Because movies and TV are just flickers of light on a screen, it can be easy to gloss over the fact that the entertainment industry is, well, an industry, with all the environmental impacts that entails.

In his new book Cinema of Extractions (Columbia University Press), Caltech professor of visual culture Brian Jacobson puts the spotlight on the physical footprint of the business of Hollywood. Looking back at the earliest days of movies, Jacobson — mixing research and film theory — spotlights a wealth of information showing how filmmaking, from its start, was deeply intertwined with fossil fuels and other extractive materials.

There’s the Paramount ad from 1918 trumpeting that the studio had bought its own forest in Oregon to provide wood for film sets. Jacobson showcases silent films that set their action amid oil derricks, like 1910’s Rich Revenge (marketed as “A Comedy of the California Oil Fields”); 1915’s Sunshine Molly,...