Hollywood Crime Story: The Mob Takes Over the Movies is a three-part documentary charting organised crime’s long relationship with the American film industry, from cinema’s early years to 1990. It argues that criminal figures did not merely influence Hollywood from outside, but secured financial, labour and personal connections that helped shape studios, stars and unions.

The series begins with Thomas Edison’s use of hired enforcers against film rivals, whose move west helped establish Hollywood’s studio system. Its first episode covers figures including Al Capone, Johnny Roselli, Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen, and describes Roselli’s $500,000 loan enabling Columbia Pictures chief Harry Cohn to buy out his partners. Later episodes examine how new criminal figures replaced earlier gangsters from the late 1960s onwards, ending with Goodfellas and The Godfather Part III as symbolic bookends to the era.