Film emerged rapidly both as an art and as an industry during the same years Dos Passos was maturing as an artist and absorbing the boundary-breaking creative potentials wrought by modernist upheavals in every artistic field. The process by which film achieved its privileged status as an engine of change was both cultural and aesthetic; as film developed this agency, it was driven by and in turn drove economic systems that during the pre-Crash decades were in flux, thus fashioning the medium into the kind of potent political force that Dos Passos sought for his own art.

The revolutionary interchange among the arts that transformed them in the 1920s galvanized Dos Passos's practice in each of the several disciplines he was undertaking during that decade. The visual sensibility that had helped to draw him to the expressive potential of the experimental theater continued to find an outlet in his intensified practice of painting and drawing in addition to his set designs while he worked with the New Playwrights and especially in the years just after its disbanding. Between 1922 and 1927 he showed dozens of watercolors and gouaches in exhibitions and galleries in New York. Recently, the works he produced during these immensely creative years and the influence of the static visual arts on his modernist literary works in general have been explored at length in The Paintings and Drawings of John Dos Passos; but, almost from the outset of his career, critical analyses of the stylistic innovations that characterized his modernist novels have recognized how moving pictures shaped his style. As Dos Passos acknowledged late in his life, both Manhattan Transfer and the U.S.A. trilogy were built on montage, and in specific he credited the impact of individual pioneering film directors such as D.W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein on his narrative style.

But film's pervasive influence became clear even before Dos Passos embarked on the drama project that offered him the opportunity to explore how visual media might represent a multisensory but sociopolitically relevant experience of the world hurtling into the machine age.