3
The Hollywood Studio System in 1940-1941

By 1940, the major motion picture companies had refined a production system acutely attuned to market conditions and to the industry's vertically integrated structure. This system was the essential feature of Hollywood's "classical" era, the basis for what Tino Balio has called the "grand design" of 1930s American cinema. But as we have seen, the American cinema faced myriad challenges both inside and outside the industry in 1940-1941. These would have enormous impact on the studio production system during the 1940s, forcing Hollywood's major powers to adjust the way they rationalized and organized production, and the way they produced and marketed individual films as well. In the course of the decade, the studio system that had been refined over the previous quarter-century would be steadily, inexorably, and permanently transformed.

That transformation scarcely occurred overnight, and, in fact, Hollywood's studiobased production system was still essentially intact in 1940, despite the challenges that threatened the industry. That system was essentially a factory-oriented mass-production operation wherein revenues from distribution and exhibition enabled the studios to keep their production plants running at full capacity. This system enabled the major producer-distributors to turn out roughly one feature film per week along with assorted serials, shorts, newsreels, and so on. Hollywood's principal product, of course, was the feature film, which in 1940 accounted for over 90 percent of the $150 million invested in studio-based production.' Feature production at all of the major studios included both Á-class and B-class movies, with the proportion of the former to the latter dependent on the company's resources, theater holdings (or lack thereof), and overall market strategy. The majors also turned out occasional "prestige" pictures—bigger and more expensive features that were heavily promoted and usually released on a special "road-show" basis. Prestige films of 1940 included Paramount's Northwest Mounted Police, Selznick/ua's Rebecca, Chaplin/UA's The Great Dictator, and MGM's The Philadelphia Story.

While prestige pictures played an increasingly important role in the prewar movie marketplace, Hollywood's key commodity was the Á-class picture, particularly the routine, studio-produced "star vehicle." These films dominated the first-run market, generated the brunt of studio revenues, and provided veritable insurance policies at the box office—not only with the public but with unaffiliated theater owners as well, since a

company's A-class features effectively carried its entire block of pictures. Thus, each studio's stable of contract stars and its repertoire of presold genre variations were its most visible and viable resources. There was a direct correlation, in fact, between a studio's assets and revenues, the number of star-genre formulas in its repertoire, and the size and quality of its star stable—ranging from the talent-laden MGM, with over a dozen top stars on its roster, to lesser companies like RKO, Columbia, and Universal, each of which had only one or two top stars under exclusive contract and produced only a half-dozen or so A-class features per year.

Each studio's A-class star-genre formulations also were the prime factors in its distinctive "house style." Warner Bros, by 1940, for instance, had fashioned its corporate identity and signature style around a steady output of crime films with James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, crusading biopics with Paul Muni, Bette Davis melodramas, and romantic swashbucklers with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. These star-genre formulas were the key markers of Warners' house style, the organizing principles for its entire operation, from the New York office to the studio-factory a continent away. They were a means of stabilizing marketing and sales, of bringing efficiency and economy to high-end feature production, and of distinguishing the company's collective output from that of its competitors.

To supplement their A-class product and to render overall production and marketing operations more efficient, the studios relied heavily on B pictures. This distinctive class of low-grade feature film developed early in the Depression with the emergence of double billing and the general need to economize production. B movies were made quickly and cheaply, with second-rate stars and running times of about sixty minutes. They were ruthlessly formulaic, designed to play double bills in the subsequent-run market. Often referred to as "programmers," B's were packaged with another feature—either another B or a top feature working its way through the subsequent-run market—along with various shorts, newsreels, and cartoons in a full afternoon or evening "program" of films. All of the studios except UA produced B's, which, in fact, comprised up to one-half the output of Warners, RKO, and Fox by 1939-1940. While most of the studios' revenues were earned from first-run features, B-movie production enabled them to keep operations running smoothly and contract personnel working regularly, to develop new talent, and to ensure a regular supply of product. And given their established block-booking and blind-bidding policies, the major studios were assured of an outlet for their B-grade products.

Executive management—that is, the coordination of production and marketing operations by corporate and studio executives—was a crucial facet of the vertically integrated studio system, and one which changed considerably in the late 1930s and 1940s. The Depression-era collapse of five of the Big Eight studios had put several Wall Street firms in direct control of four motion picture companies (Paramount, Fox, RKO, and Universal), and the results were complex and somewhat paradoxical. While these studios became more efficient and market-driven, they never quite conformed to Wall Street's rigid notions of production efficiency and sound business practice. Moreover, efforts to force the studios to conform to these notions simply failed. Thus, by the late 1930s, as Robert Sklar has pointed out, "all of the studios were back under the management, if not the ownership, of men experienced in the world of entertainment." And in terms of actual studio operations, notes Sklar, "the ultimate issue is not who owns the movie companies but who manages them."²

Significantly enough, however, the newly appointed chief executives at Paramount, Fox, RKO, and Universal all came from the business side of the industry—a clear indication of Wall Street's influence and the general development of the cinema into a modern business enterprise. Tino Balio considers the ownership-management split which developed during the 1930s a necessary result of industrial and economic growth. "As they grew in size," writes Balio, the studios "became managerial, which is to say, they rationalized and organized operations into autonomous departments headed by a professional manager." The studio founders themselves either became "full-time career managers"—the Cohns at Columbia, for example, and the Warners—or, as was more often the case, relinquished direct control to salaried executives. Balio also notes that although most of the chief executives appointed during the 1930s came from either distribution or exhibition, the management of actual filmmaking operations invariably was left to a salaried executive with a production background.³

Thus, the ownership-management split in the late 1930s was accompanied by a split between the management of the corporation and the management of studio and production operations—a split that would grow even more acute during the 1940s. In the early studio era, management of the corporation, of the studio-factory, and of actual production was a top-down process with a clear chain of command. The New York office, the site of ultimate authority, dictated the direction of capital, controlled marketing and sales, and, for the Big Five, oversaw theater operations. The New York office also set the annual budget and general production requirements of the studio. The Hollywood plant, in turn, was managed by one or two corporate vice presidents—usually a "studio boss" and a "production chief—who were responsible for day-to-day studio operations and for the overall output of pictures. The chain of command extended from the studio front office into the production arena via supervisors or "associate producers" who monitored production on behalf of the higher corporate executives.

This type of central-producer system, wherein one or two executives supervised production, had all but disappeared by 1940. The studios still were managed by a studio boss and a production chief, but these individuals rarely had the kind of direct influence and authority over actual filmmaking as the studio executives of the past. Instead, the studios gradually shifted to a so-called unit-producer system during the 1930s. This system, as Janet Staiger has noted, involved "a management organization in which a group of men supervised six to eight films per year, usually each producer concentrating on a particular type of film." While actual production remained centralized in the studio-factory and fell under the ultimate control of the executive hierarchy, the unit system clearly entailed a dispersal of administrative authority and creative control into the producer ranks.⁴

Until the late 1930s, unit production was generally a studio-based process involving top talent and A-class pictures. The studios learned during the 1930s that unit production provided a means of ensuring quality and consistency in high-end production while controlling not only costs but temperamental high-end talent. These units invariably formed around top stars and the other high-salaried "creative" personnel—notably directors, writers, cinematographers, and composers—and were keyed to specific star-genre formulas. Some of these units were informal and fluid, changing somewhat from one star-genre formulation to the next except for a few key personnel, as with the writer Casey Robinson and the composer Max Steiner on the Bette Davis melodramas at Warners. Other units were remarkably consistent, like the so-called Seitz unit at MGM, which cranked out Hardy Family pictures every four to six months, each of which depended on the collaborative efforts of the regular cast (Mickey Rooney, Lewis Stone, et al.), the director George B. Seitz, the associate producer Lou Ostrow, the writer Kay Van Riper, the script supervisor Carey Wilson, the cinematographer Lew White, the editor Ben Lewis, and dozens of others.

The producer was in many ways the key figure in these units, and the unit's relative autonomy in terms of studio management was a function of both the producer's track record and the leverage (contractual or otherwise) of the top talent involved. At the A-class feature level, where product differentiation was essential, the "creativity" of the collaborators was a veritable requirement; indeed, unit production at that level was a means of managing (and limiting) innovation. At the low-budget feature level, conversely, where the "regulated difference" of products was the prime concern, the studios maintained a mass-production, assembly-line mentality. In fact, by 1940 the most obvious remnant of Hollywood's central-producer system was in the B-picture arena: each studio assigned a foreman of sorts—J. J. Cohn at MGM, Bryan Foy at Warners, Sol Wurtzel at Fox, Harold Hurley at Paramount, and Lee Marcus at RKO—to oversee production operations.

In 1940—1941, unit production began shifting to a more genuinely independent status, owing to several related factors, and three in particular: first, the increasing leverage of top filmmaking talent; second, the growing demand for A-class product which accompanied the improving market; and third, the 1940 consent decree with its blocksof-five and trade-show provisions, which forced the studios to have A-class product on hand well in advance of release. This shift was widely anticipated in the industry, and in fact the New York Times ran an in-depth story on the coming trend in February 1940, noting: "The long-predicted bloodless revolution in picture-making appears imminent. Unit production—that system by which independent producers operating under the protective wings of major lots are encouraged to use initiative and imagination while obtaining the benefits of factory costs and methods—has become an accepted practice at four studios: Warners, RKO, Universal, and Columbia."⁵ In April, Variety ran a lead story under the banner headline "Film Unit Production Grows," reporting that the trend to studio-based independent filmmaking was accelerating, spurred by rising production and studio overhead costs and by the fact that some independents had their own outside funding.⁶

As discussed earlier, top talent began deserting the studios for freelance status in 1939-1940, many of them actually creating their own companies—a tactic which would accelerate rapidly in 1941-1942 as the war-related income tax codes took effect (see chapter 6). While UA was an obvious option for independents and freelance talent, other studios began modifying the "UA model" and were beating the company at its own game. While UA offered greater autonomy perhaps, a studio could provide an in-house independent with financing, distribution, superior resources (production facilities, talent pool, etc.), and, in the case of the integrated majors, direct access to the first-run market.

Given the market and regulatory conditions, the studios were willing to consider deals with outside producers and other top talent, often on unprecedented terms, simply to secure proven filmmakers who could reliably deliver A-class features. This new leverage for independents affected studio-based contract talent as well in that the studios were forced to grant more creative and administrative authority to above-the-line personnel—stars, top directors and writers, as well as staff producers—in order to keep them under contract. The most important filmmakers in this regard, without question, were producer-directors like Frank Capra, John Ford, Leo McCarey, and Cecil B. DeMille. In fact, the number of these so-called hyphenates increased substantially in 1940-1941, and their number would continue to grow throughout the decade.

As top filmmaking talent began to enjoy more creative freedom and authority in the early 1940s than they had known in two decades of studio rule, the studios' once-absolute control of the filmmaking process steadily diminished, particularly in the realm of A-class feature production, where the economic stakes were highest. The studios still dominated and effectively controlled the production system, of course, owing to their overall command of filmmaking resources as well as their command of distribution and exhibition. Significantly, each studio responded somewhat differently to these changing industry conditions in 1940-1941. The studio system may have been an integrated industrial and economic system, but each company actually manifested the system in a different and distinctive way.

The following survey of the Hollywood studios in 1940-1941 well indicates both the similarities and differences in studio operations and output in the prewar era. It provides, in brief, a sense of each studios house style and corporate identity at this remarkable moment in American film history—that is, at the culmination of the studio era and the height of Hollywood's golden age, as the industry entered a period of dramatic and lasting change. This survey tracks the management and production operations, key resources, and market strategies of the five integrated majors (MGM, Paramount, 20th Century-Fox, Warner Bros., and RKO), the three major-minors (United Artists, Columbia, and Universal), and the struggling "Poverty Row" companies (Republic, Monogram), indicating both the continuity and the complexity of the studio system in prewar Hollywood and the range of studio strategies which were deployed during the volatile prewar era.

The Major Studios

The principal Hollywood powers in 1940-1941 were, of course, the so-called Big Eight studios, with the five theater-owning integrated majors by far the dominant companies. As discussed earlier, a clear rift existed between the five integrated majors and the three major-minors in terms of assets, resources, and overall industry power. That rift is readily evident in table 3.1, which charts the revenues, profits, and number of releases for each of the Big Eight companies in 1940 and 1941:

Besides indicating the clear superiority of the Big Five in terms of revenues and profits, these figures also show that all of the studios were beginning to capitalize on the prewar market surge by 1941. That was, in fact, the first year since 1929 that all of the Big Eight companies turned a profit. That trend would continue through the coming war boom, with the integrated majors enjoying the benefits of that boom to a far greater degree than the other studios. As discussed in chapter 2, the Big Five were ideally positioned to capitalize on the movie industry's post-Depression, war-induced recovery, thanks largely to the courts' allowing them to retain their theater chains and thus ensuring their continued domination of the industry. In fact, with the improving economic and market conditions, the Big Five's collective domination could only increase.

These conditions brought a significant shift in the power structure within the Big Five, however. During the Depression, the theater-heavy companies—Paramount (with some 1,250 theaters), Fox (650), and Warners (500)—had taken a beating due to heavy mortgage commitments and overhead costs. Now these companies stood to realize a far greater share of the war-fueled market than MGM and RKO, which had relatively meager chains of only around 150 theaters. While this was business as usual for RKO, traditionally the weakest of the Big Five, it marked a serious reversal for MGM.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

MGM, the only company to turn a profit in each year of the 1930s, had closed that decade still very much in command of the industry. In 1939, MGM produced five of the ten biggest hits and four of the ten Academy Award nominees for best picture. Moreover, its 1939 profits of $9.5 million were roughly equivalent to the net profits of all the other major studios combined. But in 1940-1941, MGM's decade-long dominance began to erode, with Paramount nearly pulling even in both gross revenues and net earnings in 1941.

MGM would not be overtaken easily, however, because its relatively limited theater holdings were offset by the tremendous resources it developed during the 1930s. Chief among these assets was the company's vastly superior star stable. MGM still could boast "all the stars in the heavens" in 1940, with a roster that included the three top box-office stars—Mickey Rooney, Clark Gable, and Spencer Tracy—and some two dozen other marquee names as well. Loew's/MGM also had the industry's foremost sales and distribution setup, which further enhanced the market value of its pictures. In fact, Selznick released Gone with the Wind through MGM largely because of its unparalleled sales and exhibition operations.

MGM's superior resources enabled the company to emphasize top feature production—more so, in fact, than any of the majors. Metro's high-end output in 1940 featured lavish costume dramas, literary adaptations, historical epics, biopics, and musicals. While these enhanced Metro's critical stature and reputation for being the Tiffany's of the industry, the high costs on these pictures often reduced (or precluded) their profitability. Much more profitable among its top features were the contemporary romantic comedies and dramas starring Clark Gable, invariably teamed with one of Metros many female stars.

The most profitable and cost-efficient MGM releases were its series pictures, most of which were produced by Joe Cohn's low-budget unit. These included the hugely successful Hardy Family pictures starring Mickey Rooney, the Thin Man series with William Powell and Myrna Loy, the Dr. Kildare series with Lew Ayres and Lionel Barrymore, the Maisie series with Ann Sothern, and the Tarzan series with Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan. Because of MGM's superior resources, however, its series pictures qualified for first-run release. Budgeted in the $300,000 range (the industry average for all features in 1940), MGM's series pictures carried production values well beyond their B-grade counterparts from the other studios. One indication of the superior production values of Metro's series pictures, besides the casting of top stars as regulars, was their A-class running time of about ninety minutes, versus the sixty-to seventy-minute range of most series pictures. (The average running time for MGM's six Hardy Family pictures of 1939-1941, for instance, was ninety-one minutes.)

Like most of the studios, the Loew's/MGM management setup featured a chief executive in the New York office and a vice president who ran the studio and oversaw production—Nicholas Schenck and Louis B. Mayer, respectively. While Mayer acted as studio boss over MGM's 187-acre facility in Culver City, California, actual filmmaking at MGM was supervised by a staff of executive producers. In fact, a distinctive feature at MGM—and an increasingly severe problem at the studio—was its bureaucratic management-by-committee setup in the production realm and the sheer number of contract producers. When Irving Thalberg was production chief at MGM in the 1920s and 1930s, he relied on a half-dozen supervisors to oversee forty-five to fifty pictures a year. Once Mayer went to a management-by-committee setup after Thalberg's death in 1937, the number of producers and executives expanded enormously. By 1941, there were forty highly paid producers and studio executives at MGM. While this number included a few top producers like Mervyn LeRoy, Hunt Stromberg, Robert Z. Leonard, and Joe Mankiewicz, the majority of Metros producers were middle-management types with little production experience, rendering MGM more conservative and less efficient than any of the other majors. And while MGM's staff of directors included such top filmmakers as George Cukor, Victor Fleming, King Vidor, and W S. Van Dyke, they enjoyed less creative and supervisory authority over their pictures than their counterparts at the other major studios.

Warner Bros

Warner Bros., the only company besides MGM among the Big Five to avoid financial collapse during the Depression, was actually antithetical to MGM in many ways. While MGM had remained flush throughout the Depression, Warners had survived by siphoning off roughly one-quarter of its assets in the early 1930s and by developing a ruthlessly cost-efficient, factory-oriented mass-production mentality.⁷ That meant tighter budgets on all features, a more streamlined studio operation, cutbacks in contract personnel, and a highly formulaic and routinized approach to its films and filmmaking. Warners split its output about evenly between the A-class star vehicles mentioned earlier and a steady output of B pictures. And unlike MGM's low-end products, there was no mistaking a Warners B picture for anything else. Moreover, Warners often assigned its mid-range stars like Ann Sheridan and Humphrey Bogart to low-budget jobs and promptly suspended them if they balked.

Warners was the only family-run studio among the Big Five. The company president (and elder sibling), Harry M. Warner, was widely considered the most cost-conscious of the Big Five chief executives. The younger brother, Jack Warner, ran the studio-factory; filmmaking operations were supervised by two longtime studio executives: Hal B. Wallis oversaw the production of all A-class pictures, while Bryan Foy handled Warners' B-picture production. Wallis was an able administrator and certainly qualified as a "creative" executive—although he was not perhaps on a par with Darryl Zanuck, his predecessor as production chief at Warners, who rose through the screenwriting ranks to executive status. Wallis relied on a staff of associate producers, who would not receive screen credit until 1942 but wielded considerable authority over A-class production at Warners. Many of them—notably Henry Blanke, Robert Lord, Jerry Wald, and Mark Hellinger—were former directors or writers and were closely involved in all phases of production. Warners also had a staff of capable, efficient directors, notably Michael Curtiz, William Dieterle, Lloyd Bacon, William Keighley, and Raoul Walsh. A few of them had considerable authority over specific star-genre formulations—Curtiz on the Flynn vehicles, for instance, and Lloyd Bacon on Cagney's action pictures.

Warners' strategy of relying on a half-dozen star-genre formulas for its A-class pictures began to change in the prewar era, for a number of reasons. In late 1939, Paul Muni left to seek freelance status, leaving Edward G. Robinson to fill in as resident biopic star while the studio brass reconsidered their commitment to the genre. Meanwhile, musical production was phased out when Busby Berkeley defected to MGM. Warners also responded to the increasingly competitive market by varying its formulas and by teaming and "off-casting" its top stars—recasting Flynn's swashbuckling Brit as a westerner, for instance, or teaming Davis and Cagney in a screwball comedy.

Equally uncharacteristic was Warners' pursuit of outside deals and presold story properties. In 1940, Harry Warner signed one-picture deals with the freelance producer-director Frank Capra for Meet John Doe (1941), and also with the independent producer Jesse Lasky for Sergeant York (1941). Both pictures were produced on the Warners lot using contract personnel, but both involved a number of outsiders as well—most notably the freelance star Gary Cooper, who played the title role in both pictures. Meanwhile, the traditionally tightfisted Warners turned spendthrift in the pursuit of presold story material. In 1940, Warners led the industry in expenditures for stage properties, spending a total of $536,000, including the top price paid by any company that year, $275,000 for The Man Who Came to Dinner."⁸

Warners actually increased the pace in 1941, a year in which a record number of stage plays (fifty-seven) were filmed.⁹ In a three-week span in early 1941, Warners paid $125,000 for George M. Cohans Yankee Doodle Dandy, $135,000 for Emlyn Williams's The Corn Is Green, and $175,000 for Joseph Kesselring, Russell Crouse, and Howard Lindsay's Arsenic and Old Lace.¹⁰ This last purchase, made at the behest of Frank Capra for his second outside deal with Warners, involved an elaborate profit-sharing deal for Capra and the playwrights—yet another radical departure from Warners' usual way of doing business." Moreover, the picture starred Cary Grant, an even more unlikely "Warners type" than Gary Cooper, and yet another indication of how much the studio was changing in the early 1940s.

While the off-casting, outside deals, and presold story buys indicated a significant shift in Warners' A-class operations in 1940-1941, the studio still maintained an efficient, assembly-line approach to B-picture production. Interestingly enough, Warners did not develop series pictures or serials at the B-grade level. The studio did excel in series-oriented short subjects, however, especially in animation production—an area which, for Warners, was enjoying a golden age of its own at the time. Leon Schlesinger's animation unit came into its own in the late 1930s, dominated by the cartoon directors Friz Freleng, Tex Avery, and Bob Clampett. Its first real cartoon "star," Porky Pig, emerged in the late 1930s, and that stuttering, porcine player provided an ideal foil for future animated stars—notably Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny. The latter's first star vehicle, "A Wild Hare," was released in July 1940, unleashing a wisecracking, anarchic screen personality who not only could compete with Disney's beloved Mickey Mouse but in the next few years would become the industry's top cartoon star.¹²

20th Century-Fox

Twentieth Century-Fox was in a resurgent position in 1940 after barely surviving the Depression. The turn in studio fortunes came in 1935 when Fox, still struggling after financial collapse in the early 1930s, merged with 20th Century Pictures. Twentieth, a successful independent company founded in 1933 by Joseph Schenck and Darryl F. Zanuck, had released through UA and supplied most of its product in 1934-1935. But Schenck and Zanucks efforts to form a partnership with UA were repeatedly thwarted by Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, who still controlled UA. So in 1935 Twentieth merged with Fox, which had been casting about for a new studio management team. The merger was engineered by Fox's president, Sidney Kent, who continued to preside over sales and theater operations out of New York. Meanwhile, Schenck became board chairman (and studio boss) and Zanuck became vice president in charge of production.¹³

Zanuck had climbed through the writers' ranks at Warners in the 1920s to become the studio's top production executive and was the last real holdover from that era of central producers and "creative" executives. Schenck was an experienced producer. Thus, their move to Fox bucked the Depression-era trend toward sales-oriented studio executives—although Schenck and Zanuck were quite sensitive to economic imperatives. Indeed, at Fox they developed an efficient and unabashedly commercial strategy that emphasized formulaic A-class star vehicles and a heavy output of B pictures. That approach proved enormously successful in the late 1930s, with the company averaging $7 million in profits from 1936 through 1939. Losses of $500,000 in 1940, marking a momentary setback, resulted primarily from a few expensive flops—notably the ponderous historical biography Brigham Young—and a lavish costume Shirley Temple musical-fantasy, THE BLUE BIRD, which was Fox's answer, in effect, to Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and MGM's The Wizard of oz (1939).

Aside from those overblown misfires, Fox fared quite well with its high-end output in 1940-1941, notably with its energetic modest musicals, light comedy-drama, sentimental Americana, and what Zanuck himself termed "hokum"—adventure yarns and quasi-historical biopics. Fox's star stable was undergoing a transition in the prewar era as Shirley Temple, Alice Faye, and the skater Sonja Henie, all top stars in the late 1930s, began to fade. These declines were offset by the fast rise of Tyrone Power to top stardom and the appeal of the second-rank male lead Don Ameche. Zanuck also signed a number of promising new players in 1939-1940, including Dana Andrews, Betty Grable, Gene Tierney, Carmen Miranda, and Henry Fonda.

Fox signed several directors as well in 1939-1940, including John Ford, Fritz Lang, Henry King, and Henry Hathaway, which tended to reinforce what Joel Finler has termed the "split personality" that Fox was developing at the time.¹⁴ Ford and Lang turned out "serious" films (usually literary adaptations or biopics done in black and white), while Hathaway and King produced commercially successful if critically suspect pictures—period musicals, quasi-historical action-adventure films, and the like, often done in Technicolor. Fox, in fact, led the industry in Technicolor production, releasing five of the eleven color pictures produced in Hollywood in 1940 and continuing to dominate color production throughout the decade.

While Zanuck oversaw production of Fox's A-class features in its main Westwood facility, Sol Wurtzel turned out a steady supply of B's in the company's smaller plant on Western Avenue. Like Warners, Fox relied on its B unit for roughly one-third to one-half its output by 1940. Unlike Warners, though, Fox sustained its B-picture output into the 1940s, and it relied heavily on series pictures as well. From 1939 through 1941, while Zanuck was upgrading Fox's high-end output, Wurtzel cranked out Charlie Chans, Mr. Motos, Jones Family comedies, Cisco Kid Westerns, and detective series featuring Michael Shayne, the Falcon, and Sherlock Holmes. The Holmes series, starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Holmes and Watson, was clearly the cream of Fox's B-movie crop, and, in fact, Fox initiated it in 1939 in an effort to upgrade its B product.

One important change in Fox's prewar production and management operations involved Schenck's trial and conviction in 1940 on income tax charges in the Browne-Bioff labor scandal (see chapter 2), resulting in his extended hiatus from the studio in 1941-1942. His absence gave Zanuck increased responsibility over day-to-day studio operations, although much of it was handled by the studio executive William Goetz, whose role would be upgraded further in 1941 when Zanuck committed both his own time and Fox's resources to producing films for the military. In the area of production supervision, Zanuck relied increasingly on a few top contract writers—principally Nunnally Johnson, Lamar Trotti, and Philip Dunne—who were approaching writer-producer status by 1940-1941, although Zanuck jealously guarded his command of A-class filmmaking operations.

Paramount

Paramount's fortunes were improving dramatically in 1940 as the company's long-term recovery strategy began to pay off. The key factor in that recovery was Paramount's massive theater chain of 1,250 houses, which gave the company a huge advantage over its competitors as the economy improved. Another was the management team of Barney Balaban and Y. Frank Freeman, two theater men who brought efficiency and a fiercely market-oriented approach to studio operations. Balaban, cofounder and long-time head of the Chicago-based Balaban and Katz theaters (the prime subsidiary in Paramount's affiliated chain), was appointed company president in 1936 in the wake of Paramount's early-Depression collapse and fiscal reorganization. In 1938, Balaban hired Freeman away from a successful Paramount theater subsidiary in the South, installing him as vice president in charge of the studio.

Freeman had little direct involvement with filmmaking operations, concentrating instead on the day-to-day management of Paramount's twenty-one-acre studio and its three thousand employees. Supervision of top features was handled by Henry Ginsberg and Buddy De Sylva, while Harold Hurley oversaw the extensive B-picture operation. Paramount's B output included several successful series, notably the Henry Aldrich films, which were adapted from a successful NBC radio program in an obvious effort to capitalize on the popularity of MGM's Hardy Family saga.

Paramount's resurgence in the prewar era involved not only a new management setup but a reformulated house style as well. In the late 1930s, Balaban and Freeman embarked on what Fortune magazine termed a "deadwood clearance program," shuf-fling off the high-paid talent and high-cost genres which had pushed the studio overhead and star salaries to an exorbitant level during the Depression. Among the stars departing Paramount after Balaban's arrival were Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper, Claudette Colbert, Fredric March, Carole Lombard, and Mae West. They were replaced by a new generation of younger, lower-paid contract players and rising stars such as Bob Hope, Ray Milland, Fred MacMurray, Dorothy Lamour, Paulette Goddard, and Veronica Lake. Balaban did maintain a nonexclusive deal with Barbara Stanwyck, as well as an exclusive contract with Bing Crosby, who had been with the studio for a decade.

Actually, Crosbys career was sagging somewhat when, in 1940, he was teamed with Hope and Lamour in a lightweight musical comedy, Road to Singapore. That unexpected hit hastened Paramount's recovery and initiated the hugely successful Hope-Crosby-Lamour Road series. It also typified the studio's shift to moderately priced con-temporary comedies and dramas—an obvious departure from the stylish exotica and high-cost spectacles turned out in the 1930s by Ernst Lubitsch, Josef Von Sternberg, and Rouben Mamoulian. Those filmmakers also left upon Balaban's arrival, and by 1940 the only remnant of those heady, exorbitant years was Cecil B. DeMille. A Paramount cofounder back in the 1910s, DeMille built his career on historical spectacles and continued to turn them out under Balaban—including in Northwest Mounted Police in 1940, his first Technicolor production. The studio's other top filmmaker was Mitchell Leisen, who specialized in romantic comedy and also served as a mentor of sorts to Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder, who would emerge in the early 1940s as the studio's top writer-directors.

Paramount had a tradition of allowing its top directors considerable authority and creative freedom. In fact, Lubitsch not only had produced his own pictures but for a brief period in the mid-1930s had been the executive in charge of all production at Paramount. This trend continued with Leisen, Sturges, and Wilder, while DeMille worked out a contractual arrangement giving him quasi-independent producer status and a percentage of the profits on his pictures. DeMille also capitalized on Paramount's ties with radio and enhanced his own celebrity status as host of the popular Lux Radio Theatre, a weekly program which dramatized (and thus publicized) not only DeMille's own pictures but a wide array of Paramount stars and products.

RKO

RKO was unique among the Big Five in 1940-1941 in terms of studio operations and market strategy, owing largely to its limited resources and its brief but troubled history. RKO had been created virtually overnight in 1928 at the dawn of the sound era and flourished in the ensuing "talkie" boom. But the company quickly faded once the Depression hit and in 1934 suffered financial collapse. In 1940, RKO was just coming out of receivership under its recently appointed president—and the company's fourth chief executive in its brief life span—George Schaefer, who before coming to RKO in 1938 had been the top domestic distribution executive with UA. Its assets at the time were $68 million, barely half those of MGM and Warner Bros.

Schaefer's regime was quite distinctive among top studio executives in that he maintained direct control over both the home office in New York and the Hollywood studio. Thus, he shuttled continually from coast to coast and tried to supervise all production during his visits to Los Angeles. Schaefer's sporadic involvement in production infuriated Pandro S. "Pan" Berman, a top producer and capable production chief who left RKO for MGM in 1939 to escape Schaefer's interference. Berman was replaced by former agent Harry Edington, who had little authority over studio operations. As the RKO historian Richard B. Jewell states, Edington "was nominal head of production, but Schaefer continued to run things like a potentate, insisting on final say with regard to all important studio decisions."¹⁵

Schaefer had come to RKO in 1938 with the idea of adapting UA's independent strategy to the resources and operations of a major studio. Interestingly enough, Walt Disney had deserted UA and gone to RKO the year before, and in 1938 Disney was enjoying terrific success with his company's first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), which was released via RKO. Once at RKO, Schaefer strongly supported Disney's shift into feature production, and in 1940-1941 Disney delivered three more feature-length cartoons: Pinocchio, Fantasia (both 1940), and DUMBO (1941). By then Schaefer was urging other leading UA independents to follow him to RKO—most notably Sam Goldwyn, who did in fact move to RKO in 1941.

Both Disney and Goldwyn were exceptional among RKO's unit producers in that both had their own production facilities and established lines of credit and thus were almost completely autonomous from RKO in terms of production operations and studio control. Schaefer also signed a number of so-called in-house independents—filmmakers who maintained their own production units but operated within the physical and administrative purview of the studio. This arrangement included several important producer-directors, including established talent like Leo McCarey and promising newcomers like Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock. Overall, these independent (and quasi-independent) filmmakers produced almost all of RKO's first-run product in the prewar era, supplying fifteen of the company's fifty-three releases in 1940 and thirteen of forty-six in 1941.'⁶

Another of Schaefer's distinctive tactics, at least among the integrated majors, was his penchant for signing one- and two-picture deals with freelance stars like Irene Dunne, Cary Grant, Carole Lombard, and Charles Laughton. In 1940, RKO had only one major star, Ginger Rogers, under exclusive studio contract, and in 1941, after an Oscar-winning performance in Kitty Foyle (1940), she too demanded—and received—a limited, nonexclusive deal.

While outside producers supplied a dozen or so A-class pictures per annum during the prewar era, RKO itself turned out another twenty-five to thirty features, most of them B-grade series pictures. RKO also released newsreels, shorts, and cartoons, with Disney's animated output by far the most reliable commercial products on its schedule. Roughly three-quarters of the RKO-produced features were budgeted at $200,000 or less; its cut-rate Westerns starring Tim Holt and George O'Brien cost under $100,000. Among its top series offerings were the Mexican Spitfire films with Lupe Velez and a crime series featuring George Sanders as the Saint. Besides complementing RKOs high-end independent productions, these series films also served as a training ground for contract talent specializing in low-budget production, including such emerging talents as the editors-turned-directors Edward Dmytryk and Robert Wise, the editor (and later director) Mark Robson, and the director Jacques Tourneur.

Another RKO tactic worth mentioning here, and one which anticipated major postwar developments, involved so-called package deals: a leading talent agency, the Music Corporation of America (MCA), packaged the script, director, stars, and producer for several RKO pictures in late 1939 and early 1940. Variety termed this "a scheme utterly new to the picture industry, a variation of the increasingly popular independent production unit idea."'⁷ MCA had no control over the actual production, nor did it have any financial stake in the finished pictures; still, the agency clearly was facilitating the shift in filmmaking authority—especially in terms of the initiation and development of movie projects—away from the studios and into the hands of individual filmmakers.

Significantly enough, George Schaefer's bold experiment was a decided failure commercially, and thus the Schaefer regime at RKO was essentially a prewar phenomenon. RKOs most costly and ambitious films invariably lost money—notably the critically acclaimed Abe Lincoln in Illinois, with losses of $740,000 in 1940, and The Magnificent Ambersons, an early-1942 release produced and directed by Orson Welles, which lost $620,000. Moreover, the Goldwyn deal involved such favorable terms for the independent producer that even major hits like Ball of Fire and The Little Foxes (both 1941) showed up as losses on the RKO ledger. Schaefer's failure in 1941 to re-sign Ginger Rogers, whose films were money in the bank for RKO, further undermined his position. Thus, Schaefer was ousted by the RKO board in June 1942 as the studio opted for a more conservative strategy during the war era.¹⁸

The Major-Minors and the Minor Studios

Outside the privileged cartel of integrated majors, the three most important studios were United Artists, Universal, and Columbia. These were Hollywood's Little Three major-minors—"major" because they produced first-run features and had their own distribution setups; "minor" because they did not own theater chains. Like the Big Five, the Little Three benefited from the improving market conditions in 1940-1941, although their lack of theater chains limited those benefits in two significant ways. First, it meant that the major-minors had to rely on the integrated majors for access to the first-run market, which the Big Five controlled. And second, it meant that the Little Three lacked the revenue flow and financial leverage—and thus the resources—to generate the same volume of high-end product as the Big Five studios.

United Artists

One of the Little Three, United Artists, focused even more heavily than the Big Five studios on high-end product, although it scarcely operated at the same volume. As mentioned earlier, UA was not a studio per se but a distribution company for Hollywood's major independent producers, serving as the industry's chief supplier of supplemental high-end product for some two decades. Founded in 1919 by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith, UA was designed to distribute its founders' prestige pictures and to ensure their independence from the emerging studio-factory system. UA changed radically, however, as the studio system took hold and as the founders' careers waned; by 1940, it relied for product almost exclusively on major independents like Goldwyn, David Selznick, Walter Wanger, and the British producer Alexander Korda. Of the founders, only Chaplin was still active in production—which in his case meant a new picture every four or five years.

Whatever their claims to independent status, UA's producers relied on the integrated majors in certain crucial areas. While a few of them had their own modest production facilities, they generally leased studio space from one of the majors for their more ambitious productions. And although all of the UA producers had top talent under contract, they also borrowed top personnel from the majors. Perhaps most important, UA's producers relied on the majors' first-run theaters for their productions. Thus, UA competed directly with the majors in the first-run market, while relying on the majors' theater chains for access to that market. The majors, in turn, relied on UA to provide supplemental high-grade product for their theaters. And with the accelerating first-run market and the flight of top talent to freelance status, in 1940-1941 UA saw its production operations and release schedule increase accordingly. UA released twenty pictures in 1940, slightly above its average for the previous five years; in 1941, UA released twenty-six films, its highest total ever. All were A-class pictures geared for the first-run market.

While industry conditions in the prewar era seemed to favor UA, the company actually was in a rather paradoxical state: its critical prestige and the demand for its product were at an all-time high, while its finances and management were shaky at best. UA reached a peak of sorts in 1940, scoring five of the ten Oscar nominations for best picture with Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent, The Great Dictator, The Long Voyage Home, and Our Town. But UA turned a profit of only $200,000 on twenty releases in 1940, down from $400,000 on sixteen pictures in 1939. UA was the only company among the Big Eight to see its profits actually decline in 1941, netting only $100,000 on twentysix releases. Clearly UA was not benefiting from the improving market conditions to any-where near the extent of the other majors. The difference was due in part to weaker product, although UAs producers complained about the poor distribution terms secured for their pictures, especially theaters affiliated with the Big Five—as indicated by Selznick's decision to release Gone With the Wind through MGM rather than UA.

Another significant problem for UA involved the management of the company. While Pickford was inactive and Chaplin had produced only two pictures in the last decade (Modern Times in 1936 and The Great Dictator, 1940), the cofounders still controlled UA's board of directors and effectively undercut partnership deals with several top producers and production executives, including Schenck and Zanuck in 1935 and Walt Disney in 1937. Similar difficulties hampered a possible deal with Frank Capra, the industry's leading producer-director, who left Columbia in 1939 and began courting UA. Even more important was the highly publicized lawsuit from the fallingout in 1940 with Sam Goldwyn, who had produced some fifty top features for UA since the 1920s, many of them sizable hits. Goldwyn and UA settled the lawsuit in early 1941, with the producer following Disney to RKO. That left Selznick, who had been with UA since creating Selznick International Pictures (SIP) in 1935, as the company's top producer. Selznick took over the top management role at UA after Goldwyn's formal resignation in 1941, although he retreated from active production following his back-to-back blockbuster hits, Gone with the Wind and Rebecca.

Columbia and Universal

The two other major-minor studios had a great deal in common with each other but very little in common with United Artists—other than a similar reliance on the Big Five for access to the first-run market. Like UA, Columbia and Universal both increased their output by about 20 percent—from roughly fifty films in 1940 to sixty in 1941.'¹⁹ While both companies hoped to upgrade their A-class output, these increases were mainly in the realm of B-picture production, which was Columbia's and Universal's forte. Both companies were full-fledged movie factories with ample production facilities and nationwide distribution setups, but without theater chains they lacked the financial leverage and the resources to compete with the major studios at the A-class level. (The assets of both Universal and Columbia were roughly $16 million—barely one-tenth those of MGM and Warners.)

During the 1930s, Universal and Columbia had developed low-cost, high-volume production operations geared to the subsequent-run market. They sustained this strategy during the prewar era, releasing a plethora of B s, series pictures, and serials. One clear measure of their overall market strategy and the status of their product was the running time of their features. Well over half of Universal's releases in 1940 and 1941, for instance, ran sixty-five minutes or less, while only three each year exceeded ninety minutes. The average running time for all of Universal's features in each year was under seventy minutes.²⁰

Universal and Columbia also turned out A-class pictures, which in fact were crucial to their established production and market strategies, for three basic reasons. First, an occasional first-run hit earned far more than even a dozen routine, reliable programmers. Second, top features brought credibility and prestige not only with critics and the public but with first-run exhibitors as well. And third, since both companies relied heavily on block booking, top features played a vital role in moving their annual output of primarily second-rate features. With the booming first-run market and the demand for high-end product in 1940-1941, both companies increased their A-class efforts. Doing so occasionally involved long-term deals with outside producers and independent units, but for the most part the two studios simply signed one- and two-picture deals with free-lance stars and filmmakers, who came in and worked with contract personnel under the usual factory conditions.

By 1940, both Universal and Columbia had devised similar strategies regarding A-class production, focusing in-house on a single star-genre formula built around the studio's one bona-fide contract star, while outside talent supplied a few additional first-run features. Universal's top contract star was Deanna Durbin, whose musicals were produced by the "Pasternak unit"—which included the producer Joe Pasternak, the director Henry Koster, the musical director Charles Previn, and the cameraman Joe Valentine—at the rate of two per annum. Universal also banked on a few B-plus formulas in 1940-1941, principally horror films with Lon Chaney Jr. and comedy musicals with second-rank stars (including W. C. Fields, Mae West, and Edgar Bergen on limited contracts). And in an interesting parallel to Paramount's Hope-Crosby pictures, Universal parlayed the unexpected success of the comedy duo Abbott and Costello into a succession of low-budget comedy hits.

Columbia's top product during the prewar era came primarily from a single genre, the romantic or "screwball" comedy. Frank Capra had refined the screwball comedy into Columbia's house genre during the Depression, and after Capra went freelance in 1939, Columbia signed one- and two-picture deals with top outside producer-directors like Howard Hawks, George Stevens, and Wesley Ruggles for its A-class product—invariably romantic comedies in the Capra mode. About half of these top features teamed Jean Arthur, the studio's lone contract star, with an outside male star, and the others featured freelance stars on limited studio contracts. Harry Cohn also signed several young contract players in 1939-1940, including William Holden, Rita Hayworth, and Glenn Ford, all of whom seemed well suited to Columbia's brand of light comedy.

Universal and Columbia also pursued similar strategies for their low-end series and serials. Universal's B-grade output included Johnny Mack Brown series Westerns and its ever-popular sci-fi serials (such as The Green Hornet), many of which were produced and directed by the serial specialist Ford Beebe. Columbia's low-grade output included the Lone Wolf, Blondie, and Boston Blackie series and several serials adapted from comic strips, such as "The Shadow" and "Terry and the Pirates." Columbia also built a successful series of comedy shorts around the Three Stooges, as well as the silentera comedy stars Buster Keaton, Charlie Chase, and Harry Langdon.

Despite their similar production and marketing strategies, Columbia and Universal were altogether different in other key areas, particularly their facilities and management operations. Universal City had been Hollywood's preeminent filmmaking facility when Carl Laemmle opened it in 1915, and in 1940—1941 it was still a first-rate movie factory. Columbia, conversely, began in the early 1920s in a ramshackle facility on the corner of Sunset and Gower on Poverty Row. Although Columbia steadily swallowed up the surrounding facilities and by 1940 occupied an entire city block, it still carried a Poverty Row stigma—which studio boss Harry Cohn seemed to regard as a badge of honor.

Both studios began as family-run businesses but underwent significant changes during the 1930s; by 1940, they evinced radically different management setups. Universal was run until 1936 by Carl Laemmle out of New York, with his son, Carl Laemmle Jr., over-seeing seeing production at the studio. Economic collapse led to the Laemmles' ouster, and in 1938 Universal replaced its company president and studio boss with two theater men, Nate Blumberg and Cliff Work—following Paramount's lead by installing exhibition executives in top management positions, even though Universal did not have a theater chain. Blumberg and Work quickly reversed Universal's fortunes: the company's net revenues in 1940-1941 exceeded those of not only Columbia and UA but RKO as well.

Columbia was founded in 1920 by Harry Brandt and the brothers Harry and Jack Cohn. Brandt and Jack Cohn ran the company out of New York while Harry, the younger Cohn brother, managed the studio, until Brandts retirement in 1931 led to a fraternal power struggle for control of the company. Harry Cohn prevailed, thanks largely to support from A. H. Giannini of the California-based Bank of America. Consequently Columbia was the only major producer-distributor in Hollywood whose chief executive also ran the studio and oversaw production and whose second-in-command ran the New York office.

Monogram and Republic

The huge demand for low-grade product that accompanied double billing and frequent program changes during the 1930s created another class of Hollywood production company: the B-picture studio. Throughout the Depression, as Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn point out, "there were literally dozens of tiny studios, usually with impressive corporate names, that lasted two or three years and then disappeared."²¹ The most successful of these minor studios were Monogram and Republic, which set up their own distribution exchanges in major cities and thereby survived the Depression. The two companies' histories were closely intertwined, dating back to Monograms founding in 1929 by W Ray Johnston and its ongoing indebtedness to Consolidated Film Laboratories. Monogram was Hollywood's leading B studio by 1934, turning out thirtysix films per year and specializing in series Westerns. Monogram also accumulated a sizable debt to Consolidated, whose owner, Herbert J. Yates, became interested in production. In 1935, Yates foreclosed on Monogram and another small independent, Mascot Pictures, merging them into Republic Pictures.²²

Republic quickly took off, thanks largely to its serials and the growing popularity of die singing cowboy Gene Autry. By 1939-1940, Republic was working in a wide range of genres, including a family series (the "Higgins"), a lawyer series ("Mr. District Attorney"), and even an occasional musical. Meanwhile, Johnston and his longtime associate Trem Carr left Republic in 1936 and resurrected Monogram, which soon was turning out about twenty B's of its own per year. Leaving serials to Republic (and the major-minors), die revived Monogram continued to specialize in series production, generally Westerns and action pictures. Other companies also challenged Republic in the late 1930s, akhough less successfully than Monogram. The most prominent of these was Grand National, which was created in 1936 and did well enough to take over another low-budget studio, Educational, in 1938. At that point, the Grand National president, James R. Grainger, tried to move into A-class production, an ill-fated effort that bankrupted the studio in 1939.²³

That left the B-picture field more securely in the hands of Monogram and Republic as Hollywood entered the prewar era, and the two low-budget outfits made the most of their limited means and market niche. Republic, the stronger of the two, turned out some two dozen features per annum on a production budget of about $2 million (less than MGM spent on a single top feature), notably its trademark John Wayne and Gene

Autry Westerns and several popular serials.²⁴ By 1940-1941, Republic was doing remarkably well, returning gross rentals of $6-7 million with profits of just over $500,000. While its profits were roughly on a par with Columbia's, Republic assets of about $3.5 million hardly compared. (Columbia's assets in 1940 were $16 million.) But as a subsidiary of Consolidated Labs, Republic did enjoy greater financial stability than any other minor independent.²⁵ Republic also enjoyed the benefits of having two stars on its roster, and in fact Yates by 1940 was exploiting Autry and Wayne in quite different ways. He sustained Republic's signature Western series with three or four Autry pictures per year, while alternating Wayne between Republic Westerns and A-class loan-outs—to UA in 1940 for The Long Voyage Home, for instance, and to Universal Seven Sinners (1940) opposite Marlene Dietrich.

Monogram had a more modest operation, with assets of just under $1 million and a stable of second-class stars, notably Westerners Buck Jones and Tim McCoy. By 1940, Monogram was concentrating almost exclusively on Westerns and "actioners," with gross rentals that year of $1.9 million, which translated into a small net loss. Monogram's fortunes improved somewhat in 1941, when rentals of just over $2 million yielded a profit of $11,000.²⁶ Johnston and Carr remained optimistic as the economy improved, although the prewar industry shift away from B-grade product toward big first-run pictures did not bode well for the likes of Republic and Monogram.

Production Strategies for the Changing Marketplace

Among the challenges facing the Hollywood studios in 1940-1941, clearly the most significant were the war and the antitrust campaign. These challenges were especially intense for the Big Five integrated majors, which stood to realize enormous gains if they could both overcome their declining overseas income and respond to the trade restrictions mandated by the 1940 consent decree. Two points about the Big Five's response to these challenges should be underscored here. First, the 1940 consent decree was signed in October 1940 but was not scheduled to take effect until September 1941. This period gave the studios ample time to adjust production operations to the new sales policies, and it also happened to coincide nicely with the defense buildup, which began gathering steam in early 1941 and hit the movie industry in full force during the summer. The second point is that the Big Five responded to both the consent decree and the surging domestic market with roughly the same strategy: scaling back low-budget production and concentrating on high-end pictures geared for the first-run market.

As will be seen in more detail later in this chapter, the majors did reduce B-picture production but did not eliminate it altogether. The market demand for low-grade product and the uncertainties of the prewar marketplace virtually demanded that the major studios continue to produce B's—and that they cultivate various other defensive market strategies as well. The most significant of these was an increased reliance on presold movies and story properties; in the B-picture realm, such properties generally were series pictures—films with recurring characters, settings, and plots whose market value was firmly established. In 1940-1941, over 10 percent of Hollywood features were series pictures, with all the studios except Warners and UA heavily invested in the practice.²⁷ The vast majority were B's, most of them Westerns; the presold status of some series was doubly reinforced by their having been adapted from popular radio series—for example, Paramount's Aldrich Family, RKO's Dr. Christian, Columbia's Blondie, RKO's Fibber McGee and Molly, and Republics Melody Ranch.²⁸ There were a few important A-class series as well—MGM's Thin Man and Hardy Family series, for instance—although the demand for product differentiation at the A-class level tended to discourage this strategy.

The Big Five developed defensive strategies for the first-run market as well. Here too the key was preselling, which at this level generally involved the reissue of A-class features and the adaptation of best-selling novels and hit stage plays. While reissues were scarcely an innovation, the trend saw a sharp increase in the prewar era. In April 1941 alone, for example, nineteen "new" reissues joined the dozens already in release. This number included several military and combat films, such as Hell's Angels (1930), Here Comes the Navy (1934), and Devil Dogs of the Air (1935), along with more routine fare like Rain (1932), Scarface and Bringing up Baby (1938).²⁹

Meanwhile, the market for presold literary and stage properties was booming. In 1939, the number (and cost) of such purchases had increased substantially, and by 1940-1941 the studios and major independents were breaking one record after another in the amount paid for the screen rights to top novels and plays.³⁰ Back in 1936, Selznick had considered the $50,000 he paid Margaret Mitchell for Gone with the Wind (1936) to be exorbitant; in 1940, Paramount paid three times that amount for Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).³¹ That record was broken in early 1941 when Warners paid $175,000 for Edna Ferber's Saratoga Trunk (1941). Also in early 1941, Paramount paid $275,000 for the rights to Moss Hart's hit play Lady in the Dark (1941), and in fact higher prices for top plays had become the rule, since these were more easily adapted to the screen.³² (Plays were in dialogue form, and the length of a stage play and a feature film was roughly equivalent.) To keep such expenditures down, Paramount, Warners, and MGM all provided financing for Broadway plays, literally banking on possible hits with minimal screen-rights costs.³³ Ultimately, however, this type of speculation proved less efficient than simply paying top dollar for proven hits.

The consummate presold picture in 1940-1941, of course, was Selznick's adaptation of Gone with the Wind. In fact, the phenomenal performance of that single picture taught the major studio-distributors a great deal about the full potential of the motion picture market in 1940-1941, and how to exploit it.

Beyond the presold value of the novel itself, Selznick enhanced audience interest with the much-publicized "Search for Scarlett" and the signing of Clark Gable to portray Rhett Butler. The promotion went into high gear in December 1939 with a press screening for 750 in Los Angeles' Four Star Theatre to launch a nationwide newspaper, magazine, and radio campaign. The world premiere of Gone with the Wind—or simply Wind, in then-current industry parlance—was held on 15 December at the Loews Grand Theatre in Atlanta, culminating a weeklong, citywide gala which was widely reported in the national press.³⁴ One week later, a double premiere was held in New York City at the Astor and Capitol Theaters, with the latter covered live by NBC-TV—the first movie premiere ever to be televised.³⁵

When it finally opened in L.A.'s Cathay Theatre in late December, Wind already was breaking attendance records in New York; at the Capitol, for instance, the picture was averaging over 11,000 admissions per day.³⁶ The record attendance continued throughout its half-year road-show run, with the unprecedented admission prices (75C in the afternoons and $1.10 in the evenings, versus 25—500 for most first-run films) pushing its record box-office take ever upward. Wind produced record rentals for distributor MGM as well, which was collecting an unprecedented 70 percent of the box-office take as a distribution fee (versus the usual 30-35 percent) during the films road-show run. And in the process, the blockbuster was steadily revising the definition of a long-running hit as it played for weeks and months on end in major metropolitan houses, in an era when even top features played only one to two weeks.

By July 1940, Wind reached saturation as a road show, and MGM revised its terms: the picture was sold on a 50-50 basis (i.e., 50 percent of the exhibitors receipts would be returned to MGM) at prices of 40C in the afternoon and 500 in the evening; reserved seating was recommended but not contractually required.³⁷ By April 1941, with its road-show and first-run engagements finally played out, Wind had grossed $31 million played to an estimated audience of 45 million in 8,500 theaters, with another 3,000 bookings still to be played as the film finally went into general release at "popular prices."³⁸

While Gone with the Wind clearly was an exceptional case, its release pattern and sales strategy had considerable influence on the marketing of top features in 1940-1941. Its most obvious impact was on asking prices for top features and the length of time those features played in metropolitan first-run theaters. In February 1940, RKO released Disney's Pinocchio on rental terms of 70 percent and an admission scale averaging 750 in New York City's 3,200-seat Center Theatre.³⁹ In March, UA released the Selznick-produced Rebecca, which surpassed Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to become the first picture play six weeks at Radio City.⁴⁰ In late 1940, MGM's The Philadelphia Story also ran six weeks at Radio City, while Chaplin's The Great Dictator (sold by UA on a 70 percent rental basis) played twenty-three weeks at the Astor, one of New York's more modest (1,100-seat) first-run theaters.⁴¹ By 1941, long-running hits were becoming routine, especially in New York; in July, eleven of the fourteen first-run theaters on Broadway were playing "holdovers." Among these was Warners' Sergeant York, a surprise hit of such magnitude that after doing six weeks of sold-out business at the Astor, it moved to the larger Hollywood Theater on Broadway for an indefinite run (at 75C for matinees and $1.10 for evening shows) on a 50-50 basis.⁴²

Wind's heavily publicized location premiere in Atlanta was also crucial to its promotional campaign, and it represented Selznick's effort to take a recent marketing innovation to another level altogether. Until the late 1930s, virtually all prestige-level pictures were launched with a Broadway premiere. Several major releases in early 1939 departed from this strategy—notably Paramount's UNION PACIFIC, which premiered with much fanfare in Omaha, and Warners' DODGE CITY, which premiered in its namesake Kansas town.⁴³ Similarly well-publicized openings were held in 1939 for Young Mr. Lincoln in Springfield, for Allegheny Uprising in Pittsburgh, and for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in the nations capital. Variety's year-end survey of "Film Showmanship" termed the location premiere a "revolutionary method of exploitation" in 1939, and a "breakdown of the long-established precedent of a Broadway premiere as the accepted official first showing."⁴⁴

The impact of Wind's weeklong Atlanta premiere underscored the promotional value of the location premiere, and the trend intensified throughout 1940. By then, in fact, even the minor studios were getting into the act. Monogram, for instance, held a gala premiere in Phoenix for the opening of The Gentleman from Arizona, a Technicolor picture shot entirely on location in Arizona (Hollywood's first).⁴⁵ Location premieres had become fairly commonplace by 1941, and in fact the more predictable ventures—Birth of the Blues premiering in New Orleans, Sun Valley Serenade in Salt Lake City, and Keep 'em Flying in Detroit—were complemented by a few truly offbeat efforts like the premiere of Underground in New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns and of The Sea Wolf on the SS America off California coast.⁴⁶

The location premiere phenomenon was cut short in late 1941 with the U.S. entry into the war, but it was a significant prewar marketing trend on several counts. It clearly signaled the rise of the big picture and a nascent blockbuster mentality in Hollywood as the studios began to recalibrate the profit potential, market impact, and promotional requirements of their top releases. These campaigns also provided nationwide multimedia exploitation, which sales offices were convinced had a much greater impact than national radio or magazine campaigns. The locale also invoked the epic stature and spectacle quality of the pictures, not only in terms of their production values (lavish sets and costumes, location shooting, Technicolor, and so on) but also in terms of the subject matter in that an increasing number of these were distinctly American pictures. As these pictures well indicated, the troubled overseas markets and the growing need to promote Americanism as the nation faced the prospect of global war provoked an on-screen emphasis on domestic settings, domestic issues, and the domestic marketplace.

The Emergence of Market Research

Owing to the growing uncertainties and instability of the prewar marketplace and the increased emphasis on high-stakes, high-end product in 1940-1941, the Hollywood studios substantially upgraded their market research efforts. This involved not only improving the studios' own internal research operations but turning to outside research firms as well, and in fact the 1940s would see motion picture research emerge as an important ancillary industry.

Before 1940, most movie research had been conducted either by the Big Eight's trade association, the MPPDA, or else on an ad-hoc basis by individual studio-distributors or independent producers. The MPPDA's figures were geared to the industry as a whole, providing data on weekly attendance, annual box-office returns, the number and size of the nation's movie theaters, and so on. This information rarely was gathered by the MPPDA itself but was culled from various federal agencies—for instance, the Commerce and Justice Departments, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Census Bureau. Although comprehensive, these data were notoriously vague and inaccurate and were frequently challenged by the fledgling independent research firms in the early 1940s.

While the MPPDA traditionally provided general information on the industry and its audience, individual studios developed their own methods of gauging audience interest in—and thus the marketability of—particular pictures or performers. Besides routine analysis of box-office returns, these methods included the occasional use of sneak previews and test screenings, analysis of fan mail, and various efforts to elicit and evaluate the opinions and preferences of exhibitors. Such studio-based research efforts were haphazard and quasi-scientific at best, but through the 1920s and 1930s they had been adequate to the industry's needs. In that era of block booking and virtually complete market control by the Big Eight, more reliable or systematic research simply was not necessary.⁴⁷

Moreover, top motion picture executives, particularly those in New York with their fingers on the financial pulse of the industry, preferred to base their market strategies and sales policies on their own intuition and business acumen. Many of these executives had backgrounds in either distribution or exhibition and were reluctant to yield their decision-making authority to research experts or outside firms. Market research may have been making strides in other U.S. industries, but movie executives prided themselves on their knack for showmanship and taste-making and their perceptions of audience interest.

By 1940, however, the studio powers recognized the need to develop more sophisticated and accurate means of market research in order to respond to the massive challenges and changes facing the industry. This realization coincided, interestingly enough, with the rapid emergence of public opinion polling as a viable form of social research, primarily as an offshoot of consumer research by advertising firms. The pioneer of public opinion polling in the United States was George H. Gallup, whose research efforts would have tremendous impact on motion picture audience research throughout the 1940s. Trained in scientific sampling, Gallup had joined the New York ad agency Young and Rubicam in 1932 as vice president in charge of research, concentrating primarily on consumer and radio audience research. In 1935, while still with Young and Rubicam, Gallup founded the American Institute of Public Opinion, which gained considerable notoriety for its accurate prediction of the 1936 presidential election. Also in 1936, and again with Young and Rubicams support, Gallup began the informal (and unsolicited) study of movie audiences, an effort he continued throughout the late 1930s.⁴⁸

In 1940, with the Gallup poll now a fixture in the American press and Gallup himself the acknowledged leader in the growing field of market research, Gallup created the Audience Research Institute (ARI) (later Audience Research, Inc.), devoted exclusively to the study of the movie industry and its audience. ARFs first major client was RKO, which signed an exclusive one-year deal with the research firm in March 1940. In 1941, ARI expanded its commercial operations and began providing its services to a number of studios and to independent producers. That year also saw the emergence of ARI's chief competitor, Leo Handel's Motion Picture Research Bureau (MPRB), along with various other (and less significant) firms.⁴⁹

One immediate effect of the research efforts by Gallup, Handel, and others was to indicate how difficult it was to generalize about audiences and moviegoing. As Handel himself would note in 1950 after a full decade of audience research, there was still "no agreement as to what constitutes a 'moviegoer,'" let alone the moviegoing audience at large.⁵⁰ In 1940, Gallup put ARI on the industry map by leaking information (while under an exclusive contract with RKO) that industry figures on weekly attendance were grossly overinflated, and that the percentage of non-moviegoers was increasing. MGM responded with outright disdain for any and all efforts to gauge weekly attendance or the size of certain audience segments. Where and how, asked MGM, did ARI or the MPPDA come up with attendance figures when ticket sales for MGM films varied up to 300 percent from week to week on different pictures?⁵¹

The debate about audience figures persisted, and indeed it heated up in March 1941 after ARI completed its one-year deal with RKO and Gallup went public with his claims about the MPPDA's inflated figures on weekly attendance and the like. At that point, Gallup was selling ARI's services industrywide, and without question his selective disclosure of valuable—and controversial—research data was one way of promoting his firm. In his first trade press interview in July 1941, Gallup openly challenged the industry's research figures, touting the detail and precision of ARI's more "scientific" methods. His boldest assertion in the interview was that weekly attendance was only 54 million, versus the habitually cited industry figure of 80 million. He also noted that 65 percent of moviegoers were under 30 years of age, and he recommended that the studios increase their output of big-budget films targeted at the 19-25 age bracket. Just over half (51 percent) of the audience was female, said Gallup, although the proportion could vary up to 75 percent for both sexes depending on the specific film. He also noted that women tended to prefer romance and serious drama, while men preferred action and comedy.⁵²

Efforts to gauge and subdivide the moviegoing audience continued, as did the debates about the nature and size of that audience. In fact, virtually all motion picture research tended to center on the audience, in an ongoing effort to assess the size, behavior, and general attitudes of "the moviegoing public." This research was done with increasing precision, parsing the audience demographically in terms of age, gender, income, education, and so on; in the process, a number of long-standing industry assumptions about audiences steadily eroded. Chief among these was the assumption that the majority of moviegoers were women; that idea was challenged by a 1941 study conducted by MPRB indicating the following attendance frequency for New York City, the nation's largest and most important movie market:

In the same study, Handel found that men were more likely to be non-moviegoers than women (24.7 versus 20.6 percent), but that overall men and women attended movies at about the same rate: men averaged 3.7 movies per month, and women 3-75.⁵³

Both ARI and MPRB advocated research conducted on a film-by-film basis. As Handel himself described it in a book-length study, Hollywood Looks at Its Audience (1950), this type of motion picture research developed throughout the 1940s along the lines of what he termed "the structure of motion picture concerns"—that is, the production, sales, promotion, and exhibition of individual films. Production research involved preliminary (preproduction) tests of audience interest in story ideas, titles, casting, and so on. During production, research involved test screenings of films or individual scenes in rough-cut and included an array of methods (and mechanisms) for gauging the response of spectators. Postproduction research used the same methods in test screenings and added sneak previews. At this stage, research was designed not only to gauge the audience appeal of a film but also to facilitate its promotional campaign. Advertising and publicity research assessed the potential audience for a film (geared to a "want-to-see" index), measured the "publicity penetration" of ad campaigns, and even conducted test screenings of movie trailers (previews).⁵⁴

Not surprisingly, this kind of research was geared to prestige and A-class pictures and thus was utilized almost exclusively by the integrated majors and by major independent producers. Among the more vocal supporters of ARI, in fact, were Sam Goldwyn and David Selznick; producers of their stature clearly had the most to gain from the market research strategies being developed in the early 1940s. Goldwyn, in fact, used ARI not only for market research on his own productions but also as a means to publicize his out-spoken condemnation of double billing. Double billing his A-class pictures with lesser product cost Goldwyn revenues and critical prestige, and in a larger sense, in Goldwyn's view, it demeaned the industry.⁵⁵ This view was scarcely shared by others in the industry—nor by a good many outside it. Indeed, the debate about B pictures and double billing, which had been brewing throughout the 1930s, reached the boiling point during the turbulent, uncertain prewar era.

Duals, B's, and the Industry Discourse About Its Audience

As the majors shifted their emphasis to A-class pictures and eased out of low-budget production in 1940-1941, and as the government railed against the foisting of substandard product on both exhibitors and audiences, the industry discourse was increasingly devoted to the "problem" of B movies and double features. As has been seen, duals and Bs did persist, owing to the prevailing market conditions and also to long-standing industry attitudes and practices. In fact, the industry discourse, especially that conducted in the trade journals, focused on the rationale behind B-movie production and double billing, and also on the industry's conception of its market and its customers. Thus, the answer to the rather obvious question, why program "B's" anyway? is most revealing in terms of the industry's governing theories about its audience, about moviegoing, and about the preferences of certain audience segments.

In terms of actual production, it should be noted that B pictures and double billing represented more of a problem for the integrated major studios than for any other area of the industry, and that this problem was both practical and political. It was a practical problem in that the 1940 consent decree and the improving first-run market both compelled the majors to concentrate more heavily on A-class pictures, which did their best business when exhibited on a first-run, singles-only basis. It was a political problem in that the major studio powers had in fact been forcing second-rate product onto unaffiliated theaters via block booking and blind selling for years, and by 1940 the negative fallout from that practice could scarcely be ignored.

Thus, the studios began planning cutbacks in B-picture production in early 1940—even before the defense buildup began to gather steam, in fact, an indication of the importance of the political pressures involved. In January 1940, Variety reported that, given the economic and regulatory situation, "there is no place left in the [majors'] setup for the large number of quickies they've been turning out in the past."⁵⁶ Consequently, Harold Hurley's B unit at Paramount reportedly was cutting its output from seventeen pictures in 1939 to about ten in 1940; Sol Wurtzel at Fox was cutting back from twenty-seven B's in 1939 to about thirteen; Bryan Foy at Warners was cutting back from twenty to ten. And while all three companies were cutting B production in half, they were planning to increase spending to obtain "better writing and more important players" and thus to enhance the production values on B movies. Moreover, Jack Warner claimed that the cutbacks at his studio were "in accordance with the policy of complete 'B' picture elimination."⁵⁷

While the majors actually did scale back B production in 1940-1941, that effort was something of a public relations gambit as well. Whatever the practical and political imperatives involved, the majors could scarcely eliminate B-picture production altogether. Studio production operations and marketing strategies relied on B's and double bills, and the blocks-of-five clause in the consent decree allowed them to continue tying second-rate product to their A-class films. Thus, in late 1941, Variety's Arthur Ungar noted "the so-called abandonment—for publicity purposes, but not actually—of the 'B' class of product." Ungar reported that the majors had upgraded B production via better scripts, directors, and casts. "But as long as Hollywood has to meet the requirements of theatres playing double bills," he observed, "one finds films known as 'second features,' or 'bottom of the bill,' or 'going into slough houses,' never hitting the screens of the top first runs." Ungar also noted that Columbia and Universal, which had not signed the consent decree, still relied heavily on B's; forty-one of Columbia's 1941 releases and thirty-seven of Universal's fell into that category.⁵⁸

There is no question about the persistence—indeed, the prevalence—of double billing in 1940-1941, despite the supposedly negative view of theater owners and audiences and the routine attacks by the Justice Department, Congress, and state and local legislatures. Variety reported that as of July 1940, about 8,700 theaters in America were "dualing," with over 50 percent of all bookings industrywide involving double bills.⁵⁹ The 1941 Film Daily Year Book indicated that 10,350 of the nation's 17,500 theaters regularly double billed, and that half of all theaters relied exclusively on double features.⁶⁰ The single-feature policy tended to be strongest in the major first-run markets throughout the country, and also regionally in the South and Southwest. In general, however, double features were very common, and in fact, an ongoing battle in the Chicago area in 1940 centered on a move by the powerful Balaban and Katz chain to triple bill on a citywide basis after successful experiments with tripling in 1939.^6l

Without question, there were strong sentiments against B's and double features in some industry quarters, particularly among subsequent-run exhibitors. The reasons for exhibitor concern were evident enough. Double features meant dealing with more product and more logistical headaches, not only in terms of programming but also in handling shipping, promotion, and so on. Duals also were considered a drain on possible revenues, particularly if the second movie was a weak B film. Like various other competitive practices developed by subsequent-run theaters during the 1930s—notably giveaways connected with games such as "banko, bingo, and other [box-office] bait"—duals and B's were deemed undesirable but difficult to eliminate.⁶² Who would be the first to pull back? How would audiences respond?

The attitude among producers and the major studios was somewhat more complex. Major independent producers tended to oppose B's and duals, predictably enough, since coupling one of their prestige-level features with a lesser product—especially a B-grade film—diminished both its stature and its income. The major studio-distributors also were voicing a more negative view as they steadily shifted their production and market strategy away from B's and concentrated more heavily on the first-run market; however, they continued to rely on double features in their own theaters. The major-minor and minor studios, meanwhile, continued to rely on B's for most of their output and to focus primarily on double features in the subsequent-run market.

As industry debate over B's and double billing intensified, various market researchers and social scientists addressed the problem in a range of studies; some were commissioned by the MPPDA or by specific producers like Goldwyn, and some were done independently. The first of these studies to be publicized were conducted by Gallup's ARI, and these were widely reported in the trade papers—not only to address the problem but also, thanks to Gallup's knack for self-promotion, to promote interest in ARFs services.

First of all, in 1940 ARI was separating Americans into distinct categories in terms of national region, urban versus rural locale, age, income bracket, and gender. In the case of double features, according to Gallup, the programming practice was most popular in New England and among urban, younger, and lower-income individuals. Specifically, in terms of age, those 6—12 favored double features by 77 percent; the ages of 13—17, by 58 percent; 18-24, by 40 percent; and over age 25, by 32 percent. In other words, the younger the audience, the more inclined it was to prefer double features. In terms of income, 58 percent of those on relief preferred double features; of lower-income people, 53 percent; middle-income, 37 percent; and upper-income, 25 percent. Thus, the lower the audience's income, the greater the appeal of duals. ARI did note that if both pictures were equally good, then the figures would improve for the older and higher-income audiences.⁶³

This statistical data about the preferences for double features could then be compared with other information that Gallup supplied. Gallup's statistics for 1940 also included who was most inclined to attend the movies. Gallup reported that moviegoing dropped after age 19, and that 57 percent of the U.S. population under 30 went to the movies at least once a week. Additionally, the poor and the lower and middle classes went more often than the upper class. In fact, in terms of total admissions, those segments of the audience accounted for 83 percent of ticket sales, although they had much less impact on the total box office since they were more likely to attend lower-cost showings and subsequent-run theaters. Further research indicated that afternoon audiences, "composed largely of housewives and children, want quantity for their money while the evening crowds want 'something good and not too much of it.'" Analyzing these findings, Sam Goldwyn remarked that programming ought to be designed for those who can afford to go, not "by what the children up to seventeen years of age and people on relief like." Gallup's research, however, indicated that those people most inclined to go to the movies were the people who preferred double features. Not surprisingly, exhibitors were prepared to accept such conclusions as confirmation of both their intuition and established trade practices.⁶⁴

Additional research was conducted by Leo Handel's MPRB, and those findings were summarized in Hollywood Looks at Its Audience. Handel summarized the pros and cons of double features:

The reasons most frequently given by those opposing double bills, in order of importance, were: (1) that one or both of the features are likely to be a "poor" picture; (2) that sitting through a double feature is fatiguing and takes too much time; (3) that seeing two full-length pictures is confusing because, as one woman puts it, "you generally think about a picture when you get home and a double feature gets you mixed up." Those who preferred double features gave as their chief reasons: (1) that a double bill gives moviegoers more for their money; (2) if one picture is inferior, the other is likely to be good and in any event adds variety; and (3) a double feature gives those who attend a chance to "Kill more time." (Handel, Hollywood Looks at Its Audience: A Report of Film Audience Research [1950; reprint, New York: Arno, 1976], pp. 132-33)

In 1940-1941, the research findings by ARI, MPRB, and other social scientists reported in the industry trade papers tended to endorse the practice of double billing not only as more popular (relative to single features) but also as more profitable. Thus, any serious reservations about the wisdom of "balanced" and more-for-your-money programming were allayed for the time being.⁶⁵ Indeed, B's were promoted by the minor studios as a means of providing a variation in the genre from the main feature and thus an appearance of more for the customers' money. As Steve Broidy, president of Monogram/Allied Artists, suggested, "Not everybody likes to eat cake. Some people like bread, and even a certain number of people like stale bread rather than fresh bread."⁶⁶

Clearly key factors here were the range of viewing options offered to moviegoers in different kinds of communities and the variety of films available. The Hollywood studio-distributors in 1940 were likely to have only about 250 prints of an A-class movie in simultaneous circulation. So although the industry judged 450 theaters to be metropolitan first-run theaters (large houses in cities with populations of over 100,000 people), one could not count on many choices about where to see the latest Bette Davis or Mickey Rooney film. This problem was alleviated, however, by the number of first-run movies circulating at any one time in major urban markets, since the studios sent anywhere from eight to ten features into national distribution every week and the major markets contained a number of first- and second-run theaters. Thus, while one might not see a new release at a favorite theater, he or she would not have to travel too far or wait too long to see it in another favorable venue.

Those in small-town or rural areas, where perhaps only one or two subsequent-run houses existed within reasonable driving distance, enjoyed fewer options in terms of available movie product. But the double-billing policies and frequent program changes in most subsequent-run theaters offered variety of a different sort—variety in terms of the sheer volume of films being booked in the local theater and the different types of films included in the programs. Although the programming strategy for the exhibitors who booked B films and ran double features was variety, it was important for the industry to acknowledge that while some types of films were of interest to certain subgroups of the audience, others were not.

In fact, the research studies of the early 1940s were an obvious extension of the informal "research" and speculation about audience tastes and preferences conducted by exhibitors since the earliest years of the industry. Exhibitors were well aware of audience resistance to certain types of films, and they provided various means to enable moviegoers to act on their tastes and preferences. By the early 1930s, for example, some theaters had begun to insert screening times in their newspaper ads. In an interesting variation on this effort, a New York theater in 1941 began routinely starting the feature at 9:00 p.m. so that patrons could time their arrival and avoid the B picture if they wished. Another industry analyst noted that sometimes one of the features would be considered inappropriate for children and knowing when it would be on might be useful to families.⁶⁷

Subsequent research throughout the 1940s also tended to confirm the governing industry assumptions about various preconceived audience segments preferring specific types of stories. Much of this research focused on genre preferences. From the beginning of the industry, exhibitors assumed that while different people were attracted to different stars, another significant taste distinction involved genres and story types. Additionally, advertising advice consistently stressed selling to subsets of the mass audience. Those subsets were to be added together through the "balanced" program—based on story type—which would then attract the largest possible number of people. Among the most important constructed audience subsets were children and women.

Since the 1910s and 1920s, it had been common to program for children and women on the assumption that they had specific tastes in story types to which the theaters could appeal.⁶⁸ Furthermore, children and women were considered valuable in two special ways: (1) advertising consultants believed that women led purchase decision-making for a household; and (2) the presence of women and children in the theater gave the establishment an aura of propriety. Other subaudiences supposedly existed: the rural or small-town audiences, for instance, which exhibitors believed favored B-grade Westerns and action pictures.⁶⁹ Differences in terms of gender, income, ethnicity, and race were deemed important as well. By programming for various subgroups, exhibitors were able to hedge their bets. Programs with sufficient variety would appeal to multiple subaudiences; two movies in two different genres would attract more than one audience sub-group. And generally one of the films, for cost purposes alone, fell into the category of the B picture.

While research firms provided the industry with a general view of audiences and of moviegoing, and one which reinforced the industry's own preconceptions, the actual situation was more complex and also more variable than the industry discourse at the time conveyed. Consider, for example, a brief case study of the sales and promotional practices conducted in the fall of 1940 by the Interstate Theater Circuit, a major chain of movie houses affiliated with Paramount and whose market area was Texas.⁷⁰ At the time, the Interstate embarked on a significant deviation from its usual trade practices. Traditionally, the Interstate prided itself on not having succumbed to the double-feature standards of exhibition prevalent elsewhere in the United States. It was one of the few circuits to continue the older pattern, dating back to the 1920s, of playing a single feature along with a large variety of shorts. Thus, it assiduously avoided the B picture, calling the double feature a "virus" in the film business.

However, the Interstate was always alert for new ways to make a profit. Hence, when the manager of the "New Ideal" in Corsicana, Texas, said that movie houses there had the "best week-end business in five months," the Interstate was willing to amend slightly its attitude about B's. The New Ideal was designed as a tactic for remedying the problem of selling B pictures "devoid of box office names." For promoting, as a company memorandum put it, "the little pictures about which we too often say, 'Sure, it's swell! But there's nobody in the cast. How we gonna sell it?'" The New Ideal's solution was to sell the 1940 Universal film La Conga Nights as "the corniest pic ever." This release probably did not mark the beginning of the cult movie, but it has similarities, for the New Ideal did not ask the audience to laugh with the film but to take an ironic stance, appreciating the film's ineptitude.⁷¹

The standard array of tactics used by the New Ideal to promote La Conga Nights, and copied by other enterprising circuit houses, was suggested in Interstate's management newsletter. Popcorn sacks were imprinted with the phrases: "Corn on film!" "Corniest-Funniest Picture Ever Made!" A mock candidate for election to "Assessor & Collector of Laughs—Mr. I. M. Corn," was put on crutches—supposedly he hurt himself laughing—and "called on every home in Corsicana." Ads for the film included drawings of Hugh Herbert, the main actor who played seven roles, with corn coming out of his ear. Other ads continued the theme. The theater was decorated with cornstalks. A series of teaser ads in the local papers personals column told the story of the dangers of watching this film. A contest was held in which the person who could sit through the film without laughing would be given a month's pass. Consolation prizes included a case of corn, a case of cornstarch, a pan of cornbread, and a bottle of corn remover—all of which were tie-ins with local stores.

As successful as this promotion for one B picture might have been, the Interstate chain continued through the 1940s to advocate a high-value A picture combined with a series of shorts as its exhibition strategy rather than the double-feature plan so common elsewhere. The Interstate took the standard line about the disadvantages of double bills that economists had noted early in the 1930s.⁷² For one thing, a typical minimum double-feature program with a short, trailers, and the news would run at least three hours; a single feature film with more shorts could be presented in much less time. Thus, a single-feature program could have four shows a day while the double-feature format could get in only three. The difference was one entire audience. In 1941, one programmer for the Interstate claimed that business at theaters that double-billed was off 10-30 percent compared with the Interstate.

A second disadvantage of the double bill was the recognized lower quality of the second feature, the B picture. In the industry's terms of the 1930s and 1940s, the B picture was defined by its lacks. In terms of content (no performers considered to have star status), length (sixty to seventy minutes running time), in production value (minimal), a B picture, as one Interstate manager politely put it, was "a small picture."⁷³ For the purposes of understanding the functions of the double feature and the B movie within Hollywood, this difference in quality helps explain the continuation of these exhibition strategies during the 1940s in spite of the evident "lacks" of B pictures. A second movie supplied quantity and variety to the program even if the variety came through unintentional "badness." If La Conga Nights was one of the corniest films to be distributed, it was not the only film exhibitors booked for the mere sake of providing an assortment for a spectrum of movie audience tastes. At the end of the 1940s, double features were still regular policy at some 25 percent of theaters and a part-time policy at another 36 percent. Only 39 percent of the houses (down by 2 percent from the reports in 1939) indicated they did single-feature programming only. What had changed were the sources for the second feature, since some of the major firms had moved toward primarily supplying A product.⁷⁴