With the movie makers

by Myron M. Stearns

Maybe your own taste would run to outdoor adventure stories—stories of the Texas border, and range riders, and tales of the Northwest Mounted Police. But if your theater happened to be, let us say, in a factory town where the majority of your patrons were mill-hands, it might be that you would find they did not like “Westerns” half as well as what are usually called “Society” films, which showed millionaires’ homes, and Wally-haired heroes who did their best work driving sport-model automobiles. Moreover, you might find that, because your customers actually knew so little about the home life of American millionaires that they liked to watch, utterly inaccurate “Society dramas” with a strong melodramatic flavor, possibly of the kind known as “Heart interest” would “get across” better, and draw bigger audiences, and make more money for you, than more accurate pictures with less melodramatic “pep” in them. What would you do then?

The average movie exhibitor buys (or more properly rents) his films through what is called a local “Exchange.” It gets its name from the fact that films are continually exchanged there—the old ones that have already been run for the new ones that have been rented for the next night or next week.

There may be several different exchanges in the town where the exhibitor goes to do his movie shopping. Indeed, there usually are, for each big distributing company has its own local office or “branch exchange” in every important center throughout the United States—the larger exchanges, covering perhaps a territory of several States, supplying their own smaller branch exchanges in that territory, and these in turn supplying the still smaller local exchanges, and these supplying the exhibitors direct. Then, in addition to the big distributing companies, there are usually small or “independent” concerns also offering films to the exhibitors—usually of the poorer and cheaper variety.

So, when you came to do your film shopping you would have perhaps a dozen different places to go to, and each of these places would have a whole lot of films for you to choose from.

That is where advertising has come to play such an important part in the film business to-day. An exhibitor, who gets very likely a good deal of his advance information about films from the trade journal that he has to subscribe to to keep posted about what’s what, reads that “Precious Polly” is one of the funnest films that has ever been made. Or that “Saved by an Inch” is sure to make a big hit with any audience. Or that “The Fatal Hour” played to capacity business in a big New York or Chicago theater. In each case he is reading an advertisement—but it influences him nevertheless. He can’t look at all the films that are available at the different exchanges; it would be a physical impossibility. So, naturally, he decides to look at the one he has read about, rather than another that he has never heard of. Wouldn’t you? And in the end he probably decided to take, even if it isn’t very good and doesn’t in the least come up to what he had expected from the advertisement—until he had learned to discount everything he read in film advertisements—the film that he has spent an hour looking at, rather than go on hunting, on the slim chance that he might find a better one if he looked long enough. Just as you would in his place.

What is the result? The distributors pay a great deal of money for advertising to sell their films to the exhibitors. Again and again they claim that the new films they are distributing are the best that have ever been made. And a poor film, or possibly a very cheap film, with say a hundred thousand dollars worth of advertising behind it, will do more business, and make more money for the distributor, than a better film that has only five thousand dollars worth of advertising.

Suppose a picture costs a hundred thousand dollars to produce. The additional prints that have to be made and sent to the different exchanges to supply all the theaters that want to use the picture cost perhaps $20,000 more. Fifty thousand more is spent in a big advertising campaign. For the service of distribution, the distributing company takes thirty-five or forty per cent. of the receipts that come in. The picture has to take in, from exhibitors, three times what it costs to make it, before there is a cent of profit for the producer.

Another thing: besides advertising, the distributing companies can reach exhibitors through salesmen.

In the small town, or the big city, where you have your theater, we will say, a movie salesman visits you. He is a persuasive talker, and convinces you that if you run the latest film of his company, you will “make a clean-up.” So you sign up for it, and pay perhaps a third of the rental in advance.

Naturally, each distributing company tries to get the best salesmen it can, even if it has to pay salaries of hundreds of dollars a week for them. Because a good salesman, selling even a poor picture, may get a lot more money for it for his distributing company than a poor salesman would be able to get for a better picture.