STACK #148 Feb 2017

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The most important of these events occurred in 1948 when the Justice Department challenged the monopolistic practices within the movie industry. Moreover, they were able to persuade the Supreme Court that the film industry's studio system was in fact a criminal conspiracy designed to strengthen their hold on the exhibition field.

The Decline of Hollywood's Studio System 1947-1950 Part 3

A key element – and the most profitable part of the studio system – was the block-booking of movies to independent exhibitors. The "big five" studios owned or controlled a network of some 1,400 movie theatres situated in the major urban areas of the US. These "picture palaces" were primarily first run theatres premiering the big name stars' A-releases, which also allowed the industry to charge high ticket prices. But when independently owned theatres – mainly located in the rural areas of America – wanted to rent these big-budget pictures, they would also have to take an entire year's worth of films from the individual studios without having the opportunity to screen them in advance. These block or blind-booking units would invariably include a number of mediocre low budget movies. The studios' B-movie units provided an indispensable training ground for contracted novice actors and directors. By bundling together these low budget productions with major features guaranteed the studios a profitable return on every film in the unit. As a consequence, if the independent movie houses did not take a certain number of these lesser quality films, plus cartoons and newsreels, they would not get the prestige productions their paying customers wanted to see. This was considered an unfair trade practice and a violation of the federal anti- trust law, and in the case of The United States vs Paramount Pictures, et al , block booking was outlawed as an abuse of market power. If that was not bad enough, the five major studios were also forced to divest themselves of their theatre chains to allow for a true free market enterprise. This meant that Paramount, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, RKO and MGM no longer The Paramount Theatre, Times Square, Manhattan in 1948 - it was premiere theatres like these that the major Hollywood studios were legally forced to relinquish control of.

become more sophisticated than previously supposed, and the post-war baby boom meant that the millions of new parents had far less time and money to spend on entertainment. The studio moguls were stunned and perplexed, for they had believed that the correlation between the industry's early post- war boom and America's weekly habit of going to the movies would continue well into the next decade. Bereft of any immediate ideas of how to lure mass audiences back into cinemas, Hollywood was then hit with a series of events that would sound the death knell for the industry's studio system.

1946 had been a bonanza year for Hollywood with combined profits of the five major, and three minor, movie studios reaching the all-time high of $122 million ($1.6 billion in today's money). But without any discernible warning, the following year millions of Americans suddenly stopped going to the movies. Hollywood's profits in 1947 dropped to $89 million and the decline accelerated to less than $60 million in 1948. The demographics of US moviegoers changed substantially after the war ended and complex factors combined to both lower attendance and change audience tastes. War-time audiences had been primarily women, made up of the mothers, wives, daughters and sweethearts left behind by the fighting men who had shipped out to Europe and the Pacific. Servicemen returning fromWWII had little taste for the fictional and somewhat frivolous onscreen entertainment that paled in comparison to what they had witnessed and experienced on the battlefield. Furthermore, a vast majority of early post-war movies were naïve and of poor quality, and Hollywood was slow to realise that cinema audiences were now carefully selecting the films that they wanted to watch. Moviegoers had

The lavish interior of the "picture palace" RKO Pantages Theatre in Hollywood

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