  The generation of novelty is central to any creative endeavor. Novelty
generation and the relationship between novelty and individual hedonic value
have long been subjects of study in social psychology. However, few studies
have utilized large-scale datasets to quantitatively investigate these issues.
Here we consider the domain of American cinema and explore these questions
using a database of films spanning a 70 year period. We use crowdsourced
keywords from the Internet Movie Database as a window into the contents of
films, and prescribe novelty scores for each film based on occurrence
probabilities of individual keywords and keyword-pairs. These scores provide
revealing insights into the dynamics of novelty in cinema. We investigate how
novelty influences the revenue generated by a film, and find a relationship
that resembles the Wundt-Berlyne curve. We also study the statistics of keyword
occurrence and the aggregate distribution of keywords over a 100 year period.
