[ELI5] How did Hollywood become the center for pop-culture and the film industry both globally and in just the USA?
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Mostly just a coincidence. Back when movie cameras were new, they were under patent and had to be licensed, and that was expensive, and it was easier to dodge that if you went out west. And once you have film studios in a place, well then you have actors going there for work, and stagehands going to build sets, and seamstresses making costumes, it snowballed into a lot of film industry stuff being built around LA. It could have been anywhere, could have been Salt Lake or Seattle just as easily.
Nowadays the industry is physically spreading out, what with it being a lot easier to move people and stuff around. A lot of physical filming these days is done in Georgia and Texas because they offer tax breaks for movie and TV production.
As to why it became a global center of film too, the really simple answer is: America was left economically strong after WWII right when the movie industry was picking up, Europe had been bombed to hell and what industry they had was still rebuilding, and America was exporting *everything* back then, which included a lot of cultural exports like film and music and literature.
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