In short, as film historian Douglas Gomery pointed out, the five major studios of the time can best be characterized as “diversified theater chains, producing features, shorts, cartoons, and newsreels to fill their houses.”Įach studio produced a distinctive style of entertainment, depending on its corporate economy and the personnel it had under contract. The remaining 94 percent of the studios’ investment went to the exhibition sector. Film production throughout the 1930s and ’40s consumed only 5 percent of total corporate assets, while distribution accounted for another 1 percent. Exhibition was controlled through the major studios’ ownership of 2,600 first-run theatres, which represented 16 percent of the national total but generated three-fourths of the revenue. Distribution was conducted at both a national and an international level: since about 1925, foreign rentals had accounted for half of all American feature revenues, and they would continue to do so for the next two decades. As it was, by 1930, 95 percent of all American production was concentrated in the hands of only eight studios-five vertically integrated major companies, which controlled production, distribution, and exhibition, and three horizontally integrated minor ones that controlled production and distribution. Without government interference, “Paramount-Vitaphone” and “Fox-Loew’s” might have divided the entertainment industries of the entire English-speaking world between them. Department of Justice intervened, forbidding Paramount’s merger with Warner Brothers and divorcing Fox from Loew’s. In an effort to become even more powerful, Paramount in 1929 acquired one-half of the newly formed Columbia Broadcasting System and proposed a merger with Warner Brothers. Its holdings were surpassed only by those of Paramount, which controlled an international distribution network and the vast Publix theatre chain. Fox went even farther, building the multimillion-dollar Movietone City in Westwood, California, in 1928 and acquiring controlling shares of both Loew’s, Inc., the parent corporation of MGM, and Gaumont British, England’s largest producer-distributor-exhibitor. By 1929, Warner Brothers had acquired the Stanley theatre circuit, which controlled nearly all the first-run houses in the mid-Atlantic states, and the production and distribution facilities of its former rival First National to become one of the largest studios in Hollywood. The unexpected success of their strategy forced the industrywide conversion to sound and transformed Warner Brothers and Fox into major corporations. It was primarily in response to those aggressive maneuvers that Warner Brothers and Fox sought to dominate smaller exhibitors by providing prerecorded musical accompaniment to their films. Throughout the 1920s, Paramount, MGM, First National, and other studios had conducted ambitious campaigns of vertical integration by ruthlessly acquiring first-run theatre chains. If the coming of sound changed the aesthetic dynamics of the filmmaking process, it altered the economic structure of the industry even more, precipitating some of the largest mergers in motion-picture history. SpaceNext50 Britannica presents SpaceNext50, From the race to the Moon to space stewardship, we explore a wide range of subjects that feed our curiosity about space!.Learn about the major environmental problems facing our planet and what can be done about them! Saving Earth Britannica Presents Earth’s To-Do List for the 21st Century.Britannica Beyond We’ve created a new place where questions are at the center of learning.100 Women Britannica celebrates the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, highlighting suffragists and history-making politicians. #Examples of deepfocus elegant theme how to#
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