With the movie makers

by Myron M. Stearns

So far we have been concerned mostly with the production of motion pictures—how they are made, and where they are made, and who makes them, and how they happen to be made the way they are. But that is only one part of the business.

There are two other parts of the motion picture industry, just as big, and just as important, as production.

One of them is selling or renting the films to the theater-owners who project them on the screens of their movie-palaces the world over. This is known as the distributing end of the business. There are great nation-wide organizations, sometimes embracing a number of associated producing companies, that are formed for the purpose of carrying it on. Each of the dozen or so of these organizations that together dominate the distributing market spends twenty thousand dollars or so a week in overhead expenses alone; some of them more than double that.

Then there is the exhibiting end of the business. That concerns the individual theater-owners who show pictures to us in their theaters, night after night, for ten or twenty cents admission, or maybe fifty cents, or even a dollar.

These two great branches of the industry are neither of them nearly as interesting as the producing end, any more than the book-keeping connected with a big railroad is as interesting as running a train, or even riding on one. But they are so important that together they pretty much dominate the industry, and to a very large extent determine the kind and quality, as well as the quantity, of the pictures that we see.

Accordingly, we shall do well to learn at least enough about them to understand how they work, and how they exert this tremendous influence on the movies, that in turn exert so much influence on us.

It is through learning something about the distributing and exhibiting angles of the motion picture business that we can find out why pictures can’t be so very much better than they are to-day, under present conditions.

Let us take up the exhibiting end first. In some ways it is the easier to understand.

Suppose you were running a motion-picture theater. How would you buy your films? And if ten or a dozen times as many pictures were available as you could use in your theater, how would you select the ones you wanted to use?

There are fifteen thousand or so motion picture exhibitors in this country, and the way in which they answer those two questions has much to do with determining how good the pictures that we see in their theaters can be.