Watson Lecture: Brian Jacobson Explores the Surprising Connections Between Extractive Industries and Hollywood

What does oil have to do with making movies? On March 26, 2025, at 7:30 p.m. PDT in Caltech's Beckman Auditorium, Brian Jacobson, professor of visual culture, will discuss how Hollywood grew up alongside the oil industry in Los Angeles and how the extractive industries used films to influence how people thought about our world.

In a public talk called "How Technology Shaped the Movies (and How Movies Shaped Technology)," Jacobson will explore how early cinema technologies required materials—such as coal, oil, metals, and chemicals—that had to be extracted from the earth along with massive amounts of water and electricity. At the same time, Hollywood films developed storylines and set pieces around the mining, transport, and fabrication of resources like petroleum and minerals to project certain ideas about extractive industries on the screen.

"Many of my questions about Hollywood these days have to do with sustainability and the environmental effects of the industry," says Jacobson. His recently published book, The Cinema of Extractions: Film Materials and Their Forms, traces the inextricable connections between extractive industries and cinema, giving readers new ways to understand films in light of the materials and processes out of which they are created. "I want people to be conscious of the ways that industry uses culture to shape the way we think and to be critical about the culture that is made by industry. I want us to pause for a moment to think about the messages that we're being taught and the ways that we're being taught to live."

Jacobson is a historian of modern visual culture and media and their intersections with histories of science and technology. His research looks at architecture, cinema, and the creation of the human-built world. In addition to his faculty position, he serves as director of the Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture, which includes undergraduate courses, postdoctoral instructorships, artist residencies, and a wide range of programs and activities. Jacobson joined Caltech in the summer of 2020 from the University of Toronto, where he taught cinema studies and history after earning his PhD at USC.

The Watson Lectures offer new opportunities each month to hear how Caltech researchers are tackling society's most pressing challenges and inventing the technologies of the future. Join a community of curiosity outside Beckman Auditorium to enjoy food, drinks, and music together before each lecture. Interactive displays related to the evening's topic will give audience members additional context and information. The festivities start at 6 p.m. Guests are also encouraged to stay for post-talk coffee and tea as well as the chance to converse with attendees and researchers.

Learn more about the Earnest C. Watson Lecture Series and its history at Caltech.edu/Watson.

Watson Lectures are free and open to the public. 

Advance registration is full! There will be a stand-by line at the event, and a recording will be made available on our YouTube channel.

Recommended Reading:

Enjoy some reading recommendations from professor Brian Jacobson! Click on the titles below to purchase from our partner bookseller, Vroman's.

• Hollywood's Dirtiest Secret: The Hidden Environmental Costs of the Movies (Film and Culture) by Hunter Vaughan
• Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene by Jennifer Fay
• Greening the Media by Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller
• Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images by Finis Dunaway
• Defending the Arctic Refuge: A Photographer, an Indigenous Nation, and a Fight for Environmental Justice by Finis Dunaway