Block Booking
Block booking, outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1948, is a system whereby film distributions companies sell multiple films to a movie theater as a package deal. Under this system, “independent theater owners were forced to take large numbers of [a] studio’s picture sight unseen. Those studios could then parcel out second rate products along with A-class features and star vehicles, which made both production and distribution more economical.” This system denied the owners of unaffiliated theaters the right to reject films on the grounds that they had to “take them all or have none.” Studio executives and film producers benefitted from this practice as it provided them with the security of knowing that even their smaller films would be provided a place of exhibition so long as they had other, more “desirable” pictures to sell.
The commodification of motion pictures goes back to the early years of film production. The nickelodeon was a prototypical form of film exhibition by which films would be projected in familiar spaces such as storefronts and audiences would be charged a small fee in order to access this new form of entertainment. By the mid-1920s, film production and distribution companies had formed an oligopoly, in effect consolidating control over a large percent of what films were made and where they would go thereafter.
“The Big Five” of the early studio system is considered to be 20th Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, RKO Pictures, Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros while the “Little Three” refer to Universal Pictures, Columbia Pictures and United Artists. If a film was being screened in an American movie theatre during the second quarter of the 20th century, there was a high chance it was produced by or distributed by (in many cases, both) one of these companies. Hollywood was almost completely vertically integrated by the 1940s.
Block Booking; Visualized
536 of the 625 films exhibited at the Campus Theatre during it's first five years of operation were produced by six film studios.
That is 86% of the films shown at the cinema over the course of half a decade.
By the numbers, the only thing more stunning than the number of major-produced films than ended up in the Campus Theatre is the number of major-distributed films that ended up in the Campus Theatre.
99% of the film prints screened at the Campus Theatre were distributed by the eight major film studios. Even the non-major production companies who had the funds to make films on a smaller scale had to go through the eight majors in order to get their film shown to a wider audience. United Artists in particular worked to represent these less financially equipped production companies, distributing dozens of films, thereby allowing artists to control their own interests. As made apparent by the visualization below, the block booking system had an enormous influence on the programming schedule of the Campus Theatre during the 1940s.. Metro-Goldwyn Mayer produced the bulk of films that were distributed to the Lewisburg theatre and with this being the case, it should come as no surprise that they had the most frequent appearance of multiple films within different weeks. During the week of July 25th, 1943, four different MGM films screened over the course of seven days.
One probable explanation for the unparalleled number of MGM films that screened at the Campus Theatre is that certain film stars on contract with the film studio may have been particularly popular in this area. In order to acquire films featuring these actors or actresses, the cinema would have had to agree to purchase prints for films that were not necessarily of as high quality as the one(s) it wanted in order to get these desired prints.
This is exemplified by Humphrey Bogart's ten appearances at the theater during the early 1940's. Every film starring Bogart (who was incredibly popular at the time) that was screened at the Campus Theatre during these years was produced by Warner Bros. These films would all be screened directly prior to or subsequent to other less popular films produced by that same studio. This is just how the system of block booking and blind selling worked during this era.