood, while the stabbing sounds were made by puncturing a melon.
Q 06Which word for a hit film began in the 1940s as press slang for bombs that could flatten a street?
Blockbuster
Blockbuster jumped from wartime bombs to cinema in 1943, when trade adverts used the word to sell the RKO war picture Bombardier.
Q 07Independent filmmakers first moved to Hollywood partly to escape the patent enforcers of which famous inventor's trust?
Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company had its home base far away on the East Coast, which made its patents much harder to enforce in California.
Q 08Which producer holds the record for most Oscars won by one person, including one with seven miniature statuettes?
Walt Disney
Walt Disney won 22 competitive Academy Awards, a record. His separate honorary prize for Snow White came as one full-sized statuette and seven little ones.
Q 09Nollywood, a film industry that grew out of a 1990s boom in straight-to-video movies, belongs to which African country?
Nigeria
Nigeria's video boom is usually dated to the 1992 hit Living in Bondage. The Nollywood label has been traced to a New York Times article of 2002.
Q 10Which Hollywood studio's films open with Leo, a roaring lion framed by a loop of film and a Latin motto?
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer inherited the lion from Goldwyn Pictures, whose publicist Howard Dietz chose it in 1916 as a tribute to his old university's mascot.
Q 11Bollywood, the Hindi-language film industry, is based in which Indian city whose older name supplies the B?
Mumbai
Mumbai was long known as Bombay, and the nickname Bollywood simply blends that older name with Hollywood.
Q 12Which 1927 Al Jolson picture helped end the silent era as the first feature film with lip-synchronised speech?
The Jazz Singer
The Jazz Singer has only a few isolated talking sequences, yet its success signalled that silent pictures were finished.
Q 13Which 1995 release, Pixar's debut feature, was the first full-length film to be animated entirely on computers?
Toy Story
Toy Story needed only 27 animators, who were drawn less by the mediocre pay than by the chance to make cinema history.
Q 21Which film won Best Picture at the 2017 Oscars moments after La La Land had been announced as the winner by mistake?
Moonlight
Moonlight was declared the winner more than two minutes into the La La Land producers' speeches, when crew members walked on stage to explain the error.
Q 22Which colour process, celebrated for the saturated look of The Wizard of Oz, ran three strips of film through a camera?
Technicolor
Technicolor's special three-strip cameras lasted until the mid-1950s, when a single strip of colour negative let a standard camera do the job.
Q 23Which actor's institute took over a Utah film festival that was later renamed after his 1969 outlaw role?
Robert Redford
Q 14Which 1997 release was first in cinema history to earn more than one billion dollars at the worldwide box office?
Titanic
Titanic passed the billion-dollar mark in March 1998 and stayed the highest-grossing film until its own director's Avatar overtook it in 2010.
Q 15Which 1975 thriller is seen as a turning point for Hollywood after opening unusually wide with heavy advertising?
Jaws
Jaws became the first film to earn $100 million in US theatrical rentals, helped by about two dozen prime-time TV adverts each night in the days before it opened.
Q 16Which thriller, already a winner at Cannes, became the first non-English-language film to win the Best Picture Oscar?
Parasite
Parasite, directed by Bong Joon-ho, was also the first South Korean film to receive any Academy Award recognition at all.
Q 17Which award, first won in 1955 by the American drama Marty, is the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival?
Palme d'Or
The Palme d'Or replaced the festival's Grand Prix, was itself dropped in 1964, and came back for good in 1975.
Q 18Which fruit tops the trophy handed out for the year's worst films on the eve of the Oscars?
Raspberry
Raspberry, in the rude sense of blowing one, gives the Golden Raspberry Awards, or Razzies, their name. The golf-ball-sized fruit sits on a film reel above a gold-painted jar lid.
Q 19Hollywood rolled out CinemaScope and other widescreen formats in the 1950s to win audiences back from which new rival?
Television
Television had sent cinema attendance into serious decline by 1950, so 20th Century Fox bet that a far wider picture would set its releases apart.
Q 20Which streaming company began in 1997 as a California start-up that rented DVDs to customers through the post?
Netflix
Netflix was founded by Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings in Scotts Valley and did not launch its streaming service until 2007.
Robert Redford played the Sundance Kid opposite Paul Newman and gave the name to land he bought in Utah's Wasatch Mountains. His Sundance Institute later took over the festival.
Q 24Which piece of set equipment is snapped shut before every take so editors can synchronise the picture with the sound?
Clapperboard
A clapperboard gives editors one sharp noise and one visible movement to line up, which matters because film stock reacts to light and not to sound.
Q 25Which company's founder George Eastman struck a 1908 deal making it the sole film supplier to America's movie producers?
Kodak
Kodak kept making motion-picture stock after directors including Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese lobbied the big studios into a 2015 supply deal.
Q 26In which European country is the Tabernas Desert, where many spaghetti westerns of the 1960s were shot?
Spain
Spain's Almería province looks so like the American Southwest that a western town was built there for Sergio Leone's For a Few Dollars More. The set later became a theme park.
Q 27Which French term, first applied by critic Nino Frank in 1946, labels shadowy Hollywood crime dramas of the 1940s?
Film noir
Film noir literally means black film, and most of the American professionals who made these pictures never heard the label at the time.
Q 28The Oscar statuette shows an Art Deco figure standing on a reel of film and holding which object?
A sword
A sword is gripped by the figure, a knight, whose reel of film has five spokes for the Academy's original branches. The gold-plated bronze statuette weighs 8.5 pounds.
Q 29Which oddly named film-crew job is the chief assistant to either the gaffer or the key grip?
Best boy
Best boy is first recorded in print in 1931, when a newspaper explained that the gaffer's first assistant went by that title.
Q 30Foley artists, named after the Universal Studios veteran Jack Foley, recreate what for a film during post-production?
Everyday sound effects
Everyday sound effects such as footsteps, swishing clothes and squeaky doors are performed in time with the picture. Jack Foley kept at it until his death in 1967.