Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries before Home Video 9780520958579

Citation preview

Hollywood Vault

Hollywood Vault Film Libraries before Home Video

eric hoyt

University of California Press berkeley

los angeles

london

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2014 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hoyt, Eric. Hollywood vault : film libraries before home video / Eric Hoyt. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978–0–520-28263-6 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978–0–520-28264-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 978–0–520-95857-9 (e-book) 1. Motion pictures—United States—Distribution. 2. Motion picture studios—United States—History—20th century. 3. Motion picture industry—United States—Finance. 4. Motion picture film collections—Economic aspects. I. Title. PN1995.9.D57H69 2014 384’.840973—dc23 2013048758 Manufactured in the United States of America 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

For Emily, Rumi, and Liam

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

introduction

1

1. the triangle frauds and the birth of the film library (1910s)

16

2. side business (1920s)

50

3. derivatives and destruction (1930s)

74

4. postwar profit center (1940s)

106

5. negotiating television (1950s)

142

6. seven arts and industry transformation (1960s)

178

Epilogue

195

Notes

203

Bibliography

247

Index

259

Illustrations

figures 1. MGM reissue profits versus total profits by season, 1944–1945 to 1949–1950

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2. Universal 16mm gross revenue, 1936–1952

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tables 1. Median age, rental revenue, and profit of MGM theatrical reissues, 1930–1939

88

2. Estimated volume of U.S. television advertising, 1950–1955

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3. Warner Bros. library television versus theatrical reissue income, 1956–1961

174

ix

Acknowledgments

The researching and writing of Hollywood Vault spanned many life transitions: from graduate student to professor, from Californian to Wisconsinite, and from an existence without kids to life as a “parent of multiples.” I would like to thank the generous people who helped this project (and me) along during the ups and downs. This project began in the Critical Studies Division of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. USC was a wonderful environment in which to write a dissertation. I enjoyed great weather while being close to the archives and surrounded by smart and energetic people. Thank you to my corps of fellow graduate students, especially James Crawford, Kate Fortmueller, Brian Jacobson, Luci Marzola, Casey Riffel, and Brett Service, for always being excellent sounding boards. I was fortunate to have an all-star team of a dissertation committee—Priya Jaikumar, Henry Jenkins, Rick Jewell, and Tara McPherson—who all reshaped my thinking about film libraries and connected me to important career opportunities. I am also grateful to Aniko Imre, David James, Akira Mizuta Lippit, Michael Renov, and Bill Whittington and, over in the Peter Stark Producing Program, Larry Turman, Joe Cohen, and Richard Shepherd. A Provost’s PhD Fellowship from USC’s Graduate School provided generous research funding and enabled me to spend a year writing and parenting in Northern California. I owe my biggest thanks to my dissertation committee chair, Ellen Seiter. Ellen’s incisive comments sharpened my writing and thinking. Her mentorship transformed my career. I think about her unique combination of humility, thoughtfulness, and rigor every time I meet with a graduate student. After graduate school, I hit the jackpot of academic jobs by landing as an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the xi

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University of Wisconsin–Madison. The weather isn’t as good as in Los Angeles, but the community and cheese curds more than compensate. I am grateful to UW-Madison’s Graduate School for providing research funds that enabled the completion of this project and to the PhD students Derek Long and Anthony Tran for their valuable assistance in preparing the final manuscript. Kit Hughes, a PhD student, helped me take the photograph in the vault of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research that is used on the book cover. I especially thank my faculty colleagues in the Media and Cultural Studies and Film areas of the Communication Arts Department: Tino Balio, Maria Belodubrovskaya, David Bordwell, Kelley Conway, Jonathan Gray, Michele Hilmes, Lea Jacobs, Derek Johnson, Vance Kepley Jr., Lori Kido Lopez, Jeremy Morris, J. J. Murphy, Ben Singer, Jeff Smith, and Kristin Thompson. All of them—even some who are technically retired—have either directly aided this project or helped support me during my first two years on the faculty. To paraphrase Blanche DuBois, I have always depended on the kindness of archivists. Sandra Lee Aguilar and Jonathon Auxier at USC’s Warner Bros. Archives and Ned Comstock at USC’s Cinematic Arts Library were vital collaborators in Los Angeles. I am also grateful to the tremendous team at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library, especially Barbara Hall, Val Almendarez, Jenny Romero, and Sandra Archer, and the staffs of the Seaver Center for Western History Research at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History and the three National Archives Records Administration sites I visited, in Riverside, California; College Park, Maryland; and New York City. My thanks also go to Wendy Hagenmaier and Joseph Pomp for taking photographs of documents in Austin and New York City when I was not able to visit research sites in person. Here in Madison, I’m fortunate to be a short walk away from the terrific collections of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR). Thank you to the WCFTR team of Vance Kepley Jr., Maxine Ducey, and Mary Hulsebeck and to Harry Miller at the Wisconsin Historical Society for providing access to the collections. And thank you to Rudy Behlmer, Rick Jewell, Karl Thiede, and Alison Trope for loaning me documents from their personal collections. I could not have completed my dissertation or this book without the help of Tom Kemper and David Pierce, who loaned materials from their collections and read every chapter draft I gave them. Tom offered thoughtful notes on early versions of the manuscript, and I’ve come to regard him as an older brother—a great friend who simultaneously awes me in his abili-

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ties as a film historian, teacher, and parent of young children. David knows more about the history of Hollywood film libraries than anyone else on the planet, and I cannot thank him enough for the insights he offered, mistakes he corrected, and archival documents he shared. Getting to know David and collaborating with him on building the Media History Digital Library has been one of the unexpected joys of this project. I presented portions of this book at four conferences: “Media Fields: Infrastructures” (2009), hosted by the University of California–Santa Barbara, “What Is Film?” (2009), hosted by the University of Oregon, “Rethinking Media Archivism” (2010), hosted by the National Library of Sweden, and the 2013 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in Chicago. The introduction and the epilogue contain sections that were first published in “The Future of Selling the Past: Studio Libraries in the 21st Century,” Jump Cut 52 (Summer 2010). Thank you to the conference organizers, journal editors, and audiences—your feedback made this project stronger. I feel fortunate to belong to a broad community of film and media scholars who are also interested in questions of industry history and media circulation. I am grateful to Emily Carman, Peter Decherney, Philip Drake, Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Nitin Govil, Barbara Klinger, Regina Longo, Paul McDonald, John McElwee, Ross Melnick, Toby Miller, Nina O’Brien, Jan Olsson, Lisa Parks, Alisa Perren, Anne Helen Petersen, Jennifer Porst, Tom Schatz, David Shepard, Katherine Spring, Shelley Stamp, Daniel Steinhart, Haidee Wasson, Mark Williams, and Chuck Wolfe for stimulating conversations and perfectly timed words of encouragement. Thanks especially to Charles Acland and Jennifer Holt for their enthusiastic responses to the manuscript and constructive suggestions for how to improve it. It has been a pleasure to work with University of California Press on producing this book. Thank you to Mary Francis, editor extraordinaire, for so many fun and productive conversations and for guiding me through the publishing process. Juliana Froggatt carefully copyedited the manuscript and helped me more clearly articulate several key points. I also appreciate the input of Kim Hogeland, the Editorial Committee reader, and everyone else on the UC Press team who has had a hand in bringing this book to life. Reaching deeper into my personal vault: Scott Curtis, Paul Edwards, Chuck Kleinhans, and Michael Sherry all changed my life when I was an undergraduate at Northwestern University. I am grateful for the potential they saw in me back then and for the support they continue to offer. Finally, I extend my supreme thanks and love to my family. I would not be the person I am today without my father and mother, Christopher and

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Elizabeth Hoyt, who always encouraged me to pursue my passions and modeled the values of empathy and hard work. Thank you to my sister, Whitney, and brother, Will, for everything they teach me about life, and to my in-laws, Carl and Debby Hagenmaier, for their unwavering support. To my grandparents both living and deceased—Bill Rutledge, Donna Rutledge, Stuart Hoyt, and Barbara Kreuzer—I am deeply grateful for all you’ve given me. This book is dedicated to my wife, Emily Hagenmaier, and our two children, Liam Oliver Hoyt and Rumi Boone Hoyt, who are about to turn three years old as I finish this project. Emily, thank you for your love, your partnership, and always believing in me. Liam and Rumi, we completed this project together: I wrote the first draft of chapter 1 while you were growing inside your mother, outlined chapters 2 and 3 while Rumi slept on my chest, and edited the final manuscript while you brightened our driveway with chalk. You have shown me how much more to the world there is than academia while also providing my motivation to finish this book. I can’t wait to watch City Lights, Meet Me in St. Louis, and the other treasures of Hollywood’s vault with you.

Introduction

In 2004, a consortium of Sony, Comcast, and three private equity firms made what looked like a safe investment: they bought a film library, acquiring MGM for five billion dollars in a leveraged buyout. The consortium intended to produce and distribute new content, but the group would not have made the deal without the stable cash flow of MGM’s library of more than four thousand films and thousands of hours of television programming.1 The MGM library had been a national news story two decades earlier, when, in 1986, Ted Turner purchased it from Kirk Kerkorian for roughly $1.1 billion—a sum that most commentators at the time thought was outrageously high. Within several years, however, Turner had proved the skeptics wrong, amortizing his purchase through colorization, cable distribution, and home video sales.2 Turner absorbed MGM’s library of classics, including The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), into Turner Broadcasting Systems, which he eventually sold to Time Warner for $7.5 billion.3 Although the post-Turner MGM had lost the Golden Age classics, the studio still boasted an impressive library—comprising MGM’s post-1986 output, the United Artists library, and a patchwork of acquired libraries, including Orion, AIP, Filmways, and PolyGram. By all outward appearances, the 2004 leveraged buyout of MGM looked like a low-risk investment—DVD and cable distribution offered valuable ways to monetize old content, and MGM’s library generated more than five hundred million dollars in cash for both 2007 and 2008.4 MGM was not the only studio enjoying high profit margins from the business of content libraries in the early 2000s.5 Edward Jay Epstein reports that Time Warner grossed more than two billion dollars in 2009 by distributing its library—which contains more than six thousand feature films and 1

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twenty thousand hours of television programs—across U.S. and global television (in other words, this does not even count the home video business).6 Studios use the term library to describe the films and television programs they own that have already gone through the first cycle of distribution, which, in the case of films, encompasses separate windows for a theatrical release, video on demand, home video, pay television, network television, and syndicated television. After five to seven years, a particular film’s cost has already been fully depreciated as an asset, the executive responsible for the project has been either promoted or fired, and the movie has generated the vast bulk of its ultimate earnings. Any new money to come in as library value is largely profit. Multiply this by the huge volume of library titles— a fraction of which become evergreens, which perform exceptionally well after the first cycle—and the studio can add hundreds of millions of dollars each year to its bottom line. Unlike with a major theatrical release, which requires tens of millions in marketing expenses, there are relatively few costs involved in bringing library titles to market. As Epstein has noted, these libraries give the established Hollywood studios a comparative advantage against any new firms entering the marketplace, which lack the annual library revenues that help cover overhead and offset any disastrous new productions.7 How did we get here? When did old movies become valuable? How has the marketplace for film libraries changed? And what have been the consequences? These are the questions that drove the research and writing of this book. The answers bear little resemblance to the narrative I initially imagined. The history of studio libraries is not a linear tale of worthless assets incrementally increasing in value through the introduction of new technologies. Instead, it is a chronicle of starts and stops, buyer demand and studio resistance, and, most of all, a shifting media and cultural marketplace. The 2004 MGM leveraged buyout did not go as expected. Whereas library revenue during the first few years generated enough cash to cover the studio’s overhead and interest payments, it decreased significantly in 2009.8 The following year, MGM filed for bankruptcy. Industry commentators noted that its buyers did not anticipate the drop in DVD and home video revenue.9 In this view of events, Sony, Comcast, and the private equity firms erred by assuming that the future would resemble the past. But this is not a satisfying explanation. As I will demonstrate in the chapters ahead, MGM’s buyers erred by assuming the future would resemble the recent past. If private equity had understood the full history of film libraries, then they might have charted a different course.

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historical scope, argument, and intervention Hollywood Vault is the story of how the business of film libraries emerged and evolved, spanning from the silent feature era to the sale of feature libraries to television. The history begins in the mid-1910s, when the star system and other developments prompted a market for old films featuring current stars. Although the Triangle Film Corporation extensively exploited the reissue market in the late 1910s, the companies we’ve come to know as the major Hollywood studios generally subordinated the reissue of films in the 1920s and 1930s. Reissues interfered with the studios’ more pressing goals, of gaining market share and maximizing ticket sales in the studioowned first-run theaters. After the transition to sound, the reissue market declined, but the studios used libraries for the production of remakes and other derivatives. The turning point came in the mid-to-late 1940s, when changes in American culture and an industry-wide recession convinced the studios to employ their libraries as profit centers through the use of theatrical reissues. This book concludes with the period when, according to conventional wisdom, the history of the film libraries’ economic significance began— with the distribution of old Hollywood films on television. In contrast to the studios’ defensive uses of libraries and reissues in the 1940s, the intermediary distributors Matty Fox and Eliot Hyman used the growing market of television in the 1950s to aggressively harness libraries as foundations for cross-media expansion, laying a blueprint that increased in importance in the 1960s and continues today. By the late 1960s, the television marketplace and the exploitation of film libraries had become so valuable that they prompted conglomerates to acquire the studios. I have structured this book, then, as a historical narrative with a beginning (film libraries in the 1910s turned into an industry problem), middle (the Hollywood studios in the 1940s embraced their libraries as profit centers), and end (film libraries prompted conglomerates to acquire the studios). This particular narrative ends in 1970, but as I have already suggested and will revisit in the epilogue, the early history of film libraries offers many lessons for the contemporary digital marketplace. Hollywood Vault’s most important lesson for understanding studio libraries, past and present, is that the role of technology has been improperly understood. I seek to overturn the pervasive assumption that film libraries have gained value chiefly through the introduction of new technologies. In Movies at Home: How Hollywood Came to Television, for instance, Kerry Segrave describes the “Hollywood throwaway mentality”

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that “once a movie had made its way through the theatres in its first to third runs, it was finished, no other possibilities existed for it, at least prior to television.” Segrave subsequently claims that “only Disney had a reissue policy in which films were recycled back into cinemas every seven years or so” and that “it was generally agreed that the film capital had indeed ‘neglected’ the reissue market.”10 In her otherwise excellent essay on the 1920s little cinema movement, Anne Morey assumes that the film industry “dismissed the economic value of its vaults until television revealed what might be made of them.”11 These claims are simply inaccurate. As I argue in chapter 4, film libraries became vital profit centers for the Hollywood studios during the post–World War II theatrical reissue boom, a full decade before the studios sold their feature films to television. In fact, the market for film reissues was so large in the mid-to-late 1940s that the Hollywood unions vowed to take action against the “reissue problem” that they believed was depriving them of employment. In the absence of any thorough history of film libraries, it is easy to fall back on the assumption that old films were throwaways before the introduction of television and an array of subsequent technologies, including home video, colorization, DVD, and digital streaming. Film libraries became valuable not because of the introduction of new technologies but because of the emergence and growth of specific markets. From 1915 to 1970, these markets were sometimes tied to new technologies, such as 16mm film and television. For most of this period, however, existing 35mm film projectors were the most financially significant technology for exploiting libraries. New technologies are important for the possibilities they afford, but a dynamic marketplace determines their adoption and impact. Once we come to see the history of film libraries as rooted in markets, we are obliged to understand the full range of marketplace participants. Most of the contemporary literature about content libraries—including some of my earlier writings—suffers from focusing too heavily on the supply side.12 The industry press asks supply-side questions: How can studios exploit libraries across new technologies? How can they adopt new technologies in a way that creates new revenue streams without cannibalizing traditional markets? These questions, while important, are insufficient. The answers they produce offer a top-down perspective on the industry, limiting our focus to the producers and suppliers: the studios. For most of the period from 1915 to 1970, however, the demand of audiences and, especially, business buyers such as motion picture exhibitors and TV stations drove the library business. In the early 1940s, the exhibitor demand for old

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movies actually outpaced the supply. Instead of focusing on the supply side, I analyze the full ecology of the media industries, framing the business of film libraries as a dynamic marketplace of producers, intermediaries, labor, business buyers, and audiences. Hollywood Vault draws from and contributes to historical scholarship on the American media industries and the growing subfield of media industry studies. No previous book has examined the history of Hollywood film libraries, but my study intersects with a number of film and television histories. It is particularly indebted to the work of Christopher Anderson, Tino Balio, William Boddy, David Bordwell, Douglas Gomery, Michele Hilmes, Jennifer Holt, Richard B. Jewell, Tom Kemper, Derek Kompare, David Pierce, Alexander Russo, Thomas Schatz, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson.13 In addition to providing essential secondary sources for my research, these scholars offer models of media industry historiography. By examining the full ecology of the media industries, we also gain new insights into cinema’s cultural history, particularly American culture’s shifting relationship to old films. Peter Decherney, William M. Drew, Caroline Frick, Jennifer Horne, Barbara Klinger, Dana Polan, Anthony Slide, Eric Smoodin, Alison Trope, and Haidee Wasson have all analyzed the changing cultural value of old works of cinema.14 Although I discuss broad cultural shifts and the responses of critics and audiences to old movies, Hollywood Vault belongs more to the field of industrial history than to cultural history, as it focuses on the economic value of film libraries in a marketplace context. As I argue, though, the media industries include a diverse range of participants, who have frequently disagreed about the best and appropriate uses for film libraries. By moving away from a supply-side view, we gain a more nuanced perspective on the way old films have circulated in American culture. We also avoid drawing a simple contrast between the studio owners of films versus nonprofit institutions, critics, and audiences. In addition to the work of film and media scholars, I draw from the field of economics. The works of Michael E. Porter and Richard E. Caves have especially influenced my analysis of the ecology of the media industries. Porter’s seminal 1980 book, Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors, offers a guide to the “structural analysis of industries,” stressing the importance of “relating a company to its environment.” He argues that an industry’s “five competitive forces—entry, threat of substitution, bargaining power of buyers, bargaining power of suppliers, and rivalry among current competitors—reflect the fact that competition in an industry goes well beyond the established players.”15 We cannot understand a firm’s environment, in other words, by studying simply the

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established players, such as the major film studios and television networks. We need to account for the entire ecology of the industry, the full range of its marketplace participants and potential entrants. In Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce, Caves combines structural analysis with contract theory to identify the ways in which creative industries are distinguishable from other industries. Especially salient to the study of film libraries are his insights into how creative industries grapple with questions of performance uncertainty, storage costs, collecting rents, and internalizing versus externalizing distribution.16 Porter and Caves demonstrate that if we want to understand Hollywood libraries, we need to look beyond the studios and take stock of the intermediaries, business buyers, and other marketplace participants. Porter and Caves offer excellent methods of economic analysis and for asking questions about media industry ecology. What they do not provide are the answers to those questions. Historical answers come from evidence, not economic theories. My evidence is in numerous archives and historical trade papers. Wherever possible, I triangulate these archival and journalistic sources—filling in gaps, testing claims off one another, and striving to present a history that is both rich and accurate. In my analysis and writing, I prioritize the most important developments and players in the history of Hollywood film libraries. An industrial history tracking every single reissue or library deal would be tedious—and endless. This book’s emphasis on theatrical reissues rather than 16mm or other small-gauge film stocks reflects the fact that the former were far more economically significant than the latter throughout the period of study. Fortunately, the recent surge in nontheatrical film scholarship is already providing insights into the networks and cultures of 16mm film circulation.17

concepts and themes for understanding the uses of a film library The six chapters that follow track the ways in which film libraries have changed in value, concentrating especially on how marketplace participants have used them. What constitutes a library use depends on the subject’s position in the marketplace. A studio that owns a library considers different uses than an exhibitor that is considering buying (or, more accurately, renting) films from a library. Audiences, critics, government regulators, and labor groups may attempt to control or influence the uses of libraries. Out of the many uses and users, though, some have proved to be especially consequential. Throughout Hollywood Vault, I return to five concepts and

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themes central to the business uses of film libraries: the copy and the derivative, strategic industry functions and industry specificity, innovations from the margins, the demand side of business buyers and audiences, and labor’s struggle for compensation and control. From the standpoint of a copyright owner, all commercial uses of a film library can be distilled into one of two categories: the copy and the derivative. My distinction between them stems from U.S. copyright law, which in fact grants motion picture copyright owners five exclusive rights: to reproduce the work in copies, to prepare derivative uses of the work, to distribute copies, to perform the work publicly, and to display the work publicly.18 For the purpose of analyzing film libraries, however, I have chosen to bundle together the rights to reproduce, distribute, perform, and display works as part of the copy. If you own the copyright to a film, you exclusively control the right to circulate copies of the work for the duration of that copyright. The copy circulates through theatrical reissues, 16mm rentals, and television broadcasts. However, copyright owners also control the rights to create derivatives—works that use substantial portions of the copyrighted material. Derivative uses for film libraries include remakes and stock footage. Importantly, derivatives receive copyright protection as new works; their copyrights can live on even after the underlying material enters the public domain. The line between a copy and a derivative is not always clear. While a straightforward film-to-video transfer creates a copy that simply exists on a different format, the colorization of a black-and-white film creates a derivative work entitled to new copyright protections (the legal reasoning is that the process, though repugnant to cinephiles, involves creative decisions about what colors to apply).19 Despite the ambiguity, distinguishing between the two forms helps us to identify the ways that a media company puts its library to use. Throughout this book, I track shifts in which use— distributing copies or producing derivatives—the studios have considered more important. In the early 1930s, for instance, the studios valued their libraries primarily for the production of derivatives—remakes, shorts, and cartoons based on one or more copyrights owned by the studio. In the late 1940s, on the other hand, the studios valued their libraries for the low-cost, high-margin business of distributing reissues (copies). Whether choosing to distribute copies or produce derivatives, library owners must consider the industrial functions of these uses and how library exploitation may impact existing strategies. A comparison between the film library and the publishing backlist helps to clarify this point. In a broad economic sense, film libraries and publishing backlists are similar. All

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copyright industries incur high fixed costs for the first unit of production and low marginal costs for reproduction. Despite this similarity, the business of film libraries developed and functions differently than that of backlists. Since the late eighteenth century, backlists have served as barriers to entry against potential competitors and low-cost, low-risk profit centers for publishers. In contrast, the Hollywood studio system developed other strategies to perform these same industrial functions—most notably, vertical integration, B-movie production, and block booking. Furthermore, the studios deliberately subordinated the reissue of films during the 1920s and 1930s in order to concentrate on maximizing market share and the profitability of their first-run theaters, which carried high fixed costs. It was not until the post–World War II industry recession that the studios turned toward their libraries as profit centers. Chapter 2 further analyzes the differences between the film library and the publishing backlist. The comparison demonstrates that elements of two different industries that appear similar may play entirely different functions in the context of those industries. It also shows why the business of film libraries requires its own history and cannot be understood simply as an extension of the backlist. Because the most successful Hollywood studios were vertically integrated corporations that subordinated the business of reissues in order to advance more important strategic objectives, the major innovations in the business of film libraries have come from the industry’s margins. The term margins is, of course, relative. In the present context, I use it as a way to group the second-tier studios and intermediary distributors that introduced new methods for exploiting library copies. Chapter 1 profiles Harry Aitken, who, after running the Triangle Film Corporation into the ground, monetized his library through retitling and reissuing William S. Hart films. In chapter 4, I provide a case study of postwar Universal Pictures, one of the “Little Three” studios that did not own theaters. In contrast to the more conservative MGM, Universal aggressively exploited its libraries across media—creating a subsidiary, run by Matty Fox, that acquired 16mm film libraries and distributed certain titles to nontheatrical venues and television. In addition to second-tier studios, the most important innovators in the library business have been intermediary distributors. Although this category includes nontheatrical film services, I focus most of my attention on the distributors that have serviced movie theaters and television stations. These intermediaries obtained feature films by purchasing or licensing them from independent producers, who were more incentivized than the studios to exploit their old assets, because they had no distribution infrastructure or exhibition business that they needed to prioritize. During World War II, the

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box office success of two intermediary distributors, Astor and Film Classics, persuaded the major studios to abandon their temporary policy of not reissuing films and instead imitate the intermediary distributors by prepackaging double features of old films. In the 1950s, the first two major Hollywood film libraries reached television, through the innovative buying and selling methods of Matty Fox (who obtained the RKO library) and Eliot Hyman (who purchased the Warner Bros. library). Fox believed that pay television would transform the business of film libraries, though he sold the rights to the RKO library long before this occurred. Hyman recognized that the value of film libraries for television could provide the financing mechanism (through cash flow and borrowing base) to grow a small company into a major Hollywood studio. In pursuing this vision, he created the blueprint for the uses of the modern conglomerate content library. No matter their cleverness, the intermediary distributors would have had no business to innovate were it not for the demand of buyers. For most of the period from 1915 to 1970, the needs of business buyers—most notably, motion picture exhibitors and television stations—drove the business of film libraries. Motion picture exhibitors demanded old movies not as an expression of cinephilia but as a conservative business strategy. As I explore in the first four chapters, exhibitors rented reissues and revivals for a fraction of the price of a new film. Additionally, old movies were attractive to exhibitors because of their predictability: an old picture’s star power, popularity, and merit were known in advance, unlike those of a new release. The needs of local television stations for filmed content in the late 1940s and early 1950s led to the development of a similar marketplace for old films, even though TV stations prior to 1956 lacked access to most of the top Hollywood features. Exhibitors and television stations demanded old movies to serve their business needs, but they were ultimately in the business of entertaining audiences. In addition to business buyers, we need to consider the industry’s end users (though for the sake of readability, I generally use the more human-sounding audiences over end users). Since the rise of the star system in the early-to-mid-1910s, movie fans have sought access to the old films of their favorite stars, preceding critics as proponents of old film screenings. In the 1910s and 1920s, most critics believed that rapid developments in the art of film rendered most old movies inherently inferior to new ones. They were more likely to discourage than encourage the watching of old films. Critical attitudes toward older films warmed in the years following the transition to sound. And in the 1940s, the demand from both audiences and critics for old films underwent a noticeable shift—moving from the fringes of fandom toward the mainstream. This was part of

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broader wartime and postwar cultural turns toward nostalgia. When old films reached television in the late 1940s and 1950s, the willingness of audiences to stay up late and watch “bad” movies provoked condescending remarks from critics, leading the Chicago Daily Tribune to wryly remark, “Nobody except the public likes movies on TV.”20 Business buyers anticipated the demands of audiences for certain types of older films and sometimes solicited their input. Postwar revival theaters encouraged participation by inviting audience members to cast votes for the old films they wanted to see. Audiences gradually obtained noncommercial means to access old films—such as the Museum of Modern Art’s Film Library and the growth of film societies and college film courses following World War II. Yet the reach of these nonprofit alternatives was small compared to those of commercial mediums of motion picture exhibition and television. Small-gauge film libraries, such as the 16mm and 8mm Kodascope Library, offered another means of access. For the film lover fortunate enough to own a 16mm or 8mm projector and to possess enough disposable income to rent prints, the small-gauge market offered the possibility of full control over film programming—limited, of course, to whatever titles the catalog offered. Despite the rise of nonprofit and small-gauge alternatives, however, from 1915 to 1970, most Americans encountered old films while attending commercial movie theaters and, later, while watching television. These audiences participated in the commercial marketplace for film libraries, demanding that business buyers obtain specific types of old movies. As business buyers and audiences demanded access to old movies, Hollywood labor groups advocated for their own needs. “Our industry is one of the few in the world where the talents and skills of its workers, preserved on strips of celluloid, can be used repeatedly without any remuneration to the possessors of those talents and skills,” the screenwriter Lester Cole said in 1947.21 At the time—a full nine years before Hollywood’s feature libraries reached television—the Screen Writers Guild was leading the other Hollywood guilds and unions in an effort to obtain compensation for their members for the reissue of their films. Even before Hollywood’s unionization in the 1930s, star actors negotiated for profit participation arrangements that ensured they would receive payment for the reuse of their work. Hollywood labor demanded residuals before the invention of television. For some stars and directors, the stakes of reuse went far beyond money. As chapters 1 and 2 discuss, William S. Hart and Douglas Fairbanks both argued that Triangle’s retitling and excerpting of their films would damage their artistic reputations. The same argument resurfaced with greater force during the campaign that film directors led against television editing in the

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1960s. Due to the need to focus on other developments of the library business, I limit my examinations of Hollywood labor to subsections in most of the chapters. Nevertheless, the workers who built the films in Hollywood’s vault are an essential part of this story. We need to recognize that just as the history of film libraries did not start with the introduction of new technologies, the history of labor’s demand for residual payments and moral rights also has a much longer legacy—one fundamentally about power and equity.

organization and chapter descriptions Hollywood Vault is organized across six chapters. Each focuses on the business of film libraries in a particular decade—chapter 1 examines the 1910s, chapter 2 the 1920s, chapter 3 the 1930s, chapter 4 the 1940s, chapter 5 the 1950s, and chapter 6 the 1960s. The decade/chapter approach is, to be sure, an imperfect periodization scheme. However, I’ve found that it allows for analyses of the most important historical developments while providing the reader with a clear sense of when and where they stand at any moment in this six-decade history. All of the chapters combine the synoptic with the specific, pairing broad descriptions of the marketplace with case studies that examine how certain companies responded to and acted on the business environment. In chapter 1, “The Triangle Frauds and the Birth of the Film Library,” I explore the historical moment when film libraries first gained commercial value and provoked controversy both inside and outside the industry. In the mid-1910s, four developments caused the value of film negatives, the basis for reproducing prints, to greatly increase: the growth of motion picture copyright law, the rise of the star system, the growth of the feature film, and the innovation of new distribution infrastructures. In 1917, the financially troubled Triangle Film Corporation was the first major film company of this era to strategically exploit its film library. Through a subsidiary, Triangle retitled old William S. Hart pictures and licensed them to subdistributors, who rented them to “snipers”—small exhibitors that opened an old film of a star whose new film was premiering in town. In response, the Federal Trade Commission investigated and passed a landmark ruling limiting the uses of a copyrighted film. The reissue business, however, was not limited to the supply side. Groups of buyers (small exhibitors) and end users (movie fans) demanded the reissue of old films. The chapter concludes by looking at how Triangle’s founder, Harry Aitken, used his company’s film library to perpetrate a three-million-dollar investment fraud.

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In chapter 2, “Side Business,” I analyze how changes in industry structure, taste culture, and technology contained film libraries to a side business throughout most of the 1920s. The industry’s decade-long shift toward vertical integration, matched with limited audience demand, ensured that film libraries and reissues remained subordinate to the studios’ core business. Only a company on the margins of the industry, such as Triangle, would position the library at the center of its business. Additionally, critics, audiences, and industry workers all participated in the creation of a taste sensibility that regarded entertainment films of the past as inherently inferior to the new productions of the 1920s. Stars appropriated these critical arguments as they continued their legal fight against the reissue of their earlier films. Technology had the most complex relationship of all to the library. On the one hand, new technologies for home exhibition, such as 16mm and 9.5mm film, held the promise of offering new platforms that could enhance the value of old films. On the other hand, those new technologies threatened the business of theatrical moviegoing, including the business of theatrical reissues. Ultimately, the home cinema technologies failed to gain market traction. And the introduction of sound technology toward the end of the decade led to the most meaningful change. The transition to sound did not destroy the value of silent film libraries, but it did transform them—from collections of properties that could be profitably recirculated as copies to collections of properties that could be used for the production of derivatives. In chapter 3, “Derivatives and Destruction,” I survey the markets for copies and derivatives in the 1930s in order to understand Warner Bros.’ decision-making process in destroying hundreds of film negatives. The primary derivative markets were for remakes (which boomed in number) and stock footage. Warner Bros., in fact, specialized in producing partial remakes that included extensive footage from silent films. The primary market for copies was the domestic reissue market, which grew in the mid-1930s due to exhibitor demand for cheap double feature product. Three smaller markets for copies also developed in this period: the international reissue market, the 16mm market, and the institutional market, led by the Museum of Modern Art’s Film Library. The chapter concludes with a case study of library destruction. Documents at the University of Southern California’s Warner Bros. Archives reveal that the studio systematically went through its silent library, identifying films with no reissue value, extracting any stock footage that might be of use, and destroying whatever remained. The biggest selection criterion, though, was whether or not Warner Bros. possessed the copyright to the film. Fearing potential lawsuits from independent producers demanding the

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return of their films, the studio chose to save films that it no longer owned and destroy films that it owned completely. In chapter 4, “Postwar Profit Center,” I argue that the mid-to-late 1940s marked a turning point in the history of film libraries. As the movie industry entered a postwar period of decline, studios reissued films theatrically at an unprecedented rate. Between 1947 and 1950, roughly one out of every four films on American screens was an old movie. In analyzing the financial data of multiple studios, we clearly see that although these reissues generated only modest revenues, they yielded high profits—making the difference, in some cases, between a profitable year and a losing one. Film libraries had finally come to occupy the industry position that backlists had long held in the book-publishing world: a low-cost, low-risk profit center. Old films, like literature, also benefited from a turn toward the library in American culture—critics and audiences expressed both nostalgia for works of the prewar years and a desire to reevaluate them. Unlike in publishing, however, the talent of the films received no compensation for the reissuing of their work. Hollywood labor demanded residual payments for theatrical reissues and, soon after, television broadcasts. After setting up the industrial and cultural contexts of the postwar reissue boom, I offer case studies of how two different studios navigated the marketplace. Vertically integrated MGM adopted a conservative library strategy—using a handful of “quality” reissues each year to enhance its profitability but never seeking revenue streams beyond theatrical distribution and exhibition. Universal, on the other hand, owned no theaters and employed a far more aggressive library strategy, exploiting its old films through reissues and a subsidiary responsible for 16mm and television distribution. Universal flooded the marketplace with its old films, angering theater owners, labor groups, and the other studios. In chapter 5, “Negotiating Television,” I examine the initial movement of Hollywood film libraries to television by analyzing the two most important film-to-TV syndicators: Matty Fox and Eliot Hyman. These men worked together and formed a library in the early 1950s by pooling their collections of films. They were also competitors, with each attempting to outmaneuver the other to buy the RKO library (Fox ultimately prevailed, though Hyman acquired the even more valuable Warner Bros. library just months later). Beyond a chronicle of rivalry, though, my analysis of Fox and Hyman examines the innovative methods they used to buy, sell, and leverage libraries. Additionally, I explore the demand of TV stations for feature films, as well as the reluctance of the major networks and studios to allow old films to reach traditional broadcast television.

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Finally, chapter 6, “Seven Arts and Industry Transformation,” examines the transformation of the film-to-TV marketplace and these entertainment industries in the 1960s and how one company, Seven Arts, participated in these transformations. I begin by analyzing the industry landscape at the start of the decade and how Hyman positioned his new company, Seven Arts, to become Hollywood’s biggest movies-to-TV distributor. Seven Arts also had a theatrical reissue unit, and by comparing the internal files of the reissue department to those of the television department, we see how the television market far exceeded the theatrical reissue market, which lost significance but never fully disappeared. I also discuss how Hollywood labor groups negotiated for residual payments and how Hollywood directors took legal action to try to prevent their films from being cut for TV. Finally, I profile Seven Arts’ 1967 acquisition of Warner Bros. and conclude by arguing that Kinney National’s 1969 acquisition of Warner Bros.–Seven Arts, along with the conglomerate takeovers of Paramount and United Artists, marked a sea change in the history of the American media industries. These deals hinged on the perceived value of film assets. Wall Street likes undervalued stocks and stable streams of revenue; the film studios, with their libraries, seemed to offer both. Film libraries, subordinated by the studios in the 1920s, had finally come to dominate them. The history of film libraries is the intertwined stories of industry transformation and cultural access. The Hollywood studio system initially subordinated film libraries, then changed course during the industry’s post– World War II recession by defensively using libraries as profit centers. The innovations of intermediary television distributors created a new business model, one that deployed libraries aggressively as foundations for the expansion of an entertainment corporation’s reach. This business model hinged on the stable revenue streams from televising libraries, which attracted the interest of Wall Street and eventually prompted conglomerates to purchase studios to acquire their film assets. Through every step of this industry transformation, the American public’s access to film history has changed. In the early twenty-first century (a period that I discuss in the epilogue), consumers have grown accustomed to media products promising high levels of access and control. We buy access to streaming library services, such as Netflix, and build personal libraries by purchasing DVDs, Blu-Rays, and digital files (which many consumers opt not to purchase but download, collect, and trade anyway). From 1915 to 1970, some film fans owned 16mm projectors and scoured mail-order catalogs for the relatively small number of available Hollywood features. Most audiences, however, lacked this level of control and instead depended on one

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of two types of business buyers—movie theaters and television stations— to obtain access to old films. We know a great deal about the commercial film industry that first produced, distributed, and exhibited King Kong (1933), Gone with the Wind (1939), and Casablanca (1943). What follows is an account of the parallel commercial media industry that delivered them to audiences the third, tenth, and twentieth times—and probably the time you first saw them too.

1. The Triangle Frauds and the Birth of the Film Library (1910s)

In 1920, William C. McIntire of the Rose Theatre in Fayetteville, North Carolina, wrote a letter to William S. Hart, one of the world’s biggest movie stars. “STARS MAKE A MISTAKE NOT HAVING THE YEAR, STAMPED ON EVERY FOOT OF FILM, And include in CONTRACTS AFTER TWO YEARS ALL OLD PRINTS MUST BE DESTROYED NOT RE ISSUED that is the JUNK killing the business. I have a lot of your old RE ISSUED pictures to meet as COMPETITION in my town.”1 Fayetteville had turned into a nest of “snipers”—the industry’s term for an exhibitor who cheaply booked one of a star’s old pictures to open the same week that the star’s expensive new production opened down the street.2 Hart did not need McIntire’s letter to know that old films were a problem. From 1917 to 1920, he had engaged in a series of legal disputes to exert control over the manner in which his old films circulated. McIntire, in fact, wrote to Hart in response to an advertisement the star had placed in Exhibitor’s Trade Review warning that the “bootleggers of the industry are at it again. Let us hit them right between the horns and prove our gratitude to that motion picture public which supports us.”3 The “bootleggers” whom Hart identified were distributors trafficking in retitled old films. Some distributors had legally obtained the films from their owners; other exchanges circulated pirated prints. Hart’s struggle resulted in a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation that established an important precedent— boundaries for the exploitation of film libraries. McIntire supported Hart’s campaign against reissues, and he wanted the star to push it even further. The correspondence from McIntire to Hart challenges our common assumptions about the value of old movies in cinema’s silent era. We tend to imagine a growth narrative in which old films were once considered worthless, then consistently rose in value due to the emergence of new 16

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technologies, such as television and home video, and new standards of critical appreciation. In popular histories and movies, such as Hugo (2011), we witness the destruction of old films. Yes, it is true that most producers took advantage of the roughly twenty cents per pound they could earn by recycling old positive prints that were worn out or no longer needed.4 Accountants in the 1910s and 1920s also fully depreciated films as assets within twelve months of release.5 It is also true that some producers considered the underlying negatives of their old films to be worthless, especially if the films lacked stars or production value. However, McIntire’s proposal to destroy all star-driven films after two years speaks to a different marketplace reality. He perceived reissued old films as a competitive threat to the new ones. He wanted to destroy old films not because they were worthless but precisely because they still held market value. Hart’s struggles, three FTC cases, and many of the industry’s sniping problems of the period emerged because of the Triangle Film Corporation. Triangle and its successors, more than any other producer of the silent era, exploited their library extensively and widely. In the process, Triangle perpetrated both consumer and financial frauds. The FTC investigated the consumer fraud and unfair competition practices of a secretive Triangle enterprise called W.H. Productions, which retitled Hart’s old films and sold them to states rights exhibitors. W.H. Productions was simultaneously part of a financial fraud carried out by Triangle’s founder, Harry Aitken. Aitken’s fraud and self-dealing resulted in a shareholder lawsuit and illustrated the way in which film negatives, as theoretically worthless assets, were ripe for financial manipulation. In her recent book Saving Cinema, Caroline Frick insightfully warns against assuming that silent-era producers did not value their old films. “Although apocryphal narratives of film preservation depict an easy villain in the studio decisions and policies that purposefully destroyed superfluous reels of film to reclaim silver before 1927,” Frick writes, “the full story of how many films remain from cinema’s first decades is much more complicated and difficult to piece together.”6 In this chapter, I attempt to piece together one part of the story. It begins before the creation of Triangle, when several forces converged that forever changed the value of a film negative.

transforming film’s value: copyright, the star system, and the feature film Hart resented Triangle’s program of reissues. The same historical developments that had turned him into a rich man, however, enabled the birth of a

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market for his old movies. Between roughly 1903 and 1915, four major developments fundamentally altered the value of a film negative, the basis for reproducing positive film prints. These were the growth of motion picture copyright law, the rise of the feature film, the dominance of the star system, and the emergence of new distribution infrastructures. In 1916, a Price Waterhouse and Company accountant noted that the previous several years had witnessed a sea change: a shift from the era of a “cheap negative”—in which the cost of making positive prints exceeded the cost of the negative from which they were based—to the era of the “high cost negative,” in which creating the film negative cost far more than striking positive prints.7 By briefly examining each of the four contributing developments, we can better understand the emergence of the “high cost negative,” the source of Hart’s riches and problems. An absence of copyright regulations and an abundance of unauthorized copying marked the moving pictures’ early years, from 1895 to 1903. “Copying was as much an industry practice as it was an industry problem,” the film scholar Jane Gaines writes.8 Motion picture companies acquired the positive prints of competitors’ films and “duped” negatives from them. The “duper,” in industry slang, then used the dupe negative to make positive prints, which were distributed to a hungry exhibition market.9 Thomas Edison voraciously duped the works of foreign film producers, but he wanted more protection for his own films. The trouble was that no such thing as a motion picture copyright existed. Edison circumvented this legal gap by printing each individual frame of his films to paper and registering the entire chain under one photographic copyright. When the Philadelphia entrepreneur Sigmund Lubin persisted in making dupes of films that Edison had registered, Edison took him to court. Edison lost his case in the lower court, but the Third Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the ruling. Edison v. Lubin (1903) established that films could be copyrighted by registering an entire film as one photograph.10 The right to make copies from a film negative, in other words, was legally protectable under copyright law. The practice of registering paper prints for copyright protection also left a fortunate by-product: decades later, archivists at the Library of Congress were able to reconstruct films, frame by frame, that had perished in celluloid form but still existed on paper. Much of the body of early American cinema we can view today comes from the paper prints at the Library of Congress.11 Over the following decade, U.S. courts and legislatures enacted a series of changes to copyright law that effectively increased the protectability and potential profitability of a motion picture negative. In 1909, the U.S.

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Congress revised the Copyright Act, granting copyright protection to mechanical reproductions of music but not motion pictures—the result, Peter Decherney suggests, of film industry lobbying to continue to allow case law and self-policing, rather than statutory law, to regulate the industry.12 Yet despite cinema’s omission from the Copyright Act of 1909, the revision included two changes that would prove essential for the future of film libraries. First, Congress doubled the period of protection. Prior to the 1909 act, copyright protection lasted fourteen years and included the option to extend for another fourteen. The 1909 act expanded the duration of copyright to twenty-eight years plus an optional extension of the same length. Second, the revision granted corporations the right to claim authorship of a copyrighted work, enabling greater leverage for companies producing “works made for hire.”13 Congress amended the act in 1912 and formally recognized motion pictures as copyrightable works in their own right, rather than as photographs that moved, but the extended protection and work-for-hire provisions of the 1909 act carried long-term significance for the film industry, allowing studios to claim ownership of the works its employees created and, subsequently, retain the exclusive rights to exploit those works for a potential fifty-six years. Between the 1909 act and the 1912 amendment, the Supreme Court heard Kalem Company v. Harper Brothers (1911), a case that held enduring significance for film libraries. Copyright law grants the right to create derivative works—those based on a preexisting work. Ideas, however, are not copyrightable; only their expression is. Kalem v. Harper asked: Did a motion picture adapted from a novel infringe the literary author’s copyright? Was a motion picture based on a novel a derivative work? Or could filmmakers liberally lift from the ideas of a novel, including characters, plot, and scenes, as long as they used silent pantomime instead of the literal words—the expression—on the page? Film producers around the turn of the century assumed they could freely take whatever portions of a book or play they desired. In 1907, the Kalem Company produced one such unauthorized adaptation—a one-reel film consisting of sixteen shots depicting scenes from General Lew Wallace’s enormously popular 1880 novel BenHur. Wallace’s heirs, the novel’s publisher, and the Broadway producers who had licensed the dramatization rights sued Kalem for copyright infringement. Kalem lost in the lower court but appealed twice, arguing that the film could not be considered a dramatization because motion pictures were mechanically recorded and not produced live. Writing for the Supreme Court’s majority, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes rejected Kalem’s logic and established an important precedent. For Holmes, what

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was important was not the “mechanism employed”—the moving picture technology—“but that we see the event or story lived.” An audience experienced a dramatization of Ben-Hur while viewing recorded images at the nickelodeon just as surely as while watching live actors on Broadway. Similarly, movie producers should have to license the rights to create a dramatization, a derivative work of a novel, just as stage producers were required to obtain the rights.14 Holmes’s decision formed the basis for a motion picture adaptation right in literary works and forever transformed the value of film negatives and film libraries. What film producers lost in licensing fees, they gained in exclusivity; after obtaining the motion picture rights to a novel, a producer could confidently move forward, knowing that none of his competitors could legally produce a film based on the same work. As a result, producers invested more in the production and marketing of movies based on wellknown properties. The name recognition of a famous literary work, combined with the right of exclusivity, functioned to distinguish certain films from the rest of the crowd, a form of differentiation that, like the casting of film stars, enhanced the value of certain film negatives. Kalem v. Harper held additional significance for film libraries: beyond the film negatives, a producer’s library included all of the underlying rights that had been acquired to make the film. These rights could be used to produce a remake or a sequel or sold off to another producer. Underlying literary rights have repeatedly proved to be one of the greatest assets of film libraries, but ambiguity over which rights were acquired has also jeopardized library exploitation. As we will see, producers and their contract lawyers through the early 1930s failed to anticipate the full range of uses that their libraries might one day enjoy. Although motion picture copyright law offered formal protection for film libraries, it was the star system more than any other development that gave producers negatives worth saving and protecting. From the mid-1910s through the late 1960s, the most consistently lucrative films in a library were those featuring stars whose popularity had increased in the years following the pictures’ initial release. At first, the film manufacturers (the term producer was later used more) of the nickelodeon era were apprehensive about promoting films based on their stars. Although star systems were present in theater and vaudeville, manufacturers wanted motion picture audiences to stay loyal to the manufacturer’s brand rather than to actors, who, if famous, might demand more money or defect to a competitor. Audiences frequenting the nickelodeons, however, formed attachments with the people they watched on-screen. They wrote to the studios seeking

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to know more about the people they watched. What were their names, backgrounds, loves? By 1909, savvy manufacturers had recognized that centering films on popular actors and supplying the public with information about those actors helped to differentiate their films from the others in the marketplace. In other words, the film negative featuring a star was a more valuable asset than the negative without the distinction of a star.15 Several producers in the mid-1910s found themselves in an enviable position, owning negatives that featured actors whose level of stardom (and salary) had skyrocketed since the production of those negatives. Thanks to the work-for-hire doctrine, the producer could capitalize on those old negatives and reissue the films. The Fayetteville exhibitor who proposed stamping dates on every film frame and destroying films after two years resented this practice. A competitor who booked a reissue received the benefit a top star offered—product differentiation—but for a fraction of the price. Destroy old movies, the big exhibitor urged, because they still held market value. For a producer, however, the entire reason to keep old films in the first place was because they might prove to be valuable again. Sure, some filmmakers and stars, including Hart, carried sentimental attachments to their films. But from a business perspective, old movies were worth the storage costs and fire risks only if the producer believed those liabilities were less than the future earning potential of the film assets. Producers knew that some films in their growing libraries would have long-term reissue value. But which films? Which young player whom you hired as an unknown would emerge as tomorrow’s star? The answers could not be known at the time of production. Only a handful of films in your library might have future value, but you never could be sure about which handful. Storing many worthless negatives was necessary in order to capitalize on the few that would prove to have remaining market value. Copyright law gave producers legal control over their libraries, but in practice, pirated prints circulated widely. Producers needed to innovate a new distribution system, one that enabled them to receive a greater share of revenue and exert more control over circulation. The explanation of how this system developed is complex, requiring us to consider the early film business, the rise of the feature film, and especially the rise and decline of the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC). Between 1908 and 1915, the MPPC provided stability for the burgeoning film business, expanded the domestic market for films, and innovated several important distribution strategies. It was a monopolistic venture—intended to control the American film industry through the pooling of patents and by demanding that producers and exhibitors acquire the licenses to those patents. Yet this trust

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ultimately failed, and not merely because the U.S. Supreme Court found that its practices violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. The MPPC’s internal conflicts, ineffective campaign of patent litigation, production budget limitations, and distribution structure—based on supplying short films to small exhibitors—made it unable to keep pace with its rivals’ booming business of star-driven feature films.16 During the nickelodeon boom of 1905 to 1907, the profits for film distributors (known as exchanges) far outpaced those of the films’ producers. As Scott Curtis explains, the exchanges operated so profitably because they purchased prints outright from the producers.17 An exchange might recoup the purchase price after only five rentals; every one beyond that was gravy. To maximize profits, exchanges were known to peddle prints until they literally fell apart, upsetting exhibitors who found themselves with unplayable or “rainy” (the industry jargon for badly scratched) films.18 Some exchanges did not even bother to purchase new prints: they duped films already in circulation or acquired another exchange’s old or duped prints. In this climate, producers had no reason to invest significant money in the production of film negatives. Even for a popular picture, most of the money would line the pockets of the exchanges that owned and rented out the prints. The positive print was king. To obtain a grater share of the profits, the large American film manufacturers persuaded Edison to call a détente on the patent litigations and enter into a cooperative agreement. From 1908 through early 1909, the shape and structure of the MPPC were ironed out: Edison and his chief rival, Biograph, agreed to pool their patents, which covered technologies essential to nearly every aspect of cinema; several other manufacturers—Kalem, Essanay, Vitagraph, Lubin, Selig, and Pathé Frères—and one importer, George Kleine, joined the pool as licensee members; Eastman Kodak agreed to sell raw film stock exclusively to the MPPC manufacturers; and finally, films were to be rented only to those exchanges and exhibited only by those theater owners that paid a weekly license fee and stayed in the good graces of the MPPC. The word rented is important here—one of the MPPC’s greatest innovations was renting films to exchanges rather than selling them outright. The rental model allowed the manufacturers both to obtain a larger chunk of the earnings and to maintain a level of quality control, by removing old, damaged prints from the marketplace. The MPPC was, to be sure, a cartel designed to monopolize and control the American film industry. However, this trust also provided stability for the burgeoning film business, enabling the rapid expansion of movie theaters from roughly 6,500 screens in 1909 to an estimated 15,183 in 1913.19 Licensee

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theaters could count on a dependable supply of one-reel films to fill their variety programs, which they changed daily and which generally consisted of three reels of different genres, interspersed with some song slides and live entertainment. The manufacturers could count on a dependable base of film sales, enabling them to produce more one-reels. Prior to the MPPC, European imports had dominated American screens. The trust changed that balance of power: not only did domestic films now outnumber imports, but American films were increasingly competitive in foreign markets. One year after its formation, the MPPC changed its distribution model. Exhibitors had continually complained about exchanges renting poor prints and employing discriminatory practices (many exchanges also owned theaters, so they sold themselves the best product and rented the inferior goods to other theaters). In response, the MPPC made the exchanges an offer they couldn’t refuse: sell out to the MPPC or lose your license. The MPPC thus acquired fifty-eight exchanges across the country, forming the infrastructure for a national distributor known as the General Film Company (GFC). The GFC codified many of the distribution practices that earlier cooperative arrangements, such as the Film Service Association (FSA), had formulated but could not enforce as effectively. Distributor favoritism was curbed. The GFC removed worn-out prints from circulation and maintained control over playable old prints, which the exchanges had all too often covertly sold or subrented.20 For our purposes, though, the GFC’s most important innovation was its pricing system, based on release date and flat rental fees. Through this system, we can understand how the MPPC enhanced the value of film negatives yet imposed structural barriers that limited their potential earnings. Like the earlier FSA exchanges, the GFC set prices on a sliding scale based on a film’s release date. A brand-new one-reeler in 1914 cost an exhibitor $7.50 per day, but that price quickly fell, bottoming out at as low as fifty cents per day a little over a month after the initial release.21 Small to midsize exhibitors frequently booked mixed programs—mingling not simply genres (one comedy, one chase, one melodrama) but ages (a new release, a one-week-to-onemonth-old reel, and a film in release longer than thirty days).22 Distributors and exhibitors assumed that audiences wanted novelty in their screen entertainment. Granted, few of the successful films of the 1910s were completely new; they featured familiar genres, stars, and stories, participating in a tradition of entertainment that cultural critics have long identified as balancing “repetition and difference.”23 But the “and difference” part of that equation was important. Although studio libraries in the early twenty-first century represent huge profit centers because of the many markets for exploiting old

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films, the movie business continues to organize itself around the release of new films, and the price points still cascade as the films age and work their way through a series of release windows. Standardization was the second component of the GFC’s pricing system. Manufacturers were paid by the foot for every print they delivered. The GFC then rented the films to exhibitors at a standard per-reel rate. The GFC had its reasons for instituting this system. It calmed exhibitors, who had complained for years of uncertain supply and discriminatory pricing, and initially helped manufacturers, who could calibrate production volume and budgeting to a market in which they could accurately predict their returns. The business model, however, was shortsighted. Whether a one-reel production cost one hundred or one thousand dollars, the manufacturer received the same set rate—somewhere between eight and eleven cents— per foot of positive film it delivered. Similarly, the exhibitor always paid the same per-reel rate. Manufacturers shared in exhibition revenues only indirectly—successful films sold more prints to the GFC—and had little incentive to invest in more expensive, ambitious productions. More problematically, even if you changed the per-foot payment equation, the overall distribution structure, built around the needs of the small exhibitor, limited the amount that any film could gross. Since exhibitors changed their programs every day, they seldom purchased local advertising for a particular film. Nor could they hold over a popular film for a few extra days, since the print needed to be delivered to another nearby movie house, the real beneficiary if the first exhibitor made the miscalculation of buying a newspaper ad that raised public awareness of the film.24 The trust’s structural decisions became fatal flaws as independent producers and distributors undeterred by its litigation became increasingly competitive, by exploiting feature films. Today we generally think of feature films as movies that run an hour or longer, but as Michael Quinn points out, the industry’s original definition revolved around not length but product differentiation.25 A feature was something special, a film distinguished by its production values, source material, or beloved star. Independent producers made one-reel features, such as the 1914 Keystone films starring Charles Chaplin. Once audiences started demanding more Chaplin in 1914 and 1915, Keystone’s distributor, Mutual, began selling his films for a premium. Independent producers also made two-reel features, such as the twenty-one westerns that Thomas Ince produced from 1914 through mid-1915 starring his old friend Hart. Soon, though, length became an integral aspect of the feature film; the standard was five reels (around seventy-five minutes), but others were longer. The top-tier

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features played for days or weeks in opera houses, legitimate theaters, and a growing number of specially-built movie theaters that seated fifteen hundred people or more, several times the number that a small movie house could hold. Features played longer, to bigger crowds, who paid more per ticket; the potential returns on a single film were dizzying. But those returns were possible only if the distribution system permitted them.

triangle and the birth of a library As the MPPC member companies lost market share to independent producers and distributors and declined in productivity, their distributor, GFC, flooded the market with reissues of one- and two-reel films. In 1915, Kalem reissued single-reel pictures starring Carlyle Blackwell and Alice Joyce.26 In 1916, fellow MPPC members Essanay and Lubin similarly put old films back into circulation.27 And in 1917, as Jennifer Horne has pointed out, Edison and George Kleine included a number of four-year-old films shot in exotic foreign locations in their “Conquest Pictures” program, which also included many new films. For years to come, Kleine attempted to market the “Conquest Pictures” based on the films’ alleged educational merits.28 The MPPC member companies established a pattern that numerous other film companies then followed—turning to the library as a last-ditch survival strategy after losing their ability to meaningfully compete as market leaders. Of all the MPPC members, Biograph pursued the most effective reissue strategy. In the summer of 1915, it began weekly reissues of oneand two-reel pictures directed between 1911 and 1913 by a film artist whose reputation had recently rocketed skyward—D. W. Griffith.29 No single film represented the ascendance of the feature film, star system, and post-MPPC industry more than Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). Griffith had directed more than four hundred one- and two-reel films for Biograph, but Birth was a project on an altogether different scale. A three-hour epic of the Civil War and Reconstruction, The Birth of a Nation was an immediate sensation, acclaimed for its artistry and emotional sweep, attacked for its vile racism. Audiences rushed to see the lightning rod of controversy for themselves. Griffith road-showed the film across the country; these theatrical engagements featured a large orchestra, reserved seating, and higher ticket prices than were typical for first-run attractions. The film contained stars—Mae Marsh and Lillian Gish, among others—but the real star was the film’s director, who received extensive coverage in the press. After months, years, and eventually decades of controversy, The Birth of a Nation grew to be much more than the sum of its parts (Griffith, Marsh,

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Gish, etc.), and its reputation became its biggest selling point.30 But even from those first road-show engagements with inflated ticket prices, The Birth of a Nation clearly rebuked the logic of the MPPC. The trust had pretended that all new films were equal, insisting that distributors pay producers and exhibitors pay distributors a standard rate based on feet of film. The positive film print was king. The trust told you what a new, a one-monthold, and a three-month-old foot of positive film was worth; it didn’t matter what stars, inputs, or production costs went into creating the film negative. Audiences, however, wanted to see some reels of celluloid more than others, and they would pay more for the privilege. The Birth of a Nation—containing more feet of film and worth more in the marketplace than any American feature before it—marked the triumph of the film negative. The picture was also a triumph for the film’s producer, Harry Aitken. The son of a Wisconsin farmer, Aitken rode the wave of the industry’s rapid expansion in the early 1910s. After operating a handful of film exchanges with his younger brother Roy, Aitken branched into production with his Majestic and Reliance Film Corporations and then national distribution with the Mutual Film Corporation. From 1912 to 1915, he served as Mutual’s president and managed one of the only four nationwide distribution networks of the time (the other three were Universal, the GFC, and, by the end of 1914, Paramount). In late 1913 he hired Griffith away from Biograph and shortly thereafter pledged forty thousand dollars of Mutual’s money to Griffith’s ambitious adaptation of Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman. When Mutual’s board of directors balked at this investment, Aitken put his own money into the picture. His forty-thousand-dollar investment in The Birth of a Nation paid enormous dividends—both enriching him personally and bolstering his industry reputation as a producer with exceptional taste and judgment. In May 1915, Mutual’s board of directors forced Aitken out of the company.31 Undeterred, he prepared to launch his most ambitious venture yet: the Triangle Film Corporation. Triangle was the DreamWorks of its day; the name referred to three of the industry’s highest-profile producer-directors: Griffith, Ince, and Mack Sennett. Aitken envisioned it as a company that would deliver high-quality films to customers who were willing to pay premium ticket prices for premium pictures. He personally convinced Griffith, Ince, and Sennett to join him in Triangle. He also won over the backers of Ince and Sennett’s productions, the New York Motion Picture Company (NYMP) owners Charlie Bauman and Adam Kessel, who had previously used Mutual to distribute their product.32 In his most impressive act of salesmanship, Aitken raised five million dollars by issuing one million shares of stock, making Triangle

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one of the first movie companies to go public.33 The shareholder equity fundamentally changed Aitken’s approach to business; he henceforth took large risks with other people’s money while seeking out hidden profit centers for his personal enrichment. Determined to create a vertically integrated enterprise, Aitken spent heavily on fixed costs: production facilities, theater leases, distribution exchanges, and talent contracts. In theory, the star contracts should have lessened Triangle’s risk, not heightened it. Audiences selected films based on the star more than any other factor. The trouble was, Aitken picked the wrong stars and paid them too much. The film historian Richard Koszarski explains: “Aitken’s importation of expensive Broadway stars proved illtimed and ill-advised. It appears to have been modeled on Adolph Zukor’s 1912 scheme of ‘Famous Players in Famous Plays,’ but even Zukor had largely abandoned this policy by 1915; audiences had already indicated they preferred screen stars in their movies. The traditional example here is Aitken’s payment of $100,000 to Sir Herbert Beerbohm-Tree for just two films, Macbeth (1916) and Old Folks at Home (1916), both of which were notable box-office failures.”34 Other pieces of Aitken’s grand plan similarly crumbled. Keen on charging the same premium ticket prices that had made him a fortune on The Birth of a Nation, he demanded that Triangle’s firstrun theaters adopt the road-show policy of two shows per day, reserved seating, and two-dollar tickets. Audiences stayed away in droves. Nearly all of Triangle’s exhibitors complained, and some revolted outright. On the production end as well, problems mounted. Sennett and Ince had developed reputations as prolific producers, but Aitken’s meddling reduced their efficiency. As Rob King points out, Triangle’s highbrow ambitions also disrupted the successful lowbrow formula that Sennett had perfected in his Keystone comedies. The Keystone style changed, and many Keystone fans found themselves geographically displaced from or priced out of the expensive theaters where the comedies now played.35 Most disappointing of all, the man who should have occupied the highest peak of the triangle, Griffith, contributed no value to the company and even tried to publicly distance himself from it.36 Griffith was too busy creating Intolerance—his epic answer to the critics of The Birth of a Nation—to bother supplying the Triangle exchanges and theaters with product. Soon there were fewer and fewer Triangle exchanges and theaters to supply. By late 1916, just a little over a year after its founding, Triangle was selling off its distribution exchanges to raise money and slash overhead. Amid all of Triangle’s problems, there was a silver lining—the films of two stars who consistently delivered the goods, Douglas Fairbanks and

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Hart. Aitken brought Fairbanks from stage to screen, signing the actor, then known primarily for comedy, to Triangle’s Fine Arts unit for the high fee of two thousand dollars per week. Unlike Beerbohm-Tree, Fairbanks proved worth every penny—his good looks, buoyant personality, and acrobatic physicality translated well to the screen. In September 1915, Aitken opened the first Triangle program at New York’s Knickerbocker Theatre with The Lamb, the first of the thirteen Fairbanks vehicles that Triangle would release.37 As the company decreased in power and stature the following year, however, Fairbanks became receptive to the overtures of Zukor, who urged the star to release his films through Artcraft, the same distribution arm that handled Mary Pickford’s films. Whereas Zukor block-booked most Famous Players films, he sold the Artcraft pictures independently as specials—allowing these star-driven features to play longer at better houses and earn more for the stars’ profit positions. Fairbanks still had obligations to appear in Triangle pictures, but in January 1917 he wrangled out of them through a clever legal maneuver. His contract guaranteed that Griffith would supervise all his pictures. Truthfully, Griffith had little interest in either Triangle productions or Fairbanks; according to legend, he thought that the actor bounced up and down too much and suggested he’d be better suited for Keystone comedies.38 Nevertheless, Fairbanks successfully argued in court that Griffith’s lack of supervision amounted to a breach of contract, nullifying the actor’s obligations to Triangle. When Fairbanks joined Artcraft in early 1917, he left behind thirteen feature negatives and a gaping hole in Triangle’s star lineup. Fortunately, Triangle still controlled Hart’s services. A far more unlikely star than Fairbanks, Hart appeared in his first motion picture at the age of forty-nine after a career onstage. He was performing in play in Los Angeles in 1914 when his old friend Ince approached him about appearing in a film. They had grown close over years of performing together in traveling companies, frequently rooming together on the road. Ince never achieved Hart’s level of stage success, prompting him in 1910 to look for opportunities in the motion picture business. Over the course of a few short years, Ince vaulted from acting in films to directing them and then to supervising the production of an entire slate of films at the same time. He managed the NYMP’s West Coast studio, and there, in Culver City, he innovated a form of unit production that became the Hollywood studio system’s dominant mode of production.39 Hart acted in two two-reel Westerns for Ince; both became immediate hits. Ince signed Hart to perform in more films, paying him a weekly salary of around one hundred dollars in 1914, which rose to seven hundred dollars by mid-1916. This was good money by stage

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standards—and great by the standards of the average American worker— but meager compared to the four- and five-figure weekly salaries that Fairbanks, Pickford, and Chaplin were receiving. When Hart complained that he was underpaid, Ince always found external forces to blame: the market for Westerns was weak; the NYMP’s owners were cheap. Hart trusted Ince, whom he counted as a friend.40 After the NYMP joined Aitken’s Triangle venture, the lowly paid but highly popular Hart became one of Triangle’s greatest assets. He went from performing in two-reelers to starring in and directing five-reel features, which he brought in on remarkably tight budgets. Hart’s popularity only grew. Audiences at the time were drawn to his “good bad man” persona, and the moral ambiguity of his Triangle features, such as The Return of Draw Egan (1916) and Hell’s Hinges (1916), continues to startle viewers today. In late 1916 and early 1917, Hart became aware that his compensation did not reflect his true star value. “It is known for a fact that you alone are holding the exhibitors on the Triangle program,” wrote a Chicago-based manager in pitching his services to Hart. “Once you leave the Triangle program[,] there will be nothing left that the exhibitors care much about.”41 Hart used this and many similar offers to negotiate a tremendous pay hike. In March 1917, Triangle agreed to pay him $432,000 per year for the next two years.42 However, just as Hart obtained his first major deal, Ince decided it was time to break away from the financially troubled Triangle. He sold out his interest to Aitken for roughly $250,000, then persuaded Hart to abandon Triangle by exploiting a clause in his contract that required Ince to supervise his productions. Triangle’s actor contracts were bad not simply because, as historians have argued, they promised too much compensation. They also opened legal loopholes in promising that specific individuals would supervise star actors rather than binding the actor solely to the firm. Hart, like Fairbanks before him, exploited this loophole and turned to Zukor. Over the spring and summer of 1917, he, Ince, and their representatives negotiated a rich deal with Zukor: the mogul would pay Hart and Ince’s production company two hundred thousand dollars per five-reel feature negative they delivered. This money went toward production costs and was treated as a minimum guarantee against the production company’s profit participation—a fifty-fifty split once Zukor recouped his payment plus the Artcraft distribution fee and costs.43 By the fall of 1917, Triangle had lost its two bona fide stars. It still, however, controlled the negatives of their films, and this is the point where the story gets interesting. Teetering on bankruptcy, Aitken and the other leaders of Triangle displayed a shrewdness largely absent from their earlier

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management decisions. Aitken loved to make big deals, spend lavishly, see his name in the headlines. But his greatest talent lay in the minutiae, identifying niches and opportunities that others had missed. In the late summer and early fall of 1917, Triangle embarked on the most systematic exploitation campaign of old movies that the industry had seen.

collateralizing and monetizing the library Owners of film libraries have repeatedly sought to monetize their assets by generating new revenue from old films. Yet there are financial applications of film libraries that go beyond generating revenue. The most important is the collateralization of debt—enabling the borrower to obtain credit and giving the lender foreclosable assets in the event of default. The contemporary mini-major Lionsgate, for instance, uses its eight-thousand-film library to provide collateral, or a borrowing base, which allows it to obtain revolving credit from lenders and to finance new productions. In 1917, no respectable American bank would have considered accepting a film library as collateral for a loan. Some banks loaned money to producers against unfinished, unreleased, and newly released negatives (though the producers nearly always had to pledge other assets as well). In contrast, old negatives had been declared worthless on the balance sheets, and, unlike depreciated real estate, banks assumed they held no market value. Through a particular juncture of business interests, though, the owners of Triangle reached an arrangement to collateralize their library. They then monetized it through two methods: reissuing Hart and Fairbanks films under the banner “The Good Ones Never Die” and setting up a series of subterfuges to mask the fact that the films had been taken from the library.44 Triangle’s library collateralization and “Good Ones Never Die” campaign emerged through the efforts of Stephen A. Lynch and not Aitken. Lynch remains a notorious figure in film history. He controlled a chain of theaters and exchanges in the American South. Beginning in the late 1910s, he and his “wrecking crew” at Southern Enterprises used ruthless tactics to establish a dominant position for Paramount in the South. But before the height of the wrecking crew’s exploits, in 1916 Lynch bought into William Hodkinson’s company Superpictures. Superpictures, in turn, purchased Triangle’s national network of exchanges, forming the basis for a separate company called the Triangle Distributing Corporation.45 When Triangle and Triangle Distributing both appeared to be losing business ventures in the fall of 1917, Lynch made a canny move. In September, he entered into a three-party agreement with the Triangle Film Corporation and Triangle

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Distributing that converted his equity in Triangle Distributing into debt. As part of the deal, Triangle Distributing obtained the exclusive reissue rights to Triangle’s library of Hart, Fairbanks, Frank Keenan, and Norma Talmadge pictures. It licensed the pictures for three years; Lynch was to receive all rental revenues, after costs, until Triangle’s debts were completely paid off.46 The deal valued Lynch’s holdings at $1,519,000 in mortgage notes, but on November 19, 1917, he forgave $819,000 of the debt in recognition of the reissue value.47 By converting his equity into debt, Lynch had reduced his risk in Triangle and made himself more likely to recoup his investment. In the event of bankruptcy, the shareholders would be wiped out and control of the company would go to the senior debtor. Through this conversion process, Lynch also innovated the use of film libraries as collateral. He was a showman, not a banker. He knew that these films still carried market value. In fact, their market value was greater than that of most old star-driven films because Triangle’s poor distribution system and inflated ticket prices had reduced the films’ circulation in their initial releases. In the fall of 1917, Lynch and Triangle Distributing began the “Good Ones Never Die” program. A few months later, Lynch auctioned off the states rights to these reissues to several different exchanges, keeping the Southern territories for himself.48 As a marketing slogan, “The Good Ones Never Die” both celebrated the quality of the films and acknowledged their age. Aitken sought to go one step further. Like Ted Turner decades later, Aitken wanted to take old film negatives and make them new again. But for him, this did not mean colorizing black-and-white images; instead, it meant changing the main titles of old films and marketing them as new productions. As Triangle Distributing handled the Hart and Fairbanks features through the “The Good Ones Never Die” campaign in the fall of 1917, Aitken covertly participated in the retitling and reissue of twenty Hart films produced by the NYMP in 1914 and 1915. Triangle had officially acquired NYMP’s assets earlier in 1917, and Aitken was intent to put its library to use. Aitken was not the first feature producer to try palming off a retitled reissue, but he may have been the first to strategically create a separate entity to perform this function. For both his own protection and his own profit, Aitken instituted multiple buffers between himself and the retitled pictures. First, Triangle sold the old NYMP Hart films—seventeen of which were two-reelers—to the Western Import Company. Though nominally managed by Hyman Winik, Western Import was founded by Harry and Roy Aitken, who continued to own large stakes in the company, which shared the same office space as Triangle. It began as a foreign sales arm—

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Triangle sold foreign rights to Western Import, which subdivided them across European territories. But the Aitkens found additional uses for this company, as Triangle’s stockholders would come to find out. Western Import erected a second buffer between Triangle and the retitled Hart films by licensing the negatives to Winik’s brother-in-law Joseph H. Simmonds. One step removed from Western Import and two steps removed from Triangle, Simmonds went into business as W.H. Productions and licensed the retitled Hart films to states rights distributors. For instance, W.H. Productions took Hart’s five-reel features On the Night Stage (1915) and The Darkening Trail (1915) and released them as The Bandit and the Preacher and The Hellhound of Alaska, respectively. The two-reel Scourge of the Desert (1915) became A Reformed Outlaw, and the two-reel Cash Parish’s Pal (1915) masqueraded as Double Crossed. W.H. Productions generally changed only the film’s main title and supporting lithographic advertisements, but in one case it substantially changed the actual film. After releasing the two-reeler The Conversion of Frosty Blake (1915) under the title The Convert, W.H. Productions collaborated with Triangle to have three new reels of footage shot at Triangle’s Culver City studio. By inserting these at the beginning of the film, W.H. Productions turned the tworeel oldie into a five-reel feature that it called Staking His Life.49 By all accounts, W.H. Productions sold the retitled Hart films at a brisk pace. More than twenty states rights exchanges throughout the country purchased licenses to rent to the films. Beginning in the fall of 1917 and continuing into 1918, W.H. Productions took out a series of trade press advertisements promoting the retitled Hart films. Exhibitors read Motion Picture News and the Moving Picture World; the ads were the best way to capture their attention. But Hart’s lawyers and corporate officers also read these trade papers, and they saw the ads too. Hart’s longtime lawyer and the vice-president of his company, Bill Grossman, turned livid on seeing the ads. He wrote a letter to W.H. Productions demanding a meeting. As a lawyer based in New York, Grossman was ideally situated to deal with the problem while Hart remained producing films in Southern California. In February 1918, Grossman obtained his meeting, not with Simmonds but with an attorney named J. Schechter, who represented W.H. Productions. Grossman confronted the attorney, telling him that W.H. Productions “had pursued a course of conduct that had every earmark of deliberate fraud, in that they had gone into business with old Hart pictures and adopted the name of W.H. Productions, Inc., in order to mislead those who were called upon to see the pictures or requested or invited to see them.”50

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Schechter denied any and all allegations of fraud. Here is Grossman’s account of their conversation: schechter: You don’t own any part of those pictures, do you? Mr. Hart does not claim to own the negatives or positives? grossman: No, so far as we know, they belong to the New York Motion Picture Company. Perhaps the Triangle Film Corporation has an interest in them. schechter: Well, as a matter of law, whoever owns them has a right to call them what he pleases. grossman: Yes, that would be true, if nobody is hurt by making the change, but even though you own this property yourself, you can not change the title for the purpose of perpetrating a fraud upon the public, nor change it in such a manner as will tend to create a fraud or perpetrate a fraud upon the public. Perhaps Mr. Hart cannot complain personally as to the use of this property, nor perhaps our company, but don’t you think that the court might interfere in your doing anything, even with your own property, that might result in fraud upon the public? Now I want to tell you something, Schechter: we are getting a large number of letters from fans all over the country, who are complaining about the practice which your company has initiated. They are asked to go into theatres to see a picture of Hart. Hart produces very few a year, and his fans, like the fans of all stars, follow up every picture. They have seen “The Conversion of Frosty Blake,” or whatever old titles there were of the pictures that were then out. . . . When they see a new title of a Hart picture, they spend their dimes or their quarters to enter the theatre to see a new picture of Hart, only to find that there is exhibited to them a picture that they have seen some time before, under a new title. Now, the theatre gets in bad, Hart gets in bad. By the use of the name W.H. Productions Company, they think Hart is connected with this thing, and want to know from him whether he is a party to this deception upon the public, that ought to be stopped.51 Grossman recalled this conversation nearly eighteen months after it occurred, enough time for his memory of the exact words to grow hazy. The essence of the conversation, though, boiled down to a disagreement over the limits of exploiting a film library. In controlling the copyrights and negatives, W.H. Productions argued, it could exploit the films in any way it chose. Grossman conceded that Hart did not own the negatives, but he

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insisted that there were limitations in exploiting a film library. At this point, he wasn’t sure to what extent W.H. Productions had changed the old Hart films. His legal papers reveal that his firm tried to build a case for an injunction and dispatched operatives to collect intelligence on how the old two-reel films had been recut, spliced together, and otherwise modified. Only later did Grossman realize that, barring one exception, just the titles of the films had been changed. Hart and Grossman’s fundamental objection was with the name of the operation—one calculated to sound like Hart’s own William S. Hart Productions. Meanwhile, W.H. Productions encountered a problem that it considered far more threatening than Hart’s potential lawsuit. Pirates were duping and distributing its productions. The copyright reforms of a decade earlier had made duping illegal, but the practice continued. Far more decentralized than national distribution, the states rights model was particularly vulnerable to both duping and the circulation of “outlaw” films (prints that circulated after the subdistributors’ rights had expired). It didn’t help that W.H. Productions made money by dealing with exchanges and exhibitors known for being deceptive. Within weeks, someone in this loose affiliation—an exchange or an exhibitor—broke ranks and either copied or enabled the copying of the retitled Hart films. The first step was using the positive prints from W.H. Productions to strike dupe negatives that could reproduce many more prints. The second step was channeling these prints to subdistributors, who rented or sold them to exhibitors. One pair of notorious dupers copied the Hart films in New York, then sold them to states rights exchanges, which offered them to exhibitors. The network they created shadowed the practices of W.H. Productions at nearly every step. The pirate market for old Chaplin shorts topped even that for the Hart films. In 1917, Triangle sold dozens of old Keystone negatives, including several starring Chaplin, to W.H. Productions. Pirated Chaplin shorts, along with the competition from Essanay’s Chaplin reissues, caused W.H. Productions to sell its Chaplin prints outright rather than lease them.52 In this way, W.H. Productions acknowledged that the value had shifted back to the positive print. Simultaneously, this decision expanded the pirate market, flooding the market with even more prints that could be used to make dupes. W.H. Productions learned a lesson that all custodians of film libraries eventually learn: the more you exploit a film library, the less control you maintain over it. Piracy was and remains one of the biggest challenges for the business of film libraries. However, library exploitation—and the piracy that accompanied it—also had significant unintended consequences for the

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preservation of American cinema, particularly American silent films. “Many of these films exist today only because of the W.H. Productions reissue,” Kalton Lahue explains about the Hart and Keystone films. “The original Mutual release prints had worn out long before Triangle expired and had the subjects not been rereleased, only a slender record of the Ince and Sennett productions of the 1912–15 period would still remain on film.”53 In the business of film libraries, piracy and preservation are externalities—the term that economists use to describe the unintentional outputs resulting from business decisions. W.H. Productions initiated an all-out publicity campaign against the “parasites” duping the retitled Harts.54 “Hart Officials Complain of Film Pirates,” headlined a story in Motion Picture News. The story came not from any official of Hart’s company but a press release cooked up by Simmonds that the paper reprinted nearly verbatim. Toward the end of the press release, W.H. Productions warned that “the industry is waking up and really going after these parasites and the time is not far off when we shall be entirely free of them.”55 What the industry actually woke up to was W.H. Productions. Hart took out trade ads explaining that W.H. Productions was using his initials and old films without his permission. In the summer of 1918, numerous trade papers and industry spokespeople weighed in on the matter of retitled reissues. All agreed that reissuing old films under new titles was both unethical and bad for business. “Do the exhibitors of this country want to be classed with quack doctors, patent medicine fakirs and bunco men?” the Moving Picture World asked. “The exhibitor who lends himself to frauds of this sort discredits his house in the eyes of his patrons.” Nevertheless, the paper made it clear that reissues of great films, main titles left intact, occupied a legitimate place in the market. The other trade papers walked a similar line. Wid’s warned against “crooks” and “cheats” in the industry but considered reissues of good productions “one of the surest sources of real revenue for the fair-minded, square-shootin’ showman.” Exhibitor’s Trade Review questioned the very logic of changing a film’s title: “Royalty may travel incognito, but a good picture should be known for all it’s worth. Its name is one of its assets. . . . If a picture is worth re-issuing at all, it is as good under its original title as the day it was released.” Motion Picture News warned, “Misleading the public will serve to destroy its valuable confidence in the motion picture and the industry back of it. . . . Furthermore, and of great importance, it is obvious that new pictures of famous stars cannot profitably be produced if old pictures are allowed to compete with them under what the public construes as a new name and therefore a new picture. This, it is equally obvious, is

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destructive of the industry’s normal and necessary development. Secondly and with equal emphasis, we point out that this controversy does not apply whatsoever to pictures properly re-issued.”56 Why did Motion Picture News and the other trades excoriate retitled reissues but carefully pull their punches when it came to reissues on the whole? Quite simply, they had to appeal to their constituencies—the producers and small exhibitors who wanted to exploit old films, the large exhibitors that wanted to stop them, and the reissue distributors who purchased advertising. By identifying the practice of retitling reissues as a problem and calling out the names of its worst perpetrators, the trade press acted as a form of industry self-regulation—establishing the boundaries for acceptable behavior and publicly shaming those who crossed the line. The industry needed to self-regulate the matter since the law, at that moment, provided no clarity. W.H. Productions legally controlled the negatives. “As a matter of law,” its attorney had said, “whoever owns them has a right to call them what he pleases.” Could a copyright owner create any derivative work he pleased? The FTC was about to have the final word.

the federal trade commission cases The FTC was still in its infancy when it began investigating retitled reissues. Congress established the FTC in 1914 to investigate and prosecute business monopolies, but only a small percentage of the FTC’s docket over its first decade involved trust-busting. Instead, most of the early FTC cases involved investigating and enjoining business practices that the commission considered “unfair competition.”57 When Hart’s lawyer brought W.H. Productions to the FTC’s attention, the commission immediately recognized its scheme as the most basic form of unfair competition: “palming off.” To palm off is to deceptively imply that your product is the product of a competitor. The law against unfair competition is meant to protect both consumers and businesses from this behavior, since the reputation of a business suffers if it is unfairly linked to a bad product that hurts consumers. On October 30, 1918, the FTC issued two complaints against distributors trafficking in retitled reissues. Its proceedings against W.H. Productions became the important test case, but the second complaint filed that day also merits discussion, for it revealed that world events, not just stars, could be harnessed to monetize old celluloid. The big world event in 1918 was, of course, World War I. Although the fighting erupted between European powers in the summer of 1914, the United States abstained from entering the war until spring 1917. In the roughly eighteen months between the

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United States’ declaration of war against Germany and the war’s conclusion, the American motion picture industry promoted the war: distributing shorts and features to training camps; using stars, such as Pickford and Hart, to sell war bonds; and producing gung ho, anti-German features— like Rupert Julian’s now lost production The Kaiser (1918)—which could support the American cause and clean up at the box office. The Royal Cinema Corporation wanted to release a timely feature about the war without investing in a costly production. So it acquired the negative of The Ordeal (1914), a five-reeler produced by the Life Photo Film Corporation and set during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. To update the film for the current conflict, Royal shot a new beginning and ending. The new version began with a young American man who refuses, against his family’s wishes, to enlist in the Great War, then cracks open a book about the Franco-Prussian War (cue transition into The Ordeal). After he reads the book—and the audience watches The Ordeal with a few cuts—the film returns to the present day as the young American, horrified by the barbarity of the Prussians, decides to enlist after all.58 Royal retitled the film, now six reels, as The Mothers of Liberty and distributed it on a states rights basis. The promotional materials failed to acknowledge the film’s source material, but this particular scheme in reediting and retitling might have escaped the FTC’s notice were it not for one overly aggressive salesman at Monopole Pictures, the exchange handling the picture in New York City and eastern New Jersey. In the summer of 1918, Monopole’s salesman screened a print of The Mothers of Liberty for the Hoboken exhibitor Henry Bishop. By the second reel, Bishop recognized that the film he was watching was The Ordeal. Even he was surprised that he could remember the title, he later admitted, considering that he “ran a picture every day, and change every day.” Bishop turned to the salesman and accused him of trying to sell used goods. “I would not think of running anything like that in my house,” Bishop told him. “I have a reputation to maintain and I have worked hard to get it, and want to hold it.” Bishop told the salesman that he should “go further down the street, down to the City Theatre. They have a different clientele, and may be [he could] do business there.” The salesman refused to budge. “No, it will run in a big house in this City,” he responded. “It will run in this house.” The salesman proceeded to march over to the local newspaper, then to the closest chapter of the American Defense Society. He invited them to follow him to the Bishop Theatre so they could see firsthand the anti-American coward living in their midst: only a German sympathizer would refuse to book The Mothers of Liberty!59 The FTC complained that Royal Cinema and Monopole’s

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actions had the tendency “to deceive the trade and motion-picture theatre going public,” defame motion picture exhibitors, and hinder interstate trade.60 The interstate aspect of the case was important; the FTC’s authority over trade, like that of the U.S. Congress, was limited to interstate commerce. The case against Royal Cinema concerned only one film, and the defendants chose not to invest the time or money on an elaborate defense. They begrudgingly participated in a brief public hearing, agreed to cease and desist, and moved on. The FTC’s complaint against W.H. Productions, however, concerned a much larger operation. W.H. Productions had entered into more than twenty different contracts with exchanges across the country to carry the retitled Hart films. Additionally, it had sold prints outright for dozens of Keystone one-reelers. A cease-and-desist order from the FTC could expose W.H. to contract termination, repayment demands, and litigation from the states rights exchanges. Moreover, W.H. Productions was a piece of a larger fraudulent enterprise that would prove disastrous to the Aitkens if brought to light. For the sake of their money and reputations, W.H. Productions decided to fight the case. In early 1919, the FTC attorney Gaylord Hawkins presented the commission’s case to the examiner (the FTC’s equivalent of a judge). Simmonds was on the witness stand for most of the proceedings. He denied that he had misled any exchanges or exhibitors. They all knew that these films were reissues, he claimed, even if his trade advertisements did not acknowledge them as such. Hawkins clearly did not believe Simmonds on this point, and as the examination wore on, Simmonds appeared ridiculous to other spectators as well. Variety reported, with a hint of irony, that “Hyman Winick [sic], one of the officers of the Western Import Co., is the brother-in-law of Simmonds, and the latter gave that as his reason for doing business under the W.H. title, stating that he had taken the initials of his brother-in-law and transposed them.”61 Simmonds’s actual statement sounded only slightly less preposterous: “[I] could just as well call it A.B.C. Company.” But, he added, “I thought it would be a happy combination to use the name W.H., because they were [Winik’s] initials, and I was selling Hart.”62 Although some of his answers made Simmonds look foolish, he carefully guarded the information that he disclosed. When the FTC’s Hawkins asked a question about the Western Import Company, Simmonds’s attorney objected: “There is a charge here that Joseph Simmonds, trading as W.H. Production Company, did certain things. The Western Import Company is not mentioned in the complaint and has nothing to do with the case.”63 Simmonds’s attorney, Walter Selisberg, successfully masked the involve-

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ment of Western Import’s two architects—and, we should note, longtime Selisberg clients—Harry and Roy Aitken. Selisberg mounted an elaborate defense against the unfair competition charges. He argued that the FTC’s problems stemmed not from W.H. Productions but instead from the pirates who duped its films.64 He subpoenaed and brought to court two dupers whom he knew had peddled the retitled Hart films: Joseph M. Goldstein and Jacob Weinberg. Selisberg had become acquainted with Goldstein and Weinberg back in 1915, when he traced a glut of Keystone dupes to the duo’s New York operation.65 The FTC issued a complaint against Goldstein and Weinberg’s Lasso Pictures Corp., and the dupers agreed to the terms of a cease-and-desist order rather than mounting a defense that might prove costly and self-incriminating.66 W.H. Productions still lost the case. The FTC examiner ultimately ruled “the entire line of defense, as being immaterial, not relevant. In other words, that you cannot, by proving that someone else has also, perhaps, competed unfairly with the W.S. Hart Productions Company, justify or excuse your competition.”67 Selisberg had used a classic criminal defense tactic—calling a shady witness to the stand, trying to catch him in a lie, and creating doubt about the defendant’s guilt. But the FTC did not operate like a criminal court. Whether it was W.H. Productions or Lasso that created marketplace confusion was beside the point. In fact, the FTC was not required to prove that a single exhibitor or consumer had been harmed. All that mattered was that the defendant had engaged in practices that had a “capacity or tendency” to result in deception and harm.68 FTC v. Joseph Simmonds, along with FTC v. Royal Cinema Corp. and FTC v. Lasso Pictures Corp., established the precedent that retitled old films needed to be advertised as such. The cases established that there were legal limits to how a copyright owner could exploit a film library. The FTC prevailed by identifying practices with a capacity to harm competitors and purchasers. It never had to document any actual harms that W.H. Productions caused. As a result, the case leaves unanswered many of the questions most interesting to historians of film and media. We know the identities of W.H. Productions’ competitors—they were other film distributors, especially Artcraft, which controlled Hart’s new films and lost leverage over exhibitors because the marketplace was flooded with his old pictures. But what about the purchasers? Were they deceived? Answering this question requires reaching beyond the FTC transcript and triangulating numerous historical sources. Equally important, it requires us to broaden our understanding of the business of film libraries. The discourse surrounding studio libraries tends to focus on supply-side

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factors—the motivation of copyright owners to monetize their assets. Yet the demand from business buyers and audiences is just as important. By mapping out the context of film exhibition in the late 1910s, we can better understand this demand and insert real exhibitors and audiences into the placeholders of the FTC’s hypothetical purchasers. Film exhibitors in the mid-to-late 1910s participated in a rapidly changing marketplace. The business had never been better for those exhibitors who invested in large theaters. Large theaters sat more than one thousand patrons; lavish “movie palaces” sat more than two thousand. These capacities enabled theater owners to harness economies of scale. Large theaters offered the best pictures, best music, best amenities. They charged more per ticket, but they didn’t have to charge much more, since they had more seats they could fill and more tickets to sell. For small exhibitors, however, the business had never been worse. In his analysis of “the crisis of the small exhibitor,” Ben Singer describes the “painful transition for many rank-and-file exhibitors” in the mid-to-late 1910s. “With their small capacities, low admissions, humble trappings, and modest socioeconomic demographics, many small theaters had great difficulty affording the expensive feature services.” He identifies five options that were available to them: continue to play one- and two-reel variety programs, even though the public clearly showed a preference for feature films; upgrade certain theater amenities but still show variety programs; “try to put together feature programs culled from cheap state rights suppliers or discount national distributors and undercut the bigger theaters on price”; show feature films in their subsequent runs; or simply throw in the towel and go out of business.69 Faced with this limited range of choices, some small exhibitors employed a variation on numbers one, three, and four—they showed a star’s old short or feature-length films and undercut the large theaters on price but promoted the old films as if they were new. Small exhibitors were the industry’s snipers and the primary buyers of the W.H. Productions.70 Simmonds was not lying when he told the FTC examiner that exhibitors knew the films were old. Although a few small exhibitors may have been deluded into believing they were booking new films, most knew what they were getting. The trade press covered which stars were affiliated with which producers and distributors; the dispute between Triangle and Artcraft over Hart’s services, in particular, received considerable publicity. Only an exhibitor ignorant about his own business could not know that the W.H. Productions were reissues—especially when they were being sold by corner-cutting states rights outfits, some peddling the licensed prints, others the outlaw dupes. Additionally, seventeen of the

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twenty-one retitled Hart films on the market were two-reelers. This was quite odd, really, considering that Hart had acted exclusively in five-reel features since late 1915. Small exhibitors knew this fact only too well—they had pleaded with producers to cast stars in more shorts that they could plug into their variety programs.71 But the big stars valued the higher paychecks and artistic status that came with features running five reels or longer, and by 1917, comedians were the only stars consistently turning out two-reelers. Most small exhibitors, therefore, quickly recognized that the W.H. Productions pictures were old films. But they also recognized that W.H. Productions offered them something they needed: feature films and tworeelers that they could afford starring one of the world’s biggest movie stars. Let’s go beyond the hypothetical small exhibitors and consider one specific sniper. The Empress Theatre in Toledo, Ohio, exemplified the type of small theater that, beset by competition from big houses, booked W.H. Productions films. The Empress was one of four Toledo theaters managed by the Gardner Amusement Company, all seating fewer than four hundred patrons. The Empress offered seating for 367, to be exact, a good size in the nickelodeon era, when cheap, hourlong variety programs ran continuously and audiences turned over rapidly. It suffered, however, in the feature era. Features cost more to rent, and their audiences turned over more slowly. The Empress could sell fewer tickets in a given day but had to pay higher rental costs (that is, if it could obtain the desirable feature films at all). By 1918, it was geographically doomed, sandwiched between the 750-seat Alhambra Theatre and the 772-seat Colonial Theatre on Summit Street in downtown Toledo. Worse yet, just blocks away were the 1,413-seat Valentine and the 1,166-seat Temple.72 These large theaters sold enough tickets to afford top-grade pictures and the amenities—orchestral music, large foyer, ushers—that audiences came to expect from the downtown movie house. Meanwhile, the Empress carried on with variety programs. One week in 1918, it offered a variety program consisting of the W.H. Productions two-reeler The Fugitive (originally Hart’s 1915 The Taking of Luke McVane) and The Scholar (1918), a two-reel comedy starring the Chaplin imitator Billy West.73 Other small theaters across the country, from New Haven to San Diego, booked the W.H. Productions two-reelers for their variety programs.74 In hindsight, we can easily see that this strategy was unsustainable. By 1918, variety programs were already antiquated, and no number of Hart reissues or Chaplin knockoffs could change this perception. The Empress went out of business just a few months later. Exhibitors who booked the retitled Hart five-reelers and promoted them as new features similarly embarked on an unsustainable

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path. The short-term surge of ticket sales came at the expense of the theater’s long-term reputation. Audiences who left your theater today feeling cheated were unlikely to return tomorrow. Showing old star-driven movies under new titles may have been shortsighted, but it was a survival strategy for small theaters nonetheless. The bigger houses—with double, triple, or quadruple the seating capacity of small theaters—could afford to pay more for feature films without charging more for tickets. The big houses outbid the smaller ones for the best features with the biggest stars. By booking a cheap reissue and emphasizing the star rather than the film’s age, small exhibitors gained competitive strength—offering the same star value as the big theaters for lower ticket prices. The trade press and large theaters labeled the practice “sniping,” but to the small exhibitor, the term sniper was more properly applied to the big theaters. After all, the small exhibitors were the incumbents. Now the large theaters were chipping away at their business, destroying an entire exhibition model that had previously served them well. The FTC never acknowledged that the plight of small theaters drove buyer demand for retitled reissues. If it had, though, the commission would have seen their plight as the price of progress. The commissioners believed that creating greater efficiencies was the essence of fair competition. Middle-class audiences liked the big theaters and the posh amenities they offered. Finding ways to deliver this experience and keep down consumer prices was the basis of fair competition. The competition became unfair when competitors resorted to means other than greater efficiencies to succeed. Film exhibitors were not deceived by the retitled reissues. Ultimately, though, the FTC’s rhetoric about the dangers of retitled reissues hinged on W.H. Productions’ deception of the public. Can we replace the FTC’s hypothetical stand-ins with real spectators? Who attended the screenings? Did they feel deceived? Excavating the experience of historical moviegoers is one of film and media studies’ most challenging tasks.75 Their voices seldom appear in studio corporate files, trade papers, lawsuits, or the other places where a historian of the media industries usually looks. Despite these challenges, it is important to take stock of the historical audience of film reissues, for two reasons. First, audiences represented the final stage in cinema’s business cycle; they were the “end users” in economic terms. The needs of buyers—exhibitors—generated demand for reissues, but the buyers still needed to appeal to the end users. Second, throughout the history of film libraries, the government, producers, and film artists have rhetorically invoked “the public.” The need to protect it generally means advancing one group’s particular agenda over another’s. To both better understand

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end-user demand and test the validity of consumer protectionist arguments, we must take stock of the historical audiences who attended new films and reissues. We can begin reconstructing the audience experience by calling Grossman, Hart’s attorney, on his bluff. He told the W.H. Productions representative, “We are getting a large number of letters from fans all over the country, who are complaining about the practice which your company has initiated.” The documentary evidence simply does not support this claim. Hart supplied trade clippings, contracts, and correspondence to the FTC, but he did not turn over a single angry fan letter. Moreover, my search through hundreds of Hart fan letters preserved at the Seaver Center at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History did not produce a single one that complained about retitled reissues.76 On the contrary, several fans expressed their willingness to watch Hart’s films over and over. Elizabeth Chadwick of New York City wrote that she watched his Triangle feature The Desert Man twice—first when it opened in New York, then again when it reached her neighborhood theater.77 Birdie De Veer of Columbus, Ohio, did not like to wait weeks between viewings of a Hart film. She confessed that she frequently bought one ticket, then stayed in the theater for backto-back screenings of the same picture.78 How many more fans like Chadwick and De Veer were out there? How many more saw films as renewable rather than distinguishable goods, worthy of making a second visit to the theater or slouching down in your seat between shows to avoid the usher’s gaze? Other fans rewatched their favorite star’s pictures with even greater devotion. Consider the following fan letter written in August 1919 by Gaylord Davidson, an insurance agent in Roanoke, Virginia: I stopped before one of the local moviehouses this afternoon where “The Return of Draw Egan” was featured. I have seen it several times. I go to all of them, over and over again. I had not intended to go until this evening, but a little wistful face looked up into mine, and I saw a ragged, sore toed little chap standing before me. “Mister, ef I had six cents I could see Bill Hart.” “Bill Hart,” I replied, “who is he?” “WHAT, haint you ever heard of Bill Hart.” “YES, I’ve heard of him, but who is he?’ “Ge mister, he’s great. He kin draw a gun quicker ‘n you can say it. He’s got a horse that jest loves him like a boy. He kin ride right straight down a mountain runnin’. Say, mister, I’ve got 5c. and if you have got 11c and six cents we kin see him.”

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Did we see him? The little urchin took me right down into the third row where dozens of other little chaps, happy to the portals of paradise, were seated. Then the play opened.79

Charles Dickens, if he’d survived long enough to go the movies, might have scripted this scene. The street urchin, colloquial speech, and paternal kindness all smell like the stuff of fiction or, at the very least, embellishment. Looking past whatever artistic liberties the writer may have taken in describing his afternoon at the movies, the letter still tells us a great deal. Let’s consider a detail that might not jump out to us as quickly as the “sore toed little chap”: the simple fact that a local theater was showing The Return of Draw Egan. Hart made this film for Triangle in 1916. The insurance agent wrote his letter on August 12, 1919. Three years had passed, but the film was still in circulation, where it had been long enough for the writer “to have seen it several times.” And the title had not been changed—The Return of Draw Egan was a Triangle “Good Ones Never Die” picture, not an NYMP two-reeler retitled as a W.H. Production. Triangle’s extensive reissue campaigns gave this fan the opportunity to watch his favorite movies “over and over again.” In today’s home-entertainment culture, it’s easy to take for granted our ability to repeatedly view our favorite films—we own them on disc, watch them on television, stream them online. But for Davidson, living in 1919 in Roanoke, a series of industry transactions had to occur for him to gain this opportunity. On a macro level, film negatives had to increase in value through the emergence of new laws, the star system, the feature film, and a new distribution system. On a micro level, Triangle had to lose its competitive edge; Lynch had to collateralize his debt in the troubled Triangle Distributing Corporation and auction the states rights to subdistributors, one of which—Super-Film Attractions—purchased a three-year license to distribute the Hart films in Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia; and Super-Film Attractions finally had to rent The Return of Draw Egan to a theater in Davidson’s hometown. This was the industrial process necessary for Davidson to pass by a theater showing The Return of Draw Egan in 1919, regardless of whether he indeed purchased a ticket for his street urchin companion.80 Davidson actively chose to rewatch the film. He was neither deceived nor bored in watching the same picture again. On the contrary, it touched him on a deep emotional level. “Why is it that whenever I see your pictures, the tears run down my face?” he asked. “I ain’t a talkin’ about women

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an’ girls. It’s natural for them to cry over your stuff—but men. Well, why do we?” The writer went to see the same Hart films repeatedly because of an emotional bond to his favorite star, but the letter also tells us about another audience for reissues: young people who experienced an old film as new. Exhibitors liked reissues because they were cheap and gave them access to the biggest stars—that much is true. However, they also clearly recognized that there were audiences for reissues, and if they did their job well, the audience left feeling satisfied, even moved, not cheated. Reissues also had the potential to create Hart fans. Consider the following letter, sent that same year from Liverpool by Thomas Coppell, an exprivate of the British Army: Dear “Big Bill Hart,” Excuse me for encroaching upon your valuable moments to offer you just a humble tribute from one of the vast army of admirers of your unequaled prowess upon the “silver screen.” Following are the three pictures which gave me the great admiration for your rough and ready, unconventional work: “The Apostle of Vengeance” (which I witnessed in a peculiar sort of cinema hall planted in a little camp, while with the British troops in France since the armistice actually upon the battle line itself), “Branding Broadway” (which is perhaps the best) and “The Breed of Men.” These two latter I have seen since being demobilized.81 Triangle released the five-reel The Apostle of Vengeance in the summer of 1916; Coppell viewed it sometime after the signing of the World War I armistice on November 11, 1918. He became a Hart fan through viewing a reissue. Rather than competing against Hart’s new pictures, this nontheatrical screening opened up new business for Hart. The Triangle reissue created a fan on the Western Front who later purchased tickets to two of Hart’s Artcraft pictures, Branding Broadway (1918) and The Breed of Men (1919)—in both of which the star enjoyed a percentage of the profits. These letters offer a small sample of fan perspectives on reissues and repeat movie viewings. They should not be mistaken for a universal attitude toward old films. Audience members who take the time to write a letter to their favorite star are a self-selecting group, not representative of all moviegoers. Moreover, as I explore in chapter 2, there were already movie fans in the late 1910s and early 1920s who watched old films with an ironic sensibility—finding pleasure in the outdated fashions, filmmaking, and performance styles. It is certainly possible that there were audience

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members who attended retitled pictures, felt cheated, and lost their affection for Hart as a result. But if some audience members felt cheated, they did not write to Hart about it. He and his legal team imagined an audience of embittered, letter-writing ex-fans. The FTC did not need to listen to any actual members of the public, read their letters, or call them to the witness stand; the commission routinely issued cease-and-desist orders based on the capacity of a particular enterprise to deceive an imagined public. The FTC’s rhetorical appeals about the public interest and Grossman’s spurious claims about bundles of angry fan mail washed the official record of the voices of actual fans. We can never excavate all of the lost voices, but those that we can, using Hart’s own collection of fan mail, tell us a different story—the story of audience members whose affection for Hart grew, rather than diminished, through repeat viewings and reissue circulations of his films. The FTC cases against W.H. Productions, Royal Cinema Corp., and Lasso are important because of the legal boundaries they established for the promotion and distribution of old films. Studying the cases in context, however, reveals that the situation was more complex than mere deception on the part of the suppliers of retitled films. A thorough reconstruction of the cases shows the importance of the demand side for the circulation of old movies on American screens. Small exhibitors were a class of business buyer desperate for inexpensive, star-powered films. They provided W.H. Productions’ chief source of demand, and most small exhibitors that rented retitled Hart films knew they were getting older fare. Audiences occupied a different position in the entertainment ecosystem and expressed a different form and level of demand. Some audience members were probably fooled into the unpleasant experience of recognizing an old movie onscreen after assuming that they were in store for something new. As the archival evidence makes clear, though, other movie fans sought out the experience of revisiting films they had watched before. In the decades that followed, fans continued to demand certain old movies. As they did so, they lobbied for the ability to access movies on their terms, not those of a film’s owner or exhibitor, who might change the title or, in the case of television, drastically alter the film itself.

financial fraud and the triangle legacy Two years after the FTC enjoined W.H. Productions from selling the retitled reissues, news emerged about a Triangle fraud of a very different order. In early 1921, Triangle filed suit against Harry Aitken, Roy Aitken, Winik, and

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Simmonds, alleging that a conspiracy among the four men had defrauded the corporation of three million dollars. For years, Harry and Roy had been transferring assets owned by Triangle, a publicly traded corporation, to their private company, Western Import. Harry sold fifteen Hart two-reel negatives that Triangle owned to his personal company for a mere sixteen thousand dollars.82 These became the backbone of W.H. Productions, a scheme that yielded at least three hundred thousand dollars and possibly far more.83 There were additional instances of self-dealing and fraud: Triangle’s fourhundred-thousand-dollar acquisition of Western Import; Triangle’s payment of forty thousand dollars for no apparent reason to the Lothbury Syndicate, another company that the Aitkens owned; the selling of Triangle stock to Lothbury at a small fraction of the security’s market value. The Aitkens ultimately settled the lawsuit for $1,375,000 ($100,000 in cash, the rest in stock).84 While they admitted no guilt, primary sources at the New York County Supreme Court’s Record Center and the Aitken Collection at the Wisconsin Historical Society offer conclusive evidence of self-dealing.85 The Aitkens’ fraud necessarily changes our understanding of the Triangle Film Corporation. As Kalton Lahue argues, the explanations of Triangle’s failure that place the blame on Harry’s mismanagement and bad talent deals are insufficient.86 The one hundred thousand dollars that Triangle spent on Sir Herbert Beerbohm-Tree’s acting services pales in comparison to the millions that Harry and Roy pilfered. Moreover, Harry’s management decisions take on a different color once we consider the fraud. Would he have made the same expensive talent deals if he had been spending the funds of a privately owned firm, such as Western Import, rather than those of a publicly traded firm, such as Triangle? Harry took ambitious risks with Triangle because they were risks with other people’s money. He offset his risks to the public company and kept the rewards for his private company. As a business executive of his time, he was hardly alone in this practice. Following the stock market crash of 1929, the U.S. government created new regulations, such as the Securities Act of 1933, the Glass-Steagal Act of 1933, and the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, that restricted fiduciaries from self-dealing, insider trading, and other conflicts of interest.87 For the purposes of this study, though, the most significant aspect of the Aitkens’ fraud was that it hinged on exploiting the uncertainty about the value of a film negative. The shareholders claimed that more than half of the three million dollars in damages arose through selling negatives to Western Import at below-market prices. The Hart and Keystone negatives that became W.H. Productions’ fodder were, the shareholders alleged, worth at least five hundred thousand dollars, compared to the roughly one

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hundred thousand that Western Import had paid.88 There was always uncertainty about the market value of negatives. Conservative accounting practices demanded that a producer capitalize the film’s negative cost as an asset depreciating rapidly from the moment of release rather than guess out of thin air what the film would earn. If Harry Aitken could have listed the negatives as assets whose worth was more than their costs but diminished in slight increments over a ten-year period, then he very well might have done so. By inflating the assets on a balance sheet, a manager could pull off a different form of fraud, convincing investors that a corporation was worth far more than its actual value. America’s great bubble of overvalued stocks burst on October 29, 1929, when the stock market crashed and countless investors who had traded cash for the paper of worthless companies lost their shirts. The Aitkens’ fraud exploited a different loophole, the flip side of this accounting rule. All the old Hart and Keystone pictures had already been fully depreciated from the NYMP’s books when Triangle acquired the company in early 1917. From an accounting standpoint, these films were worthless. Harry could easily sell brother Roy ten Hart negatives for ten thousand dollars because, on the books, they were worth zero dollars. Triangle’s shareholders later claimed that the negatives carried a fair market value of five hundred thousand dollars, but no major financial institution in 1917 would have loaned this sum against those assets. Old film negatives were the perfect assets for the Aitkens to steal without notice. If they had limited their fraud to W.H. Productions, they probably would have gotten away with it. But their decision to reach beyond a clever library con into more common forms of embezzlement and securities fraud ultimately called too much attention to itself. Triangle’s frauds are important to study because they highlight many of the major tensions and trends that continue to surround the exploitation of film libraries. Hart died in 1946, but Hollywood workers still fight for an equitable revenue share when their work is reissued. The Aitkens and Lynch pioneered financial applications for film libraries—debt collateralization, for example—that continue to make collections of old content financially significant beyond the cash they generate. Additionally, Triangle succeeded in exploiting its library not through simple deception or supply-side actions but because it satisfied the demand of film fans and small exhibitors. The demand of audiences and business buyers, which today includes subscription video-on-demand services such as Netflix and Amazon Instant Video, continues to enable a marketplace for old media content. The continuities with the present day, however, should not make us lose our sense of historical context. Triangle’s reissue campaign needs to be

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understood in relation to other historical developments of American cinema’s transitional era. The growth of motion picture copyright law, the rise of the feature film, and the emergence of new distribution infrastructures increased the value of film negatives. The development of the star system was especially important in making certain old film negatives worth more than others. In the eyes of most audiences and exhibitors, the star was the film’s most important distinguishing feature. The Aitkens fully capitalized on the stardom of Hart, Fairbanks, and Chaplin and on their ownership of these stars’ old films. The rest of the movie industry paid attention to Triangle’s model. As the motion picture industry entered the 1920s, trade press editorialists argued about whether reissues represented a boost or a threat to the industry’s well-being. Few could have known, though, that vertical integration and technological innovation would transform both the value of film libraries and the industry as a whole. The next chapter explores how the business of film libraries changed alongside broader transformations in industry structure, taste culture, and technology.

2. Side Business (1920s)

Despite its frauds—or perhaps because of them—Triangle proved to the motion picture industry that old films featuring contemporary stars still held reissue value. In the early-to-mid-1920s, the industry’s trade papers reflected on Triangle’s success in monetizing its library. The reactions of commentators were mixed. Motion Picture News praised the management of Percy Waters (Harry Aitken’s successor) and suggested that Triangle had challenged the assumptions of “bankers who believe that a released negative has no asset value.” Although it had ceased active production of new films, Triangle managed to pay off nearly four million dollars in debts through its library and “still has all its 4000 negatives with still a considerable potential value, for re-release or re-production.”1 Variety also credited Triangle with having “established [the] trade” of reissues but foresaw a bleak future if other producers followed in its footsteps. “The business of reissue and new productions cannot go on at the same time,” the trade paper warned. When Paramount considered reissuing some of its most successful productions in 1921, Variety predicted a race to the bottom. “If Famous Players offered reissues on the market at prices necessarily greatly reduced, exhibitors would not be so willing to pay the much higher prices for the new productions,” it warned.2 Producers would stop investing in high-quality, high-cost productions. Old, cheap films would flood the market. Like an animal species that drives itself to extinction by eating its young, the movie industry risked its own future by reissuing films from the library. The old would cannibalize the new. Variety’s dire forecast never came true; reissues never cannibalized the business of producing and distributing new pictures. This chapter asks: why did this not happen? Producers have never ceased to reissue films. Paramount, Universal, and Fox all frequently reissued old productions from 50

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1920 to 1927. Yet this was not a decade of industry contraction and failure. Instead, it became an era of industry expansion, concentration, and transformation. In this chapter, I argue that changes in industry structure, taste culture, and technology contained film libraries as a side business throughout most of the 1920s. The industry’s decade-long shift toward vertical integration, matched with limited audience demand, ensured that film libraries and reissues did not threaten the studios’ core business. Only a company on the margins of the industry, such as Triangle, would position the library at the center of its business. Additionally, critics, audiences, and industry workers all participated in the creation of a taste sensibility that regarded entertainment films of the past as inherently inferior to new productions. Stars appropriated these critical arguments as they continued their legal fight against the reissue of their earlier films. Technology had the most complex relationship of all to the library. On the one hand, new technologies for home exhibition, such as 16mm and 9.5mm film, held the promise of new platforms that could enhance the value of old films. On the other hand, those new technologies threatened the business of theatrical moviegoing, including the business of theatrical reissues. Ultimately, the home cinema technologies failed to gain market traction. But the introduction of sound technology toward the end of the decade had the most transformative effect, forever dating Hollywood’s silent library. In the 1920s marketplace, old feature films were not worthless. However, film libraries did not yet serve the same important functions that the backlist served for the publishing industry. How did the studios conceive of their industry and the side business of reissues? And how was this different from what publishers thought? By comparing the film library to the publishing backlist, we gain a better perspective on how different copyright industries structured themselves vis-à-vis their old assets.

the backlist and the library, paramount and triangle Although film libraries were relatively new in the 1920s, the exploitation of old copyrights was not. Book publishers had long used their backlists as profit centers and barriers to entry against prospective competitors. Donaldson v. Beckett, the pivotal lawsuit in eighteenth-century England which determined that copyright was to be a limited monopoly rather than a perpetual right, was really a battle launched by London publishers to protect their valuable backlists against the threat of the public domain or,

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more specifically, of competition from inexpensive reprints.3 The United States imported the British statutory approach to copyright, and ever since, American publishers have had monopolies of their backlist titles before the copyrights expire and the works enter the public domain, whereupon other publishers may reprint them. Just as Motion Picture News and Variety differed in their view of exploiting film libraries, the discourse in the publishing world about backlists has veered between dire warnings of cannibalism and equally harsh chastisements for neglecting their value. In 1897, the British trade paper Publisher’s Circular warned that “the dead are today taking the bread out of the mouths of the living at a rate unparalleled in the history of literature.”4 O. H. Cheney, in his famous Economic Survey of the Book Industry, complained that “backlists are naturally affected by the competition of and among new books. If the backlist is the most profitable part of a publisher’s business, why should it be made to struggle to survive?”5 In a broad economic sense, film libraries and publishing backlists are similar in that both industries face high fixed costs yet low marginal costs of reproduction. The advance payment to an author, the postage of letters imploring the author to hurry up, and the cost of creating the printing plates—those are fixed costs. They are fixed whether the printer produces one copy or ten thousand. But after the fixed costs of producing the first copy, the cost of producing each additional unit (what economists refer to as the marginal cost) is quite low in comparison. Cinema shares this basic principle. Ever since 1908, the fixed cost of producing the negative has far exceeded the low marginal cost of striking prints. Additionally, the practices of backlist publishing unquestionably influenced certain decisions that the studios made in selecting films for reissue. Seeking to replicate the success of “classics” publishers, major studios in the 1930s chose adaptations of Little Women, Treasure Island, and David Copperfield for reissue. The publishing industry shaped the copyright laws that the film studios operated within and clearly influenced assumptions (which turned out to be incorrect) about what type of film would be well suited for reissue. But when we analyze the way that backlists and libraries have functioned in each industry, clear differences emerge.6 The two most important functions that backlists have historically played in the publishing industry have been as low-risk, low-cost profit centers and as barriers to entry against competitors. These are closely related—the dependable profits from the backlist offset some of the risk of publishing new books, thus providing a competitive advantage to incumbent publishing houses. Film libraries came to serve similar functions for the major Hollywood studios during the reissue boom of

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the late 1940s (which I examine in chapter 4). In the 1920s and 1930s, however, they served neither of these functions. The revenues and profits available through reissues were too small to provide a barrier to entry. There were differences between films and books as products that also explain why their respective industries organized their old copyrights differently. The end uses of books and films differed in significant ways. Whereas consumers throughout the twentieth century could buy books as gifts or buy books and never read them, these were not prevalent end uses for feature films until the VCR boom of the 1970s and 1980s. Ordinary consumers did not receive reels of film as gifts, impulsively buy them at the store, or use them as shelf decorations. In order for exhibitors to continue wanting to rent old movies and the studios to make money, consumers had to buy tickets, which they would not do unless they intended to sit through all or part of the film program. There was an important exception to these general end-use patterns: the nontheatrical market for renting, buying, and selling small-gauge films. In 1923, Eastman Kodak launched its fireresistant 16mm film stock and announced the creation of the Kodascope Library. As Haidee Wasson says, Kodak likened “seeing and saving films in the home . . . to the function of reading and collecting books, and listening to music.”7 As we will explore later in this chapter, though, the Kodascope Library found little traction in the consumer market and failed to deliver a profit center for Hollywood’s vault. The differences in end uses help explain why the film adaptations of literary classics reissued in the 1930s performed poorly at the box office. The studios looked at the impressive sales of classic series like the Little Red Library and selected films such as Little Women and David Copperfield from their vaults for reissue. But they failed to recognize that many, perhaps most, of those classic book sales came from gift givers and consumers who desired to inexpensively accumulate a home library. When Cheney surveyed American reading habits in 1930, he found that only 3 percent of adult reading went toward consuming “world masterpieces” and the “standard authors.”8 More people bought the classics than actually read them. Buying and reading could be distinguished as different activities in the world of publishing, but no comparable distinction existed between buying movie tickets and viewing movies. Because film libraries did not function as barriers to entry against potential competitors or as low-cost, low-risk profit centers, the successful Hollywood studios had to devise other means to serve the same economic functions. One of the chief ways that the studios offset risk was through block booking, compelling exhibitors to accept entire slates of up to 104

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pictures in a single block. Exhibitors who wanted to obtain the studio’s handful of highly desirable pictures had to take the rest of them too. Block booking essentially transferred the risk of failure from the studio to the exhibitor. It was also a barrier to entry against independent producers and distributors, who now had a harder time obtaining screen space. The Motion Picture Patents Company and the General Film Company (GFC) pioneered early forms of block booking (or “program booking”) in the 1910s, but it was Adolph Zukor’s Paramount that applied and refined the practice in relation to feature films.9 Paramount, in fact, innovated or perfected most of the key structures of the Hollywood studio system. It began as the merger of five states rights companies and served as the distributor for the productions of Zukor’s Famous Players Film Corporation.10 In 1916, Zukor took control of this distributor and made Paramount the subsidiary of Famous Players–Lasky, his new production company formed from a merger of Famous Players and the Jesse L. Lasky Company. Zukor served as the president of the new company, and Lasky was the vice-president in charge of production. Zukor went on a theater-buying spree in the 1920s, acquiring the controlling interest in the Chicago-based chain Balaban and Katz in 1926.11 He spent heavily to sign Hollywood’s biggest talent, and scholars have correctly identified his strategy as one of product differentiation through the embrace of the star system. At times, this strategy even trumped block booking, as when Zukor launched Artcraft to handle the pictures of the very biggest stars as special one-offs or small groups.12 However, this use of the star system also functioned as a barrier to entry against competitors. As the Hollywood studio system continued to grow in the 1920s and 1930s, the studios kept most of the major stars under exclusive contract, loaning their services at times to one another but almost never to an outsider. The studios’ biggest barrier to entry against competitors, though, was their ownership of first-run theaters. Here too Paramount was an innovator. Ironically, at the same moment when Variety was fretting over Famous Players’ reissue plans in 1921, Zukor was plotting an aggressive campaign of theater acquisition that necessitated the subordination of reissues. By issuing stock and taking on debt, Paramount financed an expansion that saw its total assets rise from $18,881,000 in 1918 to $306,269,000 in 1929. Compared to this sort of real estate value, the potential revenues of reissues were small. Variety, for instance, offered a 1920 estimation for the “reissue value” of Famous Players’ old negatives of ten million dollars.13 Since its theater assets became worth so much more than its film assets, Paramount (and the other studios that followed in its footsteps) necessarily had to

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subordinate the business of selling film libraries to the business of producing new pictures, exhibiting them in its first-run theaters, and pushing them through the cycle of distribution. In contrast, the Triangle model of exploiting a library generated high profit margins but low revenues; it could never service the mortgages that the studios took out on their theaters or offer shareholders a meaningful return on investment. It was not merely the quantity of studio-owned theaters that both barred entry to competitors and discouraged the excessive use of reissues. The strategic deployment of studio-owned theaters as first-run houses also had these effects. The first-run theaters played a vital role in the distribution and profitability of a film. Theaters were assigned a particular run (first, second, third, etc.) in a specific geographical zone and—with the exception of the first—could exhibit the film once a predetermined clearance period (perhaps eight to twelve weeks) had passed since its preceding run in the zone. This system, known as run-zone-clearance, ensured that the most money possible reached the studios as a film played across the country. The first run commanded the highest ticket price, and for this reason, the studios granted their own theaters first-run status. Because the large, first-run theaters incurred high fixed costs, the studios needed to attract the largest audiences, which they did by playing the most desirable films, regardless of which company produced them. Since most of the major studios owned theaters concentrated in a particular region, they traded first runs among themselves. This system made it difficult for either independent exhibitors or independent producers to compete. Independent exhibitors weren’t able to sell tickets at first-run premium prices; independent producers, with a handful of notable exceptions, lacked access to the lucrative downtown first-run theaters that were essential for a film’s promotion and successful release. The Paramount model, the blueprint for the entire studio system, was for a highly capitalized, vertically integrated corporation that maintained industry dominance through the strategic ownership of important first-run theaters. The strategies that Paramount used to stabilize profits, mitigate risk, and block competitor entry also limited the opportunities for library exploitation. Whereas backlist exploitation provided stability, profitability, and a barrier to entry in the publishing industry, film library exploitation threatened to erode these essential functions if practiced on anything beyond a limited scale. As the studio system continued to take hold throughout the 1920s, Paramount came to share dominance over the industry with a cadre of similarly structured companies: First National, Loew’s, Fox, and, by the end of the decade, Warner Bros. and RKO. An oligopoly of vertically integrated companies dominated the motion picture industry.

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In this context, Paramount and the other major studios regarded reissues as a side business of marginal importance to the corporations’ overall health. In the 1920s, the studios’ chief strategic use of their libraries was to fill holes in their release slates. It was especially common to see old movies on American screens in the summer.14 Following the tradition of the legitimate stage, many movie houses closed for the summer (an understandable decision in the era before widespread air conditioning). Others remained open, but attendance levels were lower, resulting in a smaller box office pie to be divided up among whatever films were in release. If you were a studio, you would not want to open a major production in June. Your first-run engagements—the opportunity to sell tickets at a premium—would suffer. Additionally, the film would enter its second run in July or August, when the box office pie was similarly small. Instead, you would want to fill the summer months by releasing either “program pictures” (genre fare produced on a budget) or reissues. But let’s say you fell six films short of your anticipated production output for the previous season. In that case, you would move six program pictures to fill out your spring release schedule and take six oldies out of the vault for the summer. In 1924, Paramount used these exact economizing and stopgap measures, announcing that it planned to reissue twenty films that summer.15 Paramount occasionally reissued films in the cold-weather seasons. The studio repeatedly offered exhibitors the opportunity to rent reissued comedy shorts at a discounted rate. And in the fall of 1926, it reissued The Sheik (1921) at the height of the sensation caused by Rudolph Valentino’s death.16 On the whole, Paramount treated reissues as a side business, capable of generating a small profit but subordinate to the core business of maximizing ticket sales and film rentals. In contrast to Paramount’s 1920s approach to reissues, Triangle and its successor companies embraced library exploitation as their core business. In 1915 and 1916, Triangle and Paramount were genuine competitors. But by the dawn of the 1920s, the two organizations operated in different spectra of the industry. Paramount was an industry leader and prolific producer; Triangle was an inactive producer of marginal status. Waters, who managed Triangle after Aitken’s 1919 ouster, exploited Triangle’s library even more systematically than his fraudulent predecessor had. His chief responsibility was to pay down the corporation’s debts. Waters knew the benefits that reissues could offer distressed corporations: he had managed the GFC in 1915, during its surge of Kalem, Biograph, and Essanay reissues. In November 1919, Triangle contracted with the U.S. Navy Motion Picture Exchange to carry its reissues for ten dollars per exhibition of a feature and

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$1.50 or $3 per showing of a one- or two-reeler.17 In 1920, Waters obtained a far larger deal by licensing the Triangle reissues for $877,000 to the Film Distributors League, a consortium of states rights exchanges.18 After the league’s two-year license expired, Waters licensed the Keystone comedies to none other than Aitken, who, with Oscar Price, put them back on the market through a rights brokering company called Tri-Stone.19 Aitken never fully exited Triangle, nor gave up on making money through the old films. Triangle managed to pay off millions in debt through the exploitation of its old film assets. However, corporate growth and market leadership were never Waters’s goals. He kept operating expenses low by outsourcing the library’s distribution functions, to the Film Distributors League and later Tri-Stone. And at the same moment when Waters demonstrated the continued worth of a film library, he downsized Triangle and sold off the company’s other assets, which included real estate and office furniture.20 Price and Aitken had grander ambitions—to use library exploitation as a core business strategy to grow Tri-Stone into a viable industry player.21 When Triangle finally declared bankruptcy in 1924, Tri-Stone acquired its collection of roughly twenty-five hundred film negatives (many of which it had already leased). Tri-Stone had some initial success distributing the old Keystone comedies to states rights exchanges. Price took pride in the fact that Paramount tried to imitate Tri-Stone by reissuing its old Mack Sennett films just months later. “Who ever heard of Paramount following in anybody’s foot-steps,” a sales memo that went to all participating TriStone exchanges declared. “You of course are responsible for Paramount announcing for future release a series of re-edited and re-issued Mack Sennett Comedies.”22 As the years wore on, though, Tri-Stone’s library of old Triangle pictures became a harder sell. In 1924 a New York City exchange declined to carry a print of The Return of Draw Egan (1916) because of exhibitor complaints that the eight-year-old William S. Hart film had been so overplayed. Price and his associates continued to strike the occasional one-off deal until as late as 1930. However, they found that the library produced diminishing returns with each passing year. There may have been a way, even in the 1920s, for a film company to succeed by making the library its core business and not simply a side business. But doing so would have required consistently acquiring fresh films for the library. Price neglected to incorporate new acquisitions into his model. Eliot Hyman, working in a very different industry context in the 1950s and 1960s, recognized that generating new product was vital for turning a library distribution company into a sustainable, profitable business.

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regulating reissues: stars, industry, and government As I’ve argued, the logic of the vertically integrated Hollywood studio structure necessitated that the major studios subordinate the business of film libraries in order to focus on the production, distribution, and especially exhibition of new pictures. Nevertheless, conflicts involving reissues still arose, prompting the intervention of stars, industry leaders, and the Federal Trade Commission. Stars continued to wage the highest-profile battles against reissues. Despite the FTC’s important 1919 ruling against W.H. Productions, the retitled Hart pictures continued to circulate. Hart found himself in the position of having to enforce the FTC’s rules. When he discovered that two California exchanges were trafficking in the retitled two-reelers in late 1920, he filed for injunctions to stop both them and a Los Angeles movie house. Hart used the FTC’s ruling as his chief ammunition and argued that the retitled films damaged his reputation. However, he also offered an economic argument to the court. In the complaint, he explained that he held no profit participation in the two-reelers, whereas since leaving Triangle for Artcraft in July 1917 “he still retain[ed] an interest” in his pictures for the latter company, granting him a “portion of the income received on account of the distribution and exhibition thereof.”23 Hart’s campaign against the reissues had never been simply about protecting his reputation or guarding the American consumer. His Artcraft deal gave William S. Hart Productions a two-hundred-thousand-dollar minimum guarantee for each five-reel negative he delivered, against a fifty-fifty split of net profits.24 Hart wanted to maximize the circulation of his Artcraft pictures and minimize the competition from his earlier films. In the face of these costly and virtually unwinnable lawsuits, the exchanges and theaters agreed to accept permanent restraining orders against ever distributing or exhibiting the retitled films again. Hart, in turn, gave up his claims for damages. To discourage other exhibitors from booking the retitled reissues, he published an advertisement in Exhibitor’s Trade Review encouraging “any real exhibitor [to] read the following letter—and buckle on his six shooter.”25 This advertisement prompted the exhibitor William C. McIntire, discussed at the beginning of chapter 1, to write to Hart. McIntire expressed his approval of Hart’s campaign and further suggested that stars “include in CONTRACTS AFTER TWO YEARS ALL OLD PRINTS MUST BE DESTROYED NOT RE ISSUED.”26 However, McIntire’s bold proposal overlooked an important consideration. Stars would gain the

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leverage to demand such a contractual stipulation only once they had reached a significant success level. But by that point, they would be able to negotiate rich profit participation deals. By the early 1920s, the biggest stars owned the copyrights to their films and only licensed the distribution rights. Under Hart’s Artcraft deal, his production company regained ownership of his pictures after five years in circulation. He had won and exercised the right to broker licenses with subdistributors. Hart did not want to destroy his old films. He wanted to control and profit from them. Douglas Fairbanks’s early 1920s legal struggle against the Triangle library highlights the complex ways in which stars used both artistic and economic arguments to protect their reputations and to profit personally. In 1922, Hyman Winik acquired the rights to reedit Fairbanks’s Triangle pictures into a string of two-reel serials. Fairbanks sued for an injunction to halt any distribution of the shortened films, arguing that “they will be distributed before the American public in a deceptive manner, calculated to mislead the American people,” and that the “mutilated and distorted pictures will come in competition with the pictures I am now making and will inevitably have the effect of injuring my standing with the motion picture public.”27 These were the familiar arguments about stopping retitled reissues, but they held less weight than when Hart used them against W.H. Productions. In fact, precisely to avoid finding himself caught in the same type of litigation again, Winik preemptively published an open letter in the Film Daily in June 1922 informing Fairbanks that “in all advertising matter, the public will be advised that these Playlets have been re-edited and reconstructed from your former successes.”28 If Winik was telling the truth, no audience members would have been deceived into thinking that they were watching something else. This was not a case of unfair competition, and thus not a case for the FTC. Nor was it really a case of competition at all. A two-reel serial was no substitute for an extravagant twelve-reel picture like The Three Musketeers (1921). The two-reel serials would play before feature films; they were complementary products, not substitutes. Fairbanks’s complaint was not about marketplace confusion; it was about protecting his films and reputation. He had reason to be concerned. By 1920, some exhibitors were lampooning short films from the nickelodeon era by showing them before feature programs under the banner of “The Old Time Movie Show.” As William M. Drew explains, these promoters hoped that the contrast between old short and new feature “could illustrate effectively the dramatic progress in the development of film while furnishing added mirth for an audience convulsed by the ‘ancient’ primitive movies of a decade ago.”29 Unlike with movies passed off as new, the appeal for

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the audience of “The Good Old Movie Show” hinged precisely on the fact that the films were old—and funny for reasons that their makers never intended. Fairbanks was not a screen actor in the nickelodeon days, but his wife of two years, Mary Pickford, had appeared in dozens of one- and tworeel films starting in 1909. Pickford’s early Biograph work circulated widely in these tongue-in-cheek revival screenings, and the films in which she costarred with her first husband, Owen Moore, became particular favorites—allowing audiences to witness both outdated film conventions and a romance set to expire.30 Fairbanks’s films had not aged to the same extent, and Winik pledged to edit them respectfully. However, the risk for ridicule was still great: Winik would likely take films with Fairbanks’s former comedian persona and adapt them into serialized adventures that fit his new swashbuckler persona. Whereas audiences laughed at moments in short Pickford melodramas that now played like comedies, they might laugh at moments in the Fairbanks adventure serials that they thought overwrought, not realizing that the footage came from comedies. Fairbanks argued that the films “will bring discredit on me and will unavoidably injure my professional standing.”31 Pickford could not prevent the recontextualized screenings of her Biograph work, but her husband had a shot at stopping the Triangle serializations. She filed an affidavit on her husband’s behalf and may have been a driving force behind the lawsuit.32 The New York County Supreme Court denied Fairbanks’s petition for an injunction, but the star prevailed on appeal. He won with the same basic argument that he used to break free of his Triangle contract: his contract guaranteed that D. W. Griffith would supervise his productions; Winik’s two-reel reconstructions would not be supervised by Griffith; therefore, the alteration of the completed films by anyone except Griffith would amount to a breach of contract. The defendants pointed out that Griffith played no meaningful role in the creation of the films in the first place, but the Appellate Division judge still granted the injunction “in view of the contractual obligation concerning the supervision of direction by Mr. Griffith, the approval of stories to be filmed and the right to inspection of the completed photoplay by the plaintiff.”33 The judge also approvingly cited Fairbanks’s objection that “he has never appeared in a two-reel picture, but has appeared only in feature pictures of five or more reels,” a point that takes for granted the presumed inferiority of the short to the feature. The case was an early victory for film artists seeking to retain control over their completed work.34 Over the subsequent decades, other stars and directors mounted legal attacks to prevent their old films from being shortened, interrupted by television commercials, or colorized (chapter 6 discusses one

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such case involving George Stevens). Although judges frequently decided these cases based on narrow contractual interpretations, the rhetoric always implied that more was at stake—the artist’s reputation, the integrity of the film, the protection of the American public. While he fought in civil court to protect his reputation, Fairbanks participated in an FTC unfair competition case. He was the victim of one of the most brazen sniping stunts in film history, and, once again, the plot stemmed from the Triangle library. Shortly after the Film Distributors League agreed to pay $877,000 for a two-year license to the Triangle library, the consortium of states rights exchanges struck numerous prints of the 1915 film D’Artagnan. They, like everyone else in the industry, had read Fairbanks’s announcement that he would produce and star in a lavish production of The Three Musketeers, to be distributed that fall by United Artists. As Fairbanks began production on his seven-hundred-thousanddollar movie, the Film Distributors League readied its own campaign— changing the title of Triangle’s $17,780 D’Artagnan to that of its underlying literary source, The Three Musketeers, and printing new promotional materials that mentioned in small print that the film was an “adaptation of D’Artagnan” or a “re-creation of D’Artagnan.” The league knew that the FTC required acknowledgement of a film’s reissue status, but it also knew that it controlled the rights to Triangle’s negative and no one controlled the rights to Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, which was in the public domain. In fact, the league was prepared to argue the legal high ground. The Three Musketeers was a public domain novel, but Triangle controlled the copyright to any transformations unique to the 1915 film version. On August 28, 1921, the evening of The Three Musketeers’ New York premiere, following months of United Artists publicity and advertising, the moment was right to strike. League president and New Jersey exchange operator William Alexander wired his exhibitor clients, “Douglas Fairbanks in The Three Musketeers opened at the Lyric Theatre Sunday night, Acclaimed the greatest picture success of season, Stop. We have The Three Musketeers formerly titled D’Artagnan personally directed by Thomas H. Ince featuring Orrin Johnson, Dorothy Dalton, Louise Glaum, Rhea Mitchell, Walt Whitman, and supporting cast of over twenty-five hundred. Positively the best directed and greatest presentation of Alexander Dumas’ masterpiece ever attempted. Stop. You now have a chance for tremendous cleanup. Book now to insure dates best suited for your theatres.”35 Truthfully, Ince only supervised the production of D’Artagnan; Charles Swickard directed it. Yet aside from that misstatement and an embellishment or two, the Film Distributors League had reported the situation

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accurately. The league controlled The Three Musketeers, formerly D’Artagnan, and its money-making potential was huge. No exhibitors were deceived, in other words. They knew exactly the product and the opportunity that they were being offered. The exchanges carrying the retitled D’Artagnan had gangbuster bookings. League president Alexander successfully negotiated with a New Jersey exhibitor to receive a percentage of the box office gross, a rare deal in the business of film reissues, which generally operated on a flat rental basis. Only one obstacle slowed the sniping bonanza: Fairbanks didn’t appear in Triangle’s D’Artagnan. The star had been under contract with Triangle at the time, but he performed in the Fine Arts Film Company unit productions, not those supervised by Ince. Sniping had always depended on exploiting the star system. The public’s recognition of individual film titles played a far lesser role, and snipers fared better the less the audience remembered specific titles, plots, and scenes. So as a way to associate Fairbanks’s name with the retitled D’Artagnan, the Film Distributors League offered certain exhibitors prints of old Fairbanks Triangle features, free of charge, to play alongside the “adaptation.” Theaters in New Brunswick, South Amboy, and South River, New Jersey, advertised “Manhattan Madness with Douglas Fairbanks” and “The Three Musketeers” in large letters the same night that United Artists’ Three Musketeers opened in those towns.36 Fairbanks and United Artists argued that the reissue of D’Artagnan under the title of The Three Musketeers amounted to unfair competition, citing the “William S. Hart test case.” Triangle, the Film Distributors League, and the Alexander Film Corporation responded by suing United Artists for copyright infringement, making the far-fetched claim that Fairbanks’s film was an imitation infringing on Triangle’s copyright.37 The FTC took three years to investigate the matter, not offering its findings and order until 1925. By far its longest published decision on retitled reissues, FTC v. Film Distributors League clarified some of the rules for reissues. An old picture needed to be clearly denoted as such. Phrases such as “an adaptation of” or “a re-creation of” had the capacity to deceive patrons into thinking that they were watching a new film, particularly when it was an adaptation of a famous novel. Intent was also important. The FTC found that “the motive which prompted the parties in bringing about reissue of ‘D’Artagnan’ under the title of ‘Three Musketeers’ was to profit by the extraordinary publicity campaign of the United Artists Corporation for ‘The Three Musketeers’ without any of the anxiety, burden or expense the producers of the genuine ‘Three Musketeers’ had been compelled to sustain.”38 The FTC had clarified the boundaries of legal and ethical library exploitation.

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On March 23, 1925, it ordered the Film Distributors League to cease and desist from distributing Triangle’s D’Artagnan in a manner to confuse it with United Artists’ The Three Musketeers. In its findings, the FTC finally implicated exhibitors as participants in the deceptive practice of retitling reissues. But by then, both the cease-and-desist order and the acknowledgment of exhibitor complicity were moot points. Not only had United Artists’ The Three Musketeers lost its marketplace luster, but many of the exchanges and theaters involved in the “re-creation of D’Artagnan” had gone out of business. As chapter 1 discusses, sniping was generally a survival strategy practiced by small exhibitors and exchanges that were being squeezed out of the industry. The Fox Film Corporation offers one notable exception to the trend of snipers being small-time players on the losing side of industry change. In 1920, Fox retitled three 1917 productions and sent them to exhibitors that had block-booked for a full season of new productions. In 1922, the FTC intervened on behalf of the exhibitors, who, unlike those in the cases of W.H. Productions and the Film Distributors League, were genuinely misled into believing that the retitled films were new.39 In 1927, the now larger Fox brought sniping to the first-run market. In the same week that MGM opened John Gilbert’s Flesh and the Devil in Philadelphia’s Arcadia Theatre, Fox opened one of the star’s earlier productions, The Count of Monte Cristo (1923), in its twenty-four-hundred-seat Philly theater.40 It then reissued another six Gilbert pictures before the end of the year, which earned impressive grosses by reissue standards.41 As the decade continued, the industry codified its guidelines and selfregulations on the matter of reissues. In the Standard Exhibition Contract of 1926, the nation’s leading distributors and exhibitors agreed on the following provision concerning the titles of reissues: “The Distributor reserves the right to change the title of any of the photoplays specified in the said schedule but shall not substitute any other photoplay therefor without the consent of the Exhibitor: and warrants that none of such photoplays are reissues from old negatives or are old negatives renamed excepting those specifically set forth as such in the said schedule.”42 Beyond the codification of guidelines, the major industry players helped contain the threat of reissues by participating in a cultural discourse that emphasized cinema’s progress. As Shelley Stamp explains in her work on Lois Weber, the movie industry in the late 1920s began to “mark a series of anniversaries and milestones, the discourse surrounding which crafted a particular story about Hollywood’s past in which an older generation of Hollywood denizens was distanced from a new, modern generation.”43 As we’ll see, by

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emphasizing the distance between the present and the past, the industry aligned itself well with the assumptions of 1920s film critics.

taste culture, critics, and fans When Hart filed for the injunctions in 1920 against the California exchanges that were distributing retitled two-reelers of his, he argued to the court “that at the time said pictures were produced, the methods of making motion pictures had not been developed to their present standard of excellence, and the pictures in which the plaintiff then appeared were necessarily much inferior in point of clearness and general excellence to the pictures subsequently made.”44 Hart was appropriating a critical framework that valued films made only five or six years earlier as “much inferior” to “their present standard of excellence.” The Los Angeles Superior Court judge recognized his argument as a matter of common sense: today’s movies were inherently superior to yesterday’s, just as tomorrow’s would surely surpass today’s. I argue that the dominant critical attitude toward old movies in the 1920s was this stance, which might best be termed “forward looking.” Other scholars have commented on related aspects of cinema and taste culture. In The Decline of Sentiment: American Film in the 1920s, Lea Jacobs demonstrates that even before World War I, influential literary critics such as H. L. Mencken had taken a stance against sentimental “hokum.” Mencken and his many followers demanded that novelists use greater naturalism and restraint. In the 1920s, Variety’s reviewers and other leading film critics gravitated toward this antisentimental position. The trade press reviewers imagined an audience that was bifurcated between sophisticated urban viewers and small-town moviegoers who clung to old-fashioned conventions.45 Critics praised the films that they believe signaled the best new developments in filmmaking and implored viewers to demand the same. Photoplay offers a useful gauge of the cultural and critical attitude toward old movies. This magazine simultaneously targeted movie fans, catered to the industry’s publicity needs, and reflected the voice of its opinionated editor, James Quirk. It occasionally ran articles that compared a star’s current appearance to the way she looked years before, calling attention to an improved hairstyle, for instance. Quirk, who became Photoplay’s vice-president in 1915 and chief editor in 1920, similarly emphasized cinema’s growth.46 His belief in film as an art form was entirely forwardlooking—a film was good or bad to the extent that it advanced or retarded the progress of film art. Quirk’s values were reflected in the way he

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conceived of Photoplay’s award for the year’s best picture. Beginning in 1921, he encouraged readers to mail in ballots for what they considered the best American picture from the previous year. Film awards and critics’ top-ten lists have come to perform canonical and commemorative functions, inscribing passing ephemera into the permanence of history. Quirk’s intention in creating the award, however, was “to encourage better pictures by giving proper recognition” to the best works. The award was a message to the producers of America: this is the type of picture we want you to make!47 When Photoplay’s critics reviewed film reissues, they employed a similar value system, emphasizing cinema’s growth and the superiority of modern to old pictures. The magazine mocked certain old films, finding humor in their self-seriousness. Reviewing the 1921 reissue of The Spirit of ‘76 (1917), Photoplay found that the picture “resembles nothing so much as a fourteen-reel Ben Turpin comedy without the talented Ben. If this is a specimen of the real Spirit of ‘76, how did we ever manage to win the Revolution?”48 At other times, it would praise an older film but still note its shortcomings compared to the present state of cinema. Photoplay offered the following review of Universal’s 1926 reissue of Outside the Law (1920): “A RE-ISSUE of a crook drama that was released many years ago. It really has a splendid plot and cast—Lon Chaney, Priscilla Dean, and Ralph Lewis—but in these days of beautiful sets, gorgeous costumes and perfect lighting, one can’t feel as enthusiastic about it as if it were a modern picture. If you can overlook the old-fashioned dress, sets, etc., you will find this an engrossing picture.”49 Photoplay reveals how some audiences and critics in the 1920s could be avid moviegoers, connoisseurs of stars, and passionate about film as an art form but still hold little interest in the reissue of old films. Film’s true promise lay in the future, not the past. Only in the subsequent decade, as some began to regard the introduction of sound as an artistic step backward, did more audiences come to believe that viewing film’s past was an important step toward charting its future. Other critics took an even harsher view of old films. In 1923, the Baltimore Sun published an article with the headline “Old Films Are Compared with New by Critic: Views of Reissues Fail to Substantiate Movie Fan’s Claims That Former Successes Were Better than Those of Today.” The Sun’s critic discouraged viewers from seeking old films, cautioning them against allowing nostalgia to play tricks on their judgment.50 Across the Atlantic the following year, the Manchester Guardian’s critic had a far more acerbic take. In an editorial titled “Let Bygones Be Bygones,” the critic warned, “Poor fools who catch at the past and try to re-create it

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are fair game for the businessman. . . . Let us face it squarely. The films are out of date, and our modern minds, coloured with yesterday’s experiences and to-day’s surroundings, find it hard to meet them on the level. Art may be timeless, but the kinema is only now hesitatingly on the threshold of art, and has barely yet glanced through the door.”51 A few critics recognized film as an art form and advocated for the reissue of old pictures that they considered significant artistic achievements. Two hundred miles south of Manchester, the London-based film critic Iris Barry lamented the “mutability” of films, which made “it impossible for many of those people who would appreciate the most novel, interesting, original films, ever to see them.” In her 1926 book Let’s Go to the Pictures, she explained, “A film appears, say in the Charing Cross Road, for three days. One hears about it a day too late. Where can one look for it? There is no means of knowing. Those who know the ropes can, of course, by discovering the name of the company that owns it, ring them up and find out where it is to be seen. But the public doesn’t know that trick, and in any case why should it?”52 In the following decade, Barry migrated to America and attempted to arrest film’s mutability through the creation of the Museum of Modern Art Film Library. Barry wanted old films to be made more readily available, but it’s important to note that her tastes (at least in the 1920s) differed significantly from those of the fans of Hart and Fairbanks reissues. Barry wanted the most artistically important films to circulate, not the old films of famous stars. In fact, she argued that the star system marked “the greatest possible benefit to the commercial development of the movies” but “the greatest possible handicap to its artistic development,” since it limited the stories that films could tell and the roles that actors could play.53 Barry proposed specialized theaters that would show the great films, new and old. In New York City, Symon Gould was already putting a similar vision into practice as a leader of the little cinema movement. Centering on theaters with small seating capacities and sparse amenities, this movement of 1925–29 marked, in Anne Morey’s words, a “long-running dissatisfaction with both Hollywood films and exhibition circumstances.”54 The programming of these American theaters skewed heavily toward European cinema, showcasing new and old films from the United Kingdom, France, and especially Germany. However, Gould’s Lenox Little Theatre also screened revivals of U.S. films that he considered to hold artistic distinction, such as Salome (1923) and Beau Brummell (1924).55 Gould and the other promoters of the little cinemas envisioned their film revivals as occupying an oppositional position to the dominant Hollywood industry—plucking

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out gems from the past so that they could be appreciated for their artistic value and not their commercial worth. The little cinemas found a small but devoted audience that wanted to watch distinguished films from the past. They were far outnumbered, though, by the quantity of Americans theaters that occasionally showed star-driven reissues. The attitudes of audience members who watched old Hollywood films in these various contexts are difficult to generalize. Some movie fans in the 1920s liked old films and wanted to revisit them, as is clear from the Baltimore Sun critic’s rebuttal to the “Movie Fan’s Claims That Former Successes Were Better than Those of Today.” There were also viewers of “The Good Old Movie Show” who enjoyed old movies precisely because they seemed so bad, outdated, and inadvertently funny. Depending on the context, the same viewer may have been capable of occupying any one or a combination of different spectatorship positions, including nostalgia, irony, and aesthetic appreciation, while watching different reissues. One thing we can say with more confidence about movie fans in the 1920s: some valued the opportunity to revisit old films, but all wanted to do so on their own terms. This meant having a voice in the film selection and being shown the respect of not having the title switched, which was counterproductive for those fans who purposefully revisited the same picture. Fans adapted to the marketplace and developed the skills to spot a bait-andswitch reissue. A fan letter published in the Baltimore Sun in 1923 is quite telling: How many ardent movie fans have been tricked into seeing an old picture which they were led to believe was new? This happens when a newly risen star makes a big success and the public starts shouting for more of that star’s work. Some companies don’t care if the picture is five or seven years old or whether the story is bad or not—if it is one in which the new favorite appeared in a few scenes, the production is reissued for the sake of cashing in on the star’s name. No matter with how many new art titles the reissue is dolled up, or how many scenes are rearranged, it is almost sure to be a disappointment. So many old pictures are being shown nowadays that the public has to shop wisely and carefully for its entertainment. From my point of view, the thing that is wrong is for the theater manager, who knows that the film is a reissue, to try to make his patrons think it is a new subject. This is breaking faith with his patrons.

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When the Rudolph Valentino craze came into full blast, companies started to dust off their ancient films in which Valentino had a small part. These same products were often put out as new products and in some cases Valentino was announced as star.56 The writer recognized a pattern—that when an actor became famous, their earlier films were put back into circulation. The fan was intelligent enough to hold the producer and exhibitor responsible, not the star. Before concluding, the fan offered an important addendum: “By the way, a lot of these are excellent pictures and quite worth while seeing. But people should not be misled into thinking that they are new.” This last point is important. Fans wanted their favorite old films to continue to circulate, but on whose terms would this happen? Producers, distributors, and exhibitors acted in bad faith when they tried to pass off old films as new. Even when acknowledging that a picture was a reissue, studios and exhibitors frequently falsely attributed its return to overwhelming audience demand rather than, say, a shortage of new pictures or the opportunity to cash in on a new star. In the decades to follow, audiences grew even more willing to watch old films. Some fans demanded the return of favorite titles. Yet they remained sensitive about the ways that these old movies reached them. Studios had a duty to deliver old films in a forthright manner. They violated the public trust when they retitled old films, pretended that reissues were driven by demand and not supply-side concerns, or carelessly chopped up older films to fit double bills or accommodate television commercials.

technological innovation New technologies that play back old movies also tend to replay the industry’s fantasies and anxieties about technology and content libraries. Are Netflix and Amazon Prime Instant Video good for the health of the Hollywood industry because they open up new revenue streams? Or do they represent threats because they compete with more valuable and traditional sources of revenue? In the 1920s, the marketing of home movie projectors stirred up just such debates. Even in the 1920s, this idea was not new. As Ben Singer explains, “Manufacturers launched more than two dozen portable projectors designed specifically for the home and other small group uses between 1896 and 1923 alone.”57 Home cinema projectors promised to bring the visual wonders of the world into the comfortable space of the middle-to-upper-class home, offering spectators a different experience from watching movies (perhaps

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lurid movies, no less) theatrically in the company of lower-class and workingclass audiences.58 The vertically integrated Hollywood studio system, on the other hand, depended on maximizing the number of theatrical moviegoers. The tension between these two models of the film experience in part defines the uneasy dynamic between the Hollywood industry and home cinema for the first half of the twentieth century. Tensions over the very concept of a “library” also exist. The studios conceived of their film assets as private libraries. In contrast, small-gauge film stocks prompted public libraries to acquire and circulate films, numerous distributors to establish rental libraries, and individual collectors to amass personal film libraries. Under close analysis, the historical relationship between Hollywood and nontheatrical cinema resembles a series of Venn diagrams—the overlaps occurring on the levels of film content (films that both entertained and educated), business (the small amount of the nontheatrical market’s gross revenue that went to Hollywood studios), and audience (the many people who experienced films both in the theater and in other contexts, such as schools and churches). In deciding whether to participate in the nontheatrical market, the studios had to weigh whether the growth potential of this side business outweighed the damage it might cause to their core business. Triangle and Paramount each approached the matter differently. As we might expect, Triangle was quick to enter the nontheatrical market once it ceased competing as a producer of new films. In 1919, it entered into a contract with United Projector Company to make “miniature prints” and circulate them to “Chautauquas, Schools, Clubs, Social Gatherings, Fraternal, Religious, Benevolent and Charitable Benefits and Entertainments.” The deal covered ten films—all starring Hart, Fairbanks, Norma Talmadge, or Frank Keenan—for a total of eighteen thousand dollars.59 This agreement served as Triangle’s entry point into the United Safety Film Library, which rented films on flame-resistant but expensive 28mm stock to those nontheatrical sites equipped with a compatible projector.60 In 1920, Triangle entered into a similar but more far-reaching agreement with Pathéscope, a subsidiary of the French company Pathé, which had invented the 28mm safety stock.61 Triangle agreed to furnish Pathéscope with films from its library at a series of prenegotiated rates ($1,000 for a Fairbanks picture, $750 for a Hart, and $300 for any two-reel Keystone comedy). For these payments, Pathéscope gained the five-year nontheatrical distribution rights for the United States and Canada. In turn, it promised to purchase a minimum of $14,200 worth of films from Triangle and make ten prints of each.62 The dollar figures listed in these agreements are significant for what they tell us about entertainment film libraries and the nontheatrical market

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at the dawn of the 1920s. From the perspectives of United Safety and Pathéscope, it was worth paying a premium (or what they considered a premium) to obtain star-driven films that could help them sell their technological platforms and grow their rental businesses. From the standpoint of Triangle, however, the revenue was tiny compared to its earnings from the theatrical reissue market. The same year as the Pathéscope deal, the Film Distributors League agreed to pay Triangle $877,000—roughly sixtyone times Pathéscope’s minimum guarantee—for the theatrical reissue rights to the Triangle library. Granted, for an indebted movie studio that no longer produced films, some money from the nontheatrical market was better than no money. Additionally, if Pathéscope became a huge success in North America, then Triangle would certainly license far more films to it. Unfortunately, this was not the case. In 1921, Pathéscope wrote a letter to Triangle admitting that its service had failed thus far to gain traction and that “we are unable to market or use ourselves, more than five prints of most of the subjects,” rather than the ten prints per film that it had originally planned to order. Pathéscope renegotiated its contract with Triangle so it could pay the same $14,200 minimum guarantee but gain access to more films (with fewer prints struck for each).63 Triangle and its successors continued to do business with Pathéscope, eventually licensing more films for the 9.5mm Pathex rental service.64 But Triangle’s revenue from 28mm and 9.5mm never came close to matching the profits and revenue of the theatrical reissue market. Eastman Kodak’s technological innovations created the prospect of a more viable and lucrative nontheatrical market. Kodak debuted its fireresistant 16mm film stock in 1923 and soon thereafter announced the launch of the Kodascope Library. The company targeted the home as the primary market for its new line of products, which encompassed a 16mm camera, projector, stock, and accessories. In advertisements for the Kodascope, Kodak emphasized the ability of ordinary people to create movies of their own lives. However, the Kodascope Library also promised to allow movie fans to rent feature films and make “the most famous screen stars available to every home.”65 Kodak’s monthly newsletter suggested that “a thoughtfully selected program” of movies was sure to include a travelogue, some films that you had shot, and an entertainment feature (such as Hart’s The Return of Draw Egan).66 In distributing features and shorts, Kodak took advantage of its preexisting infrastructure, using its regional exchanges and camera stores to rent 16mm prints.67 In some cases, it sold 16mm prints outright to customers who wanted to amass their own libraries.68 To acquire content, it licensed films from numerous producers,

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including Triangle, Warner Bros., and Fox. In an impressive 1927 acquisition, Kodascope licensed nineteen features from Paramount for one year. These included Forbidden Paradise (1924), Manhandled (1924), and The Covered Wagon (1923).69 The Paramount-Kodascope agreement highlighted the risks and rewards of adopting the new 16mm technology. Kodascope paid Paramount a oneyear license fee of fifty thousand dollars—a reasonable amount from a platform that few consumers had adopted.70 However, fifty thousand dollars was small compared to the hundreds of thousands in profits that the reissue of Valentino’s The Sheik had generated the previous year, and it was minuscule compared to the overall theatrical exhibition business.71 Why did Paramount agree to the deal? The studio may have considered 16mm a potential growth market or may have wanted another profit stream. It may also simply have been doing a favor for its most important supplier of raw film stock. A Paramount representative alluded to this possibility when, a mere six months after it had entered into the agreement, exhibitors in Ohio expressed their displeasure. “I heartily agree with your protest against my campaign for motion picture entertainment in homes,” the Paramount executive S. R. Kent wrote in apology. “I was personally responsible for a contract made for 12 of our productions, but this was due to circumstances which had previously involved our word. We were supposed to make a three year contract. This was afterwards compromised by me for one year only and the contract will not be renewed.”72 As a side business, 16mm distribution represented a threat to both the studio’s core business and the more important side business of theatrical reissues. Its paltry revenues could not outweigh the exhibitor backlash. Paramount chose not to renew its contract with Kodascope Libraries Inc. (Kodak’s subsidiary). In addition, most American movie fans declined Kodascope’s hardware and rental service. The expense of the Kodascope partly explains the lack of significant consumer adoption. Moreover, for families who wanted to bring the worlds of news and entertainment into the home, radio was a far more cost-effective technology. It promised greater immediacy than the home film projector, and consumers did not have to rent or purchase each new piece of content they consumed through it. In her excellent essay analyzing the 1920s cultural discourse surrounding the Kodascope Library, Haidee Wasson writes, “The 16mm home theater was more an imagined ideal than a reality, an ideal that prominently migrated to other technologies. While 16mm did find a place in homes (usually in more affluent homes), it eventually became the primary gauge for schools, churches, libraries, and universities from the mid-1930s onward, a function that spread and was thus

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secured during and after World War II. Yet, throughout the 1920s, 16mm held a brief, if frequently maniacal, promise of forever-changing home entertainment.”73 Contrary to what we might expect, the 16mm market never became a lucrative site for the Hollywood studios to rent their collections of old films. Universal twice attempted to create in-house 16mm subsidiaries—the Show at Home service in the mid-to-late-1920s and, roughly twenty years later, United World (a venture that chapter 4 discusses in detail).74 Ultimately, both of these failed to live up to the parent corporation’s expectations. From a strict bottom-line perspective, the 16mm film market never became economically meaningful to the Hollywood studios in the 1920s, and it grew only marginally more significant over the following four decades. However, as Wasson invites us to consider, there are other ways that the 16mm market and the Kodascope Library mattered. They mattered in terms of the Hollywood industry’s imagination—truly “maniacal” at times—about both the positive and the negative consequences of home cinema. Sixteen millimeter film was also a production technology, which enabled amateur filmmakers to record home movies. Its inexpensiveness and portability also led educational filmmakers, religious filmmakers, avant-gardists, and other creators who viewed themselves as outside the Hollywood entertainment industry to embrace the new safety gauge. They found audiences at the schools, churches, and other nontheatrical spaces that came to possess 16mm projectors. The 16mm film stock’s most economically valuable contribution to the business of Hollywood film libraries was still decades away and arrived in an unexpected form. This contribution did not come through distribution to schools, churches, military camps, or any of the other sites we generally associate with the history of 16mm film. Instead, an altogether different site—television stations—generated substantial revenue by playing 16mm film prints and transmitting the interlaced signal into homes, which advertisers paid to enter. By adopting 16mm as the primary storage and transportation medium of feature films for television, TV stations and distributors inadvertently bolstered the cultural significance of the small gauge. As a result of the major studios selling their libraries to television in the mid1950s, thousands of movies that had never before been printed on 16mm were transferred to that narrow film stock. Some of those prints eventually reached the markets of collectors, who bought them, saved them, screened them, and occasionally duped them for other collectors. The RKO films distributed by Matty Fox’s C&C TV (a company that chapter 5 discusses extensively) became particularly prevalent on the collectors’ market due to

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Fox’s decision to sell, rather than rent, an entire library of film prints to stations across the country. The late 1920s witnessed the introduction of a technology far more transformative than 16mm for the Hollywood motion picture industry: sound. Earlier in this chapter, I compared the backlists of publishers to the libraries of film studios. One additional difference between the backlist and the library is the sensitivity of end users (readers and audiences) to the age of the work. In his survey of reading habits, O. H. Cheney found that adults in 1930 spent 40 percent of reading time on books that were between one and one-half to eight years old.75 Movies between one and a half and eight years old, on the other hand, attracted nowhere close to 40 percent of viewing time. One New York Times commentator in 1935 went so far as to say that “women’s hats and automobiles change so much from season to season that a film three years old is practically a period or costume film.”76 Films were always more sensitive than books to age, but the transition to sound exacerbated the effect. No change in the history of film aged movies more than this. Whereas a star-driven 1923 feature still held meaningful reissue value in 1927, a star’s 1927 film held little market value in 1931, after the complete transition to sound. Books contained less clear markers of age and never experienced a formal transformation in the twentieth century as dramatic as the coming of sound. Films were more sensitive to age in the minds of consumers. But on a material level, cinema was also far more sensitive than the printing plates and paper of book publishing. In the 1920s, Hollywood’s library was saved in reels of nitrate film. All it took was the light of a match, the flick of a cigarette, or a very hot day to turn the highly flammable film stock into an explosive. Films, buildings, and lives were lost forever due to nitrate fires.77 In the 1930s, the lack of reissue value for most silent films, matched with the risks and costs of storing nitrate, prompted the studios to intentionally destroy hundreds of film negatives. The next chapter examines these circumstances and processes in depth.

3. Derivatives and Destruction (1930s)

Warner Bros. entered the 1930s in possession of the largest library of silent feature films in world history. Through a series of acquisitions, it had supplemented its own library of roughly two hundred features with hundreds more films from First National, Vitagraph, World, and Triangle. But by the end of the decade, most of those films were either no longer extant or well on the path toward the same fate. Fire claimed some of the negatives, but Warner Bros. executives and staff deliberately destroyed many others. The story of the creation and destruction of the Warner Bros. film library is part of the larger histories of the transition to sound, the structure of the studio system, and the unpredictable effects of copyright law. The transition to sound did not destroy the value of silent film libraries, but it did transform them—from collections of works that could be profitably recirculated as copies into collections of properties for the production of derivatives. As I argued in the introduction, we can think about an owner’s potential uses for a film library as broadly falling into one of two categories: the copy and the derivative. If you own the copyright to a film, you exclusively control the right to circulate copies of the work for the duration of that copyright. These circulate through theatrical reissues, revival bookings, or distribution across nontheatrical formats. However, copyright owners also control the rights to create derivatives, works that use substantial portions of the copyrighted material. Derivative uses for film libraries include remakes and stock footage. Although Warner Bros. and the other film studios of the 1930s valued their libraries primarily for the production of derivatives, opportunities still existed for exploiting their library copies. By 1934, the domestic market for film reissues had rebounded, driven by exhibitor demand for cheap, dependable product to fill double features. The reissues that performed well during the 1930s were, by and large, the star-driven sound movies that a significant 74

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base of the audience had not yet seen. A handful of silent films fared well in the early sound era, but on the whole, the opportunities for silent film reissues were quite limited. Beyond the domestic reissue market, the studios weighed three other options for exploiting library copies: global reissues, 16mm distribution, and participation in the Museum of Modern Art’s Film Library. By exploring the markets for derivatives and copies in the 1930s, we can understand the decisions that studios made about their libraries—what to save, what to destroy, and how to protect derivative potential while reducing the costs and risks of storing nitrate films. Warner Bros. is the chief object of study for this chapter. However, I do discuss other industry players, and my analysis of Warner’s remake and reissue practices is broadly applicable to the other major studios. In one regard, though, Warner Bros.’ collection of copyrights was truly exceptional: it owned thousands that were neither films nor stories intended to serve as the basis for films. The studio was a major player in the nation’s music publishing industry and, to a lesser extent, the book publishing industry. In 1929, Warner Bros. acquired several Tin Pan Alley music publishing houses, gaining so many song copyrights that by 1935, the studio published between 25 and 40 percent of all music played over the radio.1 M. Witmark and Sons, the most famous of the Tin Pan Alley firms that Warner acquired, also owned a textbook publishing subsidiary, which specialized in music education but published books in other subjects as well. In 1932, the same corporation that offered a hard-hitting exposé of the Southern penal system in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang examined “the boy problem” (puberty) in Problems in Public School Music.2 And in 1933, the conglomerate reissued both the 1929 film Disraeli and the sheet music of J. S. Bach and Franz Schubert.3 Despite these curious parallels, the systemic differences between the vertically integrated motion picture industry and the retail-oriented book and music publishing businesses necessitated fundamentally different approaches to their old works. Chapter 2 offers an extended analysis of the differences between pre–World War II film libraries and publishing backlists. I begin this chapter by using the Warner Bros. film and music holdings to consider the limits of industry convergence and the studio system’s logics of reuse.

warner bros., the transition to sound, and industry convergence The tale of how Warner Bros. Pictures used sound to rise from minor exhibitor and producer into one of the major Hollywood studios has been oft told.

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According to the traditional narrative, offered by Benjamin Hampton and rehashed by others, the brothers Warner were trapped in an inferior position in the film industry through the mid-1920s due to the market power of Famous Players, Loew’s, and First National.4 In a last-ditch effort to save the family business from going under, Harry, Abe, Sam, and Jack (listed here from oldest to youngest) made the supreme gamble, investing everything they had in the speculative proposition of talking pictures. When Warner Bros. film The Jazz Singer (1927) opened, talking pictures were a hit, and Warner Bros. transformed from industry also-ran into industry leader. Douglas Gomery demolished this myth, providing the revisionist account of Warner Bros. that most scholars accept today. Warner’s investment in sound was not a wild gamble but instead part of a calculated strategy of industry expansion. In 1925, Warner Bros. obtained financing from Waddill Catchings of the investment bank Goldman Sachs. The studio immediately put the financing toward vertical integration: purchasing firstrun theaters to guarantee screen time for its product, acquiring an international distribution network of film exchanges through the purchase of Vitagraph, and investing in sound synchronization experiments that, if successful, would differentiate Warner Bros. productions from those of its competitors. Sound proved highly successful, and the industry’s first movers, Warner Bros. and Fox, benefited greatly.5 By 1929, the initial success of sound had allowed Warner Bros.—aided by Goldman Sachs, easy credit, and a robust stock market—to acquire several large music publishing companies and the assets of First National Pictures, including theaters, exchanges, and a film library. When the stock market crashed on October 29, 1929, Warner Bros. was a vertically integrated movie studio, a highly leveraged publicly traded company, and a diversified media conglomerate. The importance of music to the studios increased dramatically with the coming of sound. Whereas in the silent-feature era, exhibitors were expected to pay royalties to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers for using popular songs, those costs now transferred to the producers who filled their soundtracks with music. The transition to sound drove Warner Bros. to acquire M. Witmark and Sons and the several publishers belonging to the Music Publishers Holding Corporation. As the music historian Russell Sanjek explains, “It had become obvious to Warner, as to others, that the film industry must get control of a sufficient number of music copyrights to make it independent of any combine of music publishers, songwriters, or copyright owners.” He also notes, though, the extent to which Warner’s approach differed from that of the other studios: “By buying control of copyrights, Warner was unique in the rush by movie

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companies to purchase music houses. Most were interested only in acquiring for hire the services of experienced songwriters, for which they were then paying sums far greater than the average annual income of most of them. Warner looked to the day when it might be freed of onerous and increasingly exorbitant synchronization fees.”6 Warner Bros. immediately put the music publishing companies to use. Their new songs were inserted into movies, which then served to promote, or plug, the songs. The audience for a nationally distributed motion picture was far larger than those that would hear a song plug in a vaudeville act, in a department store performance, or through any of the other tried-and-tested Tin Pan Alley sales tactics.7 Warner Bros. felt that something was wrong with a system in which it paid top dollar for a song and gave it tons of publicity only to see another walk off with all the sheet music sales revenue. The music publishing subsidiaries allowed Warner Bros. to profit from the success of the songs that it made famous.8 Warner Bros.’ high-profile musicals of the period, such as 42nd Street and Footlight Parade (both 1933), primarily used new songs that it could simultaneously plug and sell rather than drawing old songs from the publishers’ extensive catalogues. Yet the Witmark and Music Publishers Holding Corp. catalogues played a vital role in the production of other films. Warner’s B-movie productions could not afford original music by the in-house song kings Harry Warren and Al Durbin. And for a period film, such as The Dawn Patrol (1930; remade in 1938), Tin Pan Alley songs conjured a sense of time and place. Of all the Warner Bros. films, though, it was the cartoons that most consistently exploited the old song catalogues. Cartoons relied heavily on music, with a seven-minute sound cartoon generally requiring sections of between five and fifteen separate musical compositions. To both control costs and plug the conglomerate’s feature films and sheet music, Warner Bros. executives exhorted Leon Schlesinger’s animation unit to use in-house music. As Scott Curtis explains, “Having acquired the rights to any given song, producers were eager to get as much mileage out of the tune as possible. The four featured songs from Mervyn LeRoy’s hit musical 42nd Street (1933), for example, were included in at least six cartoons of the same year. Two of the songs had their own Merrie Melodies: Young and Healthy and Shuffle Off to Buffalo, but both of these songs were also included in The Dish Ran Away with the Spoon and Bosko’s Knight-Mare.”9 One small detail worth clarifying—although Warner Bros. owned majority stock positions in Witmark and the Music Publishers Holding Corp., the studio could not simply use any song for free. Many songwriters and the original publishers retained royalty interests in the

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song catalogues.10 What the music libraries gave Warner Bros. was dependable access to songs that had been prenegotiated for use at low, fixed rates. Clearly, the late 1920s and early 1930s were a period of industry convergence. Warner Bros. Pictures became a music publisher; RCA, a radio and electronics giant, established a vertically integrated movie studio, RKO. Numerous film and media scholars have studied this convergence, including Hollywood’s engagements with the industries of music publishing,11 radio,12 recorded music,13 television,14 and new media.15 It’s important, though, that convergence not become a lazy, all-encompassing term. We need to be specific about which aspects of the industries converged and which did not. As the earlier comparison between the film library and the publishing backlist demonstrates, elements of two industries that appear similar may play entirely different functions in the context of those industries. Unlike publishing backlists, film libraries did not provide the studios with key profit centers and a barrier to entry. Still, the studios in the 1930s valued their libraries, particularly as engines for the production of derivatives.

producing the derivative: four steps To understand the studios’ rampant reuse of stories and footage, we need to think about these practices in the larger context of the 1930s Hollywood production process. Every year, as Richard B. Jewell explains, “top studio executives would meet to map out production plans. A target number of films would be agreed upon with an approximate budget for the year’s production activities. Other topics which the executives might discuss included the studio’s major talent and how best to utilize it, the literary properties owned by the company and their suitability for filming and the number of big-budget productions to be produced compared to less-expensive efforts. Each company’s head of production would then assume responsibility for implementing the overall plan.”16 The overall plan frequently called for the studio to produce fifty or more productions in a given year, an ambitious schedule that required it to efficiently use its inputs (including labor, equipment, and studio space) to produce a steady set of outputs. What distinguished the great production heads, such as Warner Bros.’ Darryl F. Zanuck and his successor, Hal Wallis, was their ability to creatively combine the same or similar sets of inputs to produce unique outputs. Many of the essential inputs were human. The head of production delegated projects to a contract producer, who in turn collaborated with contract directors, contract writers, contract actors, contract cameramen, contract set painters, and

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so on. The contract producer encouraged his department heads to reuse sets, costumes, and props from other productions. The system encouraged the combination and recombination of inputs, and producing derivatives— which inherently involved the use of one or more copyrighted works to create another—fit perfectly in this model. Studios also combined and recombined inputs from one another. The loan-out of contract actors from one studio to another is a well-known practice of the studio system. In a far less commented-on but equally prevalent practice, the studios bought and sold story properties from one another, to remake the films of their competitors. We can learn even more about derivatives by tracking the steps that the studios took in creating them. The first step was the production of the original film. After all, before a studio could turn a silent film into a sound remake, it or another producer had to have already made the silent film. And that initial silent film usually began with the producer or studio story department purchasing the motion picture rights to a novel, play, article, or short story. Although original screenplays became more prevalent toward the mid-to-late 1930s, the vast majority of films from the transitional sound years were adapted from other works.17 Technically speaking, then, most Hollywood features, even nonremakes, were derivatives, because they were based on the derivative rights to a copyrighted work of literature. Studios acquired the motion picture rights from the owner of the literary copyright. The literary author or owner controlled the exclusive right to license derivative works, which could be a literary sequel, a stage play adaptation, or—thanks to Kalem v. Harper Brothers—an authorized motion picture adaptation. Depending on the particular deal, the motion picture rights could extend for the duration of the copyright or be as limited as a five-year license to produce one motion picture based on the novel. In the transitional sound years, Warner Bros.’ library of remakable properties consisted of motion pictures covered by the patchwork of rights agreements for the studio’s own silent productions plus those that it had inherited by acquiring Vitagraph in 1925 and First National in 1928. The second step in creating a sound remake was to resecure or purchase the underlying rights. When an executive wanted to remake a silent film from the studio’s library, the lawyers opened up the old contract file with a sense of dread. For most stage plays adapted into silent films, the studio had acquired the motion picture story rights but not the accompanying dialogue rights. If a studio wanted to copy direct passages of dialogue from the stage play into the sound film—and most did—then it had to renegotiate with the playwright for the dialogue rights.18 The studios encountered

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fewer rights problems with the novels, articles, and short stories they had licensed; dialogue seldom translated so directly from page to screen, and even when it might, as in a western short story, the literary author generally gave up more rights than the playwright. The renegotiations for dialogue rights demonstrate that the importance of film libraries for remakes was not merely about cost cutting. Studios had to fork over new money to remake certain films from their libraries, hardly an economizing move. The remake boom of the early sound years was driven by a perceived shortage of suitable screen stories. Although some remakes deliberately included as much footage from the original film as possible to lessen the production budget, the studios just as often turned to previously successful pictures to control the risk of failure rather than to control costs. The demand for tested story material created a lively market for the buying and selling of remake rights. Independent producers and defunct film companies marketed their remakable properties to the studios. In 1929, for instance, Warner Bros. paid ten thousand dollars for World Film Corporation’s library (or what remained of it after previous sales). The most recent film that Warner acquired in the deal had been produced in 1918.19 Independent producers who had released silent features through United Artists or First National were also well-positioned; they generally retained the underlying film copyright and, after the distributor’s exclusive distribution period had passed, could sell off the remake rights. Harry Aitken, never one to miss an opportunity for library exploitation, became an active player in the rights trade. In 1928, he compiled a catalogue of the story rights that the Triangle Studios controlled, emphasizing their availability and desirability for sound remakes.20 One year later, Warner Bros. snapped up fifty-eight of the Triangle properties, mostly western stories that could be used as the basis for more of Warner’s low-budget oaters.21 As further proof of its vibrancy, the remake rights market attracted the interest of agents. The deal between Warner Bros. and Triangle, for instance, was negotiated by R. L. Giffen, who developed a niche in rights brokering. The studios also bought, sold, and traded story rights among one another. The loan-out of contract actors from one studio to another is a well-known practice of the studio system. To obtain the two stars of It Happened One Night (1934), for instance, Columbia had to contract with MGM for the services of Clark Gable and with Paramount for Claudette Colbert. What has received less attention from film historians is the similar sale and trade of story properties. In 1920, Fox produced a silent version of Justin Huntly McCarthy’s play If I Were King, which Paramount remade in sound in 1930

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and again in 1938. Paramount, for its part, transferred the underlying rights to Fast Company (1929) to Warner Bros., which remade the film a mere four years later, under its original stage title, Elmer, the Great (1933).22 The seller generally had to agree not to reissue the original picture. Sometimes the selling studio had to destroy all positive and negative prints of the original production; other times the original studio was allowed to keep a print exclusively for reference purposes. Today it is exceedingly rare for one studio to sell the rights to a previously produced film (or even to put a movie in “turnaround,” the industry term for when a studio offers to sell an unproduced project to another studio for the development costs plus interest). If the remake is hugely successful, the executive who decided to sell the rights and not produce it inhouse will lose face and, probably, his or her job. In the 1920s and 1930s, however, no such conflict existed. The industry’s commonsense belief was that trading story rights among studios was both necessary and advisable: necessary because of the shortage in suitable screen stories; advisable because the remake of another producer’s film would likely reach a slightly different, and hopefully bigger, audience. As Variety reported in 1931, “Remake tendency in the industry as a whole is to do three pictures previously done by rivals for every two originated by the studio. Thus if a similarity to the old silent is evident it is likely to play different theatres and reach a somewhat different public.”23 As the decade continued, the ratio changed, skewing more toward studios remaking their own properties. Still, they continued to buy, sell, and trade story properties, indicating that derivative value lay in the potential both to reuse properties and to sell them to other studios to reuse. The third step in creating a derivative was the production process of scripting, shooting, and editing the remake. Although remakes had always been a part of commercial cinema, their production spiked during the transition to sound. In the single season of 1928–29, no fewer than seventy-five features were remade in sound.24 The studios’ output of silent-to-sound remakes in the three years from January 1928 to January 1931 demonstrates the extent of the trend: Paramount produced twenty-five, Fox sixteen, MGM fifteen, Columbia eleven, Universal ten, United Artists eight, and RKO six. However, no studio embraced the remake so fully as Warner Bros. It topped all other remake producers, churning out thirty-five in the same period.25 Warner Bros. remade all types of films, at all budget levels. Some remakes were composed entirely of new footage, such as Disraeli (1929) and The Millionaire (1931), both based on films released by United Artists

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in the early 1920s and their underlying properties. George Arliss had starred in both the theatrical stage and silent film versions of Disraeli and The Millionaire. The Warner Bros. remakes, also starring Arliss, amounted to a form of restaging. Other remakes relied heavily on preshot footage, inserting a new star and sound into a silent film produced years ago. Critics attacked remakes, but the studios ignored the criticism and used the same properties again and again. In perhaps the most frequently cited example of a remake being vastly superior to the original, Warner Bros. produced two sound features based on Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, in 1931 and 1936, before arriving at “the stuff that dreams are made of” in the 1941 version, starring Humphrey Bogart and directed by John Huston.26 Warner Bros. excelled at reusing both stories and footage. Its Captain Blood (1935) is best remembered as the picture that launched Errol Flynn into swashbuckling stardom, but the film is also a remake that used footage from other pictures. Warner Bros. obtained the rights to Rafael Sabatini’s novel Captain Blood through its 1925 acquisition of Vitagraph, which had produced a film version the previous year. When it came time for the 1935 sound remake, Warner Bros. inserted sea footage originally shot for First National’s The Sea Hawk (1924) and Divine Lady (1929).27 The reuse of film libraries did not always have an economizing effect: even with the recycling of story rights and footage, it still cost $995,000 to produce Captain Blood’s negative.28 However, the decision to reuse the Sabatini novel and earlier footage demonstrates the extent to which the recombination of studio asserts was ingrained into the classical Hollywood production process. On the lower end of the budget spectrum, the reuse of assets served a more important cost-controlling function. Of the roughly fifty features that Warner Bros. produced per year between 1932 and 1941, B pictures constituted between one-third and one-half of the annual output. With budgets capped around $150,000 (and frequently lower), the B unit needed to economize on story properties and turned to the Warner Bros. film library for material.29 Warner Bros. and the independent producer Leon Schlesinger took extreme steps to control costs through the reuse of stories and footage in a series of B westerns for the 1932–33 season that starred John Wayne. Haunted Gold, The Big Stampede, Somewhere in Sonora, and Ride ‘Em Cowboy were not only remakes of silent Ken Maynard films released by First National a few years earlier; the action scenes were reprints of the old footage. The climactic stampede in The Big Stampede (1932), for instance, cuts between medium shots of Wayne and long shots of his same character herding cattle in First National’s 1927 silent film Land beyond

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the Law. In the same sequence, The Big Stampede’s villain gets his comeuppance when he is trampled by stock footage of livestock. Wayne later complained of having to “dress up to look like Ken Maynard because a lot of the old footage they inserted had shots of Maynard in the distance. I really hated that.”30 Wayne may have resented imitating another on-screen cowboy, but the efficiencies of having story rights, screenplays, and preshot action footage meant that Schlesinger could deliver the six remakes to Warner Bros. for a fraction of the cost of even average B movies of the period. The films were produced as “negative pickups”: Warner Bros. paid Schlesinger twenty-eight thousand dollars on the delivery of each film, and Schlesinger presumably budgeted the pictures at an even lower level.31 The practice of reusing footage from other productions was even more common in short films, which Warner Bros. cranked out at a high volume on minuscule budgets. Stock footage could blend into the short, help fill out the eight-minute running time, and provide a bit of production value. Alternatively, rather than trying to seamlessly blend the footage, short films could make the older images jarringly stand out and serve as the main source of entertainment. Rival studio MGM perfected this practice in the production of Goofy Movies (1933–34)—a precursor of sorts to Mystery Science Theater 3000—in which the narrator, Pete Smith, offered ironic commentary over silent film footage. Old-fashioned clothing and acting styles provided a dependable source of joke fodder. So too did cutting between films from different genres—for instance, from a melodramatic scene of lovers quarreling to the slapstick image of a monkey driving an automobile.32 Warner Bros.’ Vitaphone unit also turned to the past for entertainment, compiling Thrills of Yesterday (1931), The Movie Album (1932), The Nickelette (1932), and Movie Memories (1933) from footage in its enormous silent library. The Vitaphone editor Bert Frank unknowingly created an archive as he searched through the old prints in the Warner Bros. vaults that were ripe for gentle teasing; the Vitaphone shorts contain footage from silent features that were later lost, such as Vitagraph’s My Official Wife (1914).33 The fourth and final step in creating derivatives was safeguarding the asset for future copies and derivatives. To understand Hollywood film libraries, we cannot simply examine how a studio had exploited its past. Instead, we need to take into account the assumptions about a film’s likely future value and uses that the studio made at the moment of production. The decisions made during production fundamentally shape the manner in which the library can or cannot be put to future use. Warner Bros. took some steps to protect the future value that its current productions might

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enjoy. It was the sole copyright owner of all of its sound productions and controlled all rights to theatrical reissues, the most lucrative aftermarket for old films until the mid-1950s. The studio also recognized that future opportunities for exploiting old films might lie beyond the movie theater. Its lawyers stayed abreast of the technological development of television in the late 1920s and early 1930s. By 1931, Warner Bros. was reserving television as a distribution right in its standard talent contracts for actors, screenwriters, and directors.34 However, if Warner Bros. showed forward thinking in regard to its talent contracts and television, then it proved shortsighted in its acquisition of story rights and imagining of how television might be used. In the talent contracts with actors and directors, the studio could easily retain “all rights whatsoever”; these were workers for hire employed for the purpose of building copyrights for the studio. When it came to Warner Bros. acquiring rights to successful plays and books, on the other hand, the author had already created a copyright that he or she owned. The author could separate the derivative rights (motion picture, radio, etc.) and license them individually. Additionally, due to the high demand for screen stories in the early sound years, a successful playwright had the leverage to negotiate a rich movie deal that would give away as few rights as possible. This was certainly the case with Spring Is Here, the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart musical that Warner Bros. turned into a 1929 film. Rodgers, Hart, and the playwright Owen Davis gave up the motion picture rights to their musical but explicitly retained radio and television rights. Just as the studios had blundered in the silent era by not acquiring dialogue rights, they blundered in the early sound era by not insisting on television rights, a mistake caused by the assumption that television, like radio, would be essentially a live medium.35 Warner Bros. gradually curbed these mistakes, and by the mid1930s, the lawyers made sure to reserve all television rights. But these earlier agreements reveal that the legal boilerplate—much like microphones, amplifiers, and acting styles—had to evolve in stages during the transition to sound. The general assumption within the industry was that short films had an even shorter life-span than features. Warner Bros. instituted little rigor in the record keeping of short-subject films, which required a fraction of the capital investment of features and which vaudeville talent might work on for only a day or two. In the early years of Vitaphone short film production, from 1926 through 1930, the studio infrequently had the performers sign contracts and paid them for their work in cash, practices that resulted in a dearth of record keeping.36 When Warner Bros. set about clearing the rights

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to its film library for television in 1956, it could not find contracts for the majority of Vitaphone short films through 1939. There was no sense that these shorts had long-term value at the time of production. Warner Bros. implemented one important organizational change, though, that greatly benefited the future value of its library. At some point in the late 1920s or early 1930s, Warner Bros. started the Trust Department, an institution born of the need for a central filing system amid the corporation’s rapid growth. New York City was the headquarters for Warner’s distribution, exhibition, and short film production operations. Rather than sharing one large office building or studio lot, the studio’s executives, lawyers, lab technicians, and salespeople were spread out across at least two boroughs of the city. Additionally, they coordinated with “exchange men” and exhibitors in cities across the country and the globe. If every worker in this vast circuit simply filed contracts in their own cabinet, then documents would inevitably get lost, the studio would lose oversight, and it would lack access to essential documentation when it was faced with a lawsuit or wanted to file suit (both frequent scenarios). Located in New York City, the Trust Department provided the infrastructural hub necessary to keep the system running smoothly. Because Warner Bros.’ Burbank lot handled the feature production side of the business and had ample office space, the studio did not consider it necessary to create a West Coast Trust Department.37 The studio’s West Coast lawyers believed that their Legal Department could sufficiently track all of the talent contracts, rights acquisitions, and other legal documents that the production process generated. This was an assumption that, in multiple instances, proved false. The Trust Department also performed a valuable archival function. As one Warner Bros. lawyer explained years later, it “serves as a sort of ‘protection’ for us with respect to legal documents, i.e., the executed copies of documents which we send to the trust department are analogous to the fine grain dupe negative or protective master of a picture so that if we ever lose our copy (which is generally the original or ribbon copy) we know there is another signed copy in the trust department.”38 The analogy between the Trust Department and a film vault is telling. We tend to think about negative and positive films as the material basis for film libraries. However, the Trust Department reveals that paper legal documents were equally important as films for the commercial exploitation of old movies. The Trust Department archived the contracts and legal documents which proved that Warner Bros. owned the films in its library. If certain documents were missing or certain contracts did not license all the necessary rights, then Warner Bros. was limited in what it could do with its library. As chapter 5

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explores, contracts that were missing or incomplete became a problem for Warner Bros. in 1956 when the studio agreed to sell its library to Eliot Hyman. And as we’ll see later in this chapter, the Trust Department’s ownership records were critical to Warner Bros.’ decisions about which film negatives from its library to save and which to destroy.

the domestic reissue market: the supply side In the 1930s, the studios valued their film libraries primarily for the production of derivatives. A dynamic set of market forces, however, ensured that old films never left American screens. Theatrical presentations of old films took one of two forms: reissues or revivals. Reissues were national releases initiated by the studio, which struck new prints and created new marketing materials. The studios used reissues to fill gaps in their release schedules (most often in the summer) and generate a small but reliable profit stream. Revivals, on the other hand, were local in nature and initiated by the exhibitor. An exhibitor contacted a studio’s nearest exchange and inquired whether it still possessed a print of a particular old film. If the exchange had it, it generally rented the film to the exhibitor at a low flat rate. Exhibitors were able to rent national reissues from studios for similarly low rates. As in the silent feature era, the demand for old movies in the 1930s was driven by the needs of independent exhibitors, who identified reissues and revivals as opportunities in a system that perpetually put them at a disadvantage. The early sound years witnessed a handful of high-profile silent reissues that found success at the box office, including The Phantom of the Opera (1925; reissued in 1929), The Birth of a Nation (1915; reissued in 1930), Ben-Hur (1925; reissued in 1931), and The Big Parade (1925; reissued in 1931). These pictures benefited from their reputations for delivering quality and spectacle; the distributors emphasized their epic status and the newly prepared soundtracks they now featured.39 In the transitional sound years there was also a place on the opposite end of the spectrum, for reissues of low-budget genre films, a type of picture that had decreased in production. In the summer and fall of 1929, Universal reissued six silent westerns—three starring William Desmond and three starring Jack Hoxie.40 These oaters were rented by cost-conscious exhibitors who hadn’t made the conversion to sound. But as unwired theaters all but disappeared in the early-to-mid-1930s, the market for silent reissues shrank considerably. High-profile reissues with new soundtracks also grew rare. While the profitable reissue of two Rudolph Valentino features in 1938 drew significant

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industry attention and comment, the 1939 reissue of William S. Hart’s biggest-budget silent film was far more indicative of the limited market for silent films by the decade’s end.41 This picture earned only $9,300, failing to recoup its reissue costs, and its title, Tumbleweeds (1925), aptly described the deserted theaters that showed it.42 As the market for silent films and silent reissues decreased by the mid1930s, studios slowly began reissuing early and partially synced sound films. In one of the only secondary sources published on the history of theatrical reissues, John P. McElwee writes, “In view of exhibitor hostility toward silent film, there was very little re-issue activity between 1929 and approximately 1938. This ten-year period was needed to create a backlog of talkies to allow for the passage of time from the initial release of a feature to its subsequent re-release. The standard practice called for a minimal period of seven years. Under this plan, the product would have been off screen long enough to stimulate the patron’s interest in its revival, but not so long as to render it completely out of date.”43 McElwee offers a perfectly plausible explanation, but it’s one that primary sources reveal to be inaccurate. No such “standard practice” for the selection of reissues existed in this period. According to MGM’s ledger of theatrical rentals, the studio reissued eleven films in the 1930s. As table 1 shows, their ages ranged from two to seven years, and the median age was four years. McElwee is correct that MGM and the other studios increased their number of reissues toward the end of the 1930s. Even in 1937 and 1938, however, a studio was far more likely to put a film into rerelease after four years than seven.44 Rather than assuming that the studios shared a uniform approach, we should recognize the 1930s as a time when they tested out multiple strategies of selecting and marketing reissues. Some of these strategies succeeded; others failed. The losing strategy, though a hard one to shake, was selecting and marketing reissues on their status as classics. The more successful strategy harkened back to the Hart and Fairbanks reissues: select star-powered films, market them like new movies, and seek out audiences who had missed them the first time around. Because of the FTC case against W.H. Productions, movie studios had to acknowledge reissues as such. But that didn’t mean that they needed to overly emphasize the film’s age. They could market the film based on its stars, genre, or spectacle—just like a new picture—and simply mention “a re-release” at the bottom of the ad. As the 1930s wore on, the most successful reissues were star-driven pictures that truly were new to a large segment of the audience. Warner Bros. underwent this shift in reissue strategy in the 1930s. While MGM succeeded in selling Ben-Hur and The Big Parade in 1931 as classic

Ben-Hur The Big Parade Smilin’ Through Manhattan Melodrama Trader Horn Naughty Marietta Hell Divers Treasure Island David Copperfield The Champ Mutiny on the Bounty San Francisco Rose Marie

Picture 1924–25 1925–26 1932–33 1933–34 1930–31 1934–35 1931–32 1933–34 1934–35 1933–34 1934–35 1935–36 1935–36 Median

Picture’s original season 7 6 3 3 6 2 6 4 3 5 4 3 3 4

Age (seasons old) 199,000 115,000 unknown 234,000 188,000 113,000 unknown 144,000 95,000 116,000 189,000 201,000 131,000 144,000

Reissue domestic rentals

779,000 54,000 unknown 158,000 123,000 92,000 unknown 87,000 48,000 70,000 116,000 124,000 54,000 92,000

Reissue profit (in dollars)

source: The data for this table comes from the Eddie Mannix Ledger, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, with the exception of two reissues that it does not record. The first, Smilin’ Through (1932), starring Norma Shearer, was reissued in July 1935 (first at the Capitol in New York) and extended into the 1935–36 season. The second, Hell Divers (original release: January 1932) was also reissued, and played in the summer and fall of 1937. Thank you to Karl Thiede for bringing these omissions to my attention. See Daily Variety, July 10, 1935, 1; March 17, 1937, 2. See also Variety, May 22, 1935, 4; September 11, 1935, 9; October 2, 1935, 11; October 13, 1937, 27.

1931–32 1931–32 1935–36 1936–37 1936–37 1936–37 1937–38 1937–38 1937–38 1938–39 1938–39 1938–39 1938–39

Season of reissue

Median Age, Rental Revenue, and Profit

table 1 MGM Theatrical Reissues, 1930–1939

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spectacles of the silent era, Warner Bros.’ reissue that same year of The Jazz Singer (1927), the partial talkie already celebrated by that point as a key catalyst for the transition to sound, was a flop, and the studio pulled it from its flagship New York theater after two days.45 Warner Bros. also marketed Disraeli (1929; reissued in 1933) as a classic; the advertising copy announced, “Back by Popular Demand,” “No Picture Is Immortal,” and “Now in Its 5th Year”—all of which called attention to the fact that the picture was old.46 Although the Warner Bros. ledger does not include financial data on the Disraeli reissue, the trade press commented that it performed poorly in its initial engagements.47 After Disraeli, Warner Bros. changed its reissue strategy, turning to star-powered and genre-oriented pictures that would click in small towns as well as the city. In 1935, it reissued Silver Dollar (1932) and The House on 56th Street (1933). During the 1936–1937 season, the studio reissued the William Powell–Kay Francis melodrama One Way Passage, which grossed $225,000 in domestic rentals, an impressive 66 percent of its original-release domestic haul of $342,000. Warner Bros.’ reissue the following season of Bordertown (1934), starring the less popular Paul Muni and Bette Davis, also performed well, generating $151,000 in domestic rentals, or 33 percent of its initial domestic take. The studio ended the decade by reissuing all six of its Schlesinger westerns from the 1932–1933 season, which reused silent film scripts and footage and starred John Wayne, an actor whose star was on the rise thanks to Stagecoach (1939).48 The studios had transitioned away from marketing reissues as classics and back toward the silent-era tactic of capitalizing on the old pictures of new stars. MGM’s experience on the reissue market further demonstrates the importance of stars. Of the eleven films that the Lion reissued nationally in the 1930s, Manhattan Melodrama (1934; reissued in 1937) earned the highest domestic rentals ($234,000), even though it had the lowest production budget ($355,000) and the lowest initial release rentals ($735,000). MGM produced Manhattan Melodrama as what the film historian Richard B. Jewell has called an “in-betweener”—less expensive than a typical A picture but containing more star power and production value than a typical B picture.49 When it was released in the spring of 1934, the film had one bona fide star, Clark Gable. But the studio had also cast it with two actors who would become one of the decade’s most popular on-screen couples: William Powell and Myrna Loy, whose iconic Thin Man performances as Nick and Nora Charles reached American screens a few weeks after the opening of Manhattan Melodrama. By 1937, Powell and Loy had joined Gable on the exhibitors’ list of most popular stars. MGM believed that Manhattan Melodrama could draw some die-hard fans back to theaters and

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attract members of Powell and Loy’s new fan base who had missed it the first time around. The studio was correct; the reissue made $158,000 in profits, more than any other domestic reissue of that decade, including the spectacle-oriented Trader Horn (1931; reissued in 1937; profits of $123,000), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935; reissued in 1939; profits of $116,000), and San Francisco (1936; reissued in 1939; profits of $124,000). MGM’s lowest-grossing reissue of the decade was David Copperfield (1935; reissued in 1938), which earned domestic rentals of $95,000—not bad for a picture that had more than recouped its costs in original release, but hardly impressive. RKO found success with the 1937 reissue of King Kong (domestic rentals of $155,000; originally released in 1933) but chose less wisely that year when it reissued Little Women (1933; reissued in 1937; domestic rentals of $60,000). David Copperfield and Little Women seemed like natural choices for reissue. After all, publishers had long churned out reprints of Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott novels. Wouldn’t audiences spring at the opportunity to reexperience the film versions of these literary classics? The trouble was, just because a novel was considered a classic did not mean that audiences would think that the film based on it was a classic. Moreover, as O. H. Cheney discovered in researching American reading habits in the late 1920s, far more people bought cheap copies of the classics than actually took the time to read them.50 Treasure Island (1934; reissued in 1938; rentals of $144,000) fared better than the other classic adaptations—at least it promised adventure and spectacle to viewers. Still, the star-driven reissues that reached out to new audiences generally outperformed the spectacle-oriented reissues and the literary classics. The studios learned how to reissue a sound film in the 1930s through trial and error. They encountered an obstacle of their own making when plucking films from the early 1930s for rerelease in the mid-to-late 1930s: the Production Code Administration (PCA). The PCA emerged through the confluence of internal Hollywood business interests and external censorship pressures. After the transition to sound, tailoring films to suit the requirements of local censorship became increasingly difficult. Chicago’s censors might cut a pivotal scene or section of dialogue; Kansas might cut another; by the time the print reached Nebraska, the story might no longer make sense. The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (now the Motion Picture Association of America, or MPAA) penned the Production Code in 1930, but the industry finally gave it teeth in 1934 by creating the PCA and appointing the zealous workaholic Joseph Breen as its leader.51 When MGM asked for permission to reissue Manhattan Melodrama, Breen mandated multiple changes. The most significant occurred in the

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first reel, a prologue of sorts that establishes the Powell and Gable characters as orphaned childhood friends. For a scene in which their adoptive father attends a political rally, Breen required MGM to eliminate the “Socialist” lines of dialogue, “Revolution in this world is inevitable” and “Not until the working people learn to act, not talk.” Breen also objected to the following suggestive exchange from reel 4: “It’s five o’clock in the morning, honey. Do you have to start this at five o’clock in the morning?” “Yes, it’s now or never. It’s got to be now before I let you drive tonight out of my mind.”

MGM made the changes, reissued the film, and earned a handsome return.52 But the changes remind us that MGM recirculated a different film than the version released in 1933. The same holds true for the other studios. Audiences saw less violence and skin on-screen when they purchased tickets for the national 1935 reissue of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Paramount, 1931) and the 1937 reissue of King Kong than they had on those films’ initial releases.53 Many pre-1934 pictures would exist in the coming decades only in their censored rerelease form, a troublesome fact for future generations of film critics and preservationists. Warner Bros. also encountered censorship difficulties in exploiting its library. During a single week in September 1936, it submitted one hundred films to the PCA for reissue seals. Warner Bros. may have hoped that submitting its library titles in such bulk might overwhelm the PCA and allow some of the racier oldies to slip by the censors. Breen, however, exerted characteristic vigilance. Using the files that the PCA had kept before the agency first mandated compliance, Breen quickly ruled on most of the submissions. Forty-eight could be approved in their current form. Eighteen could be approved with minor alterations—for instance, the elimination of a suggestive line of dialogue or two. For twenty-one features, though, Breen took “the liberty of suggesting you withdraw your request for a certificate to permit their reissue.” These films, including Little Caesar (1931), Picture Snatcher (1933), and Convention City (1933), “contain[ed] so much objectionable matter that any attempt to re-edit them so as to bring them within the requirements of the Production Code would be extremely difficult.”54 Movie audiences waited another two decades before Little Caesar returned to the big screen. Convention City disappeared forever. On receiving Warner Bros.’ hundred-film submission, the PCA’s New York officer H. J. McCord remarked to Breen that the 1936–37 season “looks like a busy year on reissues.”55 Yet a comparison of the list of PCA

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submissions and Warner’s actual distribution slate reveals that the studio reissued only one film, One Way Passage, on a national basis with a new marketing campaign in that season. So why did the studio decide to submit one hundred films? The decision was about more than overwhelming Breen. It was about preparing for numerous requests that Warner Bros. knew its regional exchanges would receive from exhibitors. The decision was not the sign of a busy reissue season; it was the sign of a busy revival season.

revivals and reissue demand From the mid- to the late 1930s, independent exhibitors demanded old movies to an extent that outpaced the supply of studio reissues. An independent exhibitor in 1938 could wait for RKO to mail out a press book that pitched the virtues of booking the studio’s national reissues of King Kong and Little Women. But the exhibitor could also seize the initiative, contacting the regional RKO exchange to book a revival of Flying Down to Rio (1933) or The Informer (1935), say. The exchange might say no—generally because it had already shipped the used prints off for recycling to clear shelf space, a common practice after roughly two years in release. However, the exchanges frequently had the print and booked the revival. This practice grew so widespread that in the summer of 1938, the Motion Picture Herald cited 245 films currently circulating as revivals due to exhibitor demand.56 Hungry for affordable films to fill double feature programs, independent exhibitors embraced revival bookings. Prior to the 1930s, movie houses had occasionally shown two movies for the price of one. But as Tino Balio explains, the Depression years turned the double feature into an American institution. In 1932, roughly six thousand of the fourteen thousand theaters in the country regularly exhibited double features, and as the decade went on, the number of double feature houses increased. Independent theaters lacking access to first-run movies found the double bill essential to compete with one another for the quarters of a cost-conscious American public. The double bill ratcheted up the demand for feature films to new levels. Just consider: if a double bill house changed programs three times a week and remained open year-round, then it required 312 pictures per annum. Balio correctly explains that the major studios and Poverty Row producers increased the production of B pictures to fill this demand.57 However, the revival of oldies also padded many a double feature in the 1930s—a fact that has received little comment from film historians studying the decade.

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The beauty of revivals was that they were tested A pictures that could be rented for the price of untested B pictures. Neighborhood and small-town theater owners knew their audience’s tastes. They remembered which pictures their audience had liked, and they knew which stars their audience loved. Revival pictures had been tested; they were known entities. In contrast, exhibitors could only anticipate—but not truly know—the quality of a new B picture, which at any rate was sure to feature lesser stars and lower production values. More importantly, revivals (and most reissues) could be booked for the price of a B picture. The real difference between an A picture and a B picture had less to do with budget than with rental terms: the studios rented As for a percentage rate but Bs for a fixed price.58 Consider the Capitol Theatre in Paterson, New Jersey. In January 1937, it agreed to pay Warner Bros. the fixed rental price of $100, plus 50 percent of gross receipts over $475, for the privilege of booking a two-to-three-day subsequent run of The Charge of the Light Brigade, a film that had opened in first-run theaters more than a full year earlier.59 In contrast, the Capitol booked reissues of Warner’s Bordertown (1935; reissued in 1938), Devil Dogs of the Air (1935; reissued in 1941), and Here Comes the Navy (1934; reissued in 1941) for a mere $17.50 or $20 per picture—no percentage terms attached—for two-tothree-day runs.60 Sure, more people in Paterson would leave their homes to see Errol Flynn charge his lancers into the Valley of Death than would come out for a Bette Davis or a James Cagney reissue. But five times as many? The rental terms that the Capitol negotiated for the Warner Bros. reissues were far better than the terms that it obtained for subsequent-run playdates. Further review of Warner Bros.’ exhibition records reveals that the Capitol Theatre was no exception: Warner rented reissues and revivals in the 1930s to subsequent-run theaters for roughly 20 to 30 percent of what those theaters paid for newly released A pictures.61 Best of all, from the exhibitors’ standpoint, the revival and reissue bookings were obtained at fixed rental rates. When these same theaters booked a subsequent run of an A picture, on the other hand, they paid a much higher rental fee, which the studio frequently treated as a minimum guarantee against a percentage of the box office. A highly successful three-day run of new picture would be shared with the studio, whereas an equally successful three-day run of a revival would stay entirely in the exhibitor’s coffers. When exhibitors wanted to book a very recent revival, a picture that had finished its run in the past several months, the studios demanded higher rates than for a three- or four-year oldie. Still, exhibitors received even

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these revivals at a discount. Daily Variety reported in the summer of 1935 that exhibitors were booking the previous year’s hits for 50 to 75 percent of their previous rental costs.62 In 1937, Variety reported “indies finding they can buy a reissue or a revival of last year’s socko 40% for 25%.” The translation from showbiz speak: if a studio charged an exhibitor 40 percent of the gross last year for its hit film, that same film was available this year for only 25 percent of the gross. The trade paper acknowledged that “while this in most cases won’t burn up the b.o. [box office], it will provide a more certain reasonable net than a very ordinary program turkey.”63 Exhibitors benefited more than the studios from the availability of revivals. Because of the flat rental fees and scattered bookings, studios earned a relatively small amount of revenue from revivals, though the exact amount is impossible to pinpoint.64 Not all independent exhibitors, however, appreciated the availability of cheap revivals. Complaints of sniping resurfaced. In 1934, one exhibitor argued that cheap revival rental fees enabled a shoestring competitor to book a Mae West oldie for a fraction of what his theater paid Paramount for the Dirty Blonde’s latest picture. The sniper opened the old picture in the same week as the new one premiered, splashed West’s name across the marquee, buried the old title in tiny font, and sold tickets for half price.65 Despite these complaints, though, most independent exhibitors appreciated the predictability and cost efficiency that oldies offered. Independent exhibitors played in a rigged casino; the vertically integrated studios set the odds and enforced the house rules. Inside this casino, exhibitors recognized revivals and reissues as a low-ante table where the odds tilted in their favor. Examining reissues alongside revivals also yields insights into the cultures of distribution and exhibition. The major studios successfully implemented tight control over the circulation of their prints, curbing the piracy and unauthorized showings that had plagued the Triangle library and the states rights distribution model. Yet their regional exchanges enjoyed some flexibility in the loan of prints, and many serviced the demand of local exhibitors for revivals of old films that the exchanges continued to carry on their shelves. For every film that studios reissued nationally with a new press campaign, their exchanges loaned dozens of old films for revival screenings to exhibitors who were eager to fill double bills. Thanks to the flexibility of the exchanges, revivals of films made two, three, or four years earlier occurred throughout the nation in the mid-to-late 1930s. Once a film left the nearest exchange, however, it became very difficult to see. The cumulative effect of the studios’ distribution policies frequently meant that they controlled the only negative and positive prints of certain older films,

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leading to the irrevocable loss of hundreds of film negatives when the studios decided they no longer needed them.

other markets for the copy: international, 16mm, and moma Throughout the 1930s, U.S. theatrical reissues and revivals were, by far, the most financially significant uses of the copy in the studio libraries. However, these were not the only markets. Three others merit comment: international reissues, 16mm distribution, and the nonprofit model of the Museum of Modern Art’s Film Library. Old Hollywood movies circulated theatrically in the United States because of a specific set of market conditions—the demand of exhibitors for low-cost fare to fill continually changing double bills. Hollywood reissues also played abroad in the 1930s, but different sets of market conditions, specific to each nation, determined the ways in which the films circulated. England, by far the most important foreign market, experienced its own ebb and flow of Hollywood reissues. In 1938, English exhibitors, like their American counterparts, found that they could book old films at greatly discounted rates and seized the opportunity.66 Overall, the studios considered reissues a domestic business and treated the foreign market reissue differently. There were exceptions. MGM scored a major international success in the 1931–32 season when it reissued Ben-Hur, the film that, seven years earlier, had gone wildly over budget and nearly bankrupted the studio. This reissue, which earned a respectable $199,000 domestically, exploded on foreign screens, earning $1,153,000 in rentals, a bigger foreign haul than for any new MGM release that season except Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932).67 The Ben-Hur reissue, though, was an anomaly. Not until Disney and RKO’s 1944 reissue of Snow White did another Hollywood reissue score such huge revenues abroad. For the rest of the 1930s, MGM held back all of its domestic reissues from foreign release. Warner Bros. behaved similarly; none of its domestic reissues between the 1935–36 and 1940–41 seasons received rerelease campaigns abroad.68 RKO bucked this trend and found mixed results. In 1938, its King Kong left New York and clawed its way back around the world to $151,000 in rentals. But the studio’s other foreign reissues in the late 1930s all earned paltry sums: Little Women, The Lost Patrol, Lost Squadron, and Of Human Bondage each earned around ten thousand dollars or less, hardly worth the cost of striking and shipping new prints and advertising.69 The Hollywood studios recognized that only a special type of movie, a Ben-Hur or a King Kong, would be viable in rerelease abroad.

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Moreover, the growth in quota laws meant that the studios were limited in the number of films they could release on foreign screens. Why use one of the valuable quota slots on a reissue unlikely to achieve the grosses of a new picture? Yet if quota laws discouraged the reissue of Hollywood films for most of the 1930s, then global politics created an unexpected demand for reissues toward the end of the decade. Consider the case of two nations: Spain and Japan. Francoist Spain cut off Hollywood imports in 1936. The library of American movies that circulated in Spain for the next several years was a combination of old films that were already in the country when the gate came down and new films brought in by either foreign intermediaries (a British distributor, for instance) or smugglers. In 1938, Japan also closed its doors to Hollywood imports. Variety tried to give a positive spin to the development: “Ban on imports has been a blessing in disguise for some of the American distribs because it has enabled them to clear their vaults of a lot of weakies, imported in the past, and which couldn’t be sold at any price. Strange enough, some of these subjects, considered so weak by the exhibs, have proven b.o. smashes. Likewise, reissues of picts which didn’t do so well on release have been doing plenty on current bookings.”70 Industry publicists could crow to the paper all they wanted about Japanese reissue bookings, but one hard fact remained: there was no way for Hollywood to collect the revenue. The Japanese government had turned the yen into a blocked currency. A reissue might be a box office smash, but no studio—or any foreign business, for that matter—was going to be able to get the money out of the country.71 Not all of the old Hollywood films screened in Spain and Japan had been officially booked either. Unauthorized screenings of old Hollywood pictures took place in Madrid, Osaka, and Nazi-occupied Paris. Audiences sat through ten-reel films that had become seven-reelers not on account of government censors but instead because of projectionists, who patched and repatched used prints that were worn down to the point of destruction.72 Back in the United States, the technology of 16mm sound film improved dramatically in the 1930s. The infrastructure for 16mm production, distribution, and exhibition also expanded. Although numerous Hollywood silent films were available on the small gauge, the specialty distributors of 16mm films knew that their clients were more interested in renting Hollywood sound films. In the mid-1930s, Films Inc. and other 16mm distributors sought to persuade the Hollywood studios that they would gain a new revenue source and lose nothing by licensing their sound pictures that were more than two years old. The studios divided into camps: MGM, Warner Bros., Twentieth Century–Fox, and Columbia remained cautious and withheld their

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sound films; Paramount and Universal, on the other hand, entered into 16mm subdistribution agreements with Films Inc. In 1938, RKO entered into multiple nonexclusive contracts with 16mm distributors.73 The industry was split on the 16mm question. Donald Hyndman, the president of the New York Division of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, reminded his colleagues that 80 percent of the available 16mm films were educational or industrial shorts shot on 16mm for the 16mm market rather than 35mm features reduced for 16mm usage. Still, Hyndman, who also worked for the 16mm film stock supplier Eastman, argued that Hollywood should take the small gauge seriously as a business opportunity. Engineers were improving 16mm’s sound and picture quality by leaps and bounds; within a year or two, Hyndman predicted, the quality would equal that of 35mm film. Moreover, Hyndman argued that 16mm possessed several advantages over 35mm film. If they more fully adopted the small gauge, the Hollywood studios would save on shipping (parcel post was acceptable for 16mm), fireproofing (16mm safety stock did not present the fire hazards of 35mm nitrate film), and labor (a low-skilled workforce could replace the unionized projectionists).74 The problem was that the very features of 16mm that Hyndman saw as advantageous—the film stock’s transportability and simplicity—also made it dangerous in the wrong hands. A schoolteacher might hide a rented print, claim that the mailman had lost it, and treat friends and students to numerous unlicensed viewings. Worse yet, sophisticated collectors and bootleggers found ways to temporarily access 35mm prints and make their own 16mm reductions. A new Hollywood release, theoretically unavailable on 16mm for at least a year, could light up the portable screen of an itinerant 16mm operator before it had reached its second-run theater. Even without the studios cutting deals, therefore, the manufacture of every new 16mm projector presented a risk.75 Still, theater owners reserved their harshest scorn for the studios that actively supplied feature films to the small-gauge market. Motion Picture Herald, a trade paper for exhibitors, warned that “the so called ‘bootlegged’ 35mm and 16mm prints are not so great competition to the showman as the ‘legitimatized’ product, authorized by three large companies which allow their product to be transcribed into 16mm: RKO, Paramount, and Universal.”76 Theater owners posed the greatest obstacle to a wider library of titles on 16mm. And the Big Five studios (MGM, Paramount, RKO, Twentieth Century–Fox, and Warner Bros.) were, of course, theater owners themselves. For these reasons, MGM, Warner Bros., and Twentieth Century–Fox abstained from the 16mm market in the 1930s.

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The studios that released to 16mm placed significant limitations on the types of sites permissible for 16mm screenings. Universal had the loosest policy, allowing “all locations, including homes, not in competition with 35mm theatres.” RKO had a more restrictive policy, forbidding home use but permitting screenings in schools, theaterless towns, and “shut-ins” (a handy term for prisons, insane asylums, convents, and other institutions with a truly captive audience). Beyond these general restrictions, the studios had to approve every individual school, shut-in, or other location before Films Inc. could ship it a 16mm print from the studio’s library. Films Inc.’s approval process and tight control over circulation were major reasons why the company became the premiere subdistributor for studio films on 16mm. The Department of Justice later alleged that Films Inc. was at the heart of a conspiracy to destroy competition and limit the sites of 16mm screenings, but in actuality, the company succeeded because it catered to the traditional concern of studio distribution departments about film libraries—how to control the circulation of prints in a way that maximized revenue yet mitigated the risk of piracy and the threat of cannibalizing the core theatrical business.77 The second reason why studios chose Films Inc. was because the potential revenue from 16mm was still too small to justify establishing an inhouse business. Consider Universal’s first two years under contract with Films Inc.: 16mm earned the studio only $39,932 in 1937 and $38,989 in 1938.78 To put this in perspective, MGM realized a larger profit on its leastsuccessful theatrical reissue of the decade, David Copperfield (reissued in 1938; profit: $48,000), than Universal earned that same year from licensing dozens of features to 16mm. Because of the paltry sums available, the studios that adopted 16mm chose to externalize the small gauge as a business. Not until the 16mm sound industry matured more would the studios consider establishing in-house departments, and even then, whatever actions those in-house departments took were necessarily hamstrung by the need to protect the theatrical exhibition business.79 When it came to exploiting the copies in their film libraries, the studios could choose among the domestic reissue market, the overseas reissue market, and the 16mm market. In 1935, the Museum of Modern Art approached them with a different offer: deposit select films for preservation, nonprofit exhibition, and the study of film art. John Hay Whitney, the president of MoMA’s Film Library, assured the studios that the Film Library was a friend, not a foe. He wrote to the MPPDA chief Will Hays, “With so limited an audience in mind—students matriculated in college or museum classes— and restricting the picture presentation to those films which time has deter-

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mined as classics of the screen, I feel sure that no one needs to be concerned lest the extending of the Museum’s exhibitions to include the film will ever result in a competition with commercial entertainment.”80 Whitney and Iris Barry, the director of the Film Library, eventually won over the Hollywood studios. The deals that MoMA reached with MGM and Paramount in October 1935 became templates for the rest of the studios. The scholarly literature on the MoMA Film Library, which is vast, correctly praises Barry’s successful negotiations with the studios as an important step for American film archives.81 As Haidee Wasson persuasively argues, MoMA’s Film Library played a transformative role in shifting the cultural value of American film “from ephemeral entertainment to enduring cultural monument.”82 The traveling collection of films that played at museums and universities formed a canon of study for decades that followed. What has received less attention in the MoMA literature is the perspective of the studios in reaching this agreement. Why did MGM, Paramount, and Warner Bros. think that this was a good idea? Were they simply willing to hand over the keys to their vaults? A careful review of the original contract between Paramount and MoMA reveals that the studios gave up very little, retaining full control over the prints in circulation. The films remained “at all times the absolute property of the Licensor [studio], with only the non-exclusive, revocable right of possession” granted to MoMA. Paramount could withdraw prints from MoMA at any time without providing a cause. The studio acknowledged that remakes and reissues would be likely reasons, but ultimately it could seize its films back at any time and for any reason it chose. MoMA paid the duplication and shipping costs for the prints it received, and Paramount’s lawyers had to approve any sublicensee (i.e., universities, museums) that wanted to rent films from the Film Library.83 In the eyes of most studio executives, they were working with a charity; they maintained control over their assets while their participation with MoMA earned them a small public relations boost. MoMA, for its part, was not interested in most of what lay in the Hollywood vaults. Due to both limited resources and taste considerations, it was highly selective in choosing Hollywood films. The United States was only one nation—albeit an important one—represented in MoMA’s international Film Library, which included a large number of European films. Moreover, the type of American film that interested MoMA most was the very one that had lost nearly all its reissue value to the studios by the mid1930s: the silent picture. In the more than one hundred American movies on their “Tentative List of Films Wanted by the Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art,” dated July 15, 1935, Barry and Whitney included only ten

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sound features.84 Whether because of taste considerations, a desire to promote the circulation of the hardest-to-see type of film, a savvy recognition that producers would be more willing to part with their silent features, or a combination of all these reasons, MoMA prioritized the exact type of film that mattered least to the studios. The agreement, therefore, should not be interpreted as an admission by the studios that their libraries lacked financial value; it was only an acknowledgement that a certain type of film had lost all reissue value. The studios fully understood the opportunities and limitations of the reissue, revival, and 16mm markets. And should those market dynamics change, the studios had the option of taking back their films. However, MoMA’s Film Library holds significance beyond the contractual terms and beyond the approval or rejection of any particular film. The museum offered a compelling vision, in both theory and practice, of what a film library could be. Unlike the studios’ private and market-oriented film libraries, MoMA’s was a public and noncommercial model. Admittedly, public access to the Film Library was limited. You couldn’t simply buy a ticket. Watching one of MoMA’s selections required enrolling in a college course or subscribing to a museum series. Additionally, you had to live in proximity to a sponsoring institution for this to be a possibility at all. In terms of offering the largest number of Americans access to the largest number of old films, the for-profit marketplace of reissues, revivals, and 16mm distribution certainly outperformed MoMA’s nonprofit library in the 1930s and 1940s. Yet the access that the free market offered was ephemeral. A revival was here today, gone tomorrow. By the time an exhibitor inquired about booking a film for a second or third time, the exchange may have already shipped the print off for recycling. In contrast, MoMA offered a model of permanence. The studios always retained the right to pull their prints, but in practice, MoMA provided institutional access to and preservation for the films in its collection. Barry had finally built the index to finding great films that she had dreamed of in the 1920s (see chapter 2).

silent film destruction As MoMA labored to obtain, preserve, and circulate specific pictures from the studio libraries, Warner Bros. was working in the opposite direction— seeking out and destroying most of the negatives and positives in its silent library. Fire and deterioration had already begun the process. A fire on the Burbank lot in 1934 sent six vaults’ worth of films up in flames, including the only negatives and positives of many of the old Vitagraph, First National, and Warner Bros. films.85 The studio recognized that its vaults in

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Brooklyn held the kindling for another potential blaze. Warner Bros. needed a process for deciding which films it might need and which it could safely destroy. Based on what we know about the value of film libraries in the 1930s, the chief considerations of this decision-making process should come as no surprise. The value of a film library lay in the distribution of copies and the production of derivatives. The Warner Bros. team needed a sort of checklist to evaluate these possible uses. They never assembled any formal questionnaire, but the questions they weighed are implicit in the more than seventy pages of documents in the “Destruction of Film” file, spanning the years 1936 to 1943, at USC’s Warner Bros. Archives.86 First, Warner Bros. wanted to know, does the film have any value left as a copy? Does it hold potential for the reissue or 16mm markets? The Distribution Department weighed these questions. The Trust Department supplied it a list of film titles and asked if Distribution objected to the destruction of all remaining negative and positive prints. For nearly all the silent films, the Distribution Department answered no. Commercial silent film exhibition had dwindled by the mid-1930s. Additionally, the silent films that received national reissues—an increasingly rare practice as the decade wore on—were high-profile films, containing at least some element (star, spectacle, enduring reputation) that made them extraordinary. In contrast, most of the movies that the Distribution Department reviewed between 1936 and 1943 contained none of these marketable features. They were old First National pictures, such as The Beautiful and Damned (1922) and Behold This Woman (1924), titles that may arouse our curiosity today but, realistically, held little potential for reissue in the mid-1930s—or our present moment. As for the 16mm market, although Warner Bros. and First National had both licensed silent films to the Kodascope Library in the late 1920s, synchronous sound had caught up to the small gauge by 1936, and specialty 16mm distributors had little interest in the studio silent film libraries. One list that the Brooklyn vault prepared in 1938 contained dozens of early sound films as candidates for destruction, including The Singing Fool (1928), Disraeli (1929), and Moby Dick (1930), but executives in either distribution or production objected, reasoning that they still carried the potential for future revenue.87 There was no belief, on the other hand, that the bulk of silent films held such potential. The Distribution Department decided that the silent films, which were taking up storage space and posing a fire risk, could be destroyed. But what about the derivative uses of the libraries? As we’ve seen, studios valued their libraries in the 1930s more for the ability to produce

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derivatives than for the potential to distribute the original films. Warner’s New York–based Trust Department sent its lists to Burbank to see if the studio’s production headquarters had cause to save the films. Few were saved for remake considerations. Remakes were the most important derivative use of the libraries, but they did not require access to the original film. The text of the screen scenario or the underlying story material was generally considered sufficient. There were exceptions. In evaluating the destruction of the First National film For Sale (1924), W. G. Wallace of the Trust Department wrote, “I understand there is no copy of any story or script either here or on the West Coast, so that this should probably be preserved as our only record of the story and the type of material.”88 For the most part, though, the story material existed in written form and the nitrate films could be junked. The second most important derivative use was stock footage, and the Burbank production team attempted to safeguard this facet of the library. Maintaining a stock footage library did not mean saving every film, every scene, every shot. Instead, it meant extracting the reusable sequences from a vast pool of mostly useless footage. During the 1942–43 round of destruction, the editor Bert Frank was tasked to “pick out some film for future use” from at least sixty-one features scheduled for destruction.89 He had previously compiled old footage for the Vitaphone shorts that blended comedy with nostalgia, such as The Movie Album (1932), The Nickelette (1932), and Movie Memories (1933), which include the only surviving footage of certain lost films. In presenting Frank with a new list of films to review, the Brooklyn vault encouraged him to act quickly so that the pictures could be destroyed as soon as possible.90 It’s possible that Frank, looking for usable stock footage on his Moviola, was the last person to watch intact versions of such films as My Lady’s Latchkey (1921) and Madonna of the Streets (1924). After he took all the footage that he thought he and his fellow Warner Bros. editors would have even “a remote chance of being able to use,” the Brooklyn vault disposed of both their negative and positive prints.91 Warner Bros. had determined that these films had no reissue potential and that all of their derivative value had been secured. However, there was one additional and very important question that still needed to be answered: did Warner Bros. own the films? This more than any other factor determined which silent films Warner Bros. saved and which it destroyed. Whereas the questions over reissue potential, remake material, and even stock footage were fairly straightforward, the ownership question presented a tangled web. The problem was that First National, from its inception in 1917 until 1924, had acquired feature films exclusively from

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independent producers, most of whom had contracts in which the distribution rights reverted back to them after five or ten years. These producers, who included Sol Lesser and Louis B. Mayer, were supposed to receive all of the negative and positive prints of their pictures within three months of the end of the distribution period. Clearly, this had not happened. What should Warner Bros. do? Sending the prints back to the producers would expose the studio to risk by calling attention to its failure to abide by the terms of the distribution contracts. Destroying the prints, on the other hand, could also represent a breach of contract. What if a temperamental producer like Lesser came out of the woodwork asking for his films back? To make matters more complicated, Warner Bros. retained half ownership in some films, and other ownership agreements could not be found at all. In light of these considerations, the Trust Department and the New York attorneys informed the vault, “It is inadvisable to destroy any picture in which there is an outside interest. We checked the schedule again and we believe that we have advised you of all pictures in which we own all rights, and which can safely be destroyed. The other pictures on your list are pictures in which there is an outside interest and we do not believe it advisable to dispose of them.”92 In other words: destroy the films we own; keep the ones we don’t. Over and over, this logic governed Warner’s decisions about junking films during the documented 1936 to 1943 period of film destruction. Disposing of the First National films would have required tracking down the owners of production companies that, in some cases, were no longer in existence. The easiest thing to do in such a situation was, simply, nothing. Warner’s objective was to clear vault space and reduce fire risk. The most efficient way of achieving this was to leave the First National films alone and clear out the Warner features (which carried no messy legal obligations). The decisions to save or destroy films based on reissue potential, derivative usage, and ownership had long-term consequences for film preservation. When Warner Bros. sold its film library to the television syndicator Eliot Hyman in 1956, the studio undertook an inventory that revealed a mere seventy-five surviving silent and partially synced feature films in its vaults. In contrast, it compiled a nineteen-page list of 626 features, dating from 1920 to the 1928–29 season, for which no film materials could be found.93 This document tracks only Warner Bros. and First National films; it would have run much longed had it listed the films that the studio owned from Vitagraph, World, and Triangle. The seventy-five surviving films include notable partially synced features that Warner Bros. believed might have reissue value in the sound era,

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such as The Singing Fool (1928), Noah’s Ark (1929), and Weary River (1929). The list also includes Warner Bros.’ first feature film, My Four Years in Germany (1918), which the studio may have saved for historic and sentimental reasons. Yet what is most remarkable is that twenty-seven of the seventy-five films were First National releases that Warner Bros. did not own. The vault director had wanted to destroy these pictures, but the lawyers said no. While the silent features that Warner owned outright were removed for recycling, the First National films kept sitting on the shelf— too much of a legal liability to destroy but requiring too much effort and explanation to return. Ironically, Warner Bros. took better care of the films that it did not own the copyrights for than the films for which it did. Although some of the 626 missing films were later found, most are still lost. Triangle also lost most of its negatives, but far more of its films still survive. As chapter 1 discusses, the piracy of the states rights market, Triangle’s decision to sell prints of the Keystone shorts outright, and the studio’s licensing of its library to small-gauge distributors meant that copies of these films circulated loosely, some becoming the possessions of exhibitors, teachers, and collectors. As David Pierce demonstrates in his survey of silent film survival, roughly two-fifths of all extant complete American silent feature films exist only as foreign 35mm prints or in small-gauge versions, such as 16mm and 28mm.94 Warner Bros., in contrast to Triangle, controlled the circulation of its films tightly. Like the other major studios, it used a national distribution system and closely tracked the movement of negative films and positive prints. When exhibitors claimed that a print was lost, the matter was investigated and they had to sign an affidavit attesting to the veracity of the claim. When the exchanges sent back old prints, they were recycled in the studio’s own reclamation plant, further reducing the risk of theft. Try as it might, the studio exercised less control over the global circulation of its films, resulting in errant prints becoming the possessions of collectors and never reaching the reclamation plant. But for a great many of the silent films in the Warner Bros. library, the studio sent the negative and the only known positive copy off for destruction. Considering the threat of fire, no reissue potential, secured derivative uses, and ownership of the copyright, Warner Bros. reached the decision that the films could safely be destroyed. In the 1930s, the Hollywood studios consistently found uses for their libraries, though none functioned as the core profit center or barrier to entry that they would become. Warner Bros., like the other studios, valued its film library principally for its ability to produce derivatives—remakes, stock footage–heavy pictures, and other new works based on the underlying

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copyrights. As the 1930s progressed, Warner Bros. profited from reissues and revivals of sound films. Silent films, however, became seen as worthless on the reissue market. These priorities structured Warner’s systematic destruction of its silent library at the end of the decade. The Warner Bros. case study shows that the basis of film libraries has always been more than just negatives and prints. Paper was and remains as important as celluloid for monetizing old films. From a remake standpoint, paper scripts and stories made most silent film negatives superfluous. More importantly, paper provides the legal basis for film libraries. Incomplete, ambiguous, or missing contracts restricted the use of studio libraries. Studio lawyers had to renegotiate agreements to obtain dialogue rights, omitted from earlier contracts. Additionally, the failure to secure the rights to distribution across all media later limited the exploitation possibilities for some of Warner’s early sound films. The law, however, can influence us to behave in unexpected ways. Warner Bros. ironically chose to save films that it no longer owned the rights to and destroy films that it owned completely. This fact flies in the face of the tragedy-of-the commons arguments that Hollywood successfully advanced in lobbying for the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which added twenty years of protection to all copyrighted works. Representatives of the studios warned that according to the transhistorical laws of free-market economics, only the copyright owner of a work would invest the time and money to preserve it.95 Between 1936 and 1943, Warner Bros. behaved differently, keeping films to which it no longer held the rights and destroying its own copyrighted works. Today the studios have far more incentives and avenues for exploiting old works. Many have prioritized the preservation of their properties. But let’s not forget the other side of that coin—if you exclusively own a work of intellectual property and effectively control its circulation, then you also possess the exclusive power to destroy it.

4. Postwar Profit Center (1940s) Fairy stories keep on going Even though the kids grow old. Little “Snow White” keeps on snowing Great big flakes of gold. —george e. phair, Daily Variety, 1944

There is evidence in this revival [of Snow White] that such a masterwork on the screen has the timeless and universal richness of classic music or lore. Its pleasures are forever diverting; their recapture is a refreshing delight. —bosley crowther, New York Times, 1944

Our industry is one of the few in the world where talents and skills of its workers, preserved on strips of celluloid, can be used repeatedly without any remuneration to the possessors of those talents and skills. —lester cole, Screen Writers Guild, 1947

snowing gold The response was electrifying. Beginning with its sixty-city rollout in the heartland states of Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia, and Kentucky, Disney’s 1944 reissue of Snow White (1937) met with the applause of critics, audiences, and exhibitors. Domestically, it generated more than $1.4 million in rentals, more than Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1940), or Bambi (1942) had earned in their initial releases. Snow White played gangbusters abroad too. By the time the Seven Dwarves had finished their march around the globe, the rerelease had earned more than $1.05 million in foreign rentals.1 Observers in the industry took note. The era of the high-grossing reissue had begun. Snow White was the first in a long line of feature-length Disney reissues. Within a decade, consumers became familiar with the Disney reissue as cultural event. Disney waited seven years to bring a picture back, allowing a new crop of children to grow and creating a sense of urgency among adults to go to the theater and, later, buy the video or DVD. If you waited too long, you missed the chance to see this animated classic, “available for a limited time only.” Although the marketing campaigns celebrated the 106

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films for their timelessness, Disney’s seven-year reissue strategy was neither timeless nor inevitable. Only two years before Snow White’s successful reprise, Walt Disney had hinted that he would reissue Pinocchio (1940) in the 1942–43 season. The news would have made sense to anyone in the industry; Pinocchio would have aged three years, a common enough gap when it came to studio reissues. In 1942, Variety explained that Snow White had “created widest favorable comment when first released” of any Disney picture but was “now considered technically obsolete and unsuitable for revival owing to seven league strides advance in cartoon production in past couple of years.”2 The industry’s assumption, which Variety expressed—that technological leaps forward made Snow White, a mere five years old, look more haggard than the Evil Queen in disguise—reminds us that both the reissue of Snow White and its huge success were not foregone conclusions. Disney’s own persistent rhetoric about his studio’s technological breakthroughs, particularly around Fantasia and Bambi, made his celebrated first feature feel like a family heirloom—rich in positive memories, poor in commercial market value. The audience and critical response to the reissue, though, disproved all of these assumptions. Reportedly, adults outnumbered children at most wartime showings of Snow White. In some cities, adults topped youngsters by a two-to-one margin.3 Clearly, Snow White’s reissue success did not depend on reaching a new audience of children. The film’s appeal to adults lay in a blend of entertainment and nostalgia. “There is even an elemental premium to be enjoyed at this particular time in seeing the Old Witch destroyed by a fortuitous but elemental device. And there is more than fictitious satisfaction in the evidence that the Prince finally returns. Call this a sentimental comment. So what? You know what we mean,” wrote the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther, one of several critics who found wartime allegories in the film.4 It offered a rich and even contradictory viewing experience—a diversion from unpleasant wartime realities, an encouraging wartime allegory, and, most of all, a chance for audiences to recapture a memory of the world, and themselves, now gone. Snow White had changed in the seven years since its initial release—not because the animation looked dated but because the people watching it had irrevocably changed, and they knew it. Snow White resonated poignantly with American audiences during World War II, but the reissue would have achieved a mere fraction of its box office success were it not for one critical factor: RKO sold the film to exhibitors like a new picture. Whereas subsequent-run theaters in the 1930s might have booked a comparable reissue for a flat twenty- or thirty-dollar rental,

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RKO demanded a percentage of the box office for Snow White and its other reissues in the mid-to-late 1940s. Snow White played in more first-run theaters and for longer periods than any reissue of the 1930s. Even as it wound its way through the second- and subsequent-run houses, RKO obtained highly favorable rental terms, the likes of which exhibitors would have considered ludicrous in the prewar years. Encouraged by the example of Snow White’s success and the seller’s market for movies, the Hollywood studios embarked on the most profitable film reissue campaign in the industry’s history. The boom in reissues began in the war years and reached greater heights in the postwar years of 1946–49. The Hollywood studios, audiences, and critics celebrated the blockbuster reissue of Snow White, but one group felt left out of the party: those who had worked on the film. For years, its two lead voice actors had argued that they were entitled to additional compensation. Adriana Caselotti received less than a thousand dollars in recording fees for voicing the title character; Harry Stockwell, her Prince Charming, earned less than five hundred. By late 1938, the film had generated more than seven million dollars in worldwide rentals for RKO and Disney, and the voices of Snow White and Prince Charming had been imprinted on millions of soundtrack records, distributed by RKO’s sister company RCA. Caselotti and Stockwell sued Disney and RCA, arguing that they had not agreed to grant soundtrack rights.5 Technically, however, they had agreed—Disney’s contracts explicitly reserved the right to use their voices across all media—and a lower court judge in New York granted summary judgment to the defendants.6 Caselotti and Stockwell appealed and managed to bring their case to trial. Following a hung jury in July 1943, the parties seem to have made amends. Although she received no residual checks, Disney and RKO paid Caselotti to participate in a 1944 personal appearance tour. “The Voice of Snow White” visited Midwestern theaters, schools, and war plants to promote the reissue. Snow White finally received additional compensation, but what about the workers who had brought her to life—not the Seven Dwarves or Prince Charming but the animators who realized Disney’s vision across countless animation cells? Only three years earlier, in 1941, the Disney animators had won the right to unionize. They had gone on strike with numerous grievances: among them, Walt’s empty promises to put some of the 1938 Snow White profits into a bonus pool that would serve as delayed compensation for their many hours of unpaid overtime labor.7 After nine weeks on the picket lines, the animators obtained the right to go back to work as members of the Screen Cartoonists Guild. They achieved better wages, hours, and work conditions, but they gained no system of residual

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payments. The reissue of Snow White, however, galvanized the guild to take up the question of profit sharing again. In the spring of 1944, it issued two demands: first, that producers pay 20 percent of all 35mm or 16mm rerelease revenues to cartoonists in the armed services (which included nearly everyone working at the Disney studio in the war years); second, and very forward looking, that producers pay 20 percent of television revenues to all animators, not simply military personnel. The guild would perform the administrative functions of collecting the monies and distributing them to its members.8 Disney, who carried a chip on his shoulder from the 1941 strike, dismissed this set of demands. The guild appealed to the War Labor Board, but the arbiters ultimately sided with Disney.9 The same week that the Screen Cartoonists Guild lost its bid to obtain residuals, Wall Street analysts opened Disney’s newly released annual report. The animation studio finished the 1943–44 fiscal year $486,287 in the black—a net profit attributable almost entirely to the Snow White reissue.10 •

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The Snow White reissue influenced industry trends and foreshowed changes to come. It inspired other studios to ramp up their reissue businesses; distributors sold their oldies to exhibitors at the rental price of new pictures and reaped the rewards. During Hollywood’s lucrative years of 1943, 1944, 1945, and 1946, reissue income was mere gravy on a slate of profitable new releases. As production costs increased and attendance declined in the late 1940s, however, the studios came to regard their libraries as critical profit centers, as important to the health of Universal in 1947 and MGM in 1948 as Snow White had been to Disney in 1944. The Screen Cartoonists Guild’s demands preceded campaigns in 1947, 1948, and 1949 by the Screen Writers Guild, the Screen Actors Guild, and other unions for residual payments. Amid growing unemployment, Hollywood’s labor force watched angrily as its old work generated new revenues and consumed valuable screen space. Meanwhile, audiences at home and abroad found more opportunities than ever before to watch old films in theaters and at home. The mid-to-late 1940s marked a turning point in the history of film libraries. This chapter explains the industrial and cultural contexts of the postwar reissue boom. As the movie industry entered a postwar period of decline, studios reissued films theatrically at an unprecedented rate. Old films also benefited from a turn toward the library in American culture— critics and audiences expressed both nostalgia for and a desire to reevaluate works of the prewar years. I briefly describe the participants in the reissue

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marketplace, then compare how two studios navigated it. The vertically integrated MGM adopted a conservative approach—using a handful of “quality” reissues each year to enhance its profitability but never seeking revenue streams beyond theatrical distribution and exhibition. Universal, on the other hand, owned no theaters and employed far more aggressive tactics, exploiting its old films through reissues and a subsidiary responsible for 16mm and television distribution. It flooded the marketplace with its old films, angering theater owners, labor groups, and the other studios and setting up the central issue that the industry has been wrestling with ever since: how to exploit libraries by using alternative technologies in a way that creates new revenue streams without sacrificing traditional markets.

the 1940s industry in context: decline, war boom, and decline In the 1940s, the fortunes of the Hollywood studios shifted dramatically, first down, then up, and finally down again. The film historian Thomas Schatz argues in his seminal book on 1940s American cinema that “World War II marked an extended, dramatic, and most welcome interval in a decade-long period of industry decline.”11 The studios entered the decade on precarious footing, facing diminishing returns from foreign markets and increased pressure from labor groups, independent theater owners, and the federal government (which represented a particularly grave problem, since it threatened to divorce the studios from their most valuable assets—the first-run theaters). The attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. declaration of war in December 1941 effectively suspended these domestic problems as the nation entered the fight against two great foreign powers, Japan and Germany. The U.S. government considered motion pictures essential for building morale, communicating news, and entertaining Americans at home and abroad. Hollywood successfully adapted its production process to the new challenge, producing warthemed features for civilians and training films for military personnel.12 Hundreds of Hollywood actors, producers, and craftspeople enlisted in the armed forces. Those who remained at home had their salary levels frozen to prevent rampant inflation. Although the studios froze salaries to comply with the government’s anti-inflation policies, this wartime measure yielded corporate side benefits, curbing the power of stars and unions. The studios benefited from wartime conditions in other ways as well. Although they lost access to most foreign markets besides England and Latin America, the U.S. box office boomed like at no time before or since. The buildup of the armed forces and defense industries marked an end to

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the Depression years of un- and underemployment. Americans on the home front had more money in their pockets yet fewer goods available to buy, as automobiles, gasoline, food, and other materials were rationed. Movies provided both a welcome diversion and an acceptable site for consumer spending. Weekly attendance numbers rose modestly, from eighty million in 1940 to eighty-five million in 1945.13 More important for the studios, though, attendance at first-run theaters skyrocketed. As more moviegoers paid a premium to see pictures earlier and in superior accommodations, the engagements at the first-run theaters grew longer and longer. The studios retooled their production slates accordingly, to accommodate the new release patterns and the war’s limitations on their resources. The Big Five dramatically decreased their volume of productions, shifting from releasing an average of 47.6 pictures per studio in 1940 to 32.2 in 1943 and 26.6 in 1945.14 The biggest decrease occurred in the number of B pictures, as studios shifted their priorities to making A-level pictures that could perform well in their first-run engagements. The studios emerged from the war years in far better shape than they had entered them. Briefly, it appeared as though the wave of prosperity would last, as the studios enjoyed their most profitable year ever in 1946. Their profits declined rapidly, however, in the following years.15 There were multiple causes for this. The postwar baby boom sent millions of Americans from the city to the suburbs. Gone were the days of visiting the downtown movie house three nights a week. Middle-class white Americans increasingly stayed at home, where they embraced television, a form of entertainment that complemented the new suburban lifestyle and terrified theater owners across the country.16 Beyond television and suburbanization, however, the industry’s prewar troubles involving foreign markets, labor unions, and antitrust actions all resurfaced after the war. England and much of Western Europe, recovering from the war, established stricter screen quotas, tariffs, and exportable fund limits to bolster their national industries and avoid a flood of currency leaving the nation. Moreover, as the war had moved toward a close in 1945, Hollywood labor demanded a greater share of the immense profits that the studios were reaping. Top actors and directors negotiated rich deals, establishing their own independent companies to gain greater creative control and retain more of their earnings after taxes.17 Rank-and-file workers, meanwhile, achieved substantial gains through collective bargaining, including a 25 percent wage increase for most unionized workers in 1946. Nevertheless, problems abounded for the unions. During and following the war, the industry suffered from jurisdictional disputes between the

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International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), which eventually devolved into violent skirmishes and hysterical accusations of communism. The wage gains of 1945 and 1946 necessarily increased production costs, which had already gone up during the war years and which became a problem when attendance and revenues declined across 1947, 1948, and 1949. Employment in Hollywood then diminished nearly as rapidly as the studios’ profits, as 22,000 unionized workers in 1946 became 13,500 in 1949.18 The un- and underemployment in postwar Hollywood factored heavily in the campaign that labor waged to receive residual payments for reissued films. After the war, the Department of Justice (DOJ) resumed its antitrust case against the eight major studios. In 1948, it reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which determined that the studios had used strategic first-run theater ownership and unfair distribution practices—including block booking, blind selling, and price fixing—to control the U.S. movie market. The Supreme Court’s “Paramount decision” forced the studios to reform their distribution practices and divest themselves of their lucrative first-run theaters.19 Over the next few years, the Big Five studios and the DOJ entered into consent decrees that compelled the studios to sell some of their theater holdings outright but also permitted them to retain many theaters on the condition that they split into two independently controlled corporations: one in charge of production and distribution, the other in charge of the theater business. Whereas RKO and Paramount quickly agreed to consent decrees, the other three studios—Warner Bros., Twentieth Century– Fox, and MGM—pursued fruitless litigation and did not agree to split off their theater businesses until 1951 and, in the case of MGM, 1952.20 Meanwhile, the DOJ continued to scrutinize the behavior of the studios, fully expecting Hollywood to break the law again. As we’ll see in chapter 5, it identified the libraries of film studios as likely tools for collusion, block booking, and other anticompetitive practices.

the wartime growth of the reissue market At the beginning of the 1940s, however, film libraries seemed inconsequential to the DOJ and only moderately significant to the studios that owned them. The studios entered the decade with their 1930s assumptions about libraries intact—the remake was more important than the reissue and the derivative more important than the copy. Most studios reissued one or two pictures per year on the domestic market, where they might earn between $80,000 and $350,000 in rentals. As war swept through Europe and Asia,

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old military-oriented pictures gained a new topicality. In the 1939–40 season, Warner Bros. grossed $336,000 on Here Comes the Navy (1933) and $324,000 on Devil Dogs of the Air (1934), both starring James Cagney and Pat O’Brien.21 MGM scored $192,000 the following season with Navy, Blue and Gold (1938), impressive for a film that had cost the studio only $458,000 to produce three years earlier.22 This income was welcome, but it made only minimal contributions to the studios’ yearly revenue and profitability. The studios continued to subordinate reissues as a business and value libraries primarily for their remake rights. But the war years transformed the American movie marketplace in nearly every way, and the business of film libraries was no exception. In the 1941–42 and 1942–43 seasons, the studios showed little interest in either the copy or derivative uses of their libraries. The prolonged first-run engagements of A pictures made them focus production on high-profile, “presold” pictures—that is, films based on novels and plays that had immediate positive recognition among audiences. The Big Five trimmed the number of their new productions, cutting down especially on remakes and B movies. The studios also reduced the number of films they reissued. Paramount, RKO, and MGM did not reissue a single picture in the 1942–43 season.23 Screen time, executives assumed, should be reserved for A-level pictures that could gross the maximum amount as they slowly wound their way through booming box offices across the country. Why waste time with comparatively low-grossing reissues in this context—especially when raw film stock was subject to ration? The studios might not have veered from their no-reissue-or-revival policy were it not for the persistent demands of exhibitors for old movies. Subsequent-run theaters faced a shortage of product because fewer pictures were being produced and first-run theaters were holding them for longer periods. Both to obtain movies and to economize on rental fees, exhibitors turned to revivals. As chapter 3 explains, a revival differed from a reissue in that it was initiated by an exhibitor, who booked it on a cheap, one-off basis through an exchange that still carried the print. A reissue, in contrast, came from the studio, complete with new prints and marketing materials, though it was also booked more cheaply than a new A picture. Studios watched in frustration as exhibitors filled screens with cheaply-booked old pictures. They responded in 1942 by eliminating revival bookings and, as Variety reported, stopped “permitting accounts to raid the vaults for any old pictures which they formerly bought for a few dollars.”24 The supply of old movies, however, could not be completely cut off. Exhibitor demand benefited specialty reissue distributors, which acquired

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old films from independent producers and distributed them theatrically on a states rights basis. Astor Pictures was the most prominent specialty reissue distributor of the 1930s. Headed by Bob Savini, it acquired the rights to Howard Hughes’s film library after the temperamental producer sued his original distributor, United Artists.25 Three of the Hughes productions— Hell’s Angels (1930), Sky Devils (1932), and Scarface (1932)— generated small but steady revenues every year from the mid-1930s into the late 1940s thanks to their relevant stars, their sensational subject matter, and some clever repackaging.26 Astor’s business expanded in the war years, and it was soon joined in the reissue field by similar specialty distributors, most notably Film Classics.27 These companies served the intermediary function of connecting subsequent-run theaters with the reissue product of independent producers. By late 1943, the studios had recognized that they could not freeze old movies out of the marketplace altogether. They adopted a new strategy, continuing to deny exhibitors cheap revival bookings but selecting one or two films from their libraries for high-profile, nationwide reissues. The main differences from the 1930s were that these reissues played extended engagements at first-run theaters and exhibitors paid rentals comparable to those of new films. Snow White was the highest-grossing and most important reissue of this period, but nearly all of the studios enjoyed reissue grosses in the late war years that, even accounting for inflation, dwarfed the prewar reissue rentals. Warner Bros., for instance, obtained $552,921 in the fall of 1943 by reissuing the 1939 James Cagney western The Oklahoma Kid.28 That same fall, Paramount began to prepare Cecil B. DeMille’s 1932 Roman epic The Sign of the Cross for its second reissue. Prior to its first reissue, in 1938, the Production Code Administration had mandated certain changes, including cutting a scene in which a pagan dancer attempts to corrupt a Christian girl.29 For the wartime reissue, DeMille and Paramount exacted one large change of their own, shooting a new prologue in March 1944 to give the film a sense of timeliness.30 The roughly ten-minute prologue is set aboard a bomber plane flying over Rome. Arthur Shields, portraying a Catholic chaplain, tells the aircraft crew about the history of Rome—specifically, another time when the city was aflame, torn between cruelty and goodness, persecution and hope. The prologue then transitions into the Production Code’s censored version of The Sign of the Cross, withholding images of violence and sexuality that Americans had been able to watch twelve years earlier in peacetime but were not permitted to see in the midst of global warfare.31 Like The Oklahoma Kid, The Sign of the Cross performed well in reissue and attracted the attention of industry commentators.32

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In early 1944, Snow White provided the best indicator yet of the increased earning power of reissues, inspiring more film companies to reach into their vaults. For the 1944–45 season, every studio except RKO and United Artists tapped two or more old films for reissue, imitating the practices of the reissue specialty distributors, such as Astor and Film Classics, by offering them to exhibitors as either single features or prepackaged double bills.33 The studios’ strategy was to use these reissues as a stopgap— providing product when there was a shortage of new films—and to wrest control of the reissue market from the specialty distributors, which would otherwise monopolize it. Aside from marketing and distribution expenses, reissues were sources of pure profit, since the studios had fully depreciated the costs of their negatives years before. Yet even as reissue revenues far surpassed what they had been in the prewar years, the studios still considered these monies to be gravy—welcome additional revenue but incidental compared to the large profits that the business of producing new A pictures for first-run release generated. But as the industry changed in the postwar years, the strategic importance of reissues and film libraries changed too. No longer mere gravy, the profits from libraries became vital.

the postwar reissue marketplace The potential wealth of the reissue market became evident in the industry’s prosperous wartime years, but it wasn’t until Hollywood’s postwar decline that studios and exhibitors pushed reissues to the limits and, in the eye of labor unions, beyond. All of the studios brought films from their vaults to market. Thomas Schatz astutely points out that the “booming business for reissues” was “a major development in the postwar movie industry.”34 The industry itself reported on this development with a sense of surprise. “One in Every Five Pix Showing in NY a Reissue,” an October 1947 headline on the cover of Daily Variety announced.35 As the decade continued, the quantity of reissues swelled, and the trades reported that each season had broken the record: 67 reissues in the 1946–47 season, 105 in 1948, 102 or 136 in 1949, and 150 in the 1949–50 season.36 While we cannot take these numbers as wholly reliable, they do capture the growing sense that old movies were gobbling up the market.37 As the media scholar Nitin Govil argues, “data is discursive as well as enumerative.”38 The statistics on reissues became discursive tools, used by multiple groups in the industry toward strategic ends. The reissue surge marked a turning point in the history of film libraries. The studios, for the first time, came to value their libraries as profit centers, one of the functions that backlists had long served for book publishers.

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Studying MGM and Universal reveals two different sets of tactics, but their core strategy—the use of the library as a profit center—remained the same. Before we can understand the behavior of those studios, however, we need to briefly establish the other participants and stakeholders in the reissue marketplace. The business of film libraries is not a top-down, supply-side model. It has always hinged on interrelated marketplace participants, including exhibitors, audiences, critics, and labor groups. In the mid-to-late 1940s, all of these participants turned toward the library more than ever before. Since the 1910s, exhibitors had been the industry’s most important buyers and source of demand for old movies. To them, the chief appeal of old films lay in the terms of their deals—you could rent a star-driven reissue with high production values for a flat rental fee, rather than the box office percentage that you paid for a newly released A picture. These terms changed in the late war years, and exhibitors protested when studios began pricing reissues at rates comparable to those of new A pictures.39 By mid1947, a rough compromise had been reached: studios rented top-caliber reissues, such as Snow White and Gone with the Wind (1939), on the same terms as A pictures but offered lower prices (a flat fee or a percentage split favoring the theater) on more ordinary reissues.40 The specialty distributors Astor and Film Classics, meanwhile, never gained the leverage to charge anything more than flat rentals for their reissues. As exhibitors regained favorable terms on reissues, the supply of new films remained low, production costs escalated, and attendance levels declined. Booking reissues was a conservative move—protect your downside, give up some upside, stay in business to fight another day. One Michigan exhibitor expressed the conservative position this way: “We have had too many flops with too high rental. Let’s play reissues and be able to pay our debts rather than play new pictures and fold up.”41 A business plan designed to stay clear of bankruptcy court was hardly an enthusiastic endorsement of showing old films. But in an uncertain marketplace, where industry costs and admissions were moving in the wrong opposite directions, this strategy made sense. Some voices in the industry criticized exhibitors’ embrace of reissues. Harry L. Thomas, the head of the Independent Motion Pictures Producers Association, complained that reissues cannibalized new productions “since reissues take up the much-needed playing time necessary for the independent producer to gain revenues.” He further argued, “The exhibitor who uses [reissues] to excess—and most theatre operators are doing so today— is alienating the very public he cusses out for staying away from his theatre. True, he can buy reissues for lower rentals than new pictures, but he will find out when he examines his books that where he may have saved in

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film rentals, he has contributed to the creation of apathy on the part of the public.”42 The industry had backed itself into a corner, Thomas claimed. Studios and exhibitors booked reissues to mitigate risk in a down marketplace, but the marketplace spiraled downward faster because of the reissues. Exhibitors, for their part, firmly believed that public apathy was developing less from excessive reissue play than from the competition of two growing mediums—16mm film and television. Although historians have thoroughly documented exhibitor antagonism toward television, one overlooked source of antipathy was the fact that many theatrical reissues also appeared on TV.43 The problem lay with independent producers who licensed their old productions to specialty reissue distributors, then turned around and licensed the same films to 16mm and television distributors. In 1948, the candid exhibitor publication Harrison’s Reports noted that numerous Alexander Korda productions, initially released by United Artists and later reissued through Film Classics, had been sold to the New York television station WPIX. Although Film Classics contractually guaranteed a clearance period before The Scarlet Pimpernel (1935) or any other films reached local television, Harrison’s Reports considered this an unenforceable promise and warned, “The exhibitor who books such reissues may very well find himself in the embarrassing position of offering to his patrons a picture that they had seen on television only a few nights previously, or perhaps offering it to them on the same night when it can be seen as a telecast at no charge.”44 The same problem applied to 16mm screenings. “Believe me when I tell you that we have run many UA reissues and later on have found that these same pictures have run in our towns at no admission price on 16mm,” a Midwestern leader of the Theatre Owners of America wrote in 1948 to the United Artists executive Paul N. Lazarus Jr., who was helpless over the situation since his studio’s distribution rights to the films in question had already expired.45 The exhibitors who stood to lose the most from these 16mm and television presentations were the small but noteworthy group of revival theaters, which devoted all or most of their screen time to old films. The growth of the revival theater was most evident in Los Angeles, where, in 1946, four neighborhood theaters grouped together under the name the Academies of Proven Hits.46 The following year, there were five Academy theaters and four similar L.A. movie houses operating under the name Encore Theatres.47 Revival theaters played the occasional new release in subsequent run, but the house specialty was the reissue double feature. The five Academies simultaneously opened and played the same reissue bills, a measure designed to economize on advertising costs, which the distributors’ contributions to marketing

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further reduced.48 The name choice—the Academies of Proven Hits— promoted a film’s age and “proven” status as virtues while playfully riffing on the growing number of academic and cultural institutions promoting the serious study of film. But these L.A revival theaters and others like them across the country should not be confused with university film societies or other nontheatrical film groups. Although they certainly served some of the same patrons, they were, first and foremost, commercial enterprises built on classic business strategies—cost efficiency and specialization. Although studios and exhibitors turned to reissues as a conservative strategy during the motion picture industry’s postwar recession, the interests of these sellers and buyers alone cannot explain the scale of the reissue boom; we need to recognize the demand of the industry’s end users: audiences. For the five Academies of Proven Hits to stay in business playing the same pairs of oldies at the same time in the same city through the end of the 1940s, audiences had to not simply accept old movies but desire to see them. The Academies and other successful revival theaters, in fact, built customer loyalty by inviting and encouraging audience members to cast votes for the old films that they wanted to see return to the screen.49 Art houses, specializing in foreign films, also experienced rapid growth in the same period.50 Revival theaters and art houses generally lacked the plush accommodations of the first-run movie palaces, but they skillfully emphasized the cultural distinction of their programming over traditional amenities. For an audience that valued reflection, reevaluation, and access to a diverse pool of films, postwar movie culture contained a great irony—as the studios and exhibitors grew more impoverished, their own access to film culture grew richer. As chapter 1 explores, movie fans had long sought access to old films, even before the Hollywood studios rose to dominance. In the mid-to-late 1940s, however, the demand for old films shifted, moving from the fringes of fandom much more toward the mainstream. This was part of a turn toward the library in American culture that reached far beyond the movie industry. Postwar Americans turned to the past in other fields—evident in the booming sales of “classic edition” paperbacks, the increase in museum attendance, and the expansion of “middle-brow culture.”51 College history courses swelled with returned servicemen on the G.I. Bill, and those outside higher education could read any number of nostalgic press accounts of past works of art, literature, and film. Even as Americans looked forward to the numerous challenges, opportunities, and perils that lay ahead in the postwar era, they nevertheless participated in acts of personal and collective retrospection. To watch an old movie, read an old book, see an old image

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was an act of time travel—unlocking memories of where you were, who you were, who you were with when you first encountered the work. Even when encountered for the first time, an old work provided a capsule of past assumptions, aesthetics, and values. Since the 1910s, a contingent of movie fans has wanted access to old movies; in postwar America, their number vastly expanded. Critics provided some of the most important voices in the postwar turn toward the library and the demand for reissues. From the immediate postwar era to today, critics have been the most vocal advocates for the circulation of old films. We should remember, though, that they were latecomers to this position. As chapter 2 discusses, fans desired access to old movies years before most critics, who believed that cinema was improving at such a pace that old movies were inherently inferior and who admonished the “poor fools who catch at the past and try to re-create it.”52 Throughout the 1930s, however, more critics came to regard the circulation of select old movies as a positive and important part of film culture.53 It was not until the mid-to-late 1940s, however, that the celebration of old movies became a dominant position of film criticism. Critics lost their prewar confidence that cinema followed an upward trajectory. They no longer believed that filmmaking necessarily improved over time. More ambivalence took hold, and some critics used reissues to argue that the quality of American cinema had declined since the 1930s and early 1940s.54 In 1950, Life hailed Charles Chaplin’s recently reissued City Lights (1931) as the best film of the year, a position that would have been unthinkable just a decade earlier, due to different critical standards and the shortage of ten-to-twenty-year-old movies in circulation.55 What critic would have dared to call The Son of the Sheik (1926) the best film of 1938 or Tumbleweeds (1925) the best of 1939? Although critics celebrated the growing number of reissues, they were not naïve about the cause for the upturn of oldies. “One of the marginal consequences of post-war pressure in the film industry has been the impulsive reissue of a lot of comparatively old films,” Crowther wrote in 1949. “Granted the crisis in the business has been a blow to a lot of Hollywood folks, this fast resurrection of some grand old pictures from the vaults has been a windfall for the fans. While making a little extra money, the movie people will also make some needed friends. Certainly the disinterment of a couple of the Marx Brothers’ old films, which was one of the most auspicious functions in motion picture commerce last year, was a triumph of liberation that virtually justified whatever financial embarrassment in the industry that brought it about.”56 Crowther informed his readers about the unfortunate industrial causes of the reissue boom but ultimately presented

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the availability of more old films as a positive development—here was an opportunity to see old favorites, discover lost gems, and reevaluate film history. Although he was the most important postwar critic to advocate for reissues, he was hardly alone in doing so. Consider the press coverage that MGM’s Rage in Heaven (1941) obtained as it played in reissue throughout the country in 1946. A critic for the Hartford Courant offered, “Reissuing it might have been because of the popularity of both stars [Ingrid Bergman and Robert Montgomery] or because of scarcity in strike-torn Hollywood, but regardless of reason, it was a good move on Hollywood’s part. It stood up well.”57 This review is also revealing. The Hartford critic suggested the familiar reasons for reissuing a picture—the desire to cash in on a star’s underseen early work and a stopgap measure to cover product shortage— but nevertheless accepted the reissue as a positive step for film culture. Other voices in popular culture were less enthusiastic about reissues. “Starting with an excellent idea—bringing outstanding old pictures back on the screen—the film industry is ruining it by not playing fair with moviegoers,” the February 1949 issue of American Legion Magazine warned. In his article “The Re-issue Racket,” the Legionnaire R. Wilson Brown echoed the criticisms about reissues that had plagued the industry three decades earlier—distributors and exhibitors were promoting old films like they were new and deceiving audience members. Brown offered a sampling of newspaper advertisements to prove his point. He also quoted extensively from a resolution of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Labor (AFL) Hollywood Film Council against the “abuse” of reissues that caused “disastrous unemployment for thousands of permanent workers who are the backbone of the motion picture production industry.”58 The article likely came into being because of the public relations maneuvering of the AFL Hollywood Film Council, which forged an alliance with the American Legion in the late 1940s and early 1950s based on a mutual loathing of communism. Even so, “The Re-issue Racket” is noteworthy, insisting that the steady revival of classic films exacts a cost on labor. As for Hollywood’s fractious labor groups, the reissue problem was one of the few issues they could agree on. During and following the war, the labor movement suffered from jurisdictional disputes between the CSU on one side and IATSE and the AFL on the other side. These skirmishes ultimately resulted in violence, red-baiting, and the blacklisting of hundreds of Hollywood workers.59 In 1947, though, the CSU-affiliated Screen Writers Guild persuaded SAG and several other IATSE-affiliated guilds to form a multilateral committee designed to curb the growing number of reissues. “While all of us in the industry are pleased to have made pictures

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of such lasting quality that they merit revival, and in their own way may even become classics, it is none the less clear that it is money out of our pockets, which makes our pleasure less complete,” the editors of the Screen Writers Guild’s magazine, the Screen Writer, wryly wrote. “For, each time a picture which was made in an earlier year is reissued, it replaces one unmade picture which will not be issued at all.” The guild believed that the solution to the problem lay in revenue sharing. Without an equitable sharing of revenue, its leadership foresaw a dark future, one in which the studios would flood the market with reissues anytime the guilds tried to exercise their collective bargaining rights. “We would find our own works used against us,” the Screen Writer editors warned.60 As the call for sharing revenue on reissued pictures gained momentum, labor advocates argued that the growing mediums of 16mm film and television needed similar compensation schemes for the reuse of old films. We should recognize, therefore, that Hollywood labor’s postwar struggle for residual payments initially crystallized around the theatrical reissue of old films, then quickly attached itself to the television exhibition of films as well. Reissues galvanized Hollywood labor over the question of reuse. The Screen Writers Guild had reason to be optimistic about reaching a revenue-sharing agreement. The American Federation of Musicians (AFM) had reached an agreement with the studios in 1946 that granted rights only for theatrical exhibition and mandated that all film scores had to be rerecorded for television exhibition. This contract may be one of the best that any labor union in Hollywood has ever negotiated, guaranteeing new jobs in the event of television exhibition, plus 5 percent of all television revenues. The AFM was clearly forward looking about television, and it had good cause to be. Musicians had earlier had found themselves in the unemployment lines when radio stations turned toward recorded music to save costs over hiring live performers. The AFM’s leadership ensured that the same situation would not occur in television, and the union held sufficient leverage in the industry to pull off this deal.61 Having negotiated a better deal than any other union in town, the AFM chose not to attend the Screen Writers Guild meeting or interfere in the matter of reissues. The studios almost immediately regretted the concessions that they had given to the AFM. As the industry’s prosperity declined in the months and years following the contract’s signing, the studios vowed not to repeat the mistake of giving away any piece of their one consistently low-cost, highprofit business—the library. They flatly refused the revenue-sharing proposals of the multiunion committee on reissues. SAG became the first union to test the studios’ resolve on the matter. As its contract with producers

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neared its end date of August 1, 1948, the guild outlined eight demands, the first two of which concerned reuse: 1. Reasonable restrictions on reissues of old films to curb increasing unemployment of actors caused by such reissues. 2. Temporary “stopgap” clause to preclude use in television of films made for theater exhibition until agreement is reached so that actors as well as producers may share in additional revenue from this new medium.62

As the New York Times commented, “The reissue question is related to the television issue” because “the producers would like to establish the principle that once a foot of film is shot, they can exhibit it as they please.”63 SAG’s proposal to restrict the number of reissues rather than share revenues may have been a strategic choice. It, the Screen Writers Guild, and the other guilds had failed to gain any ground on the reissue revenuesharing proposals the previous year. Moreover, contractually defining a reissue was an exercise in frustration. All movies were first exhibited theatrically, where they remained in circulation for wildly different periods of time. Television, on the other hand, was clearly a different medium. SAG had explicitly relinquished television rights since the union’s earliest collective bargaining agreement, in the 1930s, but the guild hoped that it could regain those rights or, at the very least, ensure residual payments on all films moving forward. But the studios flatly refused to give SAG any piece of the television pie, precipitating the breakdown of negotiations and the anticipation of an actors’ strike. Three weeks before the deadline, however, SAG and the Motion Picture Producers Association compromised and reached a twenty-nine-month work agreement that allowed for “continued bargaining” on the matter of television broadcasts.64 The 1948 SAG contract was intended as a temporary solution, but it drew a line in the sand that remained unchanged for the following twelve years. The studios owned the television rights to all pre-1948 films, but they could not televise any feature films produced after August 1, 1948, without SAG’s permission. After signing the interim contract, SAG continued to advocate for a cap on the number of reissues. In 1948, it passed a resolution, which the AFL Hollywood Film Council also adopted, charging that “the practice of reissuing scores of old motion pictures has turned into an abuse which (1) [is] unfair to the public; (2) [is] in the long range detrimental to the box office; and (3) creates disastrous unemployment for thousands of permanent workers who are the backbone of the motion picture production industry.”65 The solution that the labor groups proposed was to restrict reissues

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to “recognized masterpieces of the motion picture art” and limit the number to a small percentage of total releases in a given year. In a sweeping call that reached beyond reissues, labor implored the studios to “discard their fears and uncertainties regarding the future,” recognizing that reissues were a conservative move by studios and exhibitors in a period of change.66 Discarding fear, however, was not a sane response in a postwar industry whose production costs were high, attendance was low, and vertically integrated system the DOJ was in the process of destroying. The studios continued to reissue large numbers of pictures throughout the late 1940s, and the AFL Hollywood Film Council continued to protest the practice, scoring a modest public relations victory with “The Re-issue Racket.” It rested its greatest hopes, though, on enlisting the involvement of the Motion Picture Industry Council, which represented twenty thousand union workers and studio employees. After briefly reviewing the matter, however, council declined to get involved, and the AFL scaled down its campaign.67 The reason was the same problem that consistently dogged the 1940s Hollywood labor movement: disagreement over jurisdiction. If the AFL’s arguments about reissues deceiving the public recalled the Federal Trade Commission hearings of the late 1910s on retitled films, then the postwar campaigns that stars waged to profit from reissues also resembled those of the earlier era. Once again, it was a cowboy who led the charge. John Wayne’s B westerns and his pictures for the producer Walter Wanger had become staples of both the theatrical reissue market and the nontheatrical exhibition market. In a January 1949 article on reissues, the Motion Picture Herald included a photograph of a marquee promoting Stagecoach (1939) and The Long Voyage Home (1940), one of the circulating Wayne double bills that found popularity among both urban and small-town exhibitors.68 Upset by the situation, Wayne obtained a deal ensuring that he would profit from the reissue of his subsequent work. On April 12, 1949, Daily Variety’s lead story announced, “Precedent-setting deal has been inked by John Wayne with Warners. Actor, who recently signed to do one picture a year for seven years with the studio, starting in November, will get 10 percent of the gross on the septet when and if they are reissued.”69 A trip to the University of Southern California’s Warner Bros. Archives reveals that the paper got the story wrong on two counts. First, a 1949 profit participation deal that included reissues would not have been precedent-setting.70 Second, Wayne’s contract granted him a fifty-thousanddollar bonus, not a percentage, for any of the seven productions that Warner Bros. reissued.71 Nevertheless, the announcement is noteworthy, as it highlights the postwar industry’s assumption that reissues were economically

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important to the movie business. As the case studies of MGM and Universal will show, this was a completely justifiable assumption.

comparing library strategies: mgm and universal In the years following the end of World War II, all of the studios strategically used their libraries as profit centers. However, their tactics varied significantly. By comparing those of the crème de la crème of vertically integrated studios, MGM, to those of the theaterless Universal, we can reveal two models for how studios monetized their libraries. Each model was rooted in the company’s financial conditions and its management’s attitude toward risk and innovation. MGM chose to keep its library business limited and internal—building an in-house unit devoted to reissues, carefully selecting and marketing a limited number of titles, prioritizing the theatrical market, and rejecting technological innovations in 16mm and television. Universal, in contrast, exploited its library expansively and nonuniformly. It chose to internalize certain library functions but externalize others—decisions that relinquished tight distribution control in return for much-needed cash advances and a dependable source of cash flow. The studio’s aggressiveness in exploiting its library and pursuing innovations in 16mm and television distribution caused frictions within the industry and within the corporation itself. MGM’s film library was the envy of the postwar industry. Of all the studios, it had the most desirable movies, the best brand recognition among audiences, and the biggest stars (“More stars than there are in the heavens,” it claimed). In monetizing its library in the 1940s, MGM harnessed its unique set of assets toward a shifting strategic goal. Whereas the profits from reissues in the war years were mere gravy heaped atop the enormous profits from the new-release market, reissues became an important profit center during the industry’s postwar recession. Yet MGM was never tactically reckless in exploiting its library. Because it owned New York City’s best circuit of first-run theaters, MGM’s parent company Loew’s had both an additional business to boost its profitability and a deterrent from undertaking any activity, such as 16mm film distribution, that might undercut its theater business. MGM therefore settled on a cautious approach to library exploitation—selecting a limited number of “quality” films each season for reissue, carefully marketing them, and working within the studio’s existing model of theatrical distribution. MGM achieved some success in the 1944–45 season by reissuing Naughty Marietta (1935) and Waterloo Bridge (1940), but the 1946–47 season, especially the reissue of Rage in Heaven (1941), marked a turning

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point in the way that it thought about its library. The studio had produced Rage in Heaven on a budget of roughly half a million dollars, somewhere between an A and a B picture. The melodrama-thriller starred Robert Montgomery and a Swedish actress with only one other Hollywood film to her credit. But when the studio reissued Rage in Heaven in the fall of 1946, Ingrid Bergman was one of the biggest movie stars in the world. For the many who came to know her through her roles in later hits such as Casablanca (1942), Gaslight (1944), and The Bells of St. Mary’s (1944), Rage in Heaven was a new picture in 1946. Domestically, the reissue earned a staggering $1.3 million, more than three times the picture’s initial gross.72 For a producer to capitalize on the popularity of a star by reissuing her earlier films was, of course, nothing new. As chapters 1 and 2 discuss, the reissues of old William S. Hart and Douglas Fairbanks films resulted in numerous legal actions in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Yet the American movie marketplace and taste culture had substantially changed between those earlier reissues and 1946’s reissue of Rage in Heaven. If not for the shortage of new product and the longer runs of reissues at first-run theaters, then Rage in Heaven would have earned far less money. Additionally, it benefited from the changes in American culture and critical taste. The Baltimore Sun commented that the psychological thriller had originally been dismissed by “exhibitors as being too highbrow for the film audience” but that following the war and Bergman’s box office success, “the film audience, presumably, has grown up to the picture.”73 By the spring of 1947, MGM had established a small in-house division specializing in reissues, a move that the success of Rage in Heaven had likely inspired. William Zoellner headed the unit, which included five field representatives who sold reissues to exhibitors across the country. MGM was careful to distinguish its reissue department from specialty distributors, such as Astor and Film Classics. “We dignify our reissues by giving them the same attention and advertising treatment as current product,” said Henderson M. Richey, MGM’s director of exhibitor relations. MGM boasted that it created new marketing campaigns, press materials, and advertising art to promote its reissues.74 In 1949, the studio assembled a forty-minute film for exhibitors called Some of the Best, commemorating its twenty-fifth anniversary and featuring memorable clips from MGM films. Produced twenty-five years before That’s Entertainment, Some of the Best was designed to stimulate demand for reissues and requests for specific titles.75 From the 1946–47 through the 1949–50 season, MGM’s reissues earned more than $10 million in rental revenues and $6.7 million in profits (these

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totals do not include the unknown millions that the summer 1947 Gone with the Wind reissue and a few other smaller reissues generated). Although MGM consistently emphasized the popularity and quality of the films it reissued, its selections in fact varied considerably, ranging from popular and prestigious hits (San Francisco [1936], Gone with the Wind [1939], Boom Town [1940]) through the popular yet less highly esteemed Tarzan films to box office misfires that the studio believed could find an audience in rerelease (The Great Waltz [1938], The Women [1939], The Wizard of Oz [1939]). In the case of the heavily fictionalized Johann Strauss biopic The Great Waltz, MGM’s reissue campaign suggested that audiences had both misunderstood the true nature of the film and actively demanded its rerelease—a contradiction that apparently did not trouble the marketing department. The trailer for the movie’s spring 1947 reissue opened on the image of a picture album bearing the text: “A FRANK MESSAGE FROM THE MANAGEMENT!” As the pages turned, the following appeared on-screen: We are constantly receiving requests from our patrons to bring back to our screen various fine pictures of former years Two great American films— “THE GREAT WALTZ” and “GONE WITH THE WIND”— are the most asked-for productions We’re delighted to announce that arrangements have been made with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the producers of “THE GREAT WALTZ,” to re-present this delightful musical love story. We know that very few of you saw this picture when it was originally shown. Obviously, it was one of those motion pictures ahead of its time. Some thought it was a foreign picture (at a time when foreign films weren’t popular), others, that it was merely a pretty Strauss operetta with no action and little love story. Neither is true! “THE GREAT WALTZ” is one of the most lavish and engaging musical romances ever to come out of the M-G-M Studios in Hollywood.76

We cannot know whether any audience members accepted the subterfuge that this trailer was a “frank message” from their local theater’s

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manager or believed the more dubious claim that theatergoers wanted to bring back The Great Waltz as much as Gone with the Wind, which MGM was preparing to reissue at the time. What is clear, though, is that MGM enjoyed substantial success from this reissue. The Great Waltz earned nearly as much domestically in its 1947 reissue as it had in its initial 1938 release, and the reissue profits erased the red ink from the film’s original $724,000 loss.77 MGM’s reissues consistently returned modest revenue and fat profit margins. Of the roughly thirty films that the studio released in the 1946–47 season, for instance, the Boom Town, Great Waltz, and Rage in Heaven reissues all ranked in the bottom third on the basis of revenue. In terms of profitability, on the other hand, all three ranked in the top third. Rage in Heaven, in fact, achieved reissue profits of $1,150,000, tying the Esther Williams musical Fiesta (1947) as MGM’s most profitable picture of the season.78 An anonymous studio executive was not exaggerating in April 1947 when he told Motion Picture Herald that “the margin of profit from a reissue is sometimes even greater than that received from a new picture.”79 Figure 1 reveals that reissues continually contributed a disproportionate amount to MGM’s profits over the four seasons from 1946–47 to 1949–50. Although the studio used its library as a profit center in the postwar years of dwindling attendance and increasing production costs, at no point did it allow this strategy to overtake its core businesses—the production and theatrical exhibition of new movies. Of particular concern to MGM’s management were tactical decisions that might compete with theatrical film exhibition. The annual profits that figure 1 charts are solely from film rentals, which accounted for only about 40 percent of corporate parent Loew’s Inc.’s annual gross income. Loew’s derived most of the remaining 60 percent from the first-run theaters that it owned, which also played movies by other studios. The income from these theaters explains why Loew’s was able to report a net income of $5,309,650 for the fiscal year ending August 31, 1948, even as MGM’s film rental ledger indicates a loss of $5,784,000 for the season of releases that ended on that date.80 The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in U.S. v. Paramount (1948) did not alter MGM’s cautious approach toward exploiting its library. Loew’s resisted divesting its theater chain for as long as possible. In 1952, it reluctantly agreed to a consent decree with the DOJ that compelled it to separate exhibition from the production and distribution operations of MGM.81 Loew’s technically followed through on this in 1954, but allegedly due to the challenge of dividing its substantial debts between the old and new companies, the two corporate entities were not fully severed until 1958.82

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25 Total profits Reissue profits

MGM profits per season (in millions of dollars)

20

15

10

5

0

–5

–10 1944–45

1945–46

1946–47

1947–48

1948–49

1949–50

figure 1. MGM reissue profits versus total profits by season, 1944–1945 to 1949–1950. Source: Eddie Mannix Ledger, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles.

In an effort to protect its theatrical exhibition market, MGM refused to release any films from its library to 16mm following World War II. Although Films Inc. and other 16mm distributors officially licensed 16mm films only to churches, schools, and other sites that would not directly compete with movie theaters, studio executives knew that bootleg markets existed where lost or stolen prints were bought, sold, rented, and illegally screened on the country’s rapidly growing number of 16mm projectors. Even the studios that released films to 16mm knew that this technology’s low rental fees made it a “penny business” compared to the “dollar business” of run-zone-clearance theatrical exhibition (see chapter 2).83 Moreover, the Hollywood distribution model depended on tight control over film circulation; a studio inherently relinquished some of this control the moment that it converted a 35mm film into an easily playable 16mm print or entered into a licensing agreement with an intermediary distribu-

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tor. MGM’s anti-16mm stance went even further: when loaning its actors out to other studios, it was known to include a clause prohibiting any footage featuring them from reaching a 16mm print.84 The studio similarly did not permit any of its films or actors to appear on broadcast television. MGM turned to its library as a profit center, but it did so in a conservative manner, never wavering from the basic assumptions about controlling circulation and the primacy of theatrical exhibition that had governed the industry since the 1920s. MGM would not allow ancillary library markets to compete with its theater business, which, along with reissues, kept Loew’s profitable even in weak years for film rentals. MGM had its popular New York theaters to help offset the losses from underperforming films, and the studio refused to embark on any course for its library that might jeopardize the first-run theatrical market. Paramount, Warner Bros., and Twentieth Century–Fox all occupied similar positions. RKO was the Big Five studio most willing to consider unorthodox markets, because of its unstable management structure and highly precarious financial condition. But what about the “Little Three” studios, which owned no theaters at all? How did this lack of theater ownership simultaneously restrict their sources of revenue and tactically liberate their management? The Little Three—Universal, Columbia, and United Artists—all exploited their libraries as fully as possible in the postwar years. Columbia offered as many as thirty theatrical reissues per season in the late 1940s and releasing dozens of films to 16mm.85 United Artists owned a minuscule library but still found a way to monetize it. Although the studio operated principally as a distributor for independent producers (who ultimately regained control of the rights to their films), it had acquired seventeen Walter Wanger productions through a settlement with the producer in the early 1940s. United Artists collateralized a bank loan with the reissue rights to these pictures (valued at more than one million dollars) and later licensed them to the reissue specialty distributor Masterpiece Productions.86 Of all the studios, big or little, Universal exploited its library the most aggressively, seeking the greatest reward and accepting the greatest risk. Initially, though, its library policies appeared consistent with those of the other studios. Just before and after the end of World War II, Universal reissued prepackaged double features, imitating the practice of specialty reissue distributors, such as Astor and Film Classics. Universal was not alone; by 1946, double feature reissues had gained enough traction among exhibitors that Warner Bros., Twentieth Century–Fox, and Paramount had all released prepackaged combinations.87 One of Universal’s first reissue pairings of the

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postwar era was Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and If I Had My Way (1940), a double feature that some cheeky film programmer might want to consider reviving today for a midnight screening. The first film, one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best, centers on the relationship between a teenage girl (Teresa Wright) and her pathological murderer uncle (Joseph Cotten). The second feature is a sentimental yarn about a construction worker (Bing Crosby) who becomes the guardian of an orphaned girl (Gloria Jean) and takes her to New York to find her uncle. When seen immediately after Shadow of a Doubt, the guardian/uncle/girl dynamic of If I Had My Way takes on a perverse quality—aided, in no small part, by the second film’s title. For Universal and its customer base of exhibitors, the double feature’s attractiveness lay in the two male stars, whose profiles had risen since the initial releases. Universal’s internal correspondence reveals the pragmatic challenges involved in capitalizing on the old films of new stars. After Shadow of a Doubt and If I Had My Way had been selected for reissue, the Universal marketing executive David Lipton reviewed the original promotional campaigns for each film. He considered both inadequate. “As far as trailers are concerned, we screened the old ones and feel it necessary to remake them completely,” he wrote to a colleague. “On ‘If I Had My Way,’ Gloria Jean gets almost as much attention as Crosby and there are several references to Gloria that are totally out of date. On ‘Shadow of a Doubt’ emphasis in the trailer is mainly on Theresa Wright and there isn’t a single dialogue sequence for Joseph Cotten, who is much hotter box office at the moment.”88 Lipton wanted to completely overhaul the marketing campaigns for each film, but he found his hands tied by the pictures’ talent contracts. Wright’s stipulated that her name appear larger than and before Cotten’s name on all billings. Jean contractually shared the same screen credit size as Crosby, preventing Lipton from burying her name underneath enormous lettering for Hollywood’s favorite crooner. Still, Lipton found ways to work around these obstacles. He obtained permission to make Cotten’s name equal in size to Wright’s, though still in second position. He informed his advertising designers and trailer editors to visually emphasize Cotten and Crosby over Wright and Jean.89 Lipton successfully reworked the campaign to sell the bigger stars of that moment, and the studio booked playdates for the double bill throughout the summer of 1946. That same summer, Universal changed ownership. Leo Spitz and William Goetz’s International Pictures acquired it, and the new owners publicly promised that Universal-International would produce “top pictures” and eliminate the “program pictures”—westerns, serials, and B movies—that

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had long been Universal’s bread and butter.90 In practice, though, UniversalInternational continued to produce Bud Abbott and Lou Costello pictures, and the studio’s dependency on its library only increased. By January 1947, Universal had tapped no fewer than twenty films for reissue over the coming spring and summer: four double features, including Destry Rides Again (1939) with When the Daltons Rode (1940) and Frankenstein (1931) with Dracula (1931), and twelve low-budget westerns—nine starring Johnny Mack Brown and three starring Tex Ritter.91 No longer generating the level of product that would place its old movies in serious competition with its new ones, Universal tapped into its library to boost profits and offer exhibitors reasonably priced double bills and Saturday matinee fare. It also sought to capitalize on its library abroad. In April 1947, Universal granted Phillip and Sydney Hyams the British reissue rights for its feature library from the 1937–38 through 1941–42 seasons. The Hyams paid an advance reported “in excess of $500,000” for a ten-year license, and Universal retained back-end participation that allowed it to further profit if the reissues proved popular in the British marketplace.92 Universal had opted to externalize rather than internalize its British reissue business. Although it likely would have earned more revenue by handling this in-house, Universal’s decision benefited the studio by providing a mid-six-figure cash advance that it could apply toward its 1947 earnings. Two months later, Universal used this same basic template—outsourcing reissues for a minimum guarantee in cash against a share of the gross—in crafting a far more important deal for the American market. Universal sold the reissue rights to its film library from the 1933–34 through 1945–46 seasons to Harris-Broder Pictures, later renamed Realart, for a $3.25 million advance against 35 percent of the gross. When the fiscal year ended on August 31, 1947, the Universal-International management was able to report net income of $3,230,017.93 Without the U.K. and U.S. reissue advances worth approximately $3.75 million, the studio would have ended the year half a million dollars in the red. The profits from Universal’s 1947 slate of twenty film reissues, along with some crafty deal making, had turned a losing year into a winner. The architect of Universal’s postwar library strategy, including the Harris/Realart and, most likely, the U.K. outsourcing deal, was Matthew “Matty” Fox, one of the most important figures in the history of film libraries. He got his start in the movie business on the exhibition side, rising quickly to an executive-level position in the Skouras theater circuit. In 1938, Fox left Skouras to work for his brother-in-law Nate J. Blumberg, who had assumed the presidency of Universal. Only twenty-seven years

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old, Fox served as the “vice-president in charge of reorganization.”94 Hollywood’s newest wunderkind participated in a wide range of studio activities, from the financial restructuring of the company to the signing of creative talent. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s declaration of war in December 1941, Fox, like millions of other Americans, left his peacetime occupation to join the war effort. He went to Washington DC to serve on the War Production Board, where his position was, as he described it, the “coordinator of gathering junk.”95 By all accounts, Fox was a tremendous junk gatherer, and the skills that he used to aggregate small bits of rubber, nylon, and aluminum into resources for war production served him well when he returned to Hollywood. After the war, Fox rejoined Universal, which was then reissuing double features, like the other studios. Empowered by his new bosses at UniversalInternational, he pushed Universal’s library business to another level entirely, devising strategies to aggregate and monetize old movies that no other major-studio executive had considered or, perhaps, wanted to consider.96 Whereas MGM rejected applying 16mm and television distribution technologies to film libraries, Universal embraced these innovations. Fox’s two great contributions to Universal’s library business were the Realart deal and the creation of United World Films. One was a major success, the other a failure. The basics of the Realart deal were fairly simple—a $3.25 million advance against 35 percent of the gross for the reissue rights to Universal’s library. But there was more to it than immediately met the eye. As David Pierce explains, Fox helped to line up the $3.25 million in financing that enabled Jack Broder and Paul Harris to purchase the reissue rights and go into business as Realart.97 The loan came from Serge Semenenko’s First National Bank of Boston, which also financed the most important film-toTV library deals of the next decade. Broder and Harris, for their part, were unequipped to handle the distribution of so many reissues themselves. Realart quickly signed subdistribution agreements with Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) and Film Classics, which had been reissuing independent films for years and were happy to obtain studio product, even of a second-tier studio.98 Realart, Film Classics, and PRC all essentially operated on the old states rights model, licensing the territorial rights to the Universal reissues to independently operated exchanges. The specifics of the Realart deal also meant that Universal never had to abandon the remake or reissue businesses. Although it outsourced most of its sound film library to Realart, the studio retained enough films from the recent past that it continued to reissue films in-house. Universal embargoed

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Realart from reissuing films less than four years old—the 1944–45 titles, for instance, were off limits until July 1, 1949. This allowed Universal to reissue Canyon Passage (1946) and Frontier Gal (1945) as a double feature in 1948.99 The studio’s self-distributed reissues competed in the marketplace against Realart’s catalogue of Universal oldies. Additionally, Universal retained the right to withdraw a film from Realart in the event that the studio decided to remake the property. Fox’s savvy deal making enabled Universal to profit from a hefty cash advance and a percentage of what Realart’s aggressive sales force earned while never sacrificing Universal’s in-house reissue or remake businesses. The Realart venture ultimately proved highly lucrative for all involved. By September 1952, Realart had “exceeded all expectations,” according to Variety, reissuing three hundred films, averaging five to eight thousand bookings each, and grossing eighteen million dollars. Although that last number may sound inflated, separate court statements confirm that by 1955, Realart had grossed more than $20 million and Universal had netted $6.8 million from the deal.100 The venture, however, was not without its costs. Industry observers blamed Realart and the other specialty distributors for flooding the market with mediocre oldies, giving reissues a bad name. In marketing the films, Realart emphasized the genre and star power and generally downplayed the fact that these were reissues at all. Nor was it opposed to changing a title that lacked exploitability or simply smelled old—the company turned the oft remade and reissued The Black Cat (1934) into The Vanishing Body.101 Realart claimed to always indicate in its advertising when it had changed a title, but internally, Universal-International executives worried that such changes “tend to mislead the public and can very well be the basis for action by the Federal Trade Commission.”102 Universal exploited its library more aggressively than any studio since Triangle. Although it avoided the FTC hearings and financial frauds that the earlier company had faced, Universal still found itself occupying a precarious position in the industry—due to both its oversaturation of the theatrical reissue market and, especially, its expansion into the nontheatrical and television markets.

united world, technological innovation, and the film library The 16mm format had existed since 1923, but it exploded in the Second World War. The armed forces recognized 16mm film as an efficient way to train soldiers on topics ranging from small-arms maintenance to venereal disease. Additionally, Hollywood studios released their features on 16mm

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film to entertain the wartime troops.103 The boom in demand caused a dramatic upswing in the production of 16mm cameras, stock, and projectors— resulting in an Army and Navy surplus of forty to fifty thousand projectors after the war.104 Equally important to the buildup in material infrastructure, 16mm and nontheatrical cinema gained mainstream validation during the war. Although advocates of educational film had long championed cinema’s pedagogical potential, mainstream educators and the public at large grew more familiar with and accepting of nontheatrical films through wartime usage.105 For the studios, 16mm revenue represented a drop in the bucket. In 1945, Universal’s gross revenue derived from 16mm accounted for $773,363, a mere 1.5 percent of the company’s annual gross. Yet this sum was not to be ignored. The profit margin was large, since Universal obtained the income in the form of royalties. Equally if not more important, Universal believed that 16mm represented one of the industry’s most promising growth areas. From 1938 to 1945, the studio’s 16mm earnings grew at a compound annual rate of 52 percent, an enormous increase.106 If they maintained that level of growth, 16mm revenues would pass six million dollars by the end of 1950. Even a more modest growth forecast—10 or 15 percent per year—would provide healthy returns. Moreover, Universal could retain more of its revenues if it acted as its own distributor rather than licensing its product to Films Inc. or another subcontractor. No other Hollywood studio had taken a major position in the nontheatrical market. Universal had the opportunity to seize the initiative, by launching a subsidiary that would monetize and expand its film library and turn the studio into the indisputable market leader of 16mm distribution. In November 1946, Universal announced the creation of United World Pictures, a wholly owned nontheatrical subsidiary headed by Fox as chairman and James Franey as president. Universal also disclosed its acquisition of the Bell & Howell Film-o-sound Library, a collection of some six thousand shorts, and Bell & Howell’s 16mm distribution network.107 The terms of the deal revealed Fox at his most canny. The agreed purchase price was $640,000, but United World would pay the sum in sixty-thousanddollar yearly installments over ten years.108 This transformed a film library into an arbitrage play. Confident that the Bell & Howell library would generate annual revenues greater than sixty thousand dollars, United World anticipated paying the purchase price out of earnings and pocketing the difference. “We’ll pay for this cow out of its milk,” Fox boasted to Time about the deal.109 That turn of phrase, along with the basic arbitrage model, later resurfaced in the acquisitions of Hollywood libraries by

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TV syndicators in the 1950s and by transnational conglomerates in the 1960s. United World’s next library acquisition, though, proved to be a costly mistake. In late December 1946, it paid $2.25 million to acquire control of Castle Films, a nontheatrical producer and distributor that specialized in compiling short films into packages and selling them to churches, schools, and home viewers.110 The deal greatly expanded United World’s share of the market, making it the leader in U.S. nontheatrical film distribution.111 However, its hunger for market share caused it to overpay for Castle’s library, production facilities, and distribution network. The high purchase price sunk the young subsidiary more than two million dollars in debt. Fox and Franey soon had to confront the fact that this cow was not going to pay for itself. However, in attempting to recoup the acquisition costs, they faced a problem. Castle Films’ niche lay in outright sales to home viewers and collectors, a method of distribution (sales rather than rentals) and a market of nontheatrical end users (home viewers) that the Hollywood studios had previously shunned. Films Inc. had become the dominant 16mm distributor used by the studios precisely because it operated a tightly controlled rental market; it let the studios approve or reject potential renters, and they all rejected home users. Amortizing the Castle Films purchase, then, meant adopting a business model and pursuing a market that the studios had previously considered off limits. Moreover, amortizing Castle and justifying the existence of Universal’s nontheatrical subsidiary required United World’s sales force to aggressively push its 16mm product. An inherent tension emerged between, on the one hand, parent Universal’s need to protect its core theatrical business and appease its theater owner customers and, on the other hand, United World’s need to maximize its earnings. This tension quickly escalated. Universal and United World were both beset by complaints from their respective customer bases—35mm exhibitors, who believed that the distribution policies were dangerously loose, and 16mm exchanges, which found the rental policies too restrictive. A member of the Theatre Owners of America (TOA) well summed up the exhibitors’ position on Universal. In his presentation on the “16mm situation” at the TOA’s Los Angeles convention in March 1948, he indicated that RKO, Columbia, and Fox had all established controls on the circulation of 16mm prints. He then called out the industry’s worst offender: The big problem along the line is Universal, or its subsidiary United World. They have a program that looks like it couldn’t be controlled. They are willing to put films into any camera shop, and they have a contract, it is true, and they are not supposed to compete with the

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theatres, but they have no control over that film. The camera shop agrees to give them two bookings a month at a certain figure. The way that it is worked out, they will get two bookings at $12.50 or $15.00, and then the camera shop assumes any additional on his own terms, of $5.00 or $7.00, or whatever he can get. They are selling films outright, and if you are willing to take used prints they will cut that down by 50 or 60 percent. We have not been able to do very much with Universal up to now. Our approach is to get [the TOA executives] Mr. Fabian and Ted Gamble to talk to the president of the companies. The circumstances there are that United World is on the hook, as I understand it, for three million dollars for the purchase of Castle film and also Bell & Howell libraries. It looks very much as if they were going hog wild trying to get some substantial portion of that three million dollars back, and according to my best advices they haven’t been too successful in claiming that they have broken loose. But there is a question of whether or not they have been set up too big, that is, an organization for that particular industry, too big to pack. . . . What we need, among other things, is for these exhibitors to undertake a campaign of bitching to the exchange managers about violation of fair practices. Exchange managers have no sympathy for 16mm., and if we can set up a barrage of this type, let’s do it. I am sure we could, as I suggest, bring enough pressure, that is what it requires, so that we could get rid of United World in one way or another.112

The TOA member had accurately determined United World’s losing position in the Castle acquisition. The retaliatory “campaign of bitching” for which he advocated grew steadily over the next twelve months. When Florida theater owners complained that their business was injured by 16mm screenings at Miami hotels, which used movies as a cheap substitute for live entertainment, the exhibitors’ biggest enemy was, again, Universal. In 1949, Universal’s outside legal counsel dispatched an investigator to examine these reports. The investigator found “that a substantial percentage of the exhibitions are Universal releases, the balance are independent. No other major product seems to be showing.”113 The problem was the old one of print control. Neither Universal nor United World had authorized most of the Miami hotels to show these films. Nevertheless, they had easily obtained prints through the many subdistributors with whom United World had rushed into business, many of whom disregarded the official process of submitting clients for approval. Universal may have had an easier time accepting the exhibitor backlash if United World’s 16mm business had lived up to the company’s high hopes.

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Instead, 16mm distribution proved to be a slow-growth and low-margin business. Yes, Universal had bought itself the position of nontheatrical market leader, but that market grew less quickly than expected and also grew in areas, such as industrial and dramatic educational films, in which United World’s library was lacking. Furthermore, in each of the five years (1947–51) following the creation of United World, Universal received less royalty revenue from releasing its feature films to 16mm than it had in the two years (1945 and 1946) before it created the subsidiary (see fig. 2).114 Some flattening of 16mm revenue was understandable, since the shipment of new films on 16mm to the armed forces declined after World War II. Universal, though, would still have been better off simply outsourcing 16mm distribution through Films Inc. and other sublicensees rather than internalizing this business. Granted, the revenue that United World earned as a distributor supplemented the studio’s royalty revenue. Just as in its arrangement with Films Inc., Universal split revenue, after costs, with United World on a fifty-fifty basis. Yet those costs were high—print and production expenses ate up more than half of any sale. What’s more, United World’s overhead and bank debt absorbed most of the remaining revenue. In subsequent court documents, the company revealed, “The gross revenue received by this defendant from licenses of 16mm positive prints of the features handled by it for the period October 1946 to February 28, 1953, is $3,605,054.75.”115 For all of United World’s 16mm sales efforts, for all of the friction caused by its distributing the Universal titles, the subsidiary’s gross averaged just slightly more than five hundred thousand dollars per year, not enough to pull parent company Universal out of the red in 1948 or 1949.116 Universal and Fox’s experiment in 16mm distribution was a failure. Although 16mm never delivered as promised, United World enhanced its earnings by distributing films across another medium, one that exhibitors feared and reviled even more than the small gauge. It is unclear whether United World was intended from the beginning to act covertly as a television distributor or whether it assumed this role only after the misguided Castle acquisition, but this much is certain: by mid-1947, the subsidiary was preparing a library of films for television use. “Matty Fox is anxious to build up an inventory of subjects that may be sold for television,” a Universal lawyer wrote to a colleague in June 1947.117 Fox ordered the lawyers to search through the contracts and reels of 94 westerns, 259 cartoons, 205 two-reelers, 62 serials, and 67 short subjects. His big concern, due to the American Federation of Musicians’ stringent contract, was whether any story, music, or talent contracts prevented the televising of the film’s existing soundtrack. If there were such obstacles, Fox also wanted to

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Universal 16mm gross revenue per year (in thousands of dollars)

800 700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952

figure 2. Universal 16mm gross revenue, 1936–1952. Source: “Answer of Defendant Universal Pictures Company, Inc., to Plaintiff’s Interrogatories Dated March 4, 1953,” August 5, 1953, 4, U.S. v. Twentieth Century–Fox et al., civil case file 14354, folder “Vol. 1, 2 of 2,” box 399, Records of the District Court for the Southern District of California, Central Division (1938–1961), NARA-R.

know whether it was legally and technically possible to strip out all of the old music and effects, then insert new music and effects on top of the original dialogue. Fox was again playing the role of the junk gatherer, collecting films that no longer carried theatrical reissue value and monetizing them through television. Junk also carried the benefit of being less easily identifiable than A and B feature films. Although Universal gladly accepted the television revenue from United World, it turned livid at the very suggestion that any of its films were reaching TV. Exhibitors wanted to know which studios released their films to TV, and trade publications such as the Independent Film Journal and Harrison’s Reports became sites for intelligence gathering and public shaming. These papers issued lists of the films released to television, alongside the names of their distributors. When the Independent Film Journal reported in 1951 that five Universal Johnny Mack Brown westerns were available for television, United World sent a letter to the editor explaining that the films were “no longer the property of Universal” and restating the studio’s position that “no Universal production had been released for television.”118 In fact, though, the journal had accurately represented the essence of the situation. Universal, through its subsidiary United World, had spun a convoluted web of dummy companies, intermediaries, sale agreements, and repurchases to hide the fact that it was knowingly selling films to TV. Additionally, Universal removed its logo and name from

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the credits of all of its films before they reached the air.119 Nevertheless, the Independent Film Journal and other astute industry observers were able to see through such subterfuge, identifying studio films when they appeared on television and causing more public relations problems for the already troubled Universal. Universal was the first major studio to implement these schemes, but it was not alone. As Pierce explains, “While repeatedly denying their actions to the trade press and exhibitors, Columbia, Paramount, Twentieth Century–Fox, United Artists and Universal did sell or license some of their features, Westerns, cartoons and serials to television distributors.”120 On top of smuggling its own films on to the airwaves, United World did the same for independent producers—the most notable being J. Arthur Rank, the British producer whose films United World distributed on 16mm. In 1948, United World packaged two hundred Rank features, all at least four years old, for television syndication.121 By the following year, hundreds of films that had once been shown in theaters were appearing on American television. Universal and the other major studios, meanwhile, officially denied ownership of them, and it was not until the mid-1950s that the studios brought the bulk of their feature libraries to television (a topic that the next chapter explores). Nevertheless, as the studios strategically turned toward their libraries as profit centers, a new and important question emerged. It is a question that management has wrestled with ever since: how can one use alternative technologies to exploit libraries in a way that creates new revenue streams without sacrificing traditional markets?

reevaluating the reissue surge As the movie industry entered a postwar period of decline, the domestic reissue market boomed, and the studios reconceptualized the role of the film library. From 1947 to 1950, they strategically used their libraries as low-cost, low-risk profit centers—an important industry function that film libraries have continued to play ever since. On the demand side, exhibitors embraced reissues as a conservative business strategy, and audiences and critics expressed a desire to reevaluate films of the prewar years. As the number of reissues swelled, Hollywood’s labor force became the trend’s most vocal opponent—calling for residual payments for the theatrical reissue of films and limits on the number of old films in circulation. The postwar reissue market changed the industry’s thinking about the value of film libraries. I believe that by revisiting this historical moment, we can productively challenge our own assumptions about the relationship

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between film libraries and technology. As the contribution of theatrical reissues to the profitability of MGM and Universal demonstrates, film libraries served an important industrial role prior to the mass distribution of studio features to television. Technology did not cause the business of film libraries to emerge. Instead, the industry wrestled with how new technologies would impact both their core business of producing, distributing, and exhibiting new films and their increasingly profitable side business of theatrical reissues. The case studies of MGM and Universal show how different studios approached their libraries and technology. MGM was cautious and conservative, focusing all efforts on the theatrical reissue market. Universal, on the other hand, extended itself into the nontheatrical and television businesses, alienating its core market of business buyers (exhibitors) in the process. By the mid-1950s, the television market for old movies had surpassed the theatrical reissue market in potential revenue and profits. However, the reissue boom of the mid-to-late 1940s was an essential prologue to the licensing of studio feature libraries to television, influencing how studios, labor groups, exhibitors, critics, and audiences thought about the circulation of old movies. We should also recognize this boom as a significant moment in the development of American film culture. Film and media scholars have recently taken on the challenge of historicizing our discipline—studying the study of film, as it were. Charles Acland, Peter Decherney, Dana Polan, and Haidee Wasson (among others) have excavated the institutional structures that enabled both the circulation of films and the circulation of ideas about film.122 Although much of this work focuses on nontheatrical exhibition and non-Hollywood films, Decherney, Polan, and Wasson have all noted the importance of the Hollywood studios to nonprofit institutions interested in the study of cinema. The postwar reissue boom demonstrates that we need to more fully consider the for-profit theatrical marketplace in the study of film. Nontheatrical cinema has been a handy umbrella term for categorizing the subject of these scholarly works and a larger body of scholarship, but it inadvertently carries a reductive effect—simplifying the diverse range of activities that commercial theaters perform. In the late 1940s, American exhibitors offered revival film screenings because they believed it was in their business interests to do so. Los Angeles’ Academies of Proven Hits encouraged audiences to participate in the programming and chose a name that playfully blurred the line between commercial movie theater and educational institution. Bosley Crowther and other film critics at the time celebrated the return of so many worthwhile old films, even as they acknowledged the underlying economic motives. Similarly, in

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reevaluating the postwar theatrical reissue boom, film and media scholars should recognize the contributions, limitations, and paradoxes of the commercial marketplace in the study of cinema. By following a conservative business strategy in the midst of an industry recession, the studios and exhibitors enabled greater access to old works of cinema and contributed to the vitality of American film culture.

5. Negotiating Television (1950s)

In March 1956, the two most important distributors of feature films to television arranged to meet in Miami. The two men, Matty Fox and Eliot Hyman, had gone from being rivals to business partners, then back to rivals, and were now considering a second and much bigger partnership. In 1951, Fox had persuaded both Hyman and Joseph Harris, another investor and television syndicator, to pool their film libraries with his, forming the basis for a company called Motion Pictures for Television (MPTV). On paper, the firm’s name sounded blandly descriptive. MPTV Inc. acquired films from independent producers and rented them to television stations. From the mouths of Fox, its president, and his team of aggressive salespeople, though, the phrase took on the sound of a political campaign. They were “Motion Pictures for Television,” like “Mothers for Eisenhower” or “Americans for Indonesian Independence” (as it happened, Fox was intimately involved in the Indonesian cause too). Boasting a catalog twice as deep as that of any competitor, MPTV quickly rose to become the market leader in the television distribution of feature films. Hyman, who withdrew from MPTV in 1953, had asked Fox to meet with him in Miami because a unique opportunity had presented itself. Over the previous months, each man had accomplished a considerable coup, gaining possession of a major Hollywood studio library for television use. Fox controlled most of the rights to the RKO library; Hyman, the Warner Bros. library. By merging these two, Fox and Hyman stood to create a distribution firm that would dwarf MPTV in scale. They now each controlled more and higher-quality films than they had back in the MPTV days, and they could offer them in a market that had dramatically expanded. In the four years between the end of 1951 and the beginning of 1956, advertising revenues and the cumulative number of TV sets sold had essentially tripled: $1 142

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billion in television advertising now chased viewers tuned into 42.9 million TV sets, compared to 1951’s totals of $332.3 million in advertising and 15.6 million TV sets.1 As the first firm to sell large packages of star-studded Hollywood studio films, the Fox-Hyman RKO-Warner combine stood to dominate the features-to-television market, establishing the terms and business model that both buyers (television stations) and competitors (other studios and TV distributors) would follow. The trouble was, the men could not agree on what the terms and business model should be. Fox and Hyman differed in their long-term and short-term thinking about the most profitable uses of a film library. Fox believed that pay television was the long-term solution. He had hoped to maximize the RKO library’s profitability by essentially dividing it in two—distributing the best films through the pay television service Skiatron TV, which he controlled, and selling whatever was left to “free” television.2 The timing, however, had not worked out in his favor. In the mid1950s, pay television erupted into a public controversy. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) acted slowly in licensing even the experimental testing of scrambled, over-the-air pay television frequencies (which required decoder boxes to unscramble). Facing an uncertain timetable for pay television expansion, Fox announced a business plan designed to liquidate the RKO library and recoup his investment as quickly as possible— offering local stations the full 740-film RKO library in perpetuity on an allor-nothing basis in exchange for a combination of cash and spot advertising time. The resulting profit could be reinvested into the expansion of pay television infrastructure and the acquisition of content for the new service. Hyman held a different view about the television marketplace and the value of film libraries. The growing number of television stations—and their rising advertising rate cards—meant that a long-term, profitable business existed for distributing films to free TV. The winners would be the firms that offered the best content and the best service, exactly the qualities that had distinguished MPTV from its competitors in the early 1950s. Hyman’s vision of a studio library, though, did not end simply with television distribution. If properly harnessed, he believed, a library’s cash flow and derivative rights could catapult a television distribution company into the ranks of the major Hollywood studios. Hyman planned to channel the money from television sales into new productions, many of which would be remakes of films from his library. The new productions would play theatrically, then move to television, ensuring that the TV distribution side of the company always obtained a steady supply of fresh, high-quality product. Hyman believed that his old business partner was making a mistake by

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offering all-or-nothing, perpetual-rights sales of the RKO library and little in the way of customer service. The RKO library could generate far more revenue through the gradual release of packages of thirty-nine or fifty-two films licensed for a set number of runs. Hyman wanted to combine the RKO and Warner Bros. libraries and lead the organization that would carry out this plan. Hyman realized that if Fox didn’t agree to merge or change strategies, then he would need to reevaluate his own plans. Once a station had signed with Fox, absorbed several hundred films, and committed substantial amounts of cash and spot time, why would it want to pay top dollar for a package of fifty-two Warner Bros. films? In the end, Hyman’s and Fox’s visions for the future—and the personalities that propelled them—proved too different. The meeting in Miami ended without a merger. Industry reporters scrambled for the details of what had been said. In a fashion unusually circumspect for the gregarious Fox, he merely said that he had talked with Hyman about a “variety of subjects related to the TV industry.”3 Although each distributor stuck stubbornly to his own plan, the libraries of RKO and Warner Bros. did merge three years later, in an ironic turn. Each man’s vision of the library’s use— the engine that could power a studio and the backbone for pay television— also eventually merged, forming the prototype of the contemporary media conglomerate. This chapter tells the dramatic story of the intermediaries who first brought the Hollywood feature libraries to television. By focusing on the middlemen, we gain a new perspective on a history that may already feel familiar. In 1955 and 1956, all of the studios—except the lone holdout, Paramount—licensed or sold their pre-1948 libraries to television. An outstanding body of scholarship chronicles the buildup to this moment and the relationships between the Hollywood studios and the broadcasting industry. Readers can turn to the works of Christopher Anderson, William Boddy, and Michele Hilmes for in-depth analyses of the uses of film on television in the 1940s and 1950s.4 Blair Davis, Douglas Gomery, Kevin Heffernan, William Lafferty, David Pierce, Jennifer Porst, Amy Schnapper, and Kerry Segrave have brought forth other threads in this complex history.5 My decision to focus on the intermediaries comes neither from a desire to overturn existing accounts (which, in this case, include some of the best in the field) nor from a simple love of storytelling. Instead, I concentrate on Fox and Hyman because of their innovations in distributing old movies to television and leveraging film libraries to support new entertainment business models. In the early 1950s, neither the TV networks nor the studios wanted the wide release of old feature films to free television. However, the

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competing interests of these major players, combined with the persistent and growing demands of TV stations and audiences, led to an outcome that all of the major players initially considered undesirable. Fox and Hyman capitalized on the vulnerabilities of the studios’ owners and used the libraries to serve their immediate and long-term strategic goals. Their pursuit of these goals left lasting impressions on both the entertainment industry and American culture. Local TV stations gobbled up large packages of studio movies and, night after night, sent the best and worst of Hollywood’s vault over the airwaves and into millions of living rooms.

the studios’ view of television Today it seems inevitable that old Hollywood movies would come to occupy a large portion of local television programming. Even to some observers in the 1940s and early 1950s, television’s reliance on old movies felt like a certainty. How else could stations plausibly fill all of their airtime? For the major media industry institutions, however, the saturation of advertisingsupported local television with old movies was precisely the fate that they wanted to avoid. None of the three groups that fancied themselves architects of the budding television industry—the electronics manufacturer and NBC owner RCA, the major Hollywood studios, and government regulators—wanted old movies to become staples of free programming. Premium live productions gave NBC and CBS leverage over their affiliates; film libraries, composed of fully depreciated assets, were a threat to the networks’ bottom lines and model of control. The studios recognized the lucrative potential of television, but they wanted customers to pay for the movies that they watched—through either pay television or theater television (see below). The studios certainly did not want an advertising-supported TV model that broke audiences from the habit of paying for filmed entertainment. As for the U.S. government, the FCC and the Department of Justice (DOJ) were both dubious about Hollywood’s intentions toward television. The FCC wanted to promote live, quality, and community-oriented programming, a vision that an abundance of cheap features threatened. The DOJ wanted Hollywood to open its film libraries to television, but it also wanted stations to be able to select films à la carte—not be compelled to block-book dozens of old films in order to obtain a handful of desirable titles. The Hollywood studios welcomed the development of television; however, they sought to shape the medium to suit their business model. As revealed by the Warner Bros. talent contracts that chapter 2 discusses, the Hollywood

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studios showed interest in the emerging medium of television as early as 1931, a quarter of a century before they released their feature libraries to television.6 The media historian Christopher Anderson has aptly described Hollywood’s relationship with broadcasting from the 1930s through the early 1950s as “a chronicle of thwarted ambitions.”7 The Hollywood studios wanted not simply to provide programming for television but also to control the new industry and model it on the vertically integrated studio system. During television’s experimental stage in the 1930s and the wartime pause in development and manufacturing, the Hollywood moguls imagined the dawn of a complementary medium—one ideal for distributing certain types of films and promoting the theatrical release of others. In the critical, post–World War II years of television’s growth, however, the studios failed to obtain their desired grasp on the television industry. Two interventions by the U.S. government derailed their plans. First, the DOJ, engaged in years of antitrust litigation culminating in the Supreme Court’s Paramount decision of 1948 (see chapter 4), blocked any investments in television companies or stations that might be interpreted as monopolistic. Second, the FCC’s freeze on offering new station licenses from 1948 to 1952 prevented Warner and the other studios from obtaining the grip they wanted while giving the radio networks of NBC and CBS time to consolidate their power over the television industry.8 The established networks thus gained control over television, modeling it on the advertising-sponsored radio industry that they had fought hard to create. The Hollywood studios promoted two uses of television in the early 1950s that they believed complemented their business model: theater television and pay television. Unlike advertising-supported free television, these required viewers to directly pay for their entertainment. Theater television held the promise of delivering boxing matches, operas, and other live events to an auditorium of paying spectators. The technology worked in one of two ways: the “instantaneous projection” method, which RCA developed, in which a receiver picked up the signal and projected it through a lens, or the film intermediary system, which Paramount backed, in which the incoming signal was transferred to 35mm film and then projected on to a screen in a matter of minutes. Although neither provided image quality that could rival that of a 35mm feature, the motion picture industry held high hopes for theater television. By 1952, more than a hundred American theaters had gone to the considerable expense of installing a television projection system. Yet as Michele Hilmes points out, patterns of consumer behavior and the FCC’s policies quickly snuffed out the viability of theater television. In 1953, the FCC refused Hollywood’s petition to reserve a

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portion of the UHF spectrum exclusively for theater television use. More important, the number of television markets boomed after the FCC lifted the four-year freeze and began allocating frequencies again. This expansion of markets and channels propelled millions of Americana consumers to purchase television sets. They chose the living room, not the local theater, as the site of live television viewing.9 Even if people stayed home for television, the Hollywood studios still believed that they could profit, through the introduction of pay television services (also known at the time as subscription television). Zenith’s Phonevision, Paramount’s Telemeter, and Skiatron’s Subscribervision were all variations on the same basic concept. To purchase home access to a movie, consumers inserted a Skiatron computer punch card into a slot atop the television, dropped coins into a set-top Telemeter box, or called a telephone operator. The set-top box then correctly interpreted a scrambled TV signal, and the movie appeared on-screen.10 Zenith, Paramount, and Skiatron all obtained FCC permits in the early 1950s to conduct limited, small-scale tests of the technology. The independent producer and pay TV advocate Samuel Goldwyn, for instance, licensed Wuthering Heights (1939), The Little Foxes (1941), and three other films from his library to Zenith for a 1951 test in Chicago. Walt Disney similarly licensed three past productions, including Song of the South (1946).11 In these and other tests, problems related to both technology and cost structure became evident. Yet the biggest obstacle that pay television faced was the same one that continually blocked Hollywood from television’s control switch: government regulation. “Basically, the FCC has one big question to decide,” the industry commentator Hy Hollinger remarked in 1955. “Is it in the public interest to allow the coding of TV signals and the charging of fees to decode signals?”12 The FCC delayed answering this question, insisting that it was necessary to conduct more testing but not readily granting the required testing permits.13 Fox, who became involved with Skiatron in 1954, was one of the pay television boosters caught in limbo as the FCC deliberated the right course and the networks and movie exhibitors launched a public relations campaign against pay television. As the studios kept an eye on developments in pay television, they also attempted to deliver a theatrical experience that made it worth leaving the house. Television was small, squarish, and black and white. To distinguish their product from TV, the Hollywood studios increased the use of color filmmaking and introduced new technologies, such as 3-D cinema and CinemaScope. Since audiences no longer went to the pictures but instead went to see a particular picture, the studios produced stories that promised

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action, quality, and, above all, name recognition. They paid top dollar to adapt the novels and Broadway shows that had struck chords in American culture—and that they hoped would translate into box office gold. If film’s future belonged to glorious Technicolor, breathtaking CinemaScope, and stereophonic sound, then what did this mean for the old black-and-white film libraries, lacking in such adornments? In 1953, Twentieth Century–Fox president Spyros Skouras hinted that it might mean that it was time to sell old movies to TV. “With the advent of CinemaScope and other new techniques, it is anticipated that the theater demand will generally be for pictures of the new types,” he explained to stockholders. “The demand for the older pictures will greatly decrease for theaters. Therefore, it is likely these older pictures will then be made available for television.” Skouras’s comment attracted newspaper attention and led to an increase in Twentieth Century–Fox’s stock price, which may have been his intention all along.14 The studio waited another three years before licensing any of its A-list library films to television. Meanwhile, over the year and a half following Skouras’s announcement, it theatrically reissued no fewer than fourteen films—filling the demand of exhibitors, especially drive-ins, that still wanted the bargain rental prices of “older pictures.”15 In 1955, Twentieth Century–Fox, Warner Bros., and MGM ventured into television production. The three studios created series that were intended first and foremost to promote their expensive theatrical productions but that also economized by using their libraries. As the introduction discusses, a studio’s uses of a film library can be separated into two broad categories: the copy and the derivative. Fox, Warner Bros., and MGM resisted releasing copies of library films to television but used derivatives of old films as the basis of their television series. Twentieth Century–Fox produced two series for CBS: the half-hour western series My Friend Flicka, based on the 1943 feature film of the same name, and Twentieth Century– Fox Theatre, which adapted a different old Twentieth Century–Fox picture into an hourlong stand-alone TV drama each week. Warner Bros. Presents (ABC) each week showed one of three series—King’s Row, Cheyenne, and Casablanca—all based on old Warner Bros. films. MGM took an even more drastic cost-cutting approach in producing The MGM Parade for ABC. Rather than remake old MGM films for television, the studio simply cut together footage of memorable musical sequences and other set pieces. This program of derivative entertainment generally began and ended with a plug for an upcoming MGM theatrical release.16 The studios’ halfhearted entry into television and limited understanding of what TV audiences found compelling ultimately hindered their promotional

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ambitions. Twentieth Century–Fox and Warner Bros. both went over budget and initially lost money on their derivative series. As Christopher Anderson explains in Hollywood TV, Warner Bros. proved more successful in television once it focused on western dramas and found ways to further economize, by using idle sound stages, back lots, and contracted talent.17 As for MGM, The MGM Parade lasted only one season. American viewers in 1955–56 expected MGM and ABC to deliver more each week than a couple of old film clips and a promotion for an upcoming release. When ABC canceled the series, no one expected that these medleys of library footage would themselves become valuable library assets. Today, however, Turner Classic Movies regularly replays the old MGM Parade installments. In the first month of 2012, for example, it aired four episodes of the program, which now looks ahead of its time, a proto– That’s Entertainment. While the studios raided their vaults to create inexpensive derivatives for television, they continued to resist licensing their old features to the medium. Some of their hesitation resulted from the opposition of theater owners, who worried that audiences would stop going out and paying to watch a movie when they could stay home and watch one for free. The studios also risked angering the Hollywood labor unions, which demanded payment for reuse. (Lengthier discussions of the perspectives of exhibitors and labor unions can be found in chapter 4.) As David Pierce has argued, though, the biggest reason that the studios waited to sell was because they wanted a bigger payday. The same patterns of adoption that spelled doom for theater television meant that a larger and larger market was growing for home viewing. In 1952, the Paramount executive Y. Frank Freeman told the FCC that the studio would sell its films to television “if the price is in the best interests of Paramount.”18 An analysis of the markets for old films in the late 1940s and early 1950s confirms that Paramount was wise to wait. In 1949, television syndicators paid independent producers as little as two thousand dollars to acquire the rights in perpetuity to a feature film.19 The rates that local stations paid to syndicators were similarly low: New York stations paid roughly $250 per picture for multiyear licenses of Eagle-Lion westerns and other features; Chicago and Cleveland stations paid roughly $150 per picture for the same films.20 In 1949, the postwar theatrical reissue boom was at its height. That year, MGM’s lowest-grossing reissue earned $633,000 domestically and RKO’s $220,000 domestically.21 As chapter 4 discusses, the studios came to strategically use their libraries as profit centers in the mid-to-late 1940s. For them to sell their backlogs to TV, the price needed to surpass what the reissue market could yield—plus a premium.

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television’s appetite for and aversion to hollywood features Audiences demanded certain old movies from the mid-1910s through the 1940s, but reissues and revivals reached American theaters because of the demand of the business buyers, the motion picture exhibitors. As I explored in chapter 4, exhibitors liked reissues and revivals because the quality of the films was known and, more important, they could be rented for a fraction of the price of a new film, usually for a flat fee. The programming and advertising needs of local television stations in the late 1940s and early 1950s led to the development of a similar marketplace for old films. Local stations needed to fill dozens of hours of airtime each week. Using only live local productions was an unaffordable proposition. Syndicated first-run film programs, from telefilm syndicators such as Frederick Ziv, offered one alternative to live programming.22 However, the business model for these telefilms required minimal production budgets and rental prices high enough for the producer to recoup the budget and turn a profit. In contrast, old theatrical features boasted higher production values and the potential for more flexible pricing, since the producer had already fully depreciated the picture as an asset. With the Hollywood studios holding back their A-list titles, though, local stations had access only to the old productions of independent producers, which generally lacked star power. Nevertheless, throughout the 1950s, the trade papers marveled at the success of stations that transformed their ratings through the savvy programming of feature films.23 In March 1952, Pittsburgh’s WDTV took out a full-page advertisement in Broadcasting heralding the success of its Swing Shift Theatre, which offered “the more than 200,000 workers in the Tri-State District, who finish work at midnight”—and anyone else willing to stay up late enough or wake up early enough—feature film programming from 1:00 to 7:00 a.m. Like many other stations, WDTV already programmed movies in television’s “fringe time”—the industry term for the two- or three-hour blocks before and after the “prime time” hours from 8:00 to 11:00 p.m. The late fringe hours, from 11:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m., became the temporal real estate for numerous Late Shows, supplemented in some instances by a Late, Late Show. WDTV, however, pushed the envelope considerably further, staying on the air for twenty-four hours daily during the workweek by programming feature films that it rented from MPTV.24 The cumulative effect of its all-night film programming, as well as of countless Late Shows, was a lasting cultural association between old movies and latenight television.

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The fringe model assumed that the station was a network affiliate and carried network programming in the prime-time hours. WDTV, for instance, was an affiliate of television’s short-lived DuMont Network. For independent stations lacking network affiliation, however, old movies frequently became the prime-time programming. The most famous example was New York’s WOR-TV, owned by General Teleradio, a subsidiary of the General Tire and Rubber Company. In the fall of 1954, WOR-TV unveiled its flagship program, The Million Dollar Movie. Modeling its schedule on that of the local movie house, WOR-TV showed the same picture for an entire week—twice every night, at 7:30 and 10:00 p.m., plus in weekend matinees. WOR-TV offered New Yorkers sixteen occasions to watch the same “million-dollar movie” each week and used the cumulative ratings for selling advertising time.25 These repeat viewings in the concentrated span of a week became formative experiences for a new generation of critics and filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese, who remembers watching Black Narcissus (1947) five times on his family’s Manhattan television screen over the course of a few days.26 The success of The Million Dollar Movie hinged on offering audiences quality—pictures good enough and new enough (much of the cultural discourse about movies on television used good and new synonymously) that prime-time viewers would switch channels from the networks at least once in a given week. In a splashy deal completed a few months before The Million Dollar Movie premiered, General Teleradio paid Bank of America $1.25 million for the four-year national broadcast rights to thirty films produced independently between 1946 and 1949. For the most part, they had been box office failures; the producers couldn’t pay back their loans, and the bank foreclosed on the assets. These films, including Magic Town (1947) and Arch of Triumph (1948), were rich in star power, production value, and freshness (both new to television and more recently produced than most other films available for television). Commentators snickered that Bank of America had fleeced General Teleradio’s young leader, Thomas O’Neil, the son of General Tire’s founder and chairman. Never before had a distributor or station paid such high fees, which averaged forty-two thousand dollars per picture.27 Within a year of their broadcast, however, each had more than recouped its cost, turning an average profit of twenty-eight thousand dollars. The success of The Million Dollar Movie’s first season and General Teleradio’s demand for more quality product to serve its growing number of stations contributed to a far larger acquisition—the July 1955 purchase of RKO for twenty-five million dollars, discussed in detail later in this chapter.28

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network resistance and spot advertising incentives In 1956, NBC president Robert Sarnoff offered a disaster warning to the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee. If it did not act in the network’s interest, “the accumulated product in Hollywood’s vaults—most of it musty and outdated—would hit television with the impact of a tidal wave. The American viewing public would literally drown in a celluloid sea.” Refusing to succumb to the celluloid tsunami, Sarnoff proudly declared, “We [at NBC] shall continue our emphasis in live television, on fresh new programs designed for the medium, and on the development of color.”29 As William Boddy incisively points out, though, Sarnoff’s emphasis on live television presented a false impression of the course that the networks were already taking.30 By the mid-1950s, network programs filmed in Hollywood, such as CBS’s I Love Lucy, proved that a hit filmed TV program could continue generating handsome revenues in rerun broadcasts. NBC’s stated emphasis on live programming was a rhetorical strategy, designed to paint itself as a champion of the public interest and good taste while deflecting the scrutiny of the DOJ and the FCC. Sarnoff’s real concern was control, not aesthetics. Beyond wanting to protect his network from new government regulations, Sarnoff feared that film libraries would make affiliates less dependent on the networks. Indeed, some affiliates had already bypassed the network feed to show films that they had licensed.31 The key to understanding the tension between networks and affiliates over showing films is spot advertising, which offered incentives to stations, advertisers, and station representatives that diverged in key ways from the networks’ interests. Since the early 1930s, three forms of advertising have chiefly supported American broadcasting: network, local, and spot.32 Network advertising, on a network such as NBC or CBS, offers sponsors the ability to reach the national audience that tunes in to watch (or earlier tuned in to listen to) a network program. Local advertising, on the other hand, is airtime sold directly by an individual station to a sponsor. Spot advertising is a third model—a method for national advertisers to reach audiences on a market-by-market basis. Sponsors choose spot advertising for a variety of considerations, including the desire to customize a message for a particular audience or build market share in a particular region. From the stations’ perspective, spot buying was crucial to their bottom lines. Whereas they received a mere 30 percent of the revenue from network advertising, they retained all of the money from spot purchases.33 Stations historically maintained their network affiliations to attract a wide audience,

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table 2 Estimated Volume of U.S. Television Advertising (in Millions of Dollars), 1950–1955

Network Spot Local Total

1950

1951

1952

1953

1954

1955

85.0 30.8 55.0 170.8

180.8 69.9 81.6 332.3

256.4 93.8 103.7 453.9

319.9 145.5 140.7 606.1

422.2 206.8 180.2 809.2

540.2 260.4 224.7 1,025.3

source: International Television Almanac of 1958 (New York: Quigley, 1957), 14A.

but their profitability depended on reselling that wide audience to local advertisers and spot buyers (see table 2).34 The spot model connected national advertisers to local stations on a mass scale. The grease that kept the wheels of spot advertising turning was station representatives, intermediaries who negotiated with national advertisers on behalf of local stations. In the early-to-mid-1950s, station representatives and the spot advertising model, which they created, benefited from broad shifts in American consumption and corporate marketing strategies. Whereas Ford Motors sponsored the classy anthology series Ford Theater once a week on NBC to promote its corporate image, Procter and Gamble and other sellers of inexpensive consumer products wanted airtime, and lots of it, to raise awareness of particular product brands. Boddy observes that “for makers of inexpensive consumer goods of low product differentiation, television sponsorship was useful not for corporate identification, but solely for product advertising. Large advertisers favored telefilm series for their consistency and purchased programs on the basis of their ratings history in ‘formula’ buying patterns. In 1952 Procter and Gamble led other large manufacturers of inexpensive consumer products into national advertising in daytime and other fringe hours.”35 Although advertisers spent more money on network advertising than spot, the growth rate of the latter outpaced that of the former between 1950 and 1955 (see table 2). Network advertising was useful for reaching the mass audience of prime-time viewers, but spot advertising in daytime and afternoon fringe hours could reach the specific consumers—homemakers and children, say—most likely to buy a specific product. Procter and Gamble and comparable consumer product spot buyers liked the dependable ratings and demographics of fringe-hour syndicated telefilms and reruns, which played at the same time every day over an entire week (a

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scheduling pattern that the television industry calls stripping). Old theatrical films, if properly selected and packaged, could perform this same function, perhaps drawing in even more viewers. In the early 1950s, some advertising agencies and station reps expressed disappointment at the lack of star power and production value in the films available for TV.36 Nevertheless, sponsors still bought spot time in bad features. If the libraries of Hollywood’s best films became available, then stations and their representatives stood to make a fortune—at the networks’ expense.

critics and audiences In their struggle to prevent advertising dollars from defecting to Hollywood features, the networks found key allies among the nation’s film and television critics. The New York Times’ television critic Jack Gould warned that “television is and must remain far more than a revision in the method of distributing Hollywood wares. . . . It is the spontaneity and reality of a live performance that excites and arouses the viewer whether it is in art, in politics, or in education.”37 Gould believed in medium specificity. He considered liveness to be television’s defining quality. Filmed programming, in contrast, deviated from the medium’s aesthetic purity. Gould’s critical standard also happened to validate NBC’s opposition to Hollywood films on television; Sarnoff quoted Gould in his 1956 testimony to the U.S. Senate.38 Gould’s colleague at the New York Times, the film critic Bosley Crowther, similarly detested the presentation of old films on television. As the previous chapter notes, Crowther praised the theatrical reissue and revival of old films throughout the 1940s and 1950s. He believed that the public should have regular opportunities to watch old films in the theater. “What’s wrong with permitting the public to see the old films on TV?” he wrote in 1956. “Why isn’t this a valid outlet and a profitable solution, you may inquire? The answer is that the quality of the best of them will be watered down (at least, this has so far been the experience) and their theatrical potential lost.” Crowther believed that cinema’s integrity was violated when films were shown outside their intended sites of exhibition and presented in “mutilated form.”39 Unlike the New York Times critics, Hal Humphrey, the broadcasting critic of the Los Angeles Mirror and later the Los Angeles Times, had no philosophical opposition to the presentation of old movies on TV.40 Instead, he sought to influence their selection and presentation. In a satirical 1951 column titled “Hey, the British Are Coming,” he imagined Paul Revere riding through contemporary Hollywood and warning studio executives that British films were flooding American TV stations and “worst of all, [the

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audiences] seem to like what they are seeing.” Humphrey continued, “If Paul’s warning were heeded, these gentlemen in their lush studio offices would spring into action and rush reinforcements to the TV stations. They could snow under Mr. Rank and his colleagues with thousands of feet of Grable, Lamarr, Goddard, Bogart, Cooper, and Gable.”41 In 1953, though, he echoed Gould’s concern that too many old Hollywood movies on TV would mean that television “loses its own identity and becomes simply a system of relaying the film industry’s product into the home.”42 Yet it was eclecticism rather than liveness that Humphrey understood as television’s core identity. He continually criticized the commercial interruption of films and the presentation of bad movies, but he never denied that old movies occupied a legitimate space in the aesthetic melting pot that was television.43 We should remember, though, that there were critics of movies on television beyond the major newspapers. For journalists and advocacy groups representing minorities marginalized in American society, there were more important priorities than television’s aesthetic integrity. African American organizations and critics denounced television’s reissue of racist media content.44 In 1954, the Washington Afro-American columnist Al Sweeney criticized the Hal Roach Our Gang serials from the 1920s and 1930s that had resurfaced on television. “Among the ‘Little Rascals’ is a fellow named Farina,” he wrote. “It’s the type of role that should have stayed buried.”45 Japanese Americans also objected to the television presentation of racist stereotypes from World War II. After the RKO and Warner Bros. libraries reached television, the Japanese American Citizens League called for the ban of seven of their films that hatefully depicted the Japanese. RKO’s Betrayal from the East (1945), for example, featured a Japanese cheerleader at Stanford who covertly served the Japanese Navy. In fact, as the league’s national director pointed out in 1957, “The only person of Japanese ancestry to become a cheer leader at a west coast university was Hitoshi Yonemura,” a UCLA student who “was killed in action with the U.S. 442nd Japanese American Combat Team in Italy, after volunteering for active duty from behind the barbed wires of a government relocation camp.” Moreover, he explained, “the files of every Federal intelligence agency show there was not a single case of espionage or sabotage committed by a resident person of Japanese ancestry.”46 Worst of all, the distributor had left in the film’s opening statement, which assured viewers that they were watching a true story! For minorities seeking greater equality, the revival of old movies on television threatened to stall American society in the past. In lamenting the proliferation of old movies on television, critics discussed “the viewing public” in a condescending tone that sometimes shifted

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into outright contempt. Wearing the dual hats of movie producer and critic for a nationally syndicated 1954 column, David O. Selznick offered his assessment of television’s audience: “One of the extraordinary phenomena of television has been the extent to which millions of Americans are willing to sit through, and seemingly enjoy, the oldest and for the most part the worst productions of the motion picture business. Weary wives, tired office workers, jaded tycoons sit fascinated into the small hours of the morning, before TV screens, looking at bad prints from shrunken negatives of films from which they stayed away in droves when they were first offered.”47 This analysis fit into a broader postwar cultural discourse. Critics routinely condemned both the “lowbrow” tastes of TV viewers and television’s tendency to keep people away from activities assumed to be more important, such as reading and theatergoing.48 The critical discourse was particularly harsh about people who watched movies on television and adapted their lives to fit the broadcast schedule. At times, this discourse of contempt and condemnation spread into journalistic reporting. The Chicago Daily Tribune, for instance, sympathetically reported the plight of a husband of “an addict of late TV movies” who “watch[ed] as late as 2 a.m.” Disturbed by the loud volume and required to wake up at 6 a.m. for work, the man “landed a few punches” on his wife and found himself hauled into divorce court. Rather than admonishing the workman, the judge scolded his battered wife: “If I were you . . . I would give up my TV set entirely—get rid of it entirely for the sake of my husband. Isn’t a husband worth more to you than your TV and your late movies?” With a sense of amusement, the Chicago Daily Tribune reported that the wife “answered quietly, but firmly, ‘No!’ ”49 The news story stands out first and foremost for its misogyny and insensitivity to domestic violence. Yet there are aspects of the article completely congruent with coverage of male television fans. Like the housewife, the dupe “who spends some 20 hours a week chained to his rocking chair” encouraged the televising of more garbage and—to use a cliché remark about TV viewers—got what he deserved.50 The real people who watched the Late Shows were more complicated than the passive dupes that critics and journalists imagined. Loyal viewers tried to influence the presentation of televised films—calling for fewer commercials, more variety, better films, and better scheduling. Mrs. Pat Vasey of Urbana, Illinois, for instance, sought to enlist the federal government in her effort to improve television programming: “We’ve had pictures that I know must be over 25 years old. Some are good, yes, but there are ones that are beyond repair. I’m all for TV and there’s nothing I enjoy more.

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But after I’ve waited up till 12:00 for the midnight movie and have only one channel to watch I believe I have a right to see at least a different one each night.”51

government intervention Mrs. Vasey’s call for reform entered the historical record because the DOJ filed her letter as part of its investigations into Hollywood and television. The department was attempting to influence how and when Hollywood features reached TV. As the studios resisted selling or licensing their features to television, the DOJ intervened and accused the motion picture industry of conspiring to restrain the trade of 16mm film prints to nontheatrical customers and television stations. Dubbed “the 16mm case” in the trade press, U.S. v. Twentieth Century–Fox dragged on from 1952 to 1955.52 Ten companies were named as defendants: six studios (Twentieth Century– Fox, Warner Bros., RKO, Universal, Columbia, and Republic) and four 16mm distributors (Films Inc., Pictorial Films, the Columbia-owned Screen Gems, and the Universal subsidiary United World).53 Ironically, the two most conservative studios, MGM and Paramount, were spared, because they had not released their features for 16mm use in the U.S. market and therefore could not restrain the trade of such films. Meanwhile, Universal’s subsidiary United World, which had aggressively released features to 16mm, was accused of malfeasance. The government presented a weak case, failing to acknowledge the very real differences among the defendant companies’ policies toward 16mm film and television distribution. The DOJ probably never would have prosecuted the suit were it not for two factors: the agency’s validation by the Supreme Court in the 1948 Paramount decision and the fervor of Leonard Posner, a DOJ attorney who had worked on that 1948 case and believed that given the chance, the motion picture industry would resort to anticompetitive tactics again and again. After hearing testimonies in the fall of 1955, the District Court chief judge ruled in favor of the Hollywood studios and the small-gauge distributors, finding no basis for the claim that they had conspired to restrain the interstate trade of 16mm films.54 The DOJ was interested not simply in whether the studios would sell their libraries for television use but in how the films would reach television. In 1953, a source at the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters told Posner that “while no reports of block booking of motion picture films in TV Industry has yet come to his attention, he thought that the conditions—great scarcity of films plus tremendous demand—were

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ripe for it, and he wouldn’t be surprised if it existed.”55 Another source that year confirmed the existence of block booking and singled out the worst culprit: Matty Fox, the head of MPTV.56 The DOJ chose not to investigate Fox while it concentrated on the 16mm case, but he must have already known that he was going to have to walk a tightrope. He wanted to stay in the good graces of the DOJ, protect his reputation in Hollywood, and continue selling large blocks of films to TV stations. By 1955, Fox had hired a former member of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division as his assistant. The assistant helped facilitate a meeting in August of that year between Fox and a current DOJ attorney, Samuel Flatow. They met in Fox’s penthouse suite, the top floor of the Universal building in New York City. Flatow recorded in his notes that “Mr. Fox stated that he would be completely ruined in the motion picture business if he were to appear as a witness for the Government in this case. ‘Off the record’ he agreed to talk freely and to furnish the Government with any information within his knowledge.” Fox told Flatow about the feature library that he had aggregated for MPTV. He explained that he was involved with Skiatron and hoped that the studios would chose to release their libraries to subscription TV. “Fox thinks that all good old features can make millions via subscription television. Only poor pictures and formula Westerns will be shown on free television if channels are allotted by the FCC for subscription,” Flatow noted.57 In the course of the conversation, Fox described his fruitless attempts to buy or lease the Hollywood studio libraries for television. He explained that he never traveled to Hollywood on these attempts; all of the studio chief executives worked a short distance away in New York, not Southern California. Flatow wrote, “Confidentially, he stated that Eliot Hyman of Associated Artists also tried to get films from all the majors. Should we contact Hyman, Fox asked that we keep his name undisclosed.”58 Fox was walking the tightrope, subtly encouraging the DOJ to subpoena his old business partner. If the government called Hyman to testify against the studios, Fox would benefit in multiple ways—advancing the government’s case to pry the film libraries from the Hollywood studios while turning the fury of the studio executives against his most capable competitor. Two weeks after Fox mentioned Hyman’s name to the investigator, the DOJ called Hyman as a witness for the prosecution in the 16mm case.59 However, he appears to have narrowly avoided testifying in court, thus protecting his reputation with studio executives.60 The Fox-Flatow meeting is telling. In the midst of playing the government and the Hollywood studios off each other, Fox maintained his focus on the only rival who might beat him in the chase for a studio library.

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matty fox, eliot hyman, and the pursuit of rko As chapter 4 explores, Fox was the architect of Universal’s library business in the years immediately following World War II. Applying wartime strategies of gathering junk to the film industry, he monetized Universal’s dormant film assets by licensing the theatrical reissue rights to the specialty distributor Realart and creating an in-house 16mm and television division called United World Films. Although Realart’s $3.25 million advance provided Universal with much-needed cash, United World disappointed with the expensive acquisitions of 16mm film libraries, the low profit margins of 16mm distribution, and the industry backlash that its actions triggered. Fox remained the nominal chairman of United World until the end of 1950; starting in 1948, though, he shifted most of his attention away from the movie industry.61 Instead, he concentrated on an independent business venture that allowed him put his old War Production Board skills and political connections to use. Fox pitched his financing and trade prowess to representatives of the newly formed Republic of Indonesia, which was in the process of freeing itself from Dutch colonial rule.62 The Indonesian trade commissioner agreed to make him the exclusive trade agent between the U.S. and Indonesian governments.63 The U.S. State Department gave its blessing to the arrangement but conditioned its approval on the removal from the contract of a handful of provisions that would have given Fox a near monopoly on all U.S.-Indonesia trade, services, and financing.64 Although Indonesia’s political instability prevented Fox from fully capitalizing on the arrangement, the episode revealed his characteristic desire for market leadership and knack for spotting business opportunities that others missed. By acquiring Bell & Howell and Castle Films, Fox turned United World into the market leader in 16mm distribution (see chapter 4). Through his pact with the Republic of Indonesia, he became the exclusive U.S. trade agent to the emerging nation’s government. Ultimately, neither United World’s 16mm business nor the American-Indonesian Corporation turned out to be a home run. But they could have been enormous successes if these markets had grown at the pace that Fox expected. Fox’s desire to dominate a growth market drove his post-Indonesia reentry into the motion picture industry. The distribution of feature libraries to television was a growing market, yes, but more important, it was one that Fox believed that he could control. He held the advantages of knowing the major players and of already having sales staffs, organized for United World’s 16mm and television businesses. If Fox could combine his libraries, executives, and salespeople into one umbrella organization, then he could

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exert maximum control over the market. He could package blocks of films together and time their release to ensure the largest possible revenues. True market dominance would require the leverage of controlling at least one studio’s library, but that could come later. In the meantime, Fox aggregated whatever feature films he could. In April 1951, he negotiated a three-way deal among United Artists, Eagle-Lion Classics, and his company in which he obtained the television rights to more than forty films, including Walter Wanger productions such as Stagecoach (1939) and Foreign Correspondent (1940).65 A few months later, Fox persuaded Hyman and Harris to pool their libraries with his collection; MPTV was born.66 Fox’s only true equal in the business of bringing film libraries to television was his MPTV partner Hyman. These two were a study in contrasts: Fox was round, gregarious, and a Hollywood insider; Hyman, thin, secretive, and an outsider. Hyman began his career on the East Coast, working in the wholesale tire business. He spent the war years in Norwalk, Connecticut, leading government-funded projects involving the engineering uses of microfilm. After the war, Hyman turned his sights on television syndication, which he correctly predicted would be a major area of growth. In 1948, at the age of forty-four, he struck his first major film acquisition deal, purchasing the rights to 199 mostly low-budget films from Monogram Pictures. To finance the acquisition and enter the TV syndication business, Hyman enlisted multiple partners and formed the company Associated Artists Productions (AAP). By 1950, though, he had bought out his partners and owned AAP outright. He made investments in other areas of the film industry; for instance, he cofinanced John Huston’s feature film Moulin Rouge (1952). Hyman had ambitions to form a studio that could compete with the majors in producing and theatrically releasing feature films. His wisdom—and where he differed from most Hollywood executives in the early-to-mid-1950s—lay in the recognition that the cash flow from syndicating films to television could serve as an engine for theatrical productions and a studio’s other activities.67 MPTV quickly became the market leader in the movies-to-television syndication business. Its greatest strength was its deep catalog of feature films. By combining the films he controlled with those of Hyman’s AAP, Harris’s Flamingo Films, and new acquisitions, Fox formed a collection of more than a thousand titles that, according to a March 1953 Billboard article, was “reputed to be greater than those of the next two or even three largest distributors put together.” Yet MPTV’s success cannot be attributed to its catalog alone. “Aside from sheer number, the MPTV operation is marked by aggressive selling and meticulous print handling,” the Billboard

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reported in that article, about television stations having voted MPTV the industry’s best feature syndicator.68 MPTV’s network of well-stocked offices—with branches in New York, Boston, Dallas, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles—allowed for the fast and efficient movement of 16mm film prints. Fox was an architect of this network, but his talented staff deserves the credit for MPTV’s reputation for salesmanship and service. Dick Feiner was a salesman working out of MPTV’s Los Angeles branch office. The L.A. division manager, David Wolper (who later emerged as one of the most prolific producers in television history), dispatched him to visit the television stations in his sales regions, which stretched from Southern California to Tacoma, Washington. In the anthology Fridays with Art: Insiders’ Accounts of the Early Days of the TV Biz by Some of the Guys who Made It Work, Feiner recalls how he won over the mangers of stations that had only recently obtained licenses from the FCC: I knew that some of my newly-licensed prospects had not even constructed their facilities yet and probably had no knowledge of what they would need to properly handle the films they would be airing. So I softened up the owners of the stations by telling them I had started in television for MPTV by inspecting, cleaning, and editing 16mm film, servicing two dozen stations. I carried along with me a blueprint, which I unfurled with great flourish, and which demonstrated how I set up my film room, including film racks, film benches, editing and splicing equipment, and information as to where my prospect could order the same for his station. Additionally, I carried samples of letterhead from existing TV stations so the new owner could get ideas of how to design his own. All in all, it was an impressive kit.69

As this account reveals, MPTV positioned itself with clients as a service that went beyond accepting orders and shipping prints. Feiner showed station managers a blueprint, quite literally, of how they could use films in a way that would be mutually profitable for the stations and MPTV. As the MPTV salespeople struck deal after deal with young television stations hungry for product, Fox and Hyman went after the big fish: the library of a major Hollywood studio. Nearly everyone in show business in the early 1950s assumed that RKO would be the first studio to release its library to television. This assumption proved correct, and in retrospect, the only surprise is that the sale did not occur earlier. From its formation in 1929 to its sale in 1955, RKO always struggled to keep pace with the other four vertically integrated Hollywood studios. But even though it lacked stable management, RKO enjoyed flashes of brilliance and profitability from the 1930s until the mid-1940s. The studio had major stars under con-

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tract (e.g., Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers) and had produced both one of the biggest hits in film history (King Kong [1933]) and the picture that many people considered the best (Citizen Kane [1941]). All of RKO’s future potential came toppling down, however, after Howard Hughes acquired its ownership in 1948. In a scathing 1953 article, Fortune stated, “There are two ways of running a motion picture studio: either you run it yourself or you delegate real authority to someone else. The sad story of RKO is that Howard Hughes, who took over a strong company from Floyd Odlum, has done neither.” Hughes either alienated or fired most of the talented people who could have helped the studio succeed in the postwar years. His erratic meddling in productions also slowed its output and needlessly drove films over budget. “It is almost impossible to estimate the damage done RKO by Howard Hughes,” Fortune concluded. “Where is the accountant who can set a figure on the intangible losses that came from Hughes’s inability to produce enough movies?”70 In October 1952, a syndicate led by Ralph Stolkin purchased Hughes’s RKO stock, which represented 29 percent of the corporation’s shares. The syndicate agreed to pay seven million dollars, though in an unusual arrangement, it had to pay only $1.5 million down, with the balance to be paid over the next two years. The deal came under scrutiny when the Wall Street Journal published a series of front-page exposés about the organized crime connections of “RKO’s new owners.”71 Just weeks after paying Hughes a nonrefundable $1.5 million, Stolkin and his copurchasers faced the likely event that federal regulators or other RKO shareholders would block their management of the company. As the RKO scandal unfolded, Fox and Hyman saw an opportunity to purchase a major studio film library. With Fox leading negotiations and Hyman providing financing, they offered Stolkin the chance to walk away financially whole. Fox’s syndicate would repurchase the stock for the same seven million dollars that Stolkin had paid.72 But to many in Hollywood, gangsters were preferable to TV syndicators as studio owners. In an effort to have his bid taken seriously, Fox suggested that he would serve as “insurance” that RKO’s library would not reach television. Variety explained the complex logic of this proposal: “For one thing, any major dumping of strong competitive product on the TV market would undermine MPTV, whose prime value comes from the fact that it has some competent but now quite old features for which it gets a certain standard of rentals. Any influx of superior or strongly competitive pix would perforce knock down MPTV’s potentials. Therefore, unless overriding interests of the other stockholders would influence to the contrary, Fox’s entry into RKO figures as insurance

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that the company stays in the normal distribution-for-theatre-exhibition business.”73 While Fox certainly wanted to control the movies-to-television business, his history of exploiting Universal’s library across 35mm, 16mm, and television makes it unlikely that he would have allowed RKO’s nitrate to sit dormant for long. The Stolkin syndicate ultimately did not accept MPTV’s offer and walked away from the deal with Hughes, leaving him with his stock and the $1.5 million. Hughes came away from the debacle richer than before; meanwhile, the rest of RKO’s shareholders watched their stock plunge further in value. Less than a year after the failed RKO bid, Hyman pulled out of MPTV and rebooted AAP as an autonomous entity. He sought to distinguish the new AAP by offering superior films and service. He approached major studios about licensing their films, but his offers met with universal rejection, for the reasons outlined earlier in this chapter. Rather than just wait for a large library to go on sale, Hyman snapped up whatever recently produced or star-studded pictures that he could. After entering into numerous purchasing and licensing agreements—sometimes to buy a single picture—he unveiled a package of fifty-two features just in time for the start of the fall 1954 television season. Hyman’s package offered a year’s worth of aboveaverage film programming (stations and advertisers liked to buy film packages in increments—thirteen, twenty-six, thirty-nine, fifty-two— representing quarters of the year), though he temporarily embargoed thirteen of the films for potential theatrical release. Variety declared the grouping, which included films as recent as A Christmas Carol (1951) and Park Row (1952), to be the “biggest new feature film package to be lined up since the Bank of America sale of 32 features to General Teleradio.”74 Indeed, General Teleradio thought enough of the AAP package to purchase the rights to show it on WOR’s Million Dollar Movie.75 Hyman rapidly scaled up AAP’s entertainment activities, producing the anthology series Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Presents. The company’s bread and butter, however, remained television film distribution. Hungry for content, Hyman acquired more than a hundred Spanish- and German-language films for dubbing. He also made another run at the RKO library. To raise the necessary financing, he partnered with Serge Semenenko of the First National Bank of Boston and three theater chains, Stanley Warner, United Paramount, and National Theatres.76 Absent from the negotiations was Fox. If he had been part of the deal, Hyman would have had to give up a significant amount of control and the financial upside, but his offer might have been taken more seriously. Fox was a Hollywood insider. He had spent nearly a decade working for Universal Pictures, whose president from 1936

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to 1952 was his brother-in-law Nate J. Blumberg.77 Fox had a relationship with Hughes, which meant accepting the fact that Hughes might return his calls in the middle of the night, but hey, at least Hughes returned his calls at all. No matter how many press releases Hyman churned out announcing AAP’s expansion into theatrical production and distribution, he could not change the fact that Hollywood viewed him as an outsider—an East Coast syndicator and money man, not a connected industry player like Fox. Fox, meanwhile, was also shifting his attention away from MPTV. In 1953, the company expanded its television production activities, ordering three thirty-nine-episode seasons of Duffy’s Tavern from the producer Hal Roach Jr.78 Always on the hunt for the next big thing, though, Fox showed more interest in the pay television company Skiatron. In early 1954, he obtained a large ownership position in the company and formed a subsidiary, Skiatron TV.79 In February 1955, he sold MPTV’s film library to Guild Films, a rival distributor that had surprised the industry (and the country) with the runaway success of its syndicated music virtuoso, Liberace.80 Just months later, the moment that Fox had been waiting for finally arrived.

the rko library sale In the summer of 1955, the General Tire and Rubber Company accomplished a feat that had eluded both Fox and Hyman: it bought RKO. Thomas O’Neil, the president of General Teleradio, arranged to purchase the studio from Hughes for twenty-five million dollars. According to O’Neil’s family, the negotiations were a cross-country affair—taking place in New York City, Las Vegas, the cockpit of Hughes’s private airplane, and finally the men’s restroom of the Beverly Hills Hotel.81 According to Fox’s nephew Lew Blumberg, on the other hand, Fox brought O’Neil into the RKO purchase and essentially brokered the deal to obtain access to RKO’s library (Blumberg says that Fox met O’Neil during his service at the War Production Board).82 Regardless of whether Fox or O’Neil initiated the deal, O’Neil wanted RKO for its Hollywood production facilities, distribution infrastructure, and library of films, which he could play as “million-dollar movies” on his television stations in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Hartford, Memphis, and West Palm Beach.83 O’Neil thought that the best hundred or so films in the library had national network value, but he was not interested in syndicating the entire library of 740 RKO films across the country. Fox may or may not have helped to broker the purchase from Hughes, but even if he hadn’t served in an advisory capacity, he recognized an opportunity when he saw one. In late 1955, he raised $15.2 million in bank financing and purchased most of

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the RKO library’s television rights. General Teleradio kept the rights to the library for the six markets that it owned and retained the ability to sell national telecasting rights to 150 of the best films in the library for two years; Fox took the rights to the rest of the country and the rest of the library.84 Now that he had finally obtained a studio library, what would Fox do with it? The industry’s assumption about his next steps shifted dramatically over the few weeks from mid-December 1955 to late January 1956. “Although plans for the use of the library were not disclosed, it was speculated that Mr. Fox might turn over 200 of the better films and shorts for pay-as-yousee television,” Broadcasting announced on December 19, 1955.85 This was highly plausible—Fox had invested considerable time and money in Skiatron TV and had voiced his confidence in the pay television model. The problem with that approach, though, was that he had borrowed large sums of money to acquire the library, and the schedule of his interest payments could not wait for the FCC to make a decision on pay television. Instead of the longterm, dual-tier strategy of distributing the best films to pay television and syndicating the mediocre productions to stations—the plan that he knew had the potential to gross the most money—Fox adopted a plan that focused solely on the short term and recouping his investment as quickly as possible. On January 20, 1956, just one month after the Broadcasting article, he held a press conference in New York announcing a sales plan for the RKO library that Variety called “a radical departure from orthodox featureselling techniques.” Fox offered stations the ability to purchase, as a single package, the perpetual rights to and 16mm prints of all 740 films in the RKO library. He called the new distribution venture C&C Television and structured it as a subsidiary of C&C Super Corp., a soft drink corporation that he had bought into the previous year, assigning it his television assets.86 C&C Television was intended to go out of business as quickly as possible. The entire sales structure—one market, one deal—was designed for speed and efficiency. At its height, MPTV employed 180 people in servicing stations with films; there were the salespeople who cut the deals, the bookers who tracked film orders and shipments, the print inspectors who examined all returned prints. In contrast, C&C TV employed little more than a handful of salespeople, led by the general manager and former MPTV executive Erwin “Buzz” Ezzes. MPTV licensed packages of films to stations for a finite number of runs on television. Its salespeople would follow up regularly to gauge the station’s interest in licensing another package for another number of runs. With C&C, Fox had no intention of letting his salespeople fall into the traditional routine of paying regular calls or mailing out Christmas presents to station owners at the end of each year. Its entire business model

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was one giant liquidation sale, disposing of all the licensing rights, one market at a time, until there were no leftovers. Fox wanted to quickly amortize the purchase, pay off the debt, and pocket the profits. However, C&C faced a practical obstacle to executing the one-market, one-deal plan: few stations could afford to buy the full library. Its asking price for a small or midsize market could exceed the costs of the station’s entire facilities. To remedy this problem and, equally important, insure speedy amortization for C&C, Fox asked stations to pay with a combination of cash and barter time. Under the barter plan, the station got unlimited plays of RKO films in perpetuity (later revised to ten years in most cases) while giving Fox ten sixty-second advertisements every day for five years. Rather than reselling the barter time to a variety of advertisers, Fox arranged for all of it to go to one client: International Latex, a manufacturer of brassieres, girdles, and other women’s accessories. International Latex agreed to purchase a minimum of four million dollars’ worth of advertising over five years, so long as C&C TV obtained spot time on stations that reached the equivalent of or greater than 75 percent of television homes in the top hundred markets. If C&C TV exceeded the minimum and also obtained barter time in markets beyond the top one hundred, International Latex agreed to purchase up to twenty million dollars in advertising. Before entering into a single station contract, Fox had arranged a way to fully recoup his investment and turn a profit.87 In September of 1956, Fox published an open letter in the Hollywood Reporter addressed to “Mr. TV Station Owner.” He explained the trade of spot time for the RKO library and wrote, “We don’t believe you can afford to pass up investigating what we consider to be the single most profitable deal you’ve ever been offered to date.”88 Some station owners liked the arrangement and struck up deals relatively quickly with Fox. The Westinghouse president Donald McGannon, for instance, preferred buying entire libraries to buying fifty-two-film packages. His company’s purchase of the RKO library for its stations in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Cleveland was the second deal that C&C closed (the first was with Walter Annenberg’s five Triangle stations in the Northeast). Such multistation deals reveal one of the quirks of the television syndication business—the amount that stations paid for films had to do with the competitiveness of a market, not its number of television households. Despite the fact that Boston encompassed slightly more television households than San Francisco, the market rate for film licenses in San Francisco was double their prices in Boston.89 Many more station owners, however, decided to pass on Fox’s offer. Chicago’s WGN, the top film buyer in the biggest market to which C&C

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could sell, rejected outright the idea of purchasing a 740-film library. “Our present usage of feature film can be supported adequately with smaller and more flexible packages,” WGN’s film director, Elizabeth Bain, wrote to Fox. Plus, because General Teleradio was withholding 150 of the RKO library’s best films for a national sale, WGN would lose out on exactly the quality product that it most wanted.90 Even after C&C TV responded to such complaints in April 1956 by offering a split library deal—only 370 films (which C&C chose), not the full 740—many stations still rejected the package as too big. And those stations that did purchase the entire or a split library found some unwelcome surprises, including five Spanish-language films, which most stations considered unplayable in their markets.91 Stations and especially station representatives found the barter provisions of the C&C contract even more pernicious. In a June 1956 memo to Fox, Ezzes had to explain why his salespeople were not closing as many deals as expected. He wrote, “Stations refuse to commit six or ten spots a day five years in advance. They generally feel that their rate cards will increase over the next five years. With one or two exceptions, every station has been converting the number of spots we are asking into their dollar value and then comparing that dollar value with their estimate of the dollar value of the film.”92 Spots generated a far larger profit margin than network advertising for affiliates. Although ten minutes per day may not seem like much, Fox was in fact asking stations to give away the most golden advertising time that they could sell—and ignore the increase in value that it was sure to experience in the years ahead. Nor did it help that the traditional sellers of spots, station representatives, were completely against the plan. Fox was encroaching on their business, taking away commissions on spot sales that they believed belonged to them. The Station Representatives Association mailed literature to stations across the country telling them that they were being offered a bad deal.93 There was someone else who thought that Fox was making the wrong deal: Hyman. It’s here that we return to the story that begins this chapter— Fox and Hyman’s March 1956 meeting in Miami. Hyman had more to offer Fox than an earful of criticism. He had just negotiated one of the greatest deals in Hollywood history, purchasing the Warner Bros. film library.

the warner bros. library sale The Hollywood community had anticipated the sale of the RKO library to television. The studio had suffered from unstable management and an erratic owner; by the early 1950s, it barely resembled its earlier, productive

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self. Warner Bros., in contrast, had a legacy of stable family ownership and skillful leadership by Harry Warner, who ran the company from New York and left the production management to his younger brother Jack. Also unlike RKO, it had proved nimble at adapting to changing production trends—financing and distributing big-budget pictures, such as Mister Roberts (1955), based on hit novels and Broadway shows. For these reasons, the industry community acted with some surprise when Warner Bros. announced in February 1956 that it would sell its pre-1948 film library to television (the deal was later expanded to include feature films from 1948 and 1949, though the cutoff date for short films remained August 1948).94 The Motion Picture Herald called “the family’s sale of its whopping motion picture library . . . a strikingly uncharacteristic action, running totally contrary to the Warner tradition of rock-solid resistance to competition of any and all kinds.”95 If the fact that Warner Bros. sold its library surprised contemporaries, then the price that Hyman paid may be an even greater surprise to us today: twenty-one million dollars. Why did Warner Bros. part with its library for a sum that, in hindsight, appears a pittance for a collection that included 42nd Street (1932), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), and Casablanca (1943)? By selling rather than leasing its library to television, the studio sacrificed the upside to what became the most lucrative aftermarket that the movie industry has ever known. It also relinquished its remake rights to all but a handful of films included in the deal. Commentators have pointed to Paramount’s 1958 sale of its pre1948 library to MCA as one of the worst decisions in Hollywood history, but the terms of Warner’s deal were worse.96 Paramount sold its library of 700 pre-1948 features for fifty million dollars; Warner Bros., in contrast, parted with 750 of its sound films and its pre-August 1948 shorts for a mere twenty-one million dollars. The question of why can be answered only by understanding the specific circumstances of the Warner family at the time of the sale. In February 1956, Harry, Jack, and Abe Warner were considering retiring and selling their stock to Semenenko. The brothers believed that the sale of the library would increase the value of their stock. Thanks to the Internal Revenue Service’s favorable treatment of film library sales as capital gains (taxed at 25 percent) rather than earned income (taxed at 52 percent), the sale of the library would result in roughly fifteen million dollars for the studio after fees and taxes.97 Few, if any, investors really knew what a studio library was worth. All investors, however, knew what fifteen million dollars was worth: fifteen million dollars. The Warners assumed that this added liquidity would drive up the corporation’s stock price, although the assumption

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proved false—leaving “observers in New York puzzled.”98 Nevertheless, less than three months after the library sale, Harry, Jack, and Abe Warner announced their plans to retire and sold their majority stock positions to Semenenko’s syndicate.99 Semenenko then allowed Jack to buy back in and run the company, a move that caused a rift between him and Harry for the rest of their lives.100 Warner Bros. was willing to sell its library to pump twenty-one million dollars of lightly taxed income into the corporation, raise its Wall Street valuation, and serve the immediate priorities of its founders. For Hyman, this represented an opportunity. Hyman, who had a working relationship with Semenenko, acted quickly to capitalize on the circumstances and achieve his goal of controlling a major Hollywood studio library. He financed the acquisition of the Warner Bros. library by leveraging the equity of a Canadian-based investment company called PRM. PRM was a corporate shell, all that remained after the liquidation of the auto parts manufacturer Pressed Metals of America. PRM’s chairman, Louis Chesler, was, in the words of Time, “an up-from-the-sidewalks Canadian financier and promoter” who became rich by bankrolling Canadian mining ventures.101 Rumors circulated at the time—and continue to circulate—that he had strong ties to organized crime and Meyer Lansky. It is not the place of this book to confirm or deny these rumors, though I hope that the next person to take on the task of chronicling Chesler will avoid the abundant factual errors that litter the contemporary “true crime” histories addressing him, Hollywood, and the mob.102 No one denies, however, that Chesler was an imposing figure—a man who stood six feet two inches tall, weighed more than 250 pounds, and expected a handsome return on his investments. In 1956, Hyman, with Chesler’s financial backing, reached an agreement with Warner Bros. on the key terms of the deal. In exchange for twenty-one million dollars, the studio would transfer to PRM its entire library of films released through December 31, 1949. This would include all features, some cartoons, and all of the other shorts. In specific contractual terms, though, Warner Bros. was obligated to deliver 750 sound films. For a film to count toward that threshold, Warner had to provide PRM with all of the talent contracts, literary rights, and music clearances pertaining to it. Although the Warner library also included cartoons and other shorts, PRM valued the feature films most highly. The agreement between it and Warner’s Brooklyn film lab provides a good sense of the comparative worth that the companies assigned these assets. For insurance purposes, the library was valued at “$25,000 per feature unprotected negative; $5,000 per cartoon unprotected negative; and $1,000 per short subject unprotected negative.”103 These

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valuations, when multiplied by the estimated number of qualifying films, produced the library’s twenty-one-million-dollar price tag. The sale required Warner Bros. to undertake a massive internal coordination effort.104 East Coast lawyers, West Coast lawyers, the Trust Department, and the studio’s Brooklyn laboratory had to centralize and catalogue materials in a way that they had never done before. Ultimately, the sale of the library required the creation of an archive. This was enabled by the standardized practices of the Trust Department, which, as chapter 3 discusses, kept duplicate copies of legal agreements and attempted to solve the problem of dispersed materials getting lost throughout the studio’s offices across New York City. Still, even with the Trust Department in place, the 1956 sale to PRM forced Warner Bros. to centralize these materials in a new way. The studio ultimately delivered an archive that was an engine for making money through the exploitation of old movies. Warner Bros.’ lawyers quickly encountered problems as they worked toward the 750 qualifying film threshold. Many contracts were missing. While the studio’s Legal and Trust Departments maintained excellent records of actors who had been under long-term contracts, the short-term contracts for loan-out and freelance performers proved harder to locate. Warner’s Burbank offices had no record of Kay Francis’s or Basil Rathbone’s loan-out contract for the 1930 feature Notorious Affair. The Trust Department similarly scrambled to locate the actor Garry Beresford’s contract for Page Miss Glory (1935) so that the film could be included in the deal.105 Hyman was particularly keen to obtain the full clearances for the six early John Wayne westerns that Leon Schlesinger had produced as negative pickups for Warner Bros. As chapter 3 discusses, Schlesinger produced these movies, including Ride ‘Em Cowboy (1932) and The Big Stampede (1932), by combining action footage from silent Ken Maynard films with new sound footage of Wayne, who was dressed to look like Maynard. This economizing move allowed Schlesinger to deliver the westerns to Warner Bros. for less than twenty-eight thousand dollars each. After Wayne’s success in Stagecoach (1939), Warner Bros. reissued these six B westerns in 1939 and 1940 and charged rental fees nearly identical to those of the films’ first release.106 Despite the profitability of these reissues and despite Wayne’s growing star power, the studio lost all the talent contracts related to this film. Schlesinger kept them in his office, never depositing copies with the Legal Department. When he died in 1949, the person who cleaned out his office threw the contract files into the garbage.107 The process of qualifying and delivering all of the features, cartoons, and other shorts dragged on for years. In March 1958, two full years after the

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deal was arranged, Hyman met with Warner Bros. president Benjamin Kalmenson to discuss “various problems that have arisen under the Agreement of Sale.” Hyman expressed frustration about the numerous features and cartoons that the studio had never cleared or delivered. He also wanted the library of stock footage that it had created from the movies that now belonged to him.108 But despite his long list of grievances, he had lost no time in exploiting the library of films that Warner had fully cleared and delivered. By the time of this meeting, AAP had recorded more than thirtyfive million dollars in TV contracts. For years, Hyman had been preparing for this moment, developing the necessary infrastructure and strategy to fully capitalize on a large library. If properly harnessed, he believed, the Warner library could provide the cash flow and derivative rights needed to catapult AAP into the ranks of the major Hollywood studios. The money from television sales would be channeled into new productions, many of which would be remakes of films from the library. The new productions would play theatrically, then move to television, ensuring that AAP’s Television Department obtained a steady supply of fresh, high-quality product. Something had happened, though, that Hyman had not anticipated—his old business partner Fox was saturating the market with the all-or-nothing, perpetual-rights sales of the RKO library. Hyman was losing potential customers as stations signed with C&C TV, absorbed several hundred films, and committed substantial amounts of cash and spot time to C&C. Although no primary documents from the March 1956 Miami meeting are known to exist, the trade press accounts indicate that Hyman initiated it and that Fox suspended the activities of C&C’s salespeople as he listened to what his old partner had to offer. The reports suggest that Hyman proposed a merger of the RKO and Warner Bros. libraries; it would be a reprise of the MPTV arrangement, except this time with far more valuable collections of films and with Hyman, not Fox, retaining top executive control. The potential merger held clear benefits for Hyman, who stood to become the gateway for Hollywood libraries on television, allowing him to control the supply and pace the release of film packages to drive up prices. But the merger contained benefits for Fox too: the Warner Bros. library featured better stars and a better collection of films than RKO’s; plus, the rights to many of the best RKO films would remain with General Teleradio until late 1957. The major disagreement was over control and the sales plan. As the Billboard noted, “Hyman seems to take a long-range view of feature film sales. Fox, on the other hand, seems to believe in the quick sell off as per his perpetual sales plan. This disparity in their viewpoints, it is said, is likely to make any merger attempt quite rocky.”109

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Once the negotiations in Miami reached an impasse and it became clear that Fox would not veer from his “quick sell off” strategy, Hyman implemented a marketing plan designed to distinguish AAP from C&C on the basis of service and flexibility. In a move timed to coincide with the April 1956 National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters’ convention in Chicago, AAP published a two-page advertisement in Broadcasting. It promised, “We at AAP feel that our job has only begun when we’ve sold you our product,” clearly differentiating the customer experience with AAP from that with C&C, which considered a deal complete once it had delivered the 16mm print library and obtained the spot time for International Latex. AAP’s advertisement continued to emphasize premium service, describing the hospitality, strategic consultation, and promotional kits available to customers who “step[ped] through the doorway into the AAP suite” at the Conrad Hilton (the convention’s venue).110 Hyman’s attempts to distinguish AAP from C&C extended further. In contrast to Fox’s all-or-nothing offer of the full 740-film RKO library to stations, Hyman divided the Warner Bros. library into thirteen packages of fifty-eight films. Stations could buy just one package, all thirteen, or any number in between. Hyman claimed that these were “balanced packages” containing “blockbuster pictures, good pictures, . . . program pictures,” and films of every genre.111 Whereas Fox alienated station representatives with his bartering arrangement, Hyman deliberately courted them as customers and allies. He and his sales team, supervised by Bob Rich, understood that they held considerable influence over both stations and sponsors. Alexander Russo argues that “station representatives functioned as ‘audience intellectuals’ who generated, explained, and translated knowledge about local stations to national agencies and sponsors.”112 In their role as intermediaries, however, they also functioned as sponsor intellectuals, translating knowledge about the preferences of advertisers to local television stations, which were much more inclined to buy a film package if their station rep told them that it contained the classy pictures that advertisers wanted. The salesman Donald Klauber, who traveled with Hyman from AAP to United Artists Associated and ultimately to Seven Arts (see below), explained it this way to his sales team: “There are many deals that are made and lost at the rep level. Station management wants to know ‘Can we get the national business?’ ” Klauber emphasized “the impact that can be created from the rep side to reassure the station that they must have our package to maintain rating and commercial success.”113 Since station reps generally represented a number of

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stations, Hyman’s sales team understood that winning one over could lead to several station contracts in one fell swoop. Despite Hyman’s trumpeting of AAP’s superior service and flexibility, his Warner Bros. packages found detractors, particularly station managers who felt that AAP forced them to accept pictures they did not want. For example, an AAP salesperson approached the film director of WSAZ-TV, in Huntington, West Virginia, with an offer to sell all thirteen film packages for a price that the director considered “fantastic” and “unrealistic.” He countered that he would be willing to buy a package of “42 or so” Humphrey Bogart films. The salesperson replied, “There are four or five Bogarts in each of the 13 groups, and you can have them all by buying all 13 of the groups.” AAP refused to break up a package or license the Bogart films individually.114 Recognizing the possibility of additional revenue from the reissue market, Hyman established a theatrical subsidiary, Dominant Pictures Corp., and withheld some of the best Warner Bros. films from the television market. In fact, AAP intentionally grouped films into TV packages of fiftyeight so that it could withdraw as many as six in each package for theatrical reissue yet always deliver a minimum of fifty-two films (a familiar number to stations and sponsors). In the second half of 1956 and throughout 1957, Dominant reissued old Warner Bros. pictures using the same basic model of states rights distribution (granting licenses to exchanges that acted as subdistributors) that W.H. Productions had used in the 1910s and Realart had used in the 1940s. By reissuing The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), King’s Row (1942), and dozens more films, AAP collected roughly one million dollars in income by the end of 1957 (see table 3).115 When compared to AAP’s television revenue, though, this income serves primarily as a sign of how dramatically the television syndication market had surpassed theatrical reissues. Within the first eight months of syndicating the Warner Bros. packages, AAP had entered into television contracts amounting to $21,782,465—more than the purchase price of the entire library.116 By the end of 1957, AAP’s billings had reached thirty-five million dollars. Only select films could succeed on the theatrical reissue market, and even then, they generally played for low rentals at drive-in theaters showing double features. The rise of drive-ins created demand for low-cost programming, recalling the reissue market in the 1930s, when Depression-era exhibitors turned to old movies as dependable, cheap content for double features. Hyman and Fox recognized that the television market enabled a new method of monetizing libraries, in aggregate form—

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table 3 Warner Bros. Library Television versus Theatrical Reissue Income, 1956–1961 Year

Television income

1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 Total

$13,872,059 $21,190,301 $10,202,793 $5,164,354 $4,862,093 $2,242,153 $57,533,753

Theatrical reissue income $260,897 $763,537 $186,122 $133,554 $38,226 $12,473 $1,394,809

source: Henry J. Zittau to Herbert T. Schottenfeld re: Alcott v. Eliot Hyman, January 23, 1962, folder 15, “Eliot Hyman–Ray Stark Deals,” box 4, United Artists Collection (1951–76 accession), Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin–Madison.

not simply reissuing A-quality pictures from the vault but exploiting the entire vault. The major studios raced to catch up.

library convergence After Fox and Hyman announced the availability of two of the best Hollywood studio libraries for television, the remaining studios quickly followed one another in leasing or selling their features to television. In early 1956, prior to the Warner Bros. sale, Columbia released 104 features through its television and 16mm distribution subsidiary, Screen Gems.117 That May, Twentieth Century–Fox licensed fifty-two features to National Television Associates (NTA) for $2.3 million, then closed a far bigger deal six months later, licensing 390 films to NTA for a $30 million minimum guarantee plus a 50 percent ownership stake in the NTA Film Network.118 As this chapter has discussed, the Hollywood studios had long sought to control the television medium. Rather than barter for advertising time, Twentieth Century–Fox chose to barter its library for ownership stakes in a new network and select television stations. MGM also traded library rights for ownership in television stations, though not before substantial industry speculation about what direction it would take. The studio owned the best library and historically had the most conservative approach to television. In March 1956, the Hollywood Reporter announced that MGM might lease a portion of its library to ABC,

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the home of the half-hour MGM Parade series. The trade paper also noted that “reports have been circulating that deals for MGM product for TV are imminent for anywhere from $100,000,000 to $150,000,000. PRM, Inc., the firm that just acquired the Warners backlog, is also said to be interested in all or part of the MGM catalogue.”119 Although Hyman and Chesler had ambitions to merge the MGM and Warner Bros. libraries, they never appear to have considered making an offer close to those amounts.120 Ultimately, MGM decided to keep television distribution in-house, adopting the C&C strategy of selling its entire seven-hundred-plus film library on an all-ornothing basis. Loew’s, MGM’s parent company, sought ownership interest in stations across the country in exchange for access to the MGM vault.121 The last two studios to bring their libraries to television were Universal and Paramount. In August 1957, Universal granted Screen Gems a sevenyear license to its pre-1948 library for a twenty-million-dollar guarantee.122 And in 1958, a cash-hungry Paramount finally reached an agreement, selling rather than leasing its pre-1948 library to the talent agency and television production powerhouse MCA for fifty million dollars.123 MCA booked contracts for the Paramount films at a blistering pace. Many television stations that had already entered into long-term deals for movie packages proved willing to acquire even more. Within two years, MCA had fully amortized its investment.124 Ironically, the joining of the Warner Bros. and RKO libraries, which nearly occurred in Miami in 1956, took place three years later, in New York. United Artists acquired the AAP and then the C&C library, turning from the studio that owned the smallest library in Hollywood into the one with the largest. Each of these sales occurred as a natural progression of the strategic vision of the selling company’s leader. Fox’s entire business plan for the RKO library was to liquidate it and quickly recoup his investment. By entering into the International Latex agreement for up to twenty million dollars in spot time, he mitigated his risk exposure and nearly guaranteed a profit. The one-market, one-deal approach of selling licenses for and prints of the full 740-film library was designed to minimize expenses incurred along the way. As an investor of Skiatron, Fox thought that good, desirable library films could earn significant money on pay television. But pay television’s wide-scale infrastructure was stunted for most of the 1950s, and he needed to immediately start repaying his loans for the RKO acquisition. In 1959, United Artists purchased C&C TV’s ownership stake in the RKO library for $6 million ($1.25 million in cash, with the remainder to be paid from incoming revenues). Even at this low purchase price, it had a difficult time earning anything beyond its 25 percent distribution fee for the first

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several years that it owned these films. Because General Teleradio controlled the rights in New York City, Los Angeles, and four other markets and because stations across the country still possessed ten-year licenses, unlimited runs, and cabinets filled with 16mm prints, there was a limited amount of fresh business that United Artists could push through.125 Hyman’s motivation in selling the Warner Bros. library was different. Granted, he recognized that its films would earn diminishing returns in subsequent sales, due to the availability of competing film packages that were new to television. Nevertheless, it was his personal ambition more than any other factor that led him to sell to United Artists. For Hyman, the money from the library was never an end. Instead, it was an engine with which he could expand his production operations and grow his company into a major Hollywood studio. He envisioned the library playing key roles in both his company’s financing (providing cash flow and a borrowing base) and its productions (allowing remakes based on the underlying rights). And with a steady diet of new productions, the library would replenish itself and Hyman would not be dependent on chasing the television rights to other producers’ films. He considered United Artists an attractive buyer for AAP because he knew that he could leverage the library to obtain a favorable production arrangement for himself and his producing partner, Ray Stark. United Artists, for its part, was buying not just the library but also the team that had proved so capable in exploiting it, including Hyman and the sales executive Bob Rich. In the summer of 1957, Hyman began discussing the potential sale of AAP with Robert Benjamin of United Artists.126 By that November, the parties had reached an initial agreement, though it took another full year for the transaction to close. United Artists purchased AAP for $25,750,000 and used its personnel and assets, which included films, offices, and station contracts, to form a new subsidiary company, United Artists Associated Inc. (UAA). Meanwhile, in a technically separate deal, Hyman, Stark, and the silent partner Chesler established a production arrangement at United Artists for their newly formed company, Seven Arts (which I profile in depth in the next chapter). The Hollywood studios entered the 1950s recognizing their film libraries as profit centers but resistant to selling old features to television. By the end of the decade, all of the studios had licensed their pre-1948 film libraries to television; some, such as MGM, United Artists, and Columbia, had even come to embrace film-to-television distribution as a business essential to their health. The scholarship documenting this shift primarily focuses on the perspectives of the studios and the networks.127 However, the intermediary

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distributors were a crucial part of this transition. Beginning in the early 1950s with MPTV, Fox and Hyman developed an infrastructure for connecting the supply of nonstudio feature films to the demand of local stations and audiences. By building this infrastructure and becoming market leaders, they were able to capitalize in 1955 and 1956 when the studio libraries of RKO and Warner Bros. became available for acquisition. Between Fox and Hyman, it was Fox who more intimately understood the motion picture industry, enjoyed better relationships, and had more experience exploiting film libraries. Hyman, however, proved more influential in the short and long terms. The studios imitated AAP’s sales methods in their in-house distribution units. Furthermore, over the next decade, Hyman continued to pursue his vision of building a full-fledged studio through the television distribution of film libraries. The next chapter examines how the business of selling films to television matured in the 1960s— generating new wealth, prompting more conflicts, and enabling Hyman to vault his company Seven Arts into the ranks of the Hollywood majors.

6. Seven Arts and Industry Transformation (1960s)

In 1962, Hollywood film libraries went to the U.S. Supreme Court. Two years earlier, the Department of Justice (DOJ) had won a block-booking case against the top film-to-TV distributors to emerge between 1956 and 1958: Associated Artists Productions (AAP), C&C, Loew’s, National Television Associates, Screen Gems, and United Artists.1 A U.S. district court judge found the distributors in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and ordered that they price films individually and not simply offer entire libraries for lump sums. Although the DOJ saw block booking in black-and-white terms, the marketplace reality was complex. Stations did not object to buying films in packages; they needed packages, in fact, to efficiently buy programming and sell advertising. What they resented was being forced to “eat the dogs,” a phrase they used to describe accepting poor or unusable films as part of a package. The distributors counterargued, complaining that the stations wanted to “cream” them—select packages of only the best films, leaving the rest behind and unsellable. The station representative Herb Jacobs recalled that the New York station WCBS creamed AAP in 1956 by purchasing around 160 of its best pictures, leaving behind the “dregs” of the library, which AAP had a difficult time selling. After AAP lost the chance to fully exploit its library in the nation’s most lucrative television market, it resolved to hold firm and not break up the “balanced” packages that combined A-level and B-level films.2 In November 1962, the Supreme Court validated the judgment of the DOJ and the district court: the defendants had indeed practiced illegal block booking and needed to reform their sales practices.3 By the time the Supreme Court ruled in U.S. v. Loew’s Inc., however, AAP and C&C were no longer in operation, the film-to-television marketplace had transformed, and larger entertainment industry changes were on 178

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the way. Scholars have long noted the legal system’s struggle to keep pace with the rapid growth of technology.4 In this case, the only meaningful technological change between 1956 and 1962 was the growth of color TV. What had truly rocked the film-to-TV distribution model was a series of industry changes: agreements with labor unions that permitted the broadcasting of post-1948 films, the regular airing of feature films on network TV, the audience’s seemingly endless appetite for watching movies at home, and the growth of new companies. This final chapter examines the transformations of the film-to-TV marketplace and the entertainment industry in the 1960s and how one company in particular participated in them. I begin by analyzing the industry landscape at the start of the decade and how Eliot Hyman positioned his new company, Seven Arts, to become Hollywood’s biggest movies-to-TV distributor. Seven Arts also had a theatrical reissue unit, and by comparing its internal files to those of the television department, we can see how the television market far exceeded the theatrical reissue market, which lost significance but never fully disappeared. Next, I examine the attempt of film directors to exert legal control over how their old films were presented to television audiences, who proved highly adaptive in watching movies. Then I resume the narrative of Seven Arts with its 1967 acquisition of Warner Bros. I conclude by arguing that Kinney National’s 1969 acquisition of Warner Bros.–Seven Arts, along with the conglomerate takeovers of Paramount and United Artists, marked a sea change in the history of American media industries. These deals hinged on the perceived value of film assets. Wall Street liked undervalued stocks and stable streams of revenue; the film studios, with their libraries, seemed to offer both. Film libraries, subordinated by the studios in the 1920s, had finally come to dominate them.

unions, networks, and the rise of seven arts On April 18, 1960, the fortunes of Hollywood labor unions became irrevocably linked to film libraries. That day, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) ended a six-week strike against the major Hollywood studios. The guild’s president, Ronald Reagan, and its executive secretary, Jack Dales, had reached an agreement with the majors that guaranteed residual payments for movies shown on television. For the previous twelve years, SAG and most of the other Hollywood unions had been locked in a stalemate with the studios over this issue. The studios contended that they owned the copyrights to the films and could therefore use them in any way they liked; the unions argued that their members deserved fair compensation for film

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reuse on television. “Neither party has receded from its position,” noted the SAG Basic Agreement of 1952, a hundred-page contract that enabled actors to continue working but forced the studios to withhold from television any film produced after August 1, 1948.5 As part of Reagan and Dales’s agreement, SAG surrendered all residual claims for pre-1960 movies aired on television. In exchange, the studios contributed $2.65 million to the creation of a SAG pension and welfare fund and guaranteed SAG 6 percent of all future revenues from theatrical features shown on television. The agreement infuriated Mickey Rooney, Bob Hope, and other stars whose careers had peaked during the heyday of the studio system, in the 1930s and 1940s. Some actors still pejoratively refer to the deal as “the great giveaway.” When one considers that Hope comedies and Rooney musicals continue to play on television in the early twenty-first century, there is no question that Reagan and Dales gave up a tremendous amount of possible income.6 For all current and future film actors, however, Reagan and Dales obtained a relatively high percentage of television’s gross revenue as residual compensation (more than triple the royalty that actors receive from video or DVD sales). Equally important, the administrative challenges of managing a pension and welfare fund and dispersing residual payments fundamentally changed the structure of Hollywood unions.7 SAG necessarily grew heavy in bureaucracy—a term that, along with unions more generally, became Reagan’s enemy in his subsequent political career. The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the Writers Guild of America, and the Directors Guild of America achieved similar residual arrangements and similarly adapted their infrastructures toward administering payments and benefits, services that keep the unions vital even in the absence of effective collective bargaining. Hollywood labor finally obtained compensation from the business of film libraries, irrevocably altering its long-term structures and, more immediately, opening the door for the studios to release post-1948 feature films to television. The timing of SAG’s agreement coincided with the networks’ newfound interest in broadcasting feature films as prime-time entertainment. In September 1961, NBC debuted Saturday Night at the Movies, which premiered a post-1948 Hollywood movie in prime time each week. A mere five years earlier, NBC president Robert Sarnoff had publicly opposed showing features on prime-time TV and warned the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee that “the accumulated product in Hollywood’s vaults—most of it musty and outdated—would hit television with the impact of a tidal wave. The American viewing public would literally drown in a celluloid

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sea.”8 What accounts for the network’s rhetorical and strategic change? The media historian William Lafferty explains, “Recent features made programming sense at NBC, since they represented, in many instances, readymade color programming with proven appeal that could occupy large segments of prime time and attract quality audiences, and that advertisers would be keen to sponsor. And, with their relative box office as a barometer indicating their ratings potential, features could be a formidable weapon with which to counterprogram the competing networks.”9 The other two networks adopted similar strategies. In 1962, ABC began devoting two prime-time hours every Sunday to feature films.10 And in 1965, CBS claimed Thursday nights for its weekly movie presentation.11 TV Guide criticized the networks’ new embrace of Hollywood features. “Movies do have a place on television—but not in primetime,” its editors wrote in 1963. “Television is a medium in itself. It should develop its own techniques, especially in the field of drama.”12 Numerous such “As We See It” columns echoed the earlier medium-specificity arguments that the New York Times critic Jack Gould had leveled (see chapter 5). The networks read the ratings with more interest than they read TV Guide, though, and by late 1965, movies filled eight hours of prime time each week (with NBC broadcasting movies on both Saturday and Tuesday nights).13 The practice of distributing feature films to prime-time network TV differed in important ways from the earlier television distribution models. NBC was a more selective customer than, for instance, KCIV Boise. The networks wanted recently produced, star-studded pictures that had not yet played on television. Additionally, because each network showed one movie per week (or at most two), they required far fewer than the local stations that showed movies daily in daytime and late-night fringe hours (see previous chapter). Between 1961 and 1970, the median number of Hollywood features broadcast on network television in a given season was 120 (which occurred in the 1965–66 season). In this same decade, the seven major studios collectively produced more than 150 new films per year. Moreover, from late 1948 to early 1960, the studios and independent producers had produced as many as four thousand features (previously off limits to broadcasters because of union contracts) that industry commentators believed were suitable for television.14 As this data suggests, prime-time network TV in the 1960s was less a part of the business of film libraries than a new distribution window that recent studio films predictably passed through. Tino Balio explains that by the early part of the decade, “few new film projects were put into production without assessing their potential on TV.”15 Studios counted on the

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revenue from a network sale, and they factored it into their financial models. Indeed, the revenue from a network TV sale became one of the few things that it seemed they could rely on when green-lighting a new film. Wall Street analysts chastised the studios for taking on so much risk in the production of expensive, blockbuster films. Both during its tumultuous production and after its highly visible box office failure, Cleopatra (1963) became a metonym for Hollywood’s mismanagement and out-of-control costs.16 In this context, the revenue from a network TV sale represented a silver lining. The studios knew that regardless of the film’s performance, they could expect some minimum payment from its TV sale, and if the film was a hit, then much more. The question still remains, though—what happened with the roughly four thousand films produced from 1949 to 1960, the majority of which the networks neither wanted to program nor had enough prime-time hours for? Scholars have correctly identified how important the selling of recent features to network TV became for the health of the 1960s studio system.17 However, the far greater number of film-to-TV sales still occurred at the individual stations, and this aspect of the 1960s industry has received less attention. Individual stations—and companies that owned multiple stations—were the primary television buyers of most of the Hollywood features from the 1950s. Three years before CBS initiated its Sunday-night movie broadcast, it purchased a package of forty-eight Warner Bros. features to show on its owned-and-operated stations in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and St. Louis in nonprime-time hours. This 1962 deal was brokered by Seven Arts, which Warner Bros. had contracted as its television distributor.18 Seven Arts was the industry’s leading film-to-TV distributor for the first half of the 1960s. Eliot Hyman and Ray Stark jointly managed the company, which acted as a television distributor for the studios and produced feature films that other studios distributed theatrically. As the previous chapter discusses, Hyman was one of the innovators of the film-to-TV distribution business in the 1950s. His company AAP developed a reputation for offering excellent service and high-quality films (both of which came at a price to the stations with which AAP did business). AAP achieved a considerable coup in 1956 when it purchased the pre-1950 Warner Bros. library for twenty-one million dollars. It divided the library into eleven “balanced packages,” which sold like gangbusters to stations across the country.19 In 1958, Hyman flipped the Warner Bros. library, selling AAP to United Artists (which used it to form a new subsidiary company, United Artists Associated Inc. [UAA]). For him, the money from the library was

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never an end. Instead, it was an engine with which he could expand his production operations and grow his company into a major Hollywood studio. The sale was accompanied by a production deal at United Artists for Hyman and Stark. The idea was that Hyman would continue to oversee the distribution of AAP’s films to television. Meanwhile, in setting up an overall deal with United Artists, he and Stark could expand their production capabilities by obtaining consistent financing and better distribution terms. Hyman’s partnership with Stark emerged in the mid-1950s out of a frank recognition that his biggest obstacle to achieving his grand ambitions was himself. Hyman was a Hollywood outsider. This fact did not hurt him in the television distribution business. He and his salespeople had cultivated relationships with station owners, managers, and representatives throughout the country. He was the best film-to-television distributor in the business, and even his enemies respected him for it. When it came to production, though, his social network and skill set fell short. He lacked the relationships of Matty Fox, who had come up through the movie business. He also lacked access to the best talent and story material. In 1956, Hyman tried to compensate for his weaknesses by hiring Stark, who was a talent agent at the time, to run AAP’s West Coast offices. As a vice-president at the Famous Artists Corporation, Stark had excelled at packaging star clients, such as Kirk Douglas, with hot literary material.20 He was a quintessential Hollywood insider with a reputation for good taste and relationships that reached beyond the movie colony, into Broadway and the publishing business. When Hyman and Stark moved to United Artists, they called their new production company Seven Arts. Stark loved movies, but he gloated to the press that his real passion was for “the eighth art—the art of making money.”21 The early years of Seven Arts’ production arm were rockier than expected. The Gun Runners (1958), its derivative version of an old Warner Bros. movie (Howard Hawks’s To Have and Have Not [1944]), and The Misfits (1961), a Stark package of big-name talent and classy literary material, were box office disappointments.22 Hyman and Stark’s relationship with United Artists proved disappointing for all parties involved, and they terminated the agreement between Seven Arts and United Artists after two years. Furthermore, two lawsuits challenged the legitimacy of the AAP sale: one, brought by a minority AAP shareholder, carried the plausible accusation that Hyman had ignored his fiduciary duty by undervaluing the library in exchange for a personal production deal at United Artists; the second, brought by National Telefilm Associates (NTA), claimed that it controlled AAP as a result of purchasing stock from another shareholder (AAP

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paid NTA two million dollars to settle the case).23 Stark left Seven Arts in 1959, then rejoined two years later, establishing a pattern of partial commitment to the firm that extended throughout its existence.24 Although Seven Arts had a mixed record as a producer, it dominated the field of film-to-television distribution from 1960 to 1965. After breaking away from United Artists, which retained ownership of the pre-1950 Warner Bros. library, Hyman reached agreements with Warner Bros. in 1960 and 1962 to distribute packages of its post-1949 films to television.25 In 1963, Universal and Twentieth Century–Fox selected Seven Arts to distribute a combined total of 443 post-1948 features.26 Although MCA, which acquired Universal in 1962, had its own successful television distribution division, the DOJ mandated that it release Universal’s film library to television through an independent company. Seven Arts became the beneficiary. It packaged the Universal and Fox pictures into the highly successful “Films of the 50’s” series, which it sold in ten “volumes” to television stations across the country. Seven Arts also engaged in the business of theatrical reissues. Using the old states rights model, it licensed Love Me Tender (1956), The True Story of Jesse James (1957), and other old Twentieth Century–Fox films to regional subdistributors, which in turn rented them primarily to drive-in theaters. Seven Arts’ internal corporate documents from the early 1960s reveal a stark contrast between the market sizes and sales cultures of theatrical reissues and television. The entire theatrical reissue business at Seven Arts was run by a man named Arnold Jacobs, who also peddled exploitation and horror movies on the states rights market. His correspondence is filled with expressions of outrage, anger, and mistrust. Collecting rental fees from his clients was a daily struggle. In 1964, Jacobs expressed his annoyance on receiving the excuse from a subdistributor that two East Coast theaters “will not be able to pay film rentals for playoffs that took place in 1963 because the one skipped town and the other because of bankruptcy.”27 Nor were the film rentals particularly lucrative. Seven Arts mandated only a twenty-dollar minimum rental fee per engagement, but even this amount was too high for an Oklahoma subdistributor that specialized in drive-ins and declined to license the Fox reissues.28 For the television side of Seven Arts, on the other hand, business was booming. In the first half of the 1960s, the Seven Arts TV sales force encompassed a director, a midlevel manager, numerous regional salespeople, and a former station rep, who wined and dined station reps and stepped in to help when client stations were unable to find sponsors for their feature film showcases.29 Like AAP, Seven Arts emphasized the quality of its films and

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customer service. In pitching the first package of post-1949 Warner Bros. films to a prospective buyer, one salesperson commented, “In the past years you have been well aware that the major problem with features has been that every package was put together on a ratio of 5 to 1; that is, 5 ‘C’ or ‘B’ pictures to 1 ‘A’ picture. We are extremely proud as you will note yourself that our list of 40 Post [49] features are all in the ‘A’ category.”30 Unlike Jacobs in his strained relationship with the states rights subdistributors, the TV sales staff courted station clients and gifted them every holiday season. One Virginia station manager wrote in to say, “The pepper mill which you sent me this past Christmas was like your features; strictly top drawer. I’m glad you can afford such presents even though I can’t afford your film.”31 By the beginning of 1966, Seven Arts had booked more than one hundred million dollars’ worth of TV contracts. The company’s theatrical reissue business, however, appears never to have grossed even 1 percent of that amount. Although it continued throughout the 1960s, it was far less lucrative than distributing film libraries to television.32 Despite Seven Arts’ success in distributing films to television, Hyman could not avoid a troubling fact: his supply of fresh studio features would eventually run out. Whereas only some of the studios, such as MGM and Columbia, ran subsidiary film-to-TV distribution divisions in 1960, by mid1964 all of the studios had in-house TV distribution divisions. The television market had grown so valuable that it no longer made sense for Warner Bros. or Fox to outsource the licensing of its film library to TV. Hyman publicly trumpeted the high quality of Seven Arts’ feature packages, but in private correspondence he was far more blunt. “We are, of course, most interested in the acquisition of motion picture film for television syndication, regardless of the nature, size, importance or unimportance of the film itself, whether it be in English and/or any foreign language,” he wrote to his midlevel executives in July 1964.33 Seven Arts needed more product—much more product—if it was to end the decade still open for business. Additionally, there was no way that its new productions could keep the company afloat. Because Seven Arts lacked a global infrastructure for theatrically distributing new features, it was dependent on the Hollywood studios, which charged a high distribution fee, usually between 30 and 40 percent (fittingly, Hyman charged a similarly high fee for distributing the studios’ films to TV). Even a low-budget hit, such as What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), did not yield much of a return to Seven Arts after Warner Bros. had deducted the negative cost, marketing and distribution costs, distribution fee, and interest charges. Seven Arts could grow or it could die, but it could not remain on the same course.34

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angry directors and thick-skinned audiences We interrupt this presentation of the Seven Arts story to bring you this word from our sponsors. As the post-1948 Hollywood movies were broadcast on daytime, primetime, and late-night television, they were interrupted by commercials and recut to fit time slots. In a noteworthy campaign, Directors Guild of America (DGA) members attempted to exert legal control over the presentation of their old films and to shape the public’s attitude toward their legacies as filmmakers and toward movies on television more generally. In the fall of 1960, just a few months after SAG’s “great giveaway,” the DGA accused television stations of “defrauding the public” by “butchering” their films to fit the demands of commercial breaks and ninety-minute time slots.35 For SAG’s membership, the broadcasting of old movies on TV was fundamentally an issue of remuneration. For the DGA’s elite members, the issue of artistic reputation was just as important. The writer-directorproducer Billy Wilder expressed his distaste for movies interrupted by commercials in a scene of The Apartment (1960). Early in the film, C. C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) settles down in front of his television, excited to watch a great movie. But he is assaulted by an onslaught of commercials and, frustrated, changes the channel. When the time came a few years later for CBS to broadcast The Apartment, Wilder pursued legal action to control any cuts that would occur.36 In 1965, Otto Preminger sought a permanent injunction to prevent Anatomy of a Murder (1959) from ever being broadcast on television with cuts or commercial interruptions. His case reached the New York State Supreme Court, which ruled against the autocratic producer-director, determining that his right to final cut was limited to the theatrical release.37 George Stevens waged the highest-profile legal battle of any director to exert control over his old movies as they played on television. In the late summer of 1965, he got wind that Paramount had licensed A Place in the Sun (1951) to NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies. By that point, NBC’s weekly film showcase primarily featured movies no more than a few years old. However, A Place in the Sun had been one of Stevens’s greatest critical and commercial triumphs, and NBC considered it well worth retrieving from Paramount’s library for a network television premiere. Stevens, who had won the Best Director Academy Award for the film, did not want NBC tampering with his masterpiece.38 He and his attorneys contacted NBC to demand that the network not edit the film or show it with commercials. When NBC refused, Stevens filed a

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complaint in the Superior Court of Los Angeles against NBC, Paramount, Liberty Films, and several dozen NBC affiliates. The complaint had two main legal claims: breach of contract and unfair competition. The first argument centered on Stevens’s agreement with Liberty Films, the independent production company that he had launched in 1945 with Frank Capra, William Wyler, and the executive Samuel Briskin. His Liberty contract stipulated that he “shall have the sole control of the production and direction of the photoplay includ[ing] the provisions that the right to edit, cut and score said photoplay shall remain with [him].” Stevens’s second cause of action was a far more intriguing argument, grounded in the common law of unfair competition. A Place in the Sun was billed as a “George Stevens Production.” As his argument went, if viewers tuned in to NBC and saw a small-screen version of the film in which commercial breaks arbitrarily interrupted the flow between scenes, then they were not really watching George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun. As a result of NBC’s broadcast of the commercial-laden film, Stevens argued, his “name and reputation will become associated with a motion picture film of inferior quality by reason of said distortion, truncation, and segmentation instead of with the award winning motion picture of superior quality and artistic achievement which plaintiff in fact produced and directed.”39 Impressively, he won an injunction that prohibited NBC and its affiliates from using commercials in a way that would substantially distort the “mood, effect or continuity” of A Place in the Sun.40 Stevens’s lawsuit recalled the legal battles that William S. Hart and Douglas Fairbanks had waged against the Triangle reissues nearly five decades earlier (see chapter 1). Hart had obtained injunctions in the very same courthouse against distributors who, he alleged, deceived the public and damaged his reputation by circulating the W.H. Productions prints. Fairbanks’s lawsuit over the proposed reediting of his early features into shorts offers an even closer parallel; both he and Stevens combined contract law arguments with rhetorical appeals about the need to protect artists and the integrity of their works. As Peter Decheney notes, Stevens’s case also foreshadowed the artists’ rights campaign that other high-profile directors spearheaded in the 1980s against the colorization of black-and-white films.41 Despite the injunction, NBC broadcast the film with commercials as planned. Stevens sued it for violating the injunction, but the Los Angeles Superior Court judge Richard C. Wells found the defendant not guilty. In a noteworthy memorandum, he wrote, “The main reason why the television version did not violate the injunction was the power and strength of the film. It might be said that the effect of commercial interruptions on a movie is in adverse ratio to the strength or quality of the film. In this case the film

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was so dramatic, strong, exciting, romantic, tragic, interesting and artistic that it prevailed over the commercial interruptions.” It was the ultimate catch-22. If a weak film was cut for television, then it did not really matter, because it was hardly a work of artistic quality. But if a great and artistic film was so cut, then its greatness would surely overcome the limitations of the medium. The logic seemed contradictory, yet Judge Wells was, in a way, articulating a perspective that often circulates in public discourse about popular entertainment. A great film packed with drama, romance, and excitement will hold up across viewing mediums, whether the platform is a movie theater, a television screen, or an iPhone. Judge Wells added that “the average television viewer is thick-skinned about commercials and tends to disassociate them from what goes before and after.”42 That audiences were already conditioned to experiencing movies on TV with commercials, according to Wells’s logic, mitigated the damage that commercial breaks might inflict on a film or a director’s reputation. The judge’s reference to “thick-skinned” viewers received coverage across a number of the nation’s newspapers, including the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Wall Street Journal. These reports emphasized key elements of his decision, especially his opinion that the picture was so good that it prevailed over the commercials.43 Hal Humphrey, the television critic of the Los Angeles Times, pointed out that despite the court’s rhetoric about the “average television viewer,” not a single real viewer had appeared at the trial or been asked about his or her reaction to commercial interruptions. “If viewers haven’t already developed the ‘thick skins’ with which Judge Wells credits them, then they had better do so, or give up watching old movies on TV,” he wrote sardonically.44 Audiences continued watching old movies on TV—with thick skins, perhaps, but certainly with a sense of humor. Since old movies had begun saturating TV in the early 1950s, they had found several reasons for complaint. Commercial interruptions were relatively low on the list compared to the most frequent audience complaint: most movies on TV were too old and simply bad.45 Yet it is also clear that many audience members, sometimes the same ones who complained, found pleasure in watching these “bad” old movies. The same attributes that marked an old movie as bad—dated fashions, stilted dialogue, abundant clichés—were ideal fodder for parody. Television fans in the 1960s could open TV Guide and read any number of humorous send-ups of movie programming. Gerald Gardner and Wright Everett’s recurring segment for the magazine, “Flicker Snickers: Old Movies—New Dialog,” juxtaposed images from old movies with ironic dialog captions, generally alluding to some aspect of television culture. Harry

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Purvis’s “Forgettable Moments from Late Movies” celebrated the worst and most ridiculous in movie dialogue. He skewered old and newer movies alike; his first column, from 1967, included quotes from films produced as early as 1932 and as recently as 1962.46 “The ultimate Camp statement: it’s good because it’s awful,” Susan Sontag wrote in 1964.47 She went on to complicate that statement (and many critics since have attempted to complicate her “Notes on Camp”), but this criterion succinctly describes the ironic sensibility that many viewers brought to the movies playing on the networks and the Late Shows.48 Audiences in the 1920s and 1930s had laughed at the conventions of the past when short compilations of old film footage played in theaters (see chapters 2 and 3). Television served up these flickers from the past in far greater abundance, and they reached an audience even more inclined to watch them with a sense of irony. Still, not all television audiences in the 1950s and 1960s watched old movies because they were bad. In 1966, record numbers watched The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) on ABC because of the high reputation for quality that it had earned. Moreover, television audiences are too complex to label as falling exclusively into any one sensibility—whether it be camp or middle-brow—when it comes to judgments of quality. But if there was one characteristic that unified the various modes of TV spectatorship of old movies in the 1950s and 1960s, I would say that it was an openness to encountering popular culture and film history in their many forms. Critics such as Gould and Humphrey wanted the audience to be more discriminating and not to submit to content of the lowest common denominator. They would have approved of Mrs. Pat Vasey’s 1956 letter to the DOJ and her attempt to improve the movie selection and scheduling process (see chapter 5). However, there were viewers who, in contrast to her, embraced the seeming randomness of the movies that appeared on television. In a July 1957 Associated Press column, an unnamed columnist offered a fannish interpretive strategy for encountering old movies on TV: “Perhaps the best thing about an old movie on television is that you don’t expect much good in it. You suspend hope before you turn it on and so you suspend your faculties. (And, next to your feet, there’s nothing more pleasant to suspend on a Summer evening than your critical faculties.) Thus, whatever good you find in an old movie comes as a pleasant surprise. Whether or not you’ve seen it before doesn’t much matter. In fact, I seldom can remember whether I’ve seen it before.”49 From the standpoint of 1950s and 1960s cultural critics, this proved exactly what was wrong with the American television audience—a willingness to settle for poor entertainment, a suspension of intellectual and critical judgment, a complete amnesia regarding

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what’s come before. Viewed in a different light, though, the column—which also satirizes the hokey conventions of bad movies—represents a remarkably open and adaptive approach to popular media. No, we don’t expect that what we watch will be great, but we’ll give it a try anyway. If it’s good, we can appreciate the movie for its strengths. If it’s bad, we can still laugh and enjoy it. The viewer derives pleasure either way.

the brief triumph and lasting legacy of seven arts By 1964, all of the Hollywood studios had created in-house divisions for distributing films to television, closing their vaults to Seven Arts and other intermediary distributors. Hyman’s company was still enjoying brisk sales on the basis of the more than six hundred post-1948 studio features that it had already licensed, but he knew that he needed to pursue a different strategy for Seven Arts to stay viable. That year also marked the death of Matty Fox, Hyman’s former business partner and chief rival in the 1950s. After selling the pre-1948 RKO library to television stations around the country, Fox had turned his attention almost entirely to Skiatron and pay television (see previous chapter). He had pitched his vision of viewers across the country paying one dollar per baseball game to the owners of the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers, helping persuade both franchises to relocate to the West Coast.50 He met frequently with the Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley, who loaned more than $120,000 to Skiatron TV.51 In fact, many people loaned money to Fox, who pledged stock in the parent company Skiatron Electronics as collateral. When he proved unable to deliver on his pay TV vision and pay back his debts, his lenders attempted to sell the stock, which, it turned out, had never been registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC investigated and discovered additional financial fraud at Skiatron, along with the fact that Fox owed creditors more than three million dollars.52 After this scandal, Fox never fully regained his prominence in the film or television industries, though he continued to promote the development of pay television until, at age fifty-one, he died of a heart attack.53 In 1966, Hyman suffered another loss—Stark’s final resignation from Seven Arts. Truthfully, Stark, who had also walked away from Seven Arts for two years in 1959, had always exhibited only a partial commitment to the firm.54 He was one of the shrewdest and most talented film producers of his era. A born negotiator, he always got the best deal for himself— charging Seven Arts dearly in cash and stock for his services but reserving the right to independently produce some of the best projects.55 In the wake

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of his resignation, the top production duties fell to Hyman’s son Kenneth. He was a capable producer, but he lacked Stark’s experience, effectiveness, and network of connections. In 1967, though, Eliot Hyman finally achieved his vision of using the business of film libraries as an engine to power a full-fledged studio. Just the previous year, the conglomerate Gulf and Western had shocked the Hollywood community with its leveraged buyout of Paramount.56 Similarly, between late 1966 and mid-1967, Hyman successfully leveraged the television revenues and assets of Seven Arts to purchase first Jack Warner’s holdings of Warner Bros. stock and next the controlling stock of the entire Warner Bros. Corporation. Seven Arts paid $178 million to acquire the company, which it renamed Warner Bros.–Seven Arts Ltd.57 Hyman now controlled a studio. Hollywood and Wall Street responded differently to the formation of Warner Bros.–Seven Arts. As Robert Gustafson notes in his essay on Warner Communications Inc. and media conglomeration, the Hollywood community perceived Seven Arts as an outsider.58 However, this had far less to do with the reasons that Gustafson cites—Seven Arts earned its money from television and was technically a Canadian corporation—than with the management team assembled to run Warner Bros.–Seven Arts. The Hollywood community collectively scoffed at the idea that the thirtyeight-year-old Kenneth Hyman, who had produced several independent films in England, could fill the seat that the legendary Jack Warner had occupied.59 If Stark had remained with Seven Arts and assumed the top production duties after the buyout, then the new Warner Bros. would have been run by an insider and perceived as more competitive. Wall Street did not place much more faith than Hollywood in Kenneth Hyman, but it still regarded the Warner Bros.–Seven Arts takeover as a triumph of television distribution and film libraries. Gustafson notes that the increasing amounts that the national networks paid for broadcasting Hollywood features increased “the book value of the film libraries of most motion picture companies . . . to two or three times the market price of their stock. This unequal relationship was widely recognized as a strong lure for attempted takeovers by other organizations.” Equally important, investors regarded the licensing of film libraries to television as a dependable revenue stream—an important factor from the standpoints of paying off the debt from a leveraged buyout, funding a studio’s overhead, and delivering stable quarterly earnings.60 A mere thirteen months after the Warner Bros. acquisition closed, Warner Bros.–Seven Arts itself became a candidate for conglomerate

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takeover. In August 1968, it announced plans to merge with National General Corporation, but the DOJ rejected the merger because of the NGC’s theater holdings and the likelihood that such a vertically integrated firm would violate the Sherman Antitrust Act. Immediately following this decision, in December 1968, two conglomerates announced their respective intentions to acquire Warner Bros.–Seven Arts, prompting a short bidding war. In February 1969, Eliot Hyman and the Warner Bros.–Seven Arts board accepted Kinney National’s offer to acquire the firm in a deal valued at four hundred million dollars.61 Although Kinney National’s core businesses of parking lots and funeral homes positioned it as even more of a Hollywood outsider than Seven Arts, the conglomerate had recently purchased the Ashley Famous Agency and wanted to expand its presence in the entertainment and leisure industries. By appointing the talent agent Ted Ashley as the chairman and CEO of Warner Bros. (which dropped the Seven Arts name), Kinney placed an experienced and effective Hollywood insider at the helm.62 Why did Hyman sell so quickly after acquiring Warner Bros.? We can interpret the action in one of two ways: as an unqualified success or as a success for the shareholders of Warner Bros.–Seven Arts, tinged with failure on the part of Hyman’s management team. Kinney’s takeover was clearly a victory for the Warner Bros.–Seven Arts shareholders. Its $400 million purchase price marked a significant premium over the $254 million in corporate assets that the newly formed Warner Bros.–Seven Arts had reported just eighteen months earlier.63 Hyman, one of largest shareholders, may simply have wanted to flip the corporation for a quick profit. If that was the case, the sale was an unqualified success. In the second scenario, Kinney’s acquisition happened so quickly because of Eliot and Kenneth Hyman’s difficulties in managing a full-fledged studio. Companies that possess an attractive portfolio of assets but weak management are prime targets for corporate takeovers. Viewed in this light, Hyman’s sale of Warner Bros.–Seven Arts still earned substantial profits for him and his fellow owners (unlike in his sale of AAP to United Artists, no Seven Arts shareholder could plausibly accuse him of neglecting his fiduciary duty) yet was also an acknowledgement of his limitations. In the early 1950s, Hyman believed that if he could purchase a film library, then he could use it as the foundation of an entire studio. As the film-to-television distribution marketplace grew more lucrative from the mid-1950s into the 1960s, his belief became a reality. Hyman used library television revenues to build up Seven Arts and acquire Warner Bros. Wall Street came to share his vision of the library as an engine that could power an

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entertainment firm. However, neither it nor Hollywood believed that the Hymans should sit behind the managerial controls of that engine. Warner Bros.’ subsequent history reveals how libraries continued to gain value in the conglomerate era. In the early 1970s, Steven Ross expanded the reach of Warner Communications Inc. (the name selected when Kinney National split its media companies off from the rest of the corporation) by acquiring music, publishing, and cable companies. The cable acquisitions were particularly critical for the conglomerate’s subsequent mergers. Commentators portrayed the 1989 merger of Warner Communications with Time Inc. as a marriage between film and publishing, but as Jennifer Holt has argued, it was the convergence of cable multisystem operators and pay cable services, such as HBO, that really gave the new firm its strength.64 Time Warner’s 1996 acquisition of Turner Broadcasting Systems added more cable systems, more channels, and a tremendous film and television library to the conglomerate. Fittingly, the Turner assets included both the pre-1949 Warner Bros. and pre-1949 RKO libraries, which Ted Turner had acquired when he purchased the MGM library from Kirk Kerkorian (see introduction). Warner Bros., which had owned Hollywood’s largest library of silent films at the dawn of the sound era, entered the new millennium with Hollywood’s largest collection of sound features. Although Hyman and Fox did not manage studio libraries in Hollywood’s post-1970 conglomerate era, the future played out much as they had imagined. Fox was correct that a fortune could be made by showing film libraries on pay television. As the media historian Megan Mullen has pointed out, U.S. cable television stations in the 1980s and 1990s embraced “programrecycling strategies”—relying heavily on content “that had already appeared either on broadcast television or in movie theaters.”65 In the early 2000s, Hollywood movies accounted for most of the programming of numerous basic cable channels, such as TCM and AMC, and premium cable channels, such as HBO, Showtime, and Starz. Hollywood film libraries have also tapped a global market through sales to international satellite and cable systems. Fox’s Skiatron TV was an early model of pay-per-view, which, after decades of serving the entertainment needs primarily of hotel guests and professional wrestling fans, has gained far wider adoption, thanks to the improved user interfaces, content offerings, and time-shifting features of video on demand (VOD). Both Fox and Hyman recognized that libraries could be used as foundations for expanding an entertainment corporation’s reach rather than simply defensively (the MGM strategy of the late 1940s; see chapter 4). The acquisition and exploitation of libraries has been central to the growth in the 1990s and early 2000s of Lionsgate, a young studio

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that earns roughly $250 million annually from its eight-thousand-film library. Containing Terminator 2, the Saw franchise, and scores of exercise videos, Lionsgate’s library provides the studio with a steady source of cash flow and a borrowing base (collateral that banks will lend against).66 Hyman and Fox were intermediaries in specific marketplace contexts. They served as middlemen between producers who owned films and the television stations that needed content. When the owners of RKO and Warner Bros. proved willing to sell their libraries, for both professional and personal reasons, Fox and Hyman seized the opportunity, bringing the first two major Hollywood studio libraries to television. In the 1960s, Hyman turned Seven Arts into such a successful intermediary distributor that it eventually acquired enough assets to purchase a major studio. Yet he and Fox were intermediaries in two additional ways. First, they mediated a transition in the studio system’s uses of film libraries. They modeled the organizational and exploitation strategies that studios employed as they shifted from strategically subordinating reissues in the 1920s and 1930s through using libraries defensively as profit centers in the 1940s and 1950s to finally aggressively harnessing libraries as foundations for cross-media expansion in the 1960s and beyond. Finally, Hyman and Fox mediated a new generation’s access to artistic and cultural history. In a 1968 essay titled “The Late Show as History,” Time editorialized, “Old movies have become America’s National Museum of Pop Art, the biggest repository of cultural artifacts outside the Smithsonian Institution. . . . Ghosts of America’s past, they evoke the naivete, exuberance—and problems of a simpler society.”67 Old movies on television were time machines, transporting viewers to earlier eras, whose aesthetic, moral, and social codes were different from their own. To viewers of The Late Show, the time machine seemed randomly programmed— equally likely, on a given night, to call forth the 1930s, the 1940s, the 1950s, or even a foreign country where, mysteriously, people spoke English through lips that moved out of sync with the words. The programming, however, was far less random than it appeared. The films that were shown came from packages that the studios or intermediary distributors had licensed to stations for a fixed period of time and number of runs. By aggregating and selling blocks of films, distributors forced stations to amortize their purchases by showing the full breadth of licensed material, ranging from great to terrible. Both in the 1960s and today, it is the films themselves that command our attention—moving us, entertaining us, disappointing us, surprising us. But it takes an industry to power the time machine, and only by studying that industry can we understand how and why we encounter certain ghosts of our shared cultural past.

Epilogue

In the decades following the release of studio features to television, film libraries continued to grow in importance. Cable television, domestically and abroad, generated a hungry new group of business buyers. The growth of the VHS and, later, DVD markets allowed mainstream consumers to build libraries of their own by recording programs off the air and purchasing cassettes or discs preloaded with content.1 The studios, in conjunction with the music and publishing industries, successfully lobbied for the redrafting of copyright laws, extending the duration of old and new copyrights and enhancing the value of film libraries.2 Hollywood labor unions demanded compensation as old films reached these new distribution platforms, and film directors went to court to try to protect the integrity of their films against television editing and colorization.3 Ted Turner’s expensive 1986 acquisition of the MGM library and subsequent decision to colorize hundreds of black-and-white films thrust film libraries into the national news. After his impressive feat of recouping his $1.1 billion purchase price, the industry perception became that the diffusion of new technologies would continue to enhance the value of content libraries. Turner’s purchase marked a high-profile moment in a business that had emerged long before the licensing of films to television. The marketplace for film libraries first developed in the mid-1910s, when the star system, feature film, new distribution infrastructures, and copyright law enhanced the value of film negatives. Triangle’s retitling of William S. Hart films turned film libraries into an industry problem, prompting the intervention of the Federal Trade Commission. As the vertically integrated studio system emerged in the early 1920s, the top studios subordinated the reissue of films in order to concentrate on maximizing revenue and market share. The transition to sound changed the value of film libraries: the derivative 195

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became more important than the copy—a fact that, in the late 1930s, influenced Warner Bros.’ decisions about which silent films to save and which to destroy. The post–World War II reissue boom changed the studios’ perception; film libraries became vital profit centers in the midst of industry decline. In the 1950s and 1960s, the television syndicators Matty Fox and Eliot Hyman developed business models for aggressively harnessing film libraries that continue to be relevant today. Tracing the shifting business of film libraries requires studying the full ecology of the media industries. We cannot view the business of film libraries simply as a top-down attempt by copyright holders to exploit old assets. Instead, we need to recognize the existence of a dynamic marketplace of producers, intermediaries, labor, business buyers, and audiences. In each chapter, I have combined a macro description of this dynamic marketplace with case studies that examine its most important participants. Nevertheless, the full history of film libraries prior to 1970 is too rich to fit into any single book. Each chapter contains necessarily succinct descriptions of subjects that could be expanded into lengthy essays—for instance, the circulation of old Hollywood films in Fascist Spain (chapter 3) or the audiences that watched The Late Show (chapters 5 and 6). In writing this history, I have sometimes felt like a public library curator—showcasing the books that I consider most significant to my topic, pointing out others in the stacks that contain treasures of their own. What does the business history of film libraries tell us about our present moment of digital library distribution? I opened Hollywood Vault by suggesting that the architects of the 2004 leveraged buyout of MGM, which resulted in bankruptcy six years later, could have benefited from studying this history. As this book has shown, the simple combination of a film library and technology cannot guarantee a profitable outcome. Success depends on both a focused strategy and continual adaptation to a dynamic marketplace. Even Matty Fox, one of the visionaries of the library business, misstepped by overpaying for Castle Films. As the chairman of Universal’s 16mm subsidiary United World, he mistakenly assumed that the growth of the 16mm market would enable the fast recoupment of Castle’s acquisition cost. Similarly, the MGM consortium assumed that the growth of DVD and new home video revenue steams would—in Fox’s words—“pay for this cow out of its milk.”4 The consortium also failed to understand that desirable new productions are essential for libraries to stay competitive in mature markets, such as television. Contemporary film libraries still earn the bulk of their revenues not from video or DVD but from being licensed as TV packages to broadcasters

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worldwide.5 Studios need fresh titles to drive these package sales and gain leverage in negotiations with television broadcasters. Hyman borrowed heavily to finance the acquisition of libraries, but he profited by serving the needs of business buyers (television stations) and using the libraries’ assets to acquire and produce new films, ensuring that the television distribution side of his companies always obtained fresh, high-quality product. In contrast, MGM’s owners allowed the studio’s production, acquisitions, and theatrical distribution sides to stall. Fame (2009) and Hot Tub Time Machine (2010) were the only movies that it released in those years. Despite their modest budgets, both films were box office disappointments, but even if they had been hits, two movies over two years could hardly justify the high overhead costs that MGM was incurring from a theatrical distribution division as well as production and legal departments staffed at levels appropriate for a far more active studio. In 2007 and 2008, its library brought in a cash flow of more than five hundred million dollars, enough to cover its annual threehundred-million-dollar interest payments and overhead, even if it didn’t leave much funding for new productions.6 In 2009 and 2010, however, its annual library revenues plunged as low as $228 million. MGM was no longer able to service its debt payments. Time Warner, News Corp., and Lionsgate all considered acquiring the financially distressed studio, but none made a bid acceptable to MGM’s creditors. In late 2010, the studio once known for having “more stars than there are in the heavens” filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.7 As I conclude this book in early 2014, the leadership of postbankruptcy MGM is steering a more effective course. As part of its prepackaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Gary Barber and Roger Birnbaum, who cofounded the film financing and production company Spyglass, took over management duties. In 2012, Barber became the sole CEO of MGM and Birnbaum shifted to producing and developing projects for the studio. They have reduced the studio’s staff size by a third, eliminated the theatrical distribution division, and relocated to less expensive office space. They still believe that MGM’s library can provide the engine to power the studio, but unlike their predecessors, they are using it like Hyman did. The studio is cofinancing large films, such as the Hobbit trilogy (2012–14) and the James Bond picture Skyfall (2012), in arrangements that limit its box office risk (and reward) but ensure a supply of desirable new films for television distribution. Birnbaum and MGM’s other production executives are also developing a number of library properties into derivatives, such as remakes of Death Wish (1974), Poltergeist (1982), RoboCop (1983), and WarGames (1983) and television series based on The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Fargo (1996).8

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MGM is hardly unique in embracing the derivative uses of the library. The production of derivatives is ubiquitous in contemporary Hollywood, reaching a scale comparable only to that of the early sound era. From 2005 to 2014, global multiplexes have been filled with Hollywood sequels, remakes, and “reboots”—a term used to describe a film that is not simply a remake or a sequel but the launch of an entire franchise based on an existing library property. Warner Bros.’ enormous success in rebooting Batman, for instance, has led to an entire family of derivatives—beginning with the film Batman Begins (2005) and growing to two more features, The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012), the best-selling Arkham video games, and enhanced sales of comic books, animated series, toys, and other licensed merchandise. Reboots appeal to risk-averse studio executives because they are easy to market (the audience is already aware of the brand) and can be more profitable than a sequel. Sony, for example, realized cost savings and financial upside by rebooting its flagship superhero franchise with The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) just a few years after producing Spider-Man 3 (2007), a sequel whose budget ballooned to $258 million and whose featured actors and director had back-end deals that decreased its profitability.9 Even before Barber and Birnbaum reached MGM, the studio had joined the reboot bandwagon—producing the new version of Fame, initiating the reboot of Red Dawn (2012), and developing numerous derivative projects that never reached the screen.10 What distinguishes Barber and Birnbaum’s MGM from that of their predecessors, however, is its clear focus on worldwide television distribution as “the core of [its] business.”11 Like Hyman, they understand that securing the television rights to desirable new content is essential for selling packages of older content at an advantageous price. Unlike Hyman, however, the new MGM focuses on the global television marketplace rather than the domestic marketplace. Moreover, the very term television marketplace has expanded to now encompass—besides TV stations and networks—cable, satellite, pay television, video on demand (VOD), and subscription video on demand (SVOD). In 2012, the Wall Street investment bank J. P. Morgan expressed its confidence in the new MGM business model by refinancing five hundred million dollars of the studio’s debt.12 One year later, MGM delighted its investors and creditors by more than doubling its first-quarter earnings.13 In all fairness, the failed MGM was partly a victim of bad marketplace timing. The consortium forecast future DVD revenues based on what turned out to be the height of consumer DVD spending. Several hedge funds agreed in 2004 and 2005 to cofinance slates of theatrical feature films

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based on similar revenue projections and left Hollywood similarly disappointed. The global recession of 2008 reduced MGM’s refinancing opportunities and tightened the credit available to other studios that might have otherwise acquired it. Interestingly, as consumer spending on home videodiscs has declined over the past decade, sales of library titles have proved more stable than sales of new releases. Whereas library, or “catalog,” films accounted for only 34 percent of disc sale revenue in 2004, they accounted for 44 percent of DVD and Blu-ray revenue in 2012. The library disc business has become bifurcated between high-end and low-end sales. Some consumers will pay $39.99 for the Blu-ray Collector’s Edition Box Set of MGM’s West Side Story (1961); others make the $6.99 impulse purchase of MGM’s GoldenEye (1995) when passing the cardboard display of discounted DVDs on the way to the Target checkout counter. Both types of sale help the bottom line of the contemporary studios.14 If consumers continue to value the physical collecting of old movies, then disc-based media will remain with us for some time to come. In another stroke of bad timing for the consortium that purchased MGM, the market for licensing libraries to SVOD and streaming services increased significantly in 2011, the year after the studio filed for bankruptcy. Improvements to U.S. internet infrastructure, especially increased bandwidth capacity and enhanced systems for video playback and buffering, enabled the rapid growth of SVOD. More important, the leading SVOD services took Hollywood by surprise by pursuing aggressive expansion strategies—attracting subscribers by investing heavily in exclusive content licensing deals. In the words of Variety, a “cyber-bidding war” formed as SVOD services, such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, and traditional pay TV services, such as HBO and Starz, all competed for the licensing rights to highly desirable studio content.15 But if the MGM consortium suffered from bad timing, then the investors who purchased Miramax for $660 million in July 2010 were perfectly positioned for the expansion of SVOD. Indeed, Miramax’s new owners quickly began licensing its library of films, which includes Pulp Fiction (1994), Good Will Hunting (1997), and Cold Mountain (2003), to SVOD services such as Netflix, Hulu, and Brazil’s NetMovies.16 The growth and transformation of SVOD—and Netflix in particular— resembles the maturation of the movies-to-television market in the 1950s and 1960s. In 2008, Netflix InstantWatch was the service where you were sure to find thousands of movies that no American cable channel station wanted (along with a small number of recent Hollywood movies, thanks to its deal with Starz). Foreign-language films, documentaries, and forgettable

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1980s movies were available for instant viewing because cable channels had not licensed them. Instead, cable buyers had already purchased exclusive licenses to show more-desirable studio films. Netflix’s buying patterns resembled those of a Milwaukee television station in the mid-1950s—it sought libraries of popular content but was willing to accept old, foreign, or less-demanded content for the right price and if the package included a few premium titles. Between 2010 and 2013, however, these patterns shifted significantly. Netflix has moved away from the indiscriminate bulk buying and nonexclusive licensing of content libraries. Instead, it has embraced a model premised on exclusivity and selectivity, like that of NBC or CBS with motion pictures in the 1960s.17 Netflix’s willingness to pay a premium for the right film or television content was evident in its 2012 motion picture licensing deal with Disney, valued at three billion dollars. This agreement, which gives Netflix the pay television window for new Disney films and streaming rights to highly valued library titles beginning in 2016, received far less press attention than either the company’s launch of original television series, such as House of Cards, or its clumsy 2011 severing of streaming and DVD rental services.18 As a company that primarily licenses rather than produces content, Netflix has more riding on the Disney deal than on House of Cards. And while its appetite for serialized television dramas, such as Mad Men and Breaking Bad, has been widely noted, the Disney deal is a reminder of the importance of motion pictures to its model. In 2013, Netflix cemented its strategy of selective buying by choosing not to renew some of its bulk library package deals. As a result, it removed roughly eighteen hundred older films, prompting complaints in the blogosphere about “Streamageddon” and “disappearing Netflix queues.”19 The disappearing queues are an important reminder that Netflix is not and never will be the “celestial jukebox,” the one-stop destination where users can call up any film or television show from the past.20 Instead, we should recognize that it and other SVOD services are revolving collections of licensing agreements. We can enjoy the service that they offer—I know that I certainly do. We should not, however, expect completeness or permanency. For better or worse, the digital marketplace for content libraries resembles that of television much more than of home video—in other words, oriented toward package sales to business buyers and intermediary distributors rather than the wholesale of products to retailers, which then sell the products to individual consumers.21 The Hollywood studios are not happy about this arrangement. The increase in SVOD licensing fees does

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not compensate for declining disc sales to consumers (a business known in the industry as sell-through and beloved for its high profit margins). Thus far, the studios have been unsuccessful at replicating DVD and Blu-ray sellthrough in the digital marketplace in any meaningful way. Their initial attempts to cultivate an electronic sell-through (EST) market failed because of the poor user experience, high price point (particularly compared to a VOD rental), and lack of interoperability (a movie purchased and downloaded from the PlayStation store could not be watched on an iPad, Xbox, or Roku).22 In response to the initial failure of EST and in an effort to reclaim home video’s profitability, the studios have placed much of their hopes in the development of UltraViolet, a digital locker that offers content owners strong rights management protections and consumers the ability to purchase digital copies of movies that they can access on multiple devices. The system is backed by a consortium of seventy-five technology companies, retailers, and content owners (including all of the major studios with the exception of Disney, which has developed its own digital locker system).23 When UltraViolet publicly launched, in the fall of 2011, journalists and audiences panned it. Users complained about access codes that didn’t work, confusion about what gadgets could play purchased content, and the tiny selection of films. Two years later, many more films are available and most of the technological glitches have been ironed out. Yet on a fundamental level, it remains doubtful that audiences will take to buying and collecting digital versions of movies in the manner that they have embraced DVDs. One of the UltraViolet consortium’s attempts to improve the user experience and habituate users to digital ownership has been to refer audiences to Walmart. You can bring DVDs that you already own to one of its stores, which will check and see if they are part of the UltraViolet system. If they are, then Walmart will grant you access to stream or download those titles—for a fee.24 People walking through a Walmart parking lot, half a dozen DVDs clasped under their arms, and then passing through the entrance doors—it’s an image I cannot get out of my head. If UltraViolet and Walmart’s plan works, then the spectacle will look like a security monitor rewinding footage from a Saturday afternoon in 2002 when customers exited Walmart, Best Buy, and Target having just purchased DVDs of a couple of discounted new Hollywood releases and older titles. So many of our encounters with film libraries are attempts to materialize the ephemeral, to bring back emotions and memories through something that we watched years ago. The transaction at the Walmart electronics counter, on the other hand, exchanges

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the material for the ephemeral, trading a disc for access to digital files that will probably become obsolete even sooner than DVDs become unplayable. The Walmart transaction and the disappearance of the Netflix queue are like the story of film libraries more broadly. They occur at the juncture between the personal and the aggregate. Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, is famous for driving down prices by leveraging its purchasing power and dictating terms to suppliers. When a customer walks into Walmart to add a film to her digital locker, she has a personal history with the DVD she carries. The personal history extends, most likely, both to the film and to the physical disc that it is etched on. To receive a DVD as a gift, to purchase a box set that, years later, you realize you have never watched— these are personal acts. But in the aggregate, personal actions carry significant economic weight: producing profit centers for media conglomerates, creating opportunities and risks for other marketplace participants, and influencing the future means by which audiences will again access Hollywood’s libraries.

Notes

abbreviations AMPAS LASC NARA-CP NARA-NY NARA-R NYCC SCWHR USC SCA WBA WCFTR WHS

Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles Los Angeles County Superior Court Record Center National Archives Records Administration, College Park, Maryland National Archives Records Administration, New York City National Archives Records Administration, Riverside, California New York County Clerk Records Center Seaver Center for Western History Research, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History School of Cinematic Arts Library Special Collections, University of Southern California Warner Bros. Archives, University of Southern California Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin–Madison Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison

introduction 1. William M. Kunz, Culture Conglomerates: Consolidation in the Motion Picture and Television Industries (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 47; Comcast, “Consortium Led by Sony Corporation of America . . .,” press release, September 23, 2004, www.comcast.com/About/PressRelease /PressReleaseDetail.ashx?PRID=193 (accessed October 29, 2009).

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2. Richard Natale and James Walsh, “Unscathed?” California Business, November 1987, 40. 3. Mark Landler, “Turner to Merge into Time Warner; a $7.5 Billion Deal,” New York Times, September 23, 1995, www.nytimes.com/1995/09/23/us /turner-to-merge-into-time-warner-a-7.5-billion-deal.html (accessed February 13, 2012). 4. Claudia Eller, “MGM Passes Audit, Says It’s in ‘Full Compliance’ with Debt Requirements,” Los Angeles Times, July 16, 2009, http://articles.latimes .com/2009/jul/16/business/fi-ct-mgm16 (accessed October 20, 2009). 5. This introduction contains excerpts previously published in “The Future of Selling the Past: Studio Libraries in the 21st Century,” Jump Cut 52 (Summer 2010), www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc52.2010/hoytStudioLibraries/index.html, which discusses in more depth the early twenty-first-century business of exploiting content libraries. 6. Edward Jay Epstein, “Hollywood’s Real Money Machine,” Wall Street Journal, March 4, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB200014240527 48703807904575097193237682422 (accessed February 7, 2012). 7. Edward Jay Epstein, “Hollywood’s Profits, Demystified,” Slate, August 8, 2005, www.slate.com/id/2124078/ (accessed February 7, 2012). 8. Eller, “MGM Passes Audit.” 9. Mike Spector and Lauren A. E. Schuker, “Auction Alone Unlikely to Resolve MGM Woes,” Wall Street Journal, January 22, 2010, B3; Spector and Schuker, “MGM Debt Drama Nears a Climax,” Wall Street Journal, October 28, 2010, A1; Ben Fritz and Claudia Eller, “MGM, in Deal, Files for Chap. 11,” Los Angeles Times, November 4, 2010, B1; Erica Orden, “For MGM, a Tighter Focus,” Wall Street Journal, December 27, 2011, B1. 10. Kerry Segrave, Movies at Home: How Hollywood Came to Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999), 72–73. 11. Anne Morey, “Early Art Cinema in the U.S.: Symon Gould and the Little Cinema Movement of the 1920s,” in Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of the Cinema, edited by Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes, and Robert C. Allen (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2008), 245. 12. E.g., Marc Graser, “Film Library Values Get a Rethink,” Variety, February 15, 2010, 6, 13; Graser, “Vault in Their Wounds,” Variety, April 12, 2010, 1; Hoyt, “Future of Selling the Past.” 13. Christopher Anderson, Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994); Tino Balio, United Artists: The Company Built by the Stars (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976); Balio, ed., Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993); William Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992); Gomery, The

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Coming of Sound: A History (New York: Routledge, 2005); Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System: A History (London: British Film Institute, 2005); Michele Hilmes, Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); Jennifer Holt, Empires of Entertainment: Media Industries and the Politics of Deregulation, 1980–1996 (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011); Richard B. Jewell, The Golden Age of Cinema: Hollywood, 1929–1945 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007); Tom Kemper, Hidden Talent: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Derek Kompare, Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television (New York: Routledge, 2005); David Pierce, “The Legion of the Condemned—Why American Silent Films Perished,” Film History 9, no. 1 (1997): 5–22; Pierce, “‘Senile Celluloid’: Independent Exhibitors, the Major Studios and the Fight over Feature Films on Television, 1939–1956,” Film History 10, no. 2 (1998): 141–164; Alexander Russo, Points on the Dial: Golden Age Radio beyond the Networks (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: The American Cinema in the 1940s (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1997). 14. Peter Decherney, Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); William M. Drew, The Last Silent Picture Show: Silent Films on American Screens in the 1930s (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2010); Caroline Frick, Saving Cinema: The Politics of Preservation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Jennifer Horne, “Nostalgia and Non-fiction in Edison’s 1917 Conquest Program,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 22, no. 3 (2002): 315–31; Horne, “A History Long Overdue: The Public Library and Motion Pictures,” in Useful Cinema, ed. Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2011); Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Dana Polan, Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Anthony Slide, Before Video: A History of the Non-theatrical Film (New York: Greenwood, 1992); Slide, Nitrate Won’t Wait: A History of Film Preservation in the United States (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000); Eric Smoodin, Regarding Frank Capra: Audience, Celebrity, and American Film Studies, 1930–1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2004); Alison Trope, Stardust Monuments: The Saving and Selling of Hollywood (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2012); Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 15. Michael E. Porter, Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors (New York: Free Press, 1980), 3, 6. 16. Richard E. Caves, Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 269–362. 17. Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson, eds., Useful Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2011) and Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible, eds., Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) are two recent

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anthologies that feature fascinating essays about nontheatrical circulation. They primarily address educational and sponsored films but also give some attention to the role of Hollywood and Hollywood films. 18. To read the entire section of U.S. copyright law on “exclusive rights in copyrighted works,” see U.S. Code 17, § 106, www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1. html#106 (accessed February 5, 2014). 19. Dan Renberg, “The Money of Color: Film Colorization and the 100th Congress,” Hastings Communications and Entertainment Law Journal 11 (1989): 397–404. 20. Richard Blakesley, “Good Old Movies View like New!” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 14, 1957, C7. 21. “Conference on Reissues,” Screen Writer 3, no. 3 (August 1947): 42.

1. the triangle frauds and the birth of the film library 1. William C. McIntyre (Rose Theatre, Fayetteville, NC) to William S. Hart, December 9, 1920, GC 1012, box 113, folder 12, SCWHR. 2. “System Sought to Control Reissues: Producers Canvass Possibility of Agreement to Prevent ‘Sniping,’ ” Variety, May 19, 1922, 44. 3. William S. Hart advertisement, Exhibitor’s Trade Review, November 27, 1920, 5. 4. In August 1917, Motion Picture News reported that Germany’s demand for junk films to manufacture explosives sent the standard price of eighteen or twenty-two cents per pound up to as much as forty-two cents per pound. “Germany Buying Junk Films for Explosives—Irwin,” Motion Picture News, August 4, 1917, 869; “Government Stops Germany’s Film Shipments,” Motion Picture News, August 11, 1917, 970. 5. In 1921, the accountant Max E. Prager felt “fairly certain that the cost of a picture should be depreciated within a period of twelve months from the date of its first public presentation. If the picture is a failure the cost should be depreciated in a shorter period.” Prager, “Some Accounting Problems of the Motion Picture Industry,” Administration: The Journal of Business Analysis and Control 2, no. 1 (July 1921): 70–73. A similar depreciation schedule was advocated five years earlier in F. W. Thornton, Memorandum on Moving Picture Accounts, July 10, 1916 (New York: Price Waterhouse, 1916), 7. 6. Caroline Frick, Saving Cinema: The Politics of Preservation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 64–65. 7. Thornton, Memorandum on Moving Picture Accounts, 7. Raymond Fielding discusses this accounting book in depth in “Accounting Practices in the Early American Motion Picture Industry,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 12, no. 2 (1992): 115. 8. Jane M. Gaines, “Early Cinema’s Heyday of Copying: The Too Many Copies of L’Arroseur Arrosé (The Waterer Watered),” Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2006): 227.

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9. Peter Decherney, “Copyright Dupes: Piracy and New Media in Edison v. Lubin (1903),” Film History 19, no. 2 (2007): 109. 10. Edison v. Lubin, 122 F. 240 (3rd Cir. 1903); see also ibid., 120. 11. Raymond Fielding, introduction to Motion Pictures from the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection 1894–1912, by Kemp R. Niver (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), xiii–xvi; Anthony Slide, Nitrate Won’t Wait: A History of Film Preservation in the United States (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000), 36–44. 12. Peter Decherney, Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 44. 13. Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 99–102. 14. Kalem Company v. Harper Brothers, 222 U.S. 55, 61 (U.S. 1911). See also Decherney, Hollywood’s Copyright Wars, 45–57. 15. Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915 (New York: Scribner, 1990), 106–19; Paul McDonald, The Star System: Hollywood’s Production of Popular Identities (London: Wallflower, 2000), 15–37. 16. The early histories of motion pictures paint the MPPC as a villainous, slow-moving octopus, dislodged through the ingenuity of independent producers who founded many of the studios we still know today. More recently, film historians have challenged that narrative, demonstrating that the reasons for the MPPC’s emergence and fast decline were more complex. For recent scholarly interventions on the MPPC, see especially Robert Anderson, “The Motion Picture Patents Company: A Reevaluation,” in The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio, rev. ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 133–52; Scott Curtis, “A House Divided: The MPPC in Transition,” in American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices, ed. Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 239–64; Michael Quinn, “Early Feature Distribution and the Development of the Motion Picture Industry: Famous Players and Paramount: 1912–1921” (PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1998). 17. Curtis, “A House Divided,” 242. 18. Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 22. 19. Anderson, “Motion Picture Patents Company,” 144. 20. Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 33; Anderson, “Motion Picture Patents Company,” 146. 21. Quinn, “Early Feature Distribution,” 71. 22. Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 28, 33. 23. For a recent discussion of this practice, see Toby Miller, Television Studies: The Basics (New York: Routledge, 2010), 94. 24. Curtis, “A House Divided,” 252. 25. Michael Quinn, “Distribution, the Transient Audience, and the Transition to the Feature Film,” Cinema Journal 40, no. 2 (January 1, 2001): 37–38.

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26. “Jean of the Jail,” Kalem Kalendar, May 1915, 24; “The Bell of Penance,” Kalem Kalendar, June 1915, 7; “The Suffragette Sheriff,” Kalem Kalendar, July 1915, 3. 27. “Reissues Are Popular,” Variety, August 18, 1916, 20. 28. Jennifer Horne, “Nostalgia and Non-fiction in Edison’s 1917 Conquest Program,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 22, no. 3 (2002): 321–22. See also Jennifer Peterson, “Glimpses of Animal Life: Nature Films and the Emergence of Classroom Cinema,” in Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States, ed. Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 145–48. Peterson discusses Kleine and Edison’s largely unsuccessful efforts to market “Conquest Pictures” on 35mm film. 29. “Biograph Reissues Equal to Present Day Films,” Motion Picture News, May 29, 1915, 41. 30. For more on the film’s circulation and legacy, see Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”: A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 31. There are no available primary documents concerning Aitken’s ouster from Mutual. However, Kalton C. Lahue has offered a highly plausible explanation. According to him, Aitken alienated John R. Freuler and other Mutual producers by giving preferential distribution treatment to productions from his own companies. See Dreams for Sale: The Rise and Fall of the Triangle Film Corporation (South Brunswick, NJ: A. S. Barnes, 1971), 22–25. 32. Ibid., 19–31. 33. Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915–1928 (New York: Scribner, 1990), 64–69. 34. Ibid., 68. 35. Rob King, The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 155–57. 36. “The Triangle? I know very little about it for I have only made two pictures and they have been my own,” Griffith told the Los Angeles Examiner more than a year into the firm’s existence. Los Angeles Examiner, October 5, 1916, quoted in “Papers on Appeal from Order Denying Motion for Temporary Injunction,” Douglas Fairbanks v. Hyman Winik, January 19, 1923, 56, New York County Supreme Court, Index no. 31686–1922, NYCC. 37. Tino Balio, United Artists: The Company Built by the Stars (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 18–21. 38. Ibid., 20. 39. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 129–41. 40. William Grossman provides a lengthy history of Hart’s relationship with Ince in his letter to Henry Wetherhorn, “Hart ads. Reed,” August 29, 1919,

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GC 1012, box 113, folder 11, SCWHR. See also Koszarski, Evening’s Entertainment, 279–81. 41. H. A. Spanuth (president, Commonwealth Pictures, Chicago) to Wm. S. Hart, March 2, 1917, GC 1012, box 113, folder 1, SCWHR. 42. William Grossman to Henry Wetherhorn, “Hart ads. Reed,” August 29, 1919, GC 1012, box 113, folder 11, SCWHR; Koszarski, Evening’s Entertainment, 279–81. 43. William S. Hart, telegram to Thomas H. Ince, June 15, 1917, GC 1012, box 113, folder 2, SCWHR; William Grossman to Hart, June 22, 1917, GC 1012, box 115, folder 55, SCWHR; “Synopsis of William S. Hart Company Contract with Famous Players, Dated July 17, 1919,” GC 1012, box 114, folder 28, SCWHR. 44. “The Good Ones Never Die” (Triangle advertisement), Moving Picture World, December 1, 1917, 1267. 45. Lahue, Dreams for Sale, 154–61. 46. Agreement between Triangle Film Corporation, Triangle Distributing Corporation, and S. A. Lynch, September 10, 1917, 10–11, Aitken Collection, box 15, WHS. 47. Agreement between Triangle Film Corporation, Triangle Distributing Corporation, and S. A. Lynch, November 19, 1917, Aitken Collection, box 15, WHS. 48. “Memorandum Re: Hart—Fairbanks—Keenan & Talmadge Pictures,” ca. 1918, Aitken Collection, box 17, WHS. 49. “Trade Commission Closes Case in Reissue Investigation,” Variety, April 4, 1919, 73; FTC v. Joseph Simmonds, stenographer’s minutes, February 29, 1919, 65–66, Docket no. 210, FTC Docketed Case Files, RG 122, box 96, NARA-CP. 50. FTC v. Joseph Simmonds, stenographer’s minutes, February 29, 1919, 200, Docket no. 210, FTC Docketed Case Files, RG 122, box 96, NARA-CP. 51. Ibid., 200–202. 52. The purchase price was listed as eighty dollars per reel. “To States Rights Buyers” (W.H Productions advertisement), Moving Picture World, December 29, 1917, 1891. 53. Lahue, Dreams for Sale, 175. 54. “For the Welfare of the Industry” (W.H. Productions advertisement), Motion Picture News, December 1, 1917, 3764. 55. “Hart Officials Complain of Film Pirates,” Motion Picture News, December 1, 1917, 3843. 56. The Moving Picture World aggregated the editorials of the different trade papers in “Retitled Re-issues: The Trade Press Has Its Say on a Dangerous Practice,” July 20, 1918, 294–96. 57. Marc Winerman, “The Origins of the FTC: Concentration, Cooperation, Control and Competition,” Antitrust Law Journal 71, no. 1 (2003): 91. 58. “The Ordeal” (1914), AFI Catalog of Feature Films, www.afi.com /members/catalog/DetailView.aspx?s=&Movie=13615. Royal’s acquisition of the

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Ordeal negative and some of the changes to the film are also described in FTC v. the Royal Cinema Corp., Mothers of Liberty Pictures Company, and Monopole Pictures Company, stenographer’s minutes, September 3, 1919, 8, Docket no. 208, FTC Auxiliary Case Files, RG 122, box 94, NARA-CP. 59. FTC v. the Royal Cinema Corp., Mothers of Liberty Pictures Company, and Monopole Pictures Company, stenographer’s minutes, September 3, 1919, 11, 16, 22, Docket no. 208, FTC Auxiliary Case Files, RG 122, box 94, NARA-CP. 60. FTC v. the Royal Cinema Corp., Mothers of Liberty Pictures Company, and Monopole Pictures Company, complaint, October 30, 1918, Docket no. 208, FTC Docketed Case Files, RG 122, box 96, NARA-CP. 61. “Trade Commission Closes Case in Reissue Investigation,” Variety, April 4, 1919, 73. 62. FTC v. Joseph Simmonds, stenographer’s minutes, June 18, 1919, 44–45, Docket no. 210, FTC Docketed Case Files, RG 122, box 96, NARA-CP. 63. Ibid., 14. 64. Ibid., 301. 65. Ibid., 311. 66. FTC v. Lasso Pictures Corp., “Order to Cease and Desist,” March 26, 1919, Docket no. 222, FTC Auxiliary Case Files, RG 122, box 106, NARA-CP. 67. FTC v. Joseph Simmonds, stenographer’s minutes, June 18, 1919, 332, Docket no. 210, FTC Docketed Case Files, RG 122, box 96, NARA-CP. 68. Sears, Roebuck & Co. v. FTC, 258 F. 307, 311 (7th Cir. 1919). The FTC attorney Hawkins cited Judge Baker’s recent decision in Sears, Roebuck when he argued against W.H. Productions’ defense. FTC v. Joseph Simmonds, stenographer’s minutes, June 18, 1919, 321, Docket no. 210, FTC Docketed Case Files, RG 122, box 96, NARA-CP. 69. Ben Singer, “Feature Films, Variety Programs, and the Crisis of the Small Exhibitor,” in American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices, ed. Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 89. 70. Snipers were, by and large, small theaters, but there were exceptions. Whether because distributors denied them top-tier product or because they simply wanted to economize on rental costs, large theaters occasionally booked retitled Hart films. 71. Singer, “Feature Films, Variety Programs,” 94. 72. John Joseph Phelan, Motion Pictures as a Phase of Commercial Amusement in Toledo, Ohio (Toledo: Little Book Press, 1919), 236–37, available at www.archive.org/details/motionpicturesa00phelgoog (accessed January 21, 2011). 73. “Empress,” Toledo Blade, June 29, 1918. 74. “Park Theater,” New Haven Register, August 9, 1918; “The Plaza,” San Diego Union, May 9, 1918. 75. Fortunately, several film historians have stepped up to the job. For studies of audiences in the silent era specifically, see Kathryn H. Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture

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(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001); Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 76. I examined all three boxes in the Hart collection that are catalogued as containing fan letters: 7, 10, and 70, GC 1012, SCWHR. 77. Elizabeth Chadwick to William S. Hart, May 18, 1917, GC 1012, box 70, folder 5, SCWHR. 78. Birdie De Veer to William S. Hart, May 13, 1917, GC 1012, box 70, folder 2, SCWHR. 79. Gaylord Davidson to William S. Hart, August 12, 1919, GC 1012, box 70, folder 2, SCWHR. 80. The Super-Pictures Attractions states rights license is recorded in “Memorandum Re: Hart—Fairbanks—Keenan & Talmadge Pictures,” ca. 1918, Aitken Collection, box 16, WHS. 81. Thomas Coppell to William S. Hart, December 18, 1919, GC 1012, box 70, folder 2, SCWHR. 82. Hyman Winik, receipt of delivery for five negatives from New York Motion Picture Company, September 29, 1917, Aitken Collection, box 15, WHS; “Memorandum: Mr Selisberg,” October 25, 1917, Aitken Collection, box 15, WHS; Selisberg (legal) to Fetherston (accounting), “Subject: Western Import Company Payments,” December 6, 1917, Aitken Collection, box 16, WHS. 83. From a sample contract that W.H Productions submitted to the FTC examiner, we know that it sold three of the longer Hart negatives to the states rights distributor of Wisconsin for $3,500. Specifically, the Wisconsin Film Corporation paid $1,250 each for the two five-reelers and $1,000 for one fourreeler, indicating a per-reel price of $250. The population of Wisconsin in 1920 was roughly 2.6 million people, putting it in the lower-populated half of U.S. territories that we know contracted with W.H. Productions. The $250 per-reel price therefore serves as a basis for a conservative estimate. How many reels did each territory obtain? Seventeen two-reelers makes thirty-four reels, plus twofive reelers makes forty-four, plus one four-reeler puts us at forty-eight, and finally, the five-reel composite film Staking His Life gets us to a total of fiftythree reels. Fifty-three reels at $250 each amounts to $13,250, just for the state of Wisconsin. If we then multiply this across the twenty-four states rights distributors that we know contracted with W.H. Productions—and there may have been others—we arrive at an estimated total haul of $318,000, a spectacular return on investment for Western Import’s $16,000 plus whatever sum it paid for the other six negatives. During the same time in fall 1917, Western Import paid Triangle twelve thousand dollars for twenty-five Keystone one-reel negatives, which undoubtedly enriched the Aitkens even further. Sources: agreement between W.H. Productions Company and Wisconsin Film Corporation, December 10, 1917, entered into evidence and recorded in FTC v. Joseph Simmonds, stenographer’s minutes, February 29, 1919, 235–39, Docket no. 210,

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FTC Docketed Case Files, RG 122, box 96, NARA-CP; Wisconsin population listed in U.S. Government Census, “Statistical Abstract of the United States (1921),” http://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/1921–02.pdf (accessed March 18, 2011); payments about the Keystone one-reelers in the letter from Selisberg (legal) to Fetherston (accounting), “Subject: Western Import Company Payments,” December 6, 1917, Aitken Collection, box 16, WHS. 84. “Triangle Benefits $1,375,000 by Settlement of Lawsuits,” Variety, July 7, 1922, 63. 85. The Aitken Collection includes documents on Western Import letterhead that list Roy Aitken as president, contracts that Roy signed on behalf of Western Import, and agreements that transferred assets from Triangle to Western Import at artificially low prices. 86. Lahue, Dreams for Sale, 201–3. 87. Barrie A. Wigmore, The Crash and Its Aftermath: A History of Securities Markets in the United States, 1929–1933 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985), 336. 88. The shareholders claimed two other instances of underselling, alleging that Mabel Normand’s feature Mickey was worth $500,000 domestically and abroad, compared to the $175,000 that Triangle had received from Western Import, and that Western Import had paid one million dollars below fair market prices for the foreign rights of hundreds of new Triangle productions. Triangle v. Aitken, complaint, February 27, 1921, New York County Supreme Court, Index no. 3141–921 (note: the case extends into files 3142–921 and 3143–921), NYCC.

2. side business 1. “Pictures and People,” Motion Picture News, March 31, 1923, 1536. 2. “Selznick Reissues Promise War in Film Rental,” Variety, January 28, 1921, 47. 3. Paul Goldstein, Copyright’s Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox, rev. ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 31–40; Mark Rose, “The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Becket and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship,” Representations 23 (Summer 1988): 53. 4. Publisher’s Circular, June 19, 1897, 725, quoted in Richard D. Altick, “From Aldine to Everyman: Cheap Reprint Series of the English Classics 1830– 1906,” Studies in Bibliography 11 (1958): 3. 5. O. H. Cheney, Economic Survey of the Book Industry: 1930–1931 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1949), 89. 6. My analysis of how these industries organized themselves is deeply influenced by two books: Richard E. Caves, Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Michael E. Porter, Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors (New York: Free Press, 1980).

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7. Haidee Wasson, “Electric Homes! Automatic Movies! Efficient Entertainment!: 16mm and Cinema’s Domestication in the 1920s,” Cinema Journal 48, no. 4 (Summer 2009): 21. 8. Cheney, Economic Survey, 84. 9. Michael J. Quinn, “Paramount and Early Feature Distribution: 1914– 1921,” Film History 11, no. 1 (January 1, 1999): 100–101. 10. Ibid. 11. Bernard F. Dick, Engulfed: The Death of Paramount Pictures and the Birth of Corporate Hollywood (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 11, 19. 12. Quinn, “Paramount and Early Feature Distribution,” 102–4. 13. “Estimate Famous Players Saleable Assets at $19,000,000,” Variety, October 8, 1920, 1. 14. T.M.C., “Lack of Real Features Threatens to Bring Crisis in the Movie World,” Baltimore Sun, April 30, 1922, MS9. For an example of how this trend continued into the 1930s, see “Pic Shortage Acute,” Daily Variety, May 15, 1935, 1, 4. 15. “F.P.-L. Schedules 20 Reissues for Summer,” Variety, May 21, 1924, 28. 16. “Valentino Re-issues,” Variety, September 1, 1926, 4. 17. Lt. Joseph O’Reilly to Triangle Distributing Corp., November 10, 1919, Aitken Collection, box 20, WHS. 18. Kalton C. Lahue, Dreams for Sale: The Rise and Fall of the Triangle Film Corporation (South Brunswick, NJ: A. S. Barnes, 1971), 196. 19. “Aitken’s Novel Scheme to Market 2,000 Old Triangles,” Variety, January 12, 1923, 39; “Triangle Reissues,” Variety, June 14, 1923, 23. 20. Agreement between Triangle Film Corporation and Whitman Bennett Studios, April 6, 1921, Aitken Collection, box 22, WHS. 21. Oscar Price to C. R. Berrien, September 4, 1923, Aitken Collection, box 28, WHS. 22. J. K. Burger to all Tri-Stone exchanges, July 16, 1923, Aitken Collection, box 27, WHS. 23. William S. Hart v. Peerless Film Service, “Complaint for Injunction and Accounting and Damages,” n.d., Case no. B-86839, LASC; William S. Hart v. L. F. O’Donnell, “Complaint for Injunction and Accounting and Damages,” n.d., Case no. B-86838, LASC. 24. “Synopsis of William S. Hart Company Contract with Famous Players, Dated July 17, 1919,” GC 1012, box 114, folder 28, SCWHR; Henry Wetherhorn, “Hart ads. Reed,” August 29, 1919, GC 1012, box 113, folder 11, SCWHR. Hart and Thomas Ince jointly owned William S. Hart Productions. 25. William S. Hart advertisement, Exhibitor’s Trade Review, November 27, 1920, 5. 26. William C. McIntyre (Rose Theatre, Fayetteville, NC) to William S. Hart, December 9, 1920, GC 1012, box 113, folder 12, SCWHR. 27. Affidavit of Douglas Fairbanks, “Papers on Appeal from Order Denying Motion for Temporary Injunction,” Douglas Fairbanks v. Hyman Winik, January 19, 1923, 17, New York County Supreme Court, Index no. 31686–1922.

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28. Hyman Winik open letter, Film Daily, June 1922, quoted in “Papers on Appeal from Order Denying Motion for Temporary Injunction,” ibid., 151. 29. William M. Drew, The Last Silent Picture Show: Silent Films on American Screens in the 1930s (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2010), xiii. 30. Ibid., xvi. 31. Affidavit of Douglas Fairbanks, “Papers on Appeal from Order,” Douglas Fairbanks v. Hyman Winik, December 12, 1922, 17, New York County Supreme Court, Index no. 31686–1922. 32. Affidavit of Gladys Mary Fairbanks, “Papers on Appeal from Order,” Douglas Fairbanks v. Hyman Winik, December 12, 1922, 42, New York County Supreme Court, Index no. 31686–1922. 33. Fairbanks v. Winik, 206 A.D. 449, 451 (NY App. Div. 1923). 34. Peter Decherney discusses this case in relation to copyright and film authorship in Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 108–9. 35. FTC v. Film Distributors League, Inc., et al., 9 FTC Dec. 1, 14 (1925). 36. Ibid., 16. 37. “Fairbanks Fights Triangle Re-issue,” Variety, September 9, 1921, 47. 38. FTC v. Film Distributors League, Inc., et al., 9 FTC Dec. 1, 14 (1925). 39. Fox Film Corporation v. FTC, 296 Fed. 353 (CCA 2, 1924). 40. “2,400 Capacity Fox Philly in $33,300 Week,” Variety, March 16, 1927, 8. 41. “The John Gilbert Reissues” (advertisement), Variety, September 28, 1927, 15. 42. “Standard Exhibition Contract,” Film Year Book 1927 (New York: Wid’s Films and Film Folk, 1927), 467. 43. Shelley Stamp, “‘Exit Flapper, Enter Woman,’ or Lois Weber in Jazz Age Hollywood,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 51, no. 2 (2010): 377. 44. William S. Hart v. Peerless Film Service, “Complaint for Injunction and Accounting and Damages,” n.d., Case no. B-86839, LASC; William S. Hart v. L. F. O’Donnell, “Complaint for Injunction and Accounting and Damages,” n.d., Case no. B-86838, LASC. 45. Lea Jacobs, The Decline of Sentiment: American Film in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 1–78. 46. Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915–1928 (New York: Scribner, 1990), 193. 47. “The Photoplay Medal of Honor for the Best Picture Released in 1924,” Photoplay, July 1925, 76. 48. “The Spirit of ‘76,” Photoplay, October 1921, 93. 49. “Outside the Law,” Photoplay, July 1926, 143. 50. “Old Films Are Compared with New by Critic: Views of Reissues Fail to Substantiate Movie Fan’s Claims That Former Successes Were Better than Those of Today,” Baltimore Sun, August 12, 1923, 65. 51. “Let Bygones Be Bygones,” Manchester Guardian, June 28, 1924, 9. 52. Iris Barry, Let’s Go to the Pictures (London: Chatto and Windus, 1926), 164–65.

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53. Ibid., 106. 54. Anne Morey, “Early Art Cinema in the U.S.: Symon Gould and the Little Cinema Movement of the 1920s,” in Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of the Cinema, ed. Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes, and Robert C. Allen (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2008), 235. 55. Ibid., 245. 56. T.M.C., “Movie Fans Detect Frauds Quickly,” Baltimore Sun, October 21, 1923, MP8. 57. Ben Singer, “Early Home Cinema and the Edison Home Projecting Kinetoscope,” Film History 2 (1998): 37. 58. Ibid.; Haidee Wasson, “The Reel of the Month Club: 16mm Projectors, Home Theaters and Film Libraries in the 1920s,” in Maltby, Stokes, and Allen, Going to the Movies, 217–34. 59. Agreement between S. A. Lynch Enterprises and United Hardware and Supply Company (United Projector Company branch), August 25, 1919, Aitken Collection, box 20, WHS. 60. David Pierce discusses United Safety’s 28mm gauge in “Silent Movies and the Kodascope Libraries,” American Cinematographer 70, no. 1 (January 1989): 37. 61. Anke Mebold and Charles Tepperman, “Resurrecting the Lost History of 28mm Film in North America,” Film History 15, no. 2 (2003): 137–51. 62. Agreement between Triangle Film Corporation and the Pathéscope Company of America, Inc., July 6, 1920, Aitken Collection, box 21, WHS. 63. Pathescope Company of America to Percy Waters, March 11, 1921, Aitken Collection, box 22, WHS. 64. Pathex, Pathex Motion Pictures for the Home (1927 catalog), digitized by the Media History Digital Library, http://archive.org/details/catalog ofpathexm1927path (accessed November 9, 2012). 65. “Library of Films New Attraction: Eastman Kodak Company Establishes Branch Where Fans May Rent Pictures,” Los Angeles Times, December 6, 1925, C43. 66. “Making the Most of the Kodascope Libraries,” Cine-Kodak News, c. 1927, private collection. 67. Pierce, “Silent Movies,” 37. 68. “New Cinegraphs Every Month to Make Possible a Permanent Library of Your Own,” Cine-Kodak News, c. 1927, private collection. 69. Agreement between Kodascope Libraries, Inc., and Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation, June 15, 1927, private collection. 70. Ibid. 71. MGM’s 1926 reissue of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), starring Valentino, grossed $689,000 in rentals and earned a profit of $460,000. Although we don’t know the gross or the profit of Paramount’s 1926 Sheik reissue, we can make an educated guess that it earned comparable figures. Eddie Mannix ledger, AMPAS.

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72. “Paramount to Discontinue Films for Home Showings, Kent Says,” Film Daily, December 28, 1927, 1, 8. 73. Wasson, “Electric Homes!,” 12. 74. “16mm. Film’s Seasonal Period—U Still In,” Variety, October 17, 1928, 6; Wasson, “Electric Homes!,” 10. 75. Cheney, Economic Survey, 84. 76. “A Long Life for Dead Films,” New York Times, April 14, 1935, X3. 77. David Pierce, “The Legion of the Condemned—Why American Silent Films Perished,” Film History 9, no. 1 (1997): 5–22.

3. derivatives and destruction 1. “11 Warner Units Quit Music Group,” New York Times, November 27, 1935, 16; Katherine Spring, “Pop Go the Warner Bros., Et Al.: Marketing Film Songs during the Coming of Sound,” Cinema Journal 48, no. 1 (October 1, 2008): 74–76. 2. “The Boy Problem” is the title of chapter 3 in Jacob Kwalwasser, Problems in Public School Music (New York: M. Witmark, 1932; rev. ed., New York: M. Witmark and Sons, 1941). 3. Johann Sebastian Bach and Antonio E. Cafarella, Fughetta (New York: M. Witmark and Sons, 1933); Franz Schubert and Cafarella, Minuet (New York: M. Witmark and Sons, 1933). 4. Benjamin B. Hampton, History of the American Film Industry from Its Beginnings to 1931 (New York: Dover, 1970), 379–87. Mae Huettig echoes Hampton’s narrative in her Economic Control of the Motion Picture Industry: A Study in Industrial Organization (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944), 40–41. 5. Douglas Gomery, The Coming of Sound: A History (New York: Routledge, 2005), 23–62. 6. Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years, vol. 3 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 55. 7. For a terrific description of Tin Pan Alley sales strategies, see David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 8. Spring, “Pop Go the Warner Bros.,” 72. 9. Scott Curtis, “The Sound of the Early Warner Bros. Cartoons,” in Sound Theory, Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 193. 10. The existence and continuance of these royalties are evident in the agreement between Warner Bros. Pictures and Max Dreyfus, December 23, 1938, folder F000959, “T.B. HARMS Final Agreement,” box 12684B, WBA. 11. Spring, “Pop Go the Warner Bros.” 12. Richard B. Jewell, “Hollywood and Radio: Competition and Partnership in the 1930s,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 4, no. 2 (1984): 125; Michele Hilmes, Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable

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(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); Ross Melnick, “Station R-O-X-Y: Roxy and the Radio,” Film History 17, nos. 2–3 (January 1, 2005): 217–33. 13. Jeff Smith, The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 14. Christopher Anderson, Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994); Hilmes, Hollywood and Broadcasting. 15. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Chuck Tryon, Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009). 16. Richard B, Jewell, The Golden Age of Cinema: Hollywood, 1929–1945 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 65. 17. Donald Crafton accurately explains that “the ‘original screenplay’ was still a rarity” in the transitional sound years in The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926–1931 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1997), 379. Little scholarship exists on the rise of the original screenplay, but the Hollywood trade papers tracked this development throughout the 1930s. In 1938, Variety reported that original screen stories had surpassed adaptations for the first time: “H’Wood Favors Originals,” April 13, 1938, 3, 24. 18. “Inside Stuff—Pictures,” Variety, September 24, 1930, 56. 19. Agreement between the Note Holders’ Committee of World Film Corporation’s First Mortgage Six Percent Serial Gold Notes and Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc., October 19, 1928, private collection; agreement between New York Trust Company, World Film Corporation and the Note Holders’ Committee of World Film Corporation’s First Mortgage Six Percent Serial Gold Notes and Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc., January 15, 1919, private collection. 20. Harry E. Aitken to Frank E. Woods, January 12, 1928, Harry Aitken clippings file, AMPAS. 21. Assignment of copyright from Betlew, Inc., to Warner Bros., April 30, 1929, folder F005366, box 125645B, WBA. 22. Variety’s golden jubilee fiftieth anniversary issue includes a list of Hollywood remakes: “Remakes of Feature Films,” January 4, 1956, 72. 23. “Studios on the Remake,” Variety, January 21, 1931, 11, 26. 24. Ibid. 25. This number includes both Warner Bros. and First National releases. Ibid. 26. Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 308; James Naremore, More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 55–63. 27. Anderson, Hollywood TV, 181. 28. William Schaefer Ledger, book 4, “Comparison on Negative Costs and Gross Income on Productions Released from August 31, 1936, to August 31, 1941, 5 Years, Typed Dec. 29, 1944,” USC SCA. 29. Anderson, Hollywood TV, 174, 181.

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30. Michael Munn, John Wayne: The Man behind the Myth (New York: New American Library, 2003), 35. 31. William Schaefer Ledger, book 3, “Recapitulation of Income from Re-issues on Productions Originally Released from Sept. 4, 1931, to August 26, 1939, as of February 27, 1943,” 13, USC SCA. 32. As I wrote this book from 2010 to 2014, Turner Classic Movies frequently aired the Goofy Movies shorts. William M. Drew also discusses them in The Last Silent Picture Show: Silent Films on American Screens in the 1930s (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2010), 92–93. 33. Thrills of Yesterday, The Movie Album, The Nickelette, and Movie Memories are available in “Vitaphone Cavalcade of Musical Comedy Shorts Collection,” DVD, disc 3, Warner Archive Collection (2010). The surviving excerpt of My Favorite Wife is available at the Internet Archive, www.archive .org/details/MyOfficialWife1914 (accessed June 11, 2011). 34. Warner Bros., Inc., signed agreement with Michael Curtiz, April 28, 1931, Michael Curtiz Legal File, folder 2485B, WBA. 35. When Warner Bros. sold its film library to Eliot Hyman in 1956 (see chapter 5), the Warner lawyers wanted to qualify Spring Is Here and argued to Hyman’s attorneys that at the time the contract was signed, all of the parties understood radio and television exclusively as “ ‘live’ mediums.” Therefore, Rodgers and Hart could stage a live television broadcast, but the recorded television rights were really part of the motion picture rights that Warner Bros. controlled. Hyman’s lawyers rejected this logic, and the film was not counted toward the deal. Those readers with archival inclinations may consult George Schiffer to Bernard Goodman, “SPRING IS HERE released 4/13/30,” March 23, 1956, folder F002230, “TELEVISION DEAL—Correspondence between Berkowitz & Schiffer re various features and others,” box 12707B, WBA. See also Harold Berkowitz to Sidney H. Levin, May 31, 1956, folder F002240, “Warner-P.R.M. Deal ‘Shadow at the Top of the Stairs,’ ” box 12707B, WBA. 36. Pete Knecht to George Schiffer, March 29, 1957, folder 366768, “Summary 9/57,” box 12707A, WBA. The attorney Knecht writes, “In many instances there are no files whatsoever relating to a particular picture. You must remember that from 1918 to 1930 our business was conducted on a much more informal plane than is now done and people were frequently employed without a written contract of any kind and simply paid in cash.” 37. P. D. Knecht to Harold Berkowitz, “Re: New York Trust Department Files,” September 9, 1958, folder F000820, “Trust Dept. Files—Disposition,” box 12815A, WBA. 38. Ibid. 39. Drew, Last Silent Picture Show, 37–62. 40. “Universal Aiding Both Sound, Silent Houses,” Film Daily, August 4, 1929, 1–2. 41. Drew, Last Silent Picture Show, 189–208. 42. C. J. Tevlin to William S. Hart, September 12, 1940, GC 1012, folder 10, box 70, SCWHR.

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43. John P. McElwee, “Theatrical Re-issues, Part 1” (of 3), Films in Review 40, no. 12 (December 1989): 596. 44. A notable exception were the six Leon Schlesinger westerns starring John Wayne that were reissued in 1939. Aside from those films, nearly all the Warner Bros., MGM, and RKO reissues were three, four, or five years old. This trend applies to the 1930s as a whole. Between 1930 and 1939, these studios reissued a combined total of at least thirty-one films (including the Schlesinger westerns). In this pool, the median age was four years. Data acquired from Eddie Mannix Ledger, AMPAS; C. J. Tevlin Ledger, private collection; William Schaefer Ledger, USC SCA; “ ‘Scandals,’ Tab Big 23G Wash,” Variety, December 19, 1933, 11; “Pic Shortage Acute,” Daily Variety, May 15, 1935, 1, 4. 45. Crafton, Talkies, 264. 46. “Disraeli” (reissue press book, Warner Bros., 1933), folder F002279, “Disraeli—Fragile,” box 680A, WBA. 47. “Some Nice B’Way Grosses,” Variety, January 23, 1934, 9. 48. William Schaefer Ledger, book 3, “Recapitulation of Income from Re-issues on Productions Originally Released from Sept. 4, 1931, to August 26, 1939, as at February 27, 1943,” 13, USC SCA. Unfortunately, Disraeli’s 1929– 30 release and 1933–1934 reissue revenue are merged in the studio’s mid-1940s accounting that the film cost $318,000 and earned $924,000 domestically and $574,000 in foreign markets. 49. Jewell, Golden Age of Cinema, 70. 50. O. H. Cheney, Economic Survey of the Book Industry: 1930–1931 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1949), 84. 51. Richard Maltby, “The Production Code and the Hays Office,” in Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939, ed. Tino Balio (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), 37–72. 52. Al Block to Joseph I. Breen, March 15, 1937, History of Cinema, Series 1: Hollywood and the Production Code (Woodbridge, CT: Primary Source Microfilm, 2006), microfilm, reel 9, Manhattan Melodrama file. 53. For King Kong, Breen ordered RKO to “shorten scenes showing animals killing and eating human beings. Cut scenes showing monster undressing girl.” King Kong is listed alongside twenty-eight other RKO films requiring alterations for reissue seal approval in Breen to B. B. Kahane (RKO), September 5, 1935, History of Cinema, Series 1: Hollywood and the Production Code, microfilm, reel 9, Life of Vergie Winters file. For Jekyll, see Breen to John Hammell (Paramount), June 22, 1935, History of Cinema, Series 1: Hollywood and the Production Code, microfilm, reel 3, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde file. 54. Joseph I. Breen to Jack L. Warner, September 3, 1936, History of Cinema, Series 1: Hollywood and the Production Code, microfilm, reel 6, Convention City file. The correspondence does not indicate what happened to the fifteen other films that Warner Bros. submitted to the PCA for reissue approval. 55. H. J. McCord to Joseph I. Breen, September 1, 1936, History of Cinema: Hollywood and the Production Code, microfilm, reel 6, Convention City file.

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56. Sure enough, the Motion Picture Herald cited both Flying Down to Rio and The Informer as playing as revivals: “Exhibitors Turn to Trove of Preproved Pictures,” June 4, 1938, 9. 57. Balio, Grand Design, 28–29. 58. Jewell, Golden Age of Cinema, 70. 59. Agreement between Warner Bros. and Capitol Amusement Co. re: Charge of the Light Brigade, February 15, 1937, folder F002452, “Capitol Paterson N.J., 1935–36-to-1940–41,” box 14309A, WBA. 60. Agreement between Warner Bros. and Capitol Amusement Co. re: Bordertown (rerelease), January 14, 1938; agreement between Vitagraph, Inc., and Capitol Amusement Co. re: Devil Dogs of the Air (reissue), May 20, 1941; agreement between Vitagraph, Inc., and Capitol Amusement Co. re: Here Comes the Navy, January 14, 1941, all in folder F002452, “Capitol Paterson N.J., 1935–36-to-1940–41,” box 14309A, WBA. 61. The Strand Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey, paid $150 against a 50 percent split of the gross for The Other Man, Divorce Detective, and Honeymoon Hotel (all 1931), compared to a $35 flat rental for the reissue of Disraeli. Agreement between Warner Bros. and Strand re: The Other Man, et al., September 15, 1931; agreement between Warner Bros. Pictures and Strand Theater re: Disraeli (rerelease), February 17, 1934, both in folder F002451, “Strand Theater, Red Bank, NJ,” box 14309, WBA. The Plaza Theater in Paterson, New Jersey, paid $137 plus 50 percent of gross receipts over $600 for the initial release of Charge of the Light Brigade but only a $40 fixed rental for the Bordertown reissue. In 1938, the Plaza also paid $15 flat rentals for midnight-revival screenings of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and The Petrified Forest. Agreement between Warner Bros. and Totowa Amusement Co. re: Charge of the Light Brigade, February 15, 1937; agreement between Warner Bros. and Totowa Amusement Co. re: Bordertown (rerelease), January 14, 1938; agreement between Warner Bros. and Totowa Amusement Co. re: midnight showings of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and The Petrified Forest, January 20, 1938, all in folder F002453, “Plaza Paterson, NJ,” box 14309A, WBA. 62. “Pic Shortage Acute,” Daily Variety, May 15, 1935, 1, 4. 63. “Par Strike May Force Philly Duals; All Product Buys Slowed 20–90%,” Variety, September 22, 1937, 4 64. The difficulty lies in the studios’ internal accounting, which recorded revenues for each picture on an accumulated basis. The available ledger books of MGM, RKO, and Warner Bros. all account for film revenues this way. MGM, for instance, released The Thin Man in the 1933–34 season, but the studio’s ledger lists all of the revenue that the picture earned through 1949. How much of its $818,000 in domestic rentals came from the first year? How much from the second? And how much from all the years beyond those, the fourteen years of revival showings? The answers are impossible to determine with any certainty from the available data. But my best estimate is that theatrical revival revenue for most pictures was very small, probably accounting for less than 3

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percent of a film’s lifetime revenue. The fact that revivals could be booked so cheaply contributed to the small revenues received after the initial release. 65. “Shoestring Exhibs Playing Oldie Revivals Have Everybody Squawking,” Variety, December 25, 1934, 21. 66. Aubrey Flanagan, “British Exhibitors Find Revivals Outgrossing Current Releases,” Motion Picture Herald, June 4, 1938, 78. 67. Eddie Mannix Ledger, AMPAS. Portions of this ledger are reproduced and discussed in H. Mark Glancy, “MGM—Film Grosses, 1924–1948: The Eddie Mannix Ledger,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 12, no. 2 (1992): 127–44. 68. Based on the available ledger data, it is unclear whether Warner Bros. reissued any features internationally before the 1940–41 season. Old Warner movies circulated internationally from 1935 to 1941, but none of them received studio reissue campaigns. The breakdown can be found in William Schaefer Ledger, book 3, “Recapitulation of Income from Re-issues on Productions Originally Released from Sept. 4, 1931, to August 26, 1939, as at February 27, 1943,” 13, USC SCA. Portions of this ledger, though not this reissue data, are reproduced and discussed in H. Mark Glancy, “Warner Bros Film Grosses, 1921–51: The William Schaefer Ledger,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 15, no. 1 (1995): 55–73. 69. The RKO reissue data comes from the C. J. Tevlin Ledger, which Rick Jewell generously shared with me from his personal collection. Portions of this ledger, including many reissue figures, are reproduced and discussed in Richard B. Jewell, “RKO—Film Grosses, 1929–1951: The C. J. Tevlin Ledger,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 14, no. 1 (1994): 37–49. 70. “Japs Protest Pix Imports,” Variety, July 6, 1938, 13. See also “Reissues of Old Films Viewed by Japanese Fans,” Baltimore Sun, September 25, 1938, SM13. 71. Maurice Jenks, Percival & Isitt, to Warner Bros. Pictures Inc., July 30, 1938, “Foreign Dept. Japan Audit Reports (1931–1941),” box 17255, WBA. 72. “Hollywood Inside,” Daily Variety, January 12, 1942, 2. 73. “Extra Gravy from 16mm,” Variety, March 13, 1935, 23, 31; “Answers to Certain Interrogatories,” Schedule C, October 1, 1953, U.S. v. Twentieth Century–Fox et al., civil case file 14354, folder “Vol. 2, 2 of 2,” box 400, Records of the District Court for the Southern District of California, Central Division (1938–1961), NARA-R. 74. “Industry Interest in 16mm Field Follows Technical Improvements,” Motion Picture Herald, September 4, 1937, 33. 75. “Films for 16mm Portable Shows Hinge on Avoiding Theatre Field,” Motion Picture Herald, March 5, 1938; “Stop Leakage of Unfair 16mm Film Shows, Exhibitors Demand,” Motion Picture Herald, November 18, 1939, 19. 76. “Stop Leakage of Unfair 16mm Film Shows,” 19. 77. Leonard R. Posner to Victor H. Kramer, “Factual Memorandum in Proposed Civil Action in the Sixteen Millimeter Motion Picture Industry,” June 5, 1952, 3–6, U.S. v. Twentieth Century–Fox, DOJ case file 60–6-99, private collection.

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78. Answer of defendant Universal Pictures Company, Inc., to plaintiff interrogatories, August 5, 1953, U.S. v. Twentieth Century–Fox et al., civil case file 14354, box 399, records of the District Court for the Southern District of California, Central Division, 1938–1961, NARA-R. 79. Supplementary argument for defendants, RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., Columbia Pictures Corporation, and Screen Gems, Inc., November 7, 1955, U.S. v. Twentieth Century–Fox et al., civil case file 14354, box 402, records of the District Court for the Southern District of California, Central Division, 1938– 1961, NARA-R. 80. John Hay Whitney to Will Hays, June 5, 1935, MPPDA general correspondence files, microfilm reel 3, AMPAS. Thank you to Alison Trope for pointing me toward this material. 81. Mary Lea Bandy, “The Movies at MOMA: The First Cinema Museum in the United States,” Museum International 46, no. 4 (April 2009): 26–31; Peter Decherney, Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 97–160; Drew, Last Silent Picture Show, 161–87; Bill Mikulak, “Mickey Meets Mondrian: Cartoons Enter the Museum of Modern Art,” Cinema Journal 36, no. 3 (April 1, 1997): 56–72; Anthony Slide, Nitrate Won’t Wait: A History of Film Preservation in the United States (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000), 9–24; Alison Trope, Stardust Monuments: The Saving and Selling of Hollywood (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2012), 14–26. 82. Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 2. 83. Agreement between Paramount Pictures, Inc., and Museum of Modern Art Film Library Corporation, October 1, 1935, AMPTP file no. 200, “Hollywood Museum—Agreements,” AMPAS. 84. “Tentative List of Films Wanted by the Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art,” July 15, 1935, MPPDA general correspondence files, microfilm reel 3, AMPAS. 85. David Pierce, “The Legion of the Condemned—Why American Silent Films Perished,” Film History 9, no. 1 (1997): 12. 86. Folder F00372, “Destruction of Films,” box 12700B, WBA. 87. W. G. Wallace to George O’Keefe, August 24, 1938, folder F00372, “Destruction of Films,” box 12700B, WBA. 88. W. G. Wallace to I. Levinson, May 29, 1936, folder F00372, “Destruction of Films,” box 12700B, WBA. 89. S. Schneider to W. G. Wallace and Jos. H. Spray, December 16, 1942, folder F00372, “Destruction of Films,” box 12700B, WBA. 90. W. G. Wallace to J. H. Spray, November 6, 1942, folder F00372, “Destruction of Films,” box 12700B, WBA. 91. De Leon Anthony to Bert Frank, February 16, 1943, folder F00372, “Destruction of Films,” box 12700B, WBA. 92. W. G. Wallace to George A. O’Keefe, May 5, 1939, folder F00372, “Destruction of Films,” box 12700B, WBA.

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93. One version of this list appears in Harold Berkowitz to T. J. Martin re: Silent Film Property Report, May 28, 1956, folder F002230, “TELEVISION DEAL—Correspondence between Berkowitz & Schiffer re various features and others,” box 12707B, WBA. A slightly different version appears in “Summary 9/57,” folders 366767 and 366768, box 12707A, WBA. 94. Pierce determines that 70 percent of American silent features are lost, 14 percent survive in complete form in American 35mm prints, 11 percent survive in 35mm foreign-release prints or small-gauge prints, and 5 percent are incomplete— “a few reels in 35mm, a shortened Kodascope edition in 16mm, and several cut to a third or less of the original in 9.5mm.” Pierce, The Survival of American Silent Feature Films: 1912–1929 (Washington DC: Council on Library and Information Resources and the Library of Congress, 2013), 37, available at www.loc.gov/film /pdfs/pub158.final_version_sept_2013.pdf (accessed February 5, 2014). 95. For an example of this appeal, see Scott M. Martin, “The Mythology of the Public Domain: Exploring the Myths behind Attacks on the Duration of Copyright Protection,” Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 36, no. 1 (September 1, 2002): 294.

4. postwar profit center Epigraphs: George E. Phair, “Retakes,” Daily Variety, June 21, 1944, 2; Bosley Crowther, “Disney’s ‘Snow White,’ Reissued, Proves Itself Forever New— Other Films,” New York Times, April 9, 1944, X3; “Conference on Reissues,” Screen Writer, August 1947, 42. 1. C. J. Tevlin Ledger, private collection. 2. “Disney Cartoons Remaining RKO; Reissue Plans,” Variety, April 8, 1942, 6. 3. Donald Kirkley, “Film Notes,” Baltimore Sun, May 14, 1944, A7. 4. Crowther, “Disney’s ‘Snow White,’ ” X3. 5. “Snow White and Prince Sue Walt Disney for $300,000,” Los Angeles Times, October 20, 1938, 11. 6. Caselotti v. Walt Disney Productions, Limited, et al., 21 N.Y.S. 2d 321 (NY 1940). 7. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1996), 402–10. 8. “Cartoonists Ask Profit Cut,” Daily Variety, March 30, 1944, 1, 4. 9. “Inkers Union Asking Disney for 20% Profit,” Daily Variety, September 20, 1944, 24; “Guild Refused Profit Bite,” Daily Variety, January 22, 1945, 1, 8. 10. “Disney Earnings $486,287; Increase for Year $54,751,” Daily Variety, January 16, 1945, 2. 11. Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: The American Cinema in the 1940s (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1997), 2. 12. For an excellent overview of the impact of World War II on American film production, see Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

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13. Schatz, Boom and Bust, 462. 14. Averages achieved using data from Film Daily Year Book (New York: Wid’s Films and Film Folk, 1940–50), reprinted in Schatz, Boom and Bust, 463. Because Universal and Columbia both lacked theaters, they continued producing B pictures, and their production levels declined far less. 15. Richard B. Jewell, The Golden Age of Cinema: Hollywood, 1929–1945 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 209–301. 16. Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 83–88. 17. Eric Hoyt, “Hollywood and the Income Tax, 1929–1955,” Film History 22, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 15–16. 18. Schatz, Boom and Bust, 303–7. 19. U.S. v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., 334 U.S. 131 (U.S. 1948). 20. Ernest Borneman, “United States versus Hollywood: The Case Study of an Antitrust Suit,” in The American Film Industry, rev. ed., ed. Tino Balio (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 459–60; Michael Conant, “The Paramount Decrees Reconsidered,” in ibid., 565–68; “Loew’s, Inc., May Be Forced to Sell Over 70 Theatres,” Wall Street Journal, January 29, 1952, 12. 21. William Schaefer Ledger, book 3: “Recapitulation of Income from Re-issues on Productions Originally Released from Sept. 4, 1931, to August 26, 1939, as at February 27, 1943,” 13, USC SCA. 22. Eddie Mannix Ledger, AMPAS. 23. C. J. Tevlin Ledger, private collection; Eddie Mannix Ledger, AMPAS; Paramount pressbook collection, 1942–1943 season, AMPAS. 24. Roy Chartier, “Wartime Buying and Selling Faster than Before,” Variety, January 6, 1943, 13. 25. Astor profiled in A. H. Weiler, “Life in the Old Ones Yet,” New York Times, August 24, 1941, 142; Hughes lawsuit and settlement in Tino Balio, United Artists: The Company Built by the Stars (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 110–12. 26. Between 1935 and early 1948, Astor grossed $271,912 from Hell’s Angels, $165,574 from Sky Devils, and $297,935 from Scarface. These figures are in the massive archive of evidence that the state of Texas gathered during its lawsuit against the Hughes estate. Thank you to David Pierce for sharing these documents and knowledge of this resource with both Rick Jewell and me. “Astor Pictures (Savini), 1949 Gross Figures,” folder 58, drawer 3, Newman Files Part 1, Howard Hughes Files, Texas State Archives, Austin. 27. Thomas M. Pryor, “Boom Market for Yesteryear’s Movies,” New York Times, January 30, 1944, X3. 28. William Schaefer Ledger, book 4, “Comparison on Negative Costs and Gross Income on Productions Released from August 31, 1936, to August 31, 1941, 5 Years, Typed Dec. 29, 1944,” USC SCA. “Cycle of Reissues and Repeat Dates Due to Extended Runs of Newer Pix,” Variety, September 1, 1943, 11, also mentions this reissue.

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29. Joseph I. Breen to John Hammell, August 30, 1935, History of Cinema, Series 1: Hollywood and the Production Code (Woodbridge, CT: Primary Source Microfilm, 2006), microfilm, reel 9, Sign of the Cross file. 30. Agreement between Cecil B. DeMille Productions Inc. and Paramount Pictures re: Oliver Thorndike (actor), March 18, 1944, Sign of the Cross, Paramount Pictures Production Records, 187-f.3, AMPAS. 31. “Our recent reissue of the picture SIGN OF THE CROSS, to which we added a modern prologue showing American aviators leaving from North Africa to bomb Rome, in no way differs in its historical form from the reissue of this same picture which you approved and which took place in 1938.” Luigi Luraschi to Joseph I. Breen, July 8, 1944, History of Cinema, Series 1: Hollywood and the Production Code, microfilm, reel 9, Sign of the Cross file. 32. “Reissue Grosses Big Surprise to Distribs,” Daily Variety, December 27, 1944, 1. 33. The offerings included Naughty Marietta (1935) and Waterloo Bridge (1940) from MGM, North West Mounted Police (1940) and This Gun for Hire (1942) from Paramount, Call of the Wild (1935) and Springtime in the Rockies (1942) from Twentieth Century–Fox, Manpower (1941) and Air Force (1943) from Warner Bros., Imitation of Life (1934) and East Side of Heaven (1939) from Universal, Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) from Columbia, and several Gene Autry westerns from Republic. Nelson B. Bell, “Hollywood Meets an Emergency by Reissue of Its Earlier Hits,” Washington Post, July 1, 1945, S6; Eddie Mannix Ledger, AMPAS; C. J. Tevlin Ledger, private collection. 34. Schatz, Boom and Bust, 292. 35. “One in Every Five Pix Showing in NY a Reissue,” Daily Variety, October 1, 1947, 1. 36. “Seven Majors Releasing 29 Reissues This Season,” Motion Picture Herald, April 26, 1947, 12; Thomas F. Brady, “Hollywood Reissues,” New York Times, June 5, 1949, X5; “Reissues Ease Off as Quality Lags, Though Top Pix Continue Strong,” Variety, November 16, 1949, 7, cited in Schatz, Boom and Bust, 292; “Record Reissues,” Hollywood Reporter, September 18, 1950, 1. 37. The exact number of reissues is difficult if not impossible to pinpoint. Specialty distributors, such as Astor and Film Classics, kept the same reissues on the market for years on end, causing the same pictures to be recounted year after year. Moreover, the studios announced reissues that they never released, perhaps using their press releases as barometers to gauge interest among their customer base of theater owners. Finally, the sheer number of reissues does not give a true sense of their market share or circulation, since many of the lesser ones were prepackaged into double bills and played at neighborhood theaters known to change programs multiple times each week. 38. Nitin Govil, “Size Matters,” BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 1, no. 2 (July 1, 2010): 106. 39. “Exhibs Balk at Reissues,” Variety, May 3, 1944, 3. 40. “Seven Majors Releasing 29 Reissues This Season,” Motion Picture Herald, April 26, 1947, 14; “One in Every Five Pix Showing in NY a Reissue,”

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Daily Variety, October 1, 1947, 1; “Reissues Vital Part of 1949 Sales Pattern,” Motion Picture Herald, January 8, 1949, 13. 41. “Reissues Vital Part of 1949 Sales Pattern,” Motion Picture Herald, January 8, 1949, 13. 42. “Thomas Flays Reissues, Heads Indie Prods’ Crackdown Group,” Hollywood Reporter, April 6, 1949, 7. 43. See, e.g., David Pierce, “‘Senile Celluloid’: Independent Exhibitors, the Major Studios and the Fight over Feature Films on Television, 1939–1956,” Film History 10, no. 2 (1998): 142–44; Jennifer Porst, “United States v. Twentieth Century–Fox, et al. and Hollywood’s Feature Films on Early Television,” in “Nontheatrical Film,” special issue, Film History 25, no. 4 (2013): 129–32. 44. “More about the Telecasting of Motion Pictures,” Harrison’s Reports, July 3, 1948, 108. 45. Myron N. Blank to Paul N. Lazarus Jr., September 28, 1948, private collection. 46. “Four Houses Book Oldies,” Los Angeles Times, July 16, 1946, A3. 47. “One in Every Five Pix Showing in NY a Reissue,” Daily Variety, October 1, 1947, 1. 48. “Film Classics spent $3,000 as their share of the local advertising campaign” for a Bud Abbott and Lou Costello double feature that opened in five Los Angeles theaters in the summer of 1949. Herman Levy to Archie Herzoff, June 22, 1949, “Universal Grosses,” folder 11815, box 410, Universal Collection, USC SCA. 49. “Four Houses Book Oldies,” Los Angeles Times, July 16, 1946, A3. 50. Tino Balio, The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946– 1973 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 79–99; Barbara Wilinsky, Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 1–10. 51. Rebecca Rego Barry, “The Neo-Classics: (Re)Publishing the ‘Great Books’ in the United States in the 1990s,” Book History 6 (2003): 257. 52. “Let Bygones Be Bygones,” Manchester Guardian, June 28, 1924, 9. 53. In the mid-1930s, Donald Kirkley of the Baltimore Sun and Frank S. Nugent of the New York Times both advocated for the revival of great films of the past. Kirkley, “Film Revivals Set Record Here,” Baltimore Sun, July 26, 1936, 10; Nugent, “The Good Die Young,” New York Times, August 23, 1936, X3. 54. Robert Joseph, “Cinema,” Arts and Architecture, October 1950, 42. 55. “Movie of the Week: City Lights,” Life, May 8, 1950, 81. See also Charles J. Maland, City Lights (London: British Film Institute, 2007), 112. 56. Bosley Crowther, “Ring In the Old,” New York Times, June 19, 1949, X1. 57. M.O.C., “Rage in Heaven,” Hartford Courant, December 5, 1946, 11. 58. R. Wilson Brown, “The Re-issue Racket,” American Legion Magazine, February 1949, 47. 59. For more on the rise and fall of the CSU, see Gerald Horne, Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930–1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, and Trade Unionists (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001).

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60. Editorial, Screen Writer, February 1947, 44. 61. David Pierce, “ ‘Senile Celluloid,’ ” 147. 62. “Actors’ Strike in Hollywood Now Possibility,” Los Angeles Times, April 12, 1948, 9. 63. Thomas F. Brady, “Actors Guild Poses Strike Threat,” New York Times, April 18, 1948, X5. 64. “Movie Actors Agree to 29-Month Pact,” New York Times, July 9, 1948, 10. 65. Quoted in Brown, “Reissue Racket,” 47. See also “Film Union Asks Reissue Limit,” Los Angeles Times, October 19, 1948, A8. 66. Brown, “Reissue Racket,” 47. 67. “AFL Film Council Asks MPIC to Curb Reissue ‘Abuse,’ ” Daily Variety, April 26, 1949, 6. 68. “Reissues Vital Part of 1949 Sales Pattern,” Motion Picture Herald, January 8, 1949, 13. 69. “Wayne Gets Reissue Bite,” Daily Variety, April 12, 1949, 1, 6. See also Tom Kemper, Hidden Talent: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 222. 70. A full decade earlier, James Cagney had obtained a gross participation deal from Warner Bros. that included all theatrical revenues, including reissues. Ralph Lewis to Roy Obringer, May 26, 1939, James Cagney Legal File, box 2825B, WBA. 71. The arrangement defined a reissue as a release that occurred four years after the first domestic release date. If a film was reissued only to foreign markets, then the definition changed to five years after the first release date. The fifty-thousand-dollar bonus was payable only once per picture. In other words, the maximum in bonus money that Wayne would receive from Warner Bros. would be $350,000, no matter how many times the studio reissued those seven pictures. Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc., to John Wayne, May 2, 1949, folder F000620, John Wayne Legal File (1949–1955), box 12825A, WBA. 72. Eddie Mannix Ledger, AMPAS. 73. “Rage in Heaven,” Baltimore Sun, November 8, 1946, 18. 74. “Seven Majors Releasing 29 Reissues This Season,” Motion Picture Herald, April 26, 1947, 12. 75. A. H. Weiler, “By Way of Report,” New York Times, July 3, 1949, X3. 76. “The Great Waltz Trailer Rerelease Dia. Cutting Continuity,” August 14, 1947, Turner/MGM scripts, Production Files—Produced, 1132-f.G1136, AMPAS. 77. Eddie Mannix Ledger, AMPAS. 78. Ibid. 79. “Seven Majors Releasing 29 Reissues This Season,” Motion Picture Herald, April 26, 1947, 12. 80. The film rental ledger is the Eddie Mannix Ledger, AMPAS. The net income is in Loew’s Inc. annual report, 1949, AMPAS. 81. “Loew’s, Inc., May Be Forced to Sell Over 70 Theatres,” Wall Street Journal, January 29, 1952, 12.

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82. “Loew’s Forms Theater Unit under Decree,” Los Angeles Times, August 31, 1954, 12; “Judge Approves Loew’s Proposal to Spin Off Theatres, Radio Station,” Wall Street Journal, November 24, 1958. 83. “In comparison to the 35mm business, where film rentals of thousands of dollars are usual, this is a penny business,” the attorneys of Columbia and RKO argued in their defense against the DOJ’s charges that the studios illegally conspired to restrain the distribution of films in the 16mm format. Trial memorandum for Columbia Pictures Corporation, Screen Gems, Inc., and RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., September 21, 1955, 12, U.S. v. Twentieth Century–Fox et al., civil case file 14354, folder “2 of 24,” box 401, Records of the District Court for the Southern District of California, Central Division (1938–1961), NARA-R. 84. When MGM loaned Philip Dorn out to Warner Bros. for the film Passage to Marseille (1944), for example, it contractually prohibited Warner Bros. from reducing the picture to 16mm. Dorn’s loan-out contract and similar prohibitions became an issue when Eliot Hyman purchased the pre-1948 Warner Bros. library for television exhibition (see chapter 5). See Sidney H. Levin (Stillman & Stillman attorney representing Hyman) to George Schiffer (WB attorney), “Re: Warner Bros. Withr. M. ‘Passage to Marseille’—No. 204,” April 3, 1956, folder F002229, “Television Deal–P.R.M.,” box 12707B, WBA. 85. “Reissues Vital Part of 1949 Sales Pattern,” Motion Picture Herald, January 8, 1949, 13, cites “a total of about 30” Columbia reissues on the market in the 1948–49 season. 86. Balio, United Artists (1976), 175, 188; “Reissues Vital Part of 1949 Sales Pattern,” Motion Picture Herald, January 8, 1949, 13. 87. David Lipton cited “combination re-issues” from Warner Bros. and Twentieth Century–Fox in Lipton to A. J. (Andy) Sharick, April 17, 1946, folder 11814, “Shadow of a Doubt—Reissue Correspondence,” box 410, Universal Collection, USC SCA. Paramount reissued North West Mounted Police (1940) and This Gun for Hire (1942) together in the 1944–1945 season. Paramount pressbook collection, 1944–1945 season, group A4, AMPAS. 88. David Lipton to A. J. (Andy) Sharick, April 10, 1946, folder 11814, “Shadow of a Doubt—Reissue Correspondence,” box 410, Universal Collection, USC SCA. 89. David Lipton to Maurice Bergman (eastern advertising manager), April 17, 1946, folder 11814, “Shadow of a Doubt—Reissue Correspondence,” box 410, Universal Collection, USC SCA. 90. “Universal, International Enter New Film Merger,” Los Angeles Times, July 31, 1946, A1. 91. The other two double bills were organized around stars and demographics. One package, the Irene Dunne melodrama Magnificent Obsession (1934) and the Deanna Durbin musical 100 Men and a Girl (1937), skewed toward women; the other, the W. C. Fields comedy You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man (1938) and the George Raft crime drama I Stole a Million (1938), toward men. “Reissues,” unsigned studio memo, January 20, 1947, folder 11813, “Reissues,” box 410, Universal Collection, USC SCA.

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92. “Universal Reissues Sold,” Daily Variety, April 29, 1947, 10. 93. Film Daily Year Book (New York: Wid’s Films and Film Folk, 1949), 949. 94. The dates and durations of Universal executive employment are listed in “Answer of Defendant Universal Pictures Company, Inc., to Plaintiff’s Interrogatories Dated March 4, 1953,” Schedule 2—re: Interrogatory 18, August 5, 1953, U.S. v. Twentieth Century–Fox et al., civil case file 14354, folder “Vol. 1, 2 of 2,” box 399, Records of the District Court for the Southern District of California, Central Division (1938–1961), NARA-R. 95. “Inside Stuff—Pictures,” Variety, April 8, 1942, 26. 96. “Showbiz Day by Day Record for Year from Daily Variety,” Daily Variety, October 14, 1946, 325. 97. Pierce, “ ‘Senile Celluloid,’ ” 148. 98. Agreement between Harris-Broder Pictures Corp. and Producers Releasing Corp., June 1, 1947, private collection; agreement between Realart and Film Classics, August 18, 1947, private collection. See also “PRC Will Handle U Reissues for Harris-Broder,” Daily Variety, July 7, 1947, 12. 99. “Newspaper Advertisement Schedule Reissue ‘Canyon Passage’ and ‘Frontier Girl,’ ” December 13, 1948, “Reissues,” folder 11813, box 410, Universal Collection, USC SCA. 100. “Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law,” January 10, 1956, 14, U.S. v. Twentieth Century–Fox et al., civil case file 14354, folder “1 of 24,” box 401, Records of the District Court for the Southern District of California, Central Division (1938–1961), NARA-R. The exact revenues were reported as follows: “Between June 1947 and 1955 the Realart Company, which distributes Universal reissues, received as film rentals for feature films the sum of $20,835,218.17. Of this amount Universal received as its net proceeds the sum of $6,816,429.84.” 101. “The Black Cat (1934),” AFI Catalog of Feature Films, www.afi.com /members/catalog/DetailView.aspx?s=&Movie=4590 (accessed August 8, 2011). 102. David A. Lipton to J. J. O’Connor, September 16, 1949, and Budd Rogers to O’Connor, September 20, 1949, folder 11813, “Reissues,” box 410, Universal Collection, USC SCA. 103. L. V. Burrows, “Film Big War Weapon,” Daily Variety, October 16, 1944, 15. 104. “The Surplus Projector Problem,” Educational Screen, June 1945, 310. 105. Walter Adams, “Can Our Schools Teach the G.I. Way?,” Better Homes and Gardens, February 1944, 20–21; W. A. Cram, “The Schools Originated the G.I. Way,” School Review 53 (1945): 281–85; Charles F. Hoban, Movies That Teach (New York: Dryden, 1946). 106. “Answer of Defendant Universal Pictures Company, Inc., to Plaintiff’s Interrogatories Dated March 4, 1953,” Schedule 2—re: Interrogatory 18, August 5, 1953, 4, U.S. v. Twentieth Century–Fox et al., civil case file 14354, folder “Vol. 1, 2 of 2,” box 399, Records of the District Court for the Southern District of California, Central Division (1938–1961), NARA-R.

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107. “Universal Forms World-Wide Group,” New York Times, November 14, 1946, 50. 108. United World also paid an interest rate of 4 percent. Agreement between Bell & Howell Company and United World Films, October 25, 1946, 4, private collection. 109. “Big Frog,” Time, January 13, 1947, 83. 110. The New York Times reported that “the purchase price is understood to be in the neighborhood of $1,500,000,” but the contract reveals it as $2,250,000. “United World, Inc., Buys Castle Films,” New York Times, January 2, 1947, 22; agreement between United World Films, Inc., and Eugene W. Castle, December 28, 1946, private collection. 111. “Universal Unit Acquires Castle,” Motion Picture Herald, January 4, 1947, 13. 112. Theatre Owners of America, “Unofficial 16mm Report, TOA Meeting—Los Angeles, March 9th & 10th, 1948,” private collection. 113. R. Megaher to E. A. Sargoy and J. L. Stein re: unauthorized 16mm exhibitions in Miami and Miami Beach, Fla., February 15, 1949, private collection. 114. “Answer of Defendant Universal Pictures Company, Inc., to Plaintiff’s Interrogatories Dated March 4, 1953,” Schedule 2—re: Interrogatory 18, August 5, 1953, 4, U.S. v. Twentieth Century Fox–et al., civil case file 14354 folder “Vol. 1, 2 of 2,” box 399, Records of the District Court for the Southern District of California, Central Division (1938–1961), NARA-R. 115. “Answer of Defendant United World Pictures, Inc., to Plaintiff’s Interrogatories Dated March 4, 1953,” Schedule 2—re: Interrogatory 18, August 5, 1953, 4, U.S. v. Twentieth Century–Fox et al., civil case file 14354, folder “Vol. 1, 2 of 2,” box 399, Records of the District Court for the Southern District of California, Central Division (1938–1961), NARA-R. 116. United World almost certainly earned more than $3.6 million from its 16mm distribution of all films (not just features) from 1946 to 1953. Even so, the low profit margins appear to have cut into the subsidiary’s profit contribution to the parent company. In February 1949, Daily Variety reported, “United World Film wound fiscal year with total revenue of $6,200,000 from its 16m and television operations. UWF, subsid of Universal Pictures, had a 20 percent increase in biz during 12 months ended last October. While this year’s UWF % gross is healthy, net profits on relative turnover of business is comparatively small, since 55 percent of any sale is absorbed by print and production expenses alone. Subsid is now renting over 600 subjects, and has sold outright thousands of pix. Company, handling U.S. distribution of J. Arthur Rank product, has peddled 11 packages to TV stations. Video income, however, represents only very small portion of overall take.” “16m Gets UW $6,200,000,” Daily Variety, February 16, 1949, 1. 117. Saul Friedberg to Morris Davis, June 6, 1947, and Davis to Friedberg, July 31, 1947, private collection. 118. Norman Gluck (United World sales manager) to Independent Film Journal, February 1, 1951, private collection; Morris Davis to Saul Friedberg, January 22, 1951, “Unauthorized Television,” private collection.

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119. Pierce, “ ‘Senile Celluloid,’ ” 147–48. 120. Ibid., 147. 121. “20 Rank Films in Vid Package,” Daily Variety, May 18, 1948, 1. 122. Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson, eds., Useful Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2011); Peter Decherney, Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Dana Polan, Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Lee Grieveson and Wasson, eds., Inventing Film Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2008).

5. negotiating television 1. International Television Almanac of 1958 (New York: Quigley, 1957), 12A, 14A. 2. In the 1950s, the major television networks and the press drew a distinction between “pay TV” and “free TV.” However, U.S. broadcasting is not free TV, since audiences pay with their attention to commercial advertisements. 3. “PRM, C&C TV May Merge Motion Picture Libraries,” Broadcasting, March 19, 1956, 9. 4. Christopher Anderson, Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994); William Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Michele Hilmes, Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990). 5. Blair Davis, “Small Screen, Smaller Pictures: Television Broadcasting and B-Movies in the Early 1950s,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 28, no. 2 (2008): 219–38; Davis, “Made-from-TV Movies: Turning 1950s Television into Films,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 29, no. 2 (2009): 197–218; Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992); Kevin Heffernan, Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, 1953–1968 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); William Lafferty, “Feature Films on Prime-Time Television,” in Hollywood in the Age of Television, ed. Tino Balio (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 236–56; David Pierce, “ ‘Senile Celluloid’: Independent Exhibitors, the Major Studios and the Fight over Feature Films on Television, 1939–1956,” Film History 10, no. 2 (1998): 141–64; Jennifer Porst, “United States v. Twentieth Century–Fox, et al. and Hollywood’s Feature Films on Early Television,” in “Nontheatrical Film,” special issue, Film History 25, no. 4 (2013): 114–42; Amy Schnapper, “The Distribution of Theatrical Feature Films to Television” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1975); Kerry Segrave, Movies at Home: How Hollywood Came to Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999).

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6. Warner Bros., Inc., signed agreement with Michael Curtiz, April 28, 1931, Michael Curtiz Legal File, folder 2485B, WBA; “Warner Bros. Annual Report (1951),” August 31, 1951, WBA. 7. Anderson, Hollywood TV, 45. 8. Boddy, Fifties Television, 42–62. 9. Hilmes, Hollywood and Broadcasting, 120–25. 10. Ibid., 125–30. 11. “Answers to Certain Interrogatories,” October 1, 1953, U.S. v. Twentieth Century–Fox et al., civil case file 14354, folder “Vol. 2, 2 of 2,” box 400, Records of the District Court for the Southern District of California, Central Division (1938–1961), NARA-R; “Movies at Home TV at $1 Fee Started,” New York Times, January 2, 1951, 1. 12. Hy Hollinger, “Pay—See TV,” Challenge 3, nos. 11–12 (1955): 14. 13. As Hilmes argues, “The FCC’s perception of its duty to protect the existing system of ‘free’ broadcasting from outside innovation or competition, testifies to the success of the broadcasting industry in equating the public interest with its own” (Hollywood and Broadcasting, 131). 14. Hal Humphrey, “Skouras, No Santa Claus,” Mirror, April 21, 1953, 35. See also “20th Likely to Sell Pix to TV,” Daily Variety, April 14, 1953. 15. “Lush Days Ahead for Reissues,” Hollywood Reporter, February 24, 1953, 1, 11; “Re-issue Record Set in 1953–54,” Hollywood Reporter, July 22, 1954, 1, 9. 16. Anderson, Hollywood TV, 187–90. 17. Ibid., 156–254. 18. Pierce, “ ‘Senile Celluloid,’ ” 145. 19. “Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law,” 10, U.S. v. Twentieth Century–Fox et al., civil case file 14354, folder “7 of 24,” box 402, Records of the District Court for the Southern District of California, Central Division (1938–1961), NARA-R. 20. “Television Report, Period Ended 26 March 1949,” Television Data, Eagle-Lion Legal Collection, box 15, folder 5, US MSS 99AN/1G, WCFTR. 21. Eddie Mannix Ledger, AMPAS; C. J. Tevlin Ledger, private collection. 22. For more on Ziv, see Morleen Getz Rouse, “A History of the F. W. Ziv Radio and Television Syndication Companies: 1930–1960” (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 1976); Barbara Moore, “The Cisco Kid and Friends: The Syndication of Television Series from 1948 to 1952,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 8, no. 1 (1980): 26–33. 23. See, e.g., “How to Use TV Films Effectively,” Sponsor, June 19, 1950, 32–33, 52, 56–59; “Feature Film Ratings: How Good?,” Sponsor, December 22, 1956, 26–28; “ ‘King Kong’ Sets Record,” Broadcasting, April 2, 1956, 97; “Bloom Off Features? MCA-TV Study on Par Pix Shows Differently,” Variety, July 8, 1959, 29. 24. WDTV advertisement, Broadcasting, March 24, 1952, 62. 25. Sidney Lohman, “News of TV and Radio,” New York Times, September 19, 1954, X15.

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26. Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook 2009 (Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel, 2009), 831. 27. “Movies for TV: Forty Recent Flickers May Soon Be Seen on Your Set,” Wall Street Journal, March 24, 1954, 1. 28. Jack Gould, “TV: $25,000,000 Bargain,” New York Times, July 21, 1955, 47. 29. “NBC Calls Old Movies Peril to Network TV,” New York Times, May 28, 1956, B6. Sarnoff’s speech is reproduced in “An Independent Station Manager Answers a Network President,” Telefilm, November–December 1956, 14–15. 30. Boddy writes, “Striking about such stirring network defenses of live television in 1955 and 1956 is how misleading Sarnoff’s color-coded signposts are as markers to paths the networks were already following. The proportion of live prime-time programming on all three networks fell from 50 to 30 percent in 1955–56, and the number of live drama programs in prime time on the three networks fell from fourteen in 1955 to seven in 1957 to one in 1959. The precipitous decline of the New York live anthology drama programs and their replacement by Hollywood telefilms was not the results of a single network’s strategy . . . but represented a fundamental re-calculation by the networks of their relations with affiliates, program producers, and advertisers.” Boddy, “The Studios Move into Prime Time: Hollywood and the Television Industry in the 1950s,” Cinema Journal 24, no. 4 (July 1, 1985): 29. 31. Hilmes, Hollywood and Broadcasting, 148–49. 32. Harvey J. Levin, “Economic Structure and the Regulation of Television,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 72, no. 3 (1958): 424–28. 33. Hilmes, Hollywood and Broadcasting, 148–49. 34. My understanding of this model is indebted to Alexander Russo, Points on the Dial: Golden Age Radio beyond the Networks (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 19–46, 115–50. 35. Boddy, “Studios Move into Prime Time,” 29–30. 36. Ibid., 28–30. 37. Jack Gould, “A Plea for Live Video,” New York Times, December 7, 1952, 17, cited in ibid., 28. 38. The Television Inquiry, vol. 4, Network Practices, Hearings before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Senate, 84th Cong., 2d sess., 1715 (1956), cited in Boddy, “Studios Move into Prime Time,” 29. 39. Bosley Crowther, “Sale of Birthrights,” New York Times, March 11, 1956, 129. 40. Thank you to Ned Comstock for calling my attention to the Hal Humphrey Collection in the USC School of Cinematic Arts Library Special Collections. My discussion of Humphrey, and this entire chapter, has benefited from my reading the columns that he wrote about movies on television and the clippings file that he kept on this topic. 41. Hal Humphrey, “Hey, the British Are Coming,” Mirror, June 28, 1951, 43.

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42. Hal Humphrey, “Skouras, No Santa Claus,” 35. 43. See, e.g., Hal Humphrey, “Some Tips for TV’s Chief,” Mirror, September 24, 1951, 23. 44. For example, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People protested CBS’s adaptation of the radio series Amos n’ Andy for television. “Amos n’ Andy: NAACP Denounces Show,” Broadcasting, July 9, 1951, 30. 45. Al Sweeney, “Show Business,” Washington Afro-American, April 13, 1954, 7. 46. Masso W. Satow (national director of the Japanese American Citizens League) to unnamed recipient, March 22, 1957, box 1138, DOJ case file 60–211– 76, NARA-CP. 47. David O. Selznick, “Old Movies and TV,” Daily Boston Globe, May 2, 1954, B32. 48. Richard Butsch, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 235–66. 49. “Wife Enjoys Late TV Shows, despite Wallop They Pack,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 21, 1955, 9. 50. Larry Wolters, “New TV Cities Will Receive Many Surprises,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 28, 1952, A12. 51. Mrs. Pat Vasey to Justice Department, May 25, 1956, box 1137, DOJ case file 60–211–76, NARA-CP. 52. See, e.g., “Defense Completes 16mm Case,” Broadcasting, November 7, 1955, 82. 53. Complaint, July 22, 1952, U.S. v. Twentieth Century–Fox et al., civil case file 14354, folder “Vol. 1, 1 of 2,” box 399, Records of the District Court for the Southern District of California, Central Division (1938–1961), NARA-R. 54. District Court Chief Judge Yankwich, opinion, December 3, 1955, and judgment, December 23, 1955, U.S. v. Twentieth Century–Fox et al., civil case file 14354, folder “6 of 24,” box 402, Records of the District Court for the Southern District of California, Central Division (1938–1961), NARA-R. 55. Leonard R. Posner to Victor H. Kramer, “Film Block Booking—TV Industry,” November 4, 1953, folder 1, box 1137, DOJ case file 60–211–76, NARA-CP. 56. Daniel H. Margolis to Victor H. Kramer, “ ‘Block-Booking’ in the Television Industry—Interview with Mark Hawley,” October 30, 1953, folder 1, box 1137, DOJ case file 60–211–76, NARA-CP. 57. Samuel Flatow, “Interview with Matthew Fox, United States v. Twentieth Century–Fox Film Corp., et al.,” August 11, 1955, folder 1, box 1137, DOJ case file 60–211–76, NARA-CP. 58. Ibid. 59. “Plaintiff’s Witness List,” August 25, 1955, U.S. v. Twentieth Century– Fox et al., civil case file 14354, folder “4 of 24,” box 402, Records of the District Court for the Southern District of California, Central Division (1938–1961), NARA-R.

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60. Hyman’s name is absent from the undated list of witnesses that includes the names of all witnesses and when they appeared from October 4 through November 3, 1955, U.S. v. Twentieth Century–Fox et al., civil case file 14354, folder “6 of 24,” box 402, Records of the District Court for the Southern District of California, Central Division (1938–1961),” NARA-R. 61. “Matty Fox Resigns UI Post,” Daily Variety, December 22, 1950, 1. 62. Bill Davidson, “Fox of the Indies,” Collier’s, April 23, 1949, 63–66. 63. “Foreign Trade: We Like Matty,” Time, July 19, 1948, 87. 64. Confidential memo re: Fox-Indonesian contract, November 10, 1949, folder “Economic Development—Indonesia—1948–1950,” box 38, RG 59 General Records of the Department of State, Subject Files, 1944–1952, NARA-CP. The State Department emphasized that Fox’s agreement was limited to trade with the government of Indonesia and did not extend to all trade with the nation. 65. Pierce, “ ‘Senile Celluloid,’ ” 150. 66. “Madden Made MPTV Programming V.P.,” Broadcasting, August 24, 1953, 35. 67. “Eliot Hyman, Pioneer in TV and Syndie Fields, Dies at 75,” Variety, July 30, 1980, 52, 66; Warner Bros.–Seven Arts, “Biography of Eliot Hyman,” in biographical clippings file of Eliot Hyman, AMPAS; Associated Artists Productions Corp., annual report for 1956, April 11, 1957, 15. 68. “Motion Pictures for Television Is Standout First-Place Winner,” Billboard, March 21, 1953, 12. 69. Dick Feiner, “Just Don’t Schedule It on Sunday Afternoon . . . Everybody’s Playing Polo!,” in Fridays with Art: Insiders’ Accounts of the Early Days of the TV Biz by Some of the Guys Who Made It Work, ed. Dick Woollen (Burbank, CA: Parrot Communications International, 2003), 211. 70. “RKO: It’s Only Money,” Fortune, May 1953, 123, 213. 71. “RKO’s New Owners,” Wall Street Journal, October 16, 1952, 1; “More Background on RKO’s New Owners: Saga of the Oilman,” Wall Street Journal, October 16, 1952, 1. 72. “Matty Fox Bids for RKO Control,” Daily Variety, November 12, 1952, 1, 9. 73. “Matty Fox as RKO Insurance?,” Variety, November 19, 1952, 5. 74. “Major Releases Now Moving into TV; AA’s Big Bundle of 52,” Variety, September 29, 1954, 44. 75. “AAP Television-Theatre Plans Told by Hyman,” Broadcasting, November 15, 1954, 56. 76. “Eliot Hyman (This Time) Is Bidder for RKO Old Film Inventory but Grainger Flatly Denies Any Sale,” Variety, October 6, 1954, 4; “Boston’s 1st Nat’l Bank, Eliot Hyman Dickering with Hughes for RKO,” Daily Variety, December 8, 1954, 1, 4; “Report 4 Theatre Chains, 2 Banks Trying Buy RKO, but NT’s Prexy Enters Denial,” Daily Variety, December 28, 1954, 1. 77. The dates and durations of Universal executive employment are listed in “Answer of Defendant Universal Pictures Company, Inc., to Plaintiff’s

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Interrogatories Dated March 4, 1953,” Schedule 2—re: Interrogatory 18, August 5, 1953, U.S. v. Twentieth Century–Fox et al., civil case file 14354, folder “Vol. 1, 2 of 2,” box 399, Records of the District Court for the Southern District of California, Central Division (1938–1961), NARA-R. 78. “Roach to Make Three-Year TV Series,” Broadcasting, August 10, 1953, 35. 79. “Matty Fox 2d Biggest in Skiatron,” Daily Variety, March 31, 1954, 4, 20. 80. “Guild to Distrib 700 Old Pix for Matty Fox,” Daily Variety, February 1, 1955, 1, 14. 81. Iver Peterson, “Thomas F. O’Neil, 82, Ex-Chief of RKO, Dies,” New York Times, March 17, 1998. 82. Lew Blumberg, “Total Recall,” in Fridays with Art: Insiders’ Accounts of the Early Days of the TV Biz by Some of the Guys Who Made It Work, ed. Dick Woollen (Burbank, CA: Parrot Communications International, 2003), 358. 83. Peterson, “Thomas F. O’Neil.” 84. General Tire and Rubber Company, annual report for the year ended November 30, 1955, 22, private collection. 85. “Deal by Fox for RKO Films Seen Closed by Year’s End,” Broadcasting, December 19, 1955, 40. 86. “All 740 RKO Pix Being Released Simultaneously with Buyers Getting Perpetual Rights; Pay-as-You-Play,” Variety, January 25, 1956, 29; “Films for Television: New Distributing Firms Vie to Feed the One-Eyed Monster,” Barron’s National Business and Financial Weekly, June 18, 1956, 5. 87. “All 740 RKO Pix Being Released Simultaneously with Buyers Getting Perpetual Rights; Pay-as-You-Play,” Variety, January 25, 1956, 29; “Films for Television: New Distributing Firms Vie to Feed the One-Eyed Monster,” Barron’s National Business and Financial Weekly, June 18, 1956, 5. 88. Matthew Fox, “An Open Letter to TV Station Owners and Managers” (advertisement), Hollywood Reporter, September 14, 1956, 5. 89. Leonard R. Posner, “Interview with Officials of Westinghouse Broadcasting Company—the Block Booking Cases,” May 6, 1957, box 1137, DOJ case file 60–211–76, NARA-CP; schedule of C&C contracts, n.d., U.S. v. Loew’s Inc., et al., case 119–24, box 410, C&C Super Corp. Documents, Records of the District Court of the Southern District of New York, NARA-NY. David Pierce makes a similar point in “ ‘Senile Celluloid,’ ” 145. 90. Elizabeth Bain to Matty Fox, January 27 and February 15, 1956, U.S. v. Loew’s Inc., et al., case 119–24, box 410, C&C Super Corp. Documents, Records of the District Court of the Southern District of New York, NARA-NY. 91. Leonard R. Posner, “Interview with Officials of Westinghouse Broadcasting Company—the Block Booking Cases,” May 6, 1957, box 1137, DOJ case file 60–211–76, NARA-CP. 92. E. H. Ezzes to Matthew Fox, June 19, 1956, U.S. v. Loew’s Inc., et al., case 119–24, box 410, C&C Super Corp. Documents, Records of the District Court of the Southern District of New York, NARA-NY.

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93. “Reps Rap Matty’s ‘Barter’ System,” Variety, January 25, 1956, 29. 94. “Eliot Hyman Combine Sews Up TV Rights to Old Warner Pix,” Daily Variety, February 29, 1956, 10; “Agreement of Sale,” June 20, 1956, folder F002183, “Warner-PRM Closing Papers, Sale Agreement,” box 12707A, WBA. 95. William R. Weaver, “Hollywood Guessing the Warner Future,” Motion Picture Herald, May 19, 1956, 36. 96. Forbes called the Paramount deal “probably the most stupid mistake ever made in Hollywood.” “Movies: Why Everyone Wants In,” Forbes, December 15, 1967, 31, cited in Hilmes, Hollywood and Broadcasting, 162. 97. Tax treatment was a potential deal breaker for the sale. Despite the Treasury Department’s 1955 ruling establishing library sales as capital gains, Warner Bros. insisted that the IRS issue a ruling specific to the company that the profits represented capital gains rather than ordinary income. Otherwise, Warner Bros.’ contract with PRM (which acquired the library for Hyman’s AAP; discussed later in the chapter) would be considered void and Warner Bros. would retain its library. In June 1956, the IRS provided the ruling that Warner Bros. and PRM/AAP had hoped for, treating the old films as assets that generated capital gains when sold. Each dollar of the sale price was, in a sense, worth more to Warner Bros. because taxes would have been higher on what was considered ordinary income from syndicating films to television. Warner Bros. annual report (1956), August 31, 1956, 2, WBA; “P.R.M. Reports ‘Favorable’ Tax Ruling on Film Purchase,” Wall Street Journal, June 14, 1956, 26. 98. Variety reported, “Failure of Warner Bros. stock to rise in the wake of the $21,000,000 tv deal for its library has observers in New York puzzled. Stock closed at 21 Friday (23) after reaching a year’s high of 23 ¾ in the wake of the deal. On the basis of 2,000,000 shares outstanding (including the 600,000 held by Warner brothers), the $21,000,000 cash works out to $10 a share and, sooner or later, should show up. Some insiders are wondering whether the price of WB stock is being deliberately kept down while a group is purchasing shares in anticipation of a later rise.” “WB Stock Status after Video Deal Surprises Trade,” Variety, March 28, 1956, 26. 99. When the brothers Warner sold out to Semenenko, the Motion Picture Herald reported, “Professional Hollywood took the news of the Warner sale calmly. There had been some conditioning for it. The family’s sale of its whopping motion picture library had been a strikingly uncharacteristic action, running totally contrary to the Warner tradition of rock-solid resistance to competition of any and all kinds.” William R. Weaver, “Hollywood Guessing the Warner Future,” Motion Picture Herald, May 19, 1956, 36. 100. Anderson, Hollywood TV, 222–23. 101. “Tycoons: A Fast $70 Million,” Time, March 30, 1959, 84. 102. For instance, chapter 8 of Tim Adler’s recent true-crime e-book Hollywood and the Mob: Movies, Mafia, Sex and Death (London: Bloomsbury, 2011) begins with an account of Hyman that credits him with purchasing RKO in July 1955 and selling the studio three years later—an error that apparently conflates him with both Fox and O’Neil of General Teleradio. Another example

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can be found in Alan A. Block, Masters of Paradise: Organized Crime and the Internal Revenue Service in the Bahamas (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 1991), 36: “Because of an antitrust action three years earlier [in 1953], Warner Brothers had been split, with part of it becoming the Stanley Warner Corporation (Stanley and Jack Warner were, of course, the Warner brothers), a movie theater operating company.” None of the brothers was named Stanley, and Warner Bros. had acquired the Stanley Corporation exhibition chain decades earlier. 103. “Laboratory Pledgeholder’s Agreement,” November 23, 1956, folder 366780, “ACE Pledge Termination 9/57,” box 12707A, WBA; “Agreement of Sale,” June 20, 1956, folder F002183, “Warner-PRM Closing Papers, Sale Agreement,” box 12707A, WBA. 104. For another discussion of this sale and Warner’s internal coordination effort, see Caroline Frick, Saving Cinema: The Politics of Preservation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 72–74. 105. Harold Berkowitz to Trust Dept., March 14, 1956, folder 1 of 4, “AAP (Formerly PRM) Correspondence,” box 16062B, WBA. 106. The Strand Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey, for instance, rented the original cycle of Schlesinger-Wayne westerns in 1933 for $20 per picture, then booked the same films in 1940 for $17.50 each. See exhibition contracts for Schlesinger-Wayne westerns in folder F002451, “Strand Theater, Red Bank, NJ,” box 14309A, WBA. 107. George Schiffer to N. H. Moray re: Schlesinger productions, April 12, 1956, “Television Deal P.R.M.—Warner, Correspondence bet. Everyone re Var. properties,” F002246, box 12707B, WBA. 108. Eliot Hyman to Benjamin Kalmenson, March 26, 1958, “Excluded Photoplays,” F000822, box 12707A, WBA. 109. “Talks in Wind for a Merger of Warner, RKO Libraries,” Billboard, March 24, 1956, 4. See also “PRM, C&C TV May Merge Motion Picture Libraries,” Broadcasting, March 19, 1956, 9. 110. AAP advertisement, Broadcasting, April 16, 1956, 60–61. 111. “Eliot Hyman—Direct Examination,” stenographer’s minutes, April 25, 1960, 5583, U.S. v. Loew’s Inc. et al., case 119–24, box 412, Records of the District Court of the Southern District of New York, NARA-NY. 112. Russo, Points on the Dial, 36. 113. Donald Klauber to all salesmen, March 22, 1961, folder F002381, “TV Distribution: ‘Films of the Fifties,’ ” box 14866, WBA. (Because Seven Arts acquired Warner Bros. in 1967, some of its corporate documents are housed in USC’s Warner Bros. Archive.) 114. Leonard R. Posner, “Interview with Lawrence (‘Bud’) Rogers, General Manager, and Joseph Ferguson, Film Director, WSAZ-TV, Huntington, West Virginia,” May 21, 1957, case 60–211–76, box 1137, file 3, RG 60 General Records of the Department of Justice, Antitrust Division, Classified Subject Files, 1930–1987, Class 60 Litigation Case Files, NARA-CP. 115. “To Reissue 104 Warner Films,” Motion Picture Herald, April 21, 1956, 24; Henry J. Zittau to Herbert T. Schottenfeld re: Alcott v. Eliot Hyman, January

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23, 1962, folder 15, “Eliot Hyman–Ray Stark Deals,” box 4, United Artists Collection (1951–76 accession), WCFTR. 116. Month-by-month contract accounting for 1956 is listed in Associated Artists Productions Corp., annual report 1956, April 11, 1957, 4, AMPAS. 117. Pierce, “ ‘Senile Celluloid,’ ” 158. 118. “20th Century Fox Lease,” Washington Post, May 17, 1956, 32; “Twentieth Century–Fox Leases 390 Films, Gets 50% TV Network Share,” Wall Street Journal, November 2, 1956, 5. 119. “RKO, Warners Only Majors Not Negotiating Sale of Backlog Pix,” Hollywood Reporter, March 6, 1956, 1. 120. “Huge MGM TV Backlog Deal Set: Chesler Group Reported Paying $50–75 Million for Features, Shorts Backlog,” Hollywood Reporter, May 14, 1956, 1; “Canada’s Chesler Brand on Metro Vaulties Today?,” Variety, May 16, 1956, 3. 121. Segrave, Movies at Home, 46–47. 122. “Screen Gems Gets TV Rights to 600 Universal Features,” Wall Street Journal, August 5, 1957, 6. 123. Douglas Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System: A History (London: British Film Institute, 2005), 95. 124. Gomery, Shared Pleasures, 247–49; “MCA-TV Will Recoup $50,000 Par Library Coin by End of Month,” Variety, Oct 8, 1958, 1, 44; “MCA’s $50,000,000 on Par Pix,” Variety, Dec 10, 1958, 23. 125. Vincent E. Giovinco to Leon Goldberg re: RKO library, February 1, 1962, and Seymour M. Peyser et al. to Arthur B. Krim re: Eliot Hyman, n.d., in folder 15, “Eliot Hyman–Ray Stark Deals,” box 4, United Artists Collection (1951–76 accession), WCFTR. 126. “Draft—AAP,” January 31, 1958, folder 15, “Eliot Hyman–Ray Stark Deals,” box 4, United Artists Collection (1951–76 accession), WCFTR. 127. E.g., Anderson, Hollywood TV; Hilmes, Hollywood and Broadcasting; Pierce, “ ‘Senile Celluloid.’ ”

6. seven arts and industry transformation 1. U.S. v. Loew’s Inc. et al., 371 U.S. 38, 38 (U.S. 1962); “Firms Hit Charges,” Wall Street Journal, April 19, 1957, 12. 2. Leonard R. Posner, “Interview with Herb Jacobs, TV, Inc.,” July 15, 1957, 6, case 60–211–76, RG 60 General Records of the Department of Justice, Antitrust Division, Classified Subject Files, 1930–1987, Class 60 Litigation Case Files, box 1137, file 3, NARA-CP. 3. U.S. v. Loew’s Inc. et al., 371 U.S. 38, 41 (U.S. 1962); “High Court Bars Movie Distributors’ Block Sales of Films to TV Stations,” Wall Street Journal, November 6, 1962, 26. 4. E.g., Paul Goldstein, Copyright’s Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox, rev. ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 21–23.

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5. “Producer—Screen Actors Guild Codified Basic Agreement of 1952,” private collection. 6. The circumstances surrounding “the great giveaway” are described in Marc Eliot, Reagan: The Hollywood Years (New York: Three Rivers, 2008), 298, 319; Dan E. Moldea, Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, the MCA, and the Mob (New York: Viking Adult, 1986), 142. 7. Thank you to Nina O’Brien for several helpful conversations about Hollywood unions as administrators of benefits and intermediary services. For a discussion of how residuals have increased interdependency between Hollywood labor and management, see Alan Paul and Archie Kleingartner, “Flexible Production and the Transformation of Industrial Relations in the Motion Picture and Television Industry,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 47, no. 4 (July 1, 1994): 663–78. 8. “NBC Calls Old Movies Peril to Network TV,” New York Times, May 28, 1956, B6; see also ch. 5. 9. William Lafferty, “Feature Films on Prime-Time Television,” in Hollywood in the Age of Television, ed. Tino Balio (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 244. 10. “ABC-TV to Program UA Sunday Movies,” Broadcasting, January 15, 1962, 9. 11. Neil Hickey, “The Day the Movies Run Out,” TV Guide, October 23, 1965, 7. 12. “As We See It,” TV Guide, March 16, 1963, 4. 13. Hickey, “The Day the Movies Run Out,” 7. 14. “Old Movies Are Better than Ever,” TV Guide, March 4, 1961, 14–15. 15. Tino Balio, United Artists: The Company That Changed the Film Industry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 111. 16. “Entertainment Industry,” Value Line Investment Survey 17, no. 51 (October 15, 1962): 1201. 17. Balio, United Artists (1987), 111; Lafferty, “Feature Films on Prime-Time Television,” 244–49; Robert Gustafson, “‘What’s Happening to Our Pix Biz?’ From Warner Bros. to Warner Communications Inc.,” in The American Film Industry, ed. Balio (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 575–77. 18. Sam Boverman to Howard Levinson, “Seven Arts/CBS—48 Photoplays,” November 6, 1962, folder F002404, “Seven Arts—48 Photoplays—10/4/62 Letter to CBS,” box 12817B, WBA. 19. Hyman discusses his assembling of “balanced packages” containing “blockbuster pictures, good pictures, . . . program pictures,” and films of every genre in “Eliot Hyman—Direct Examination,” stenographer’s minutes, April 25, 1960, 5583, U.S. v. Loew’s Inc. et al., case 119–24, box 412, Records of the District Court of the Southern District of New York, NARA-NY. 20. Associated Artists Productions Corp., annual report 1956, April 11, 1957, 16; Thomas M. Pryor, “New Movie Firm Formed on Coast,” New York Times, October 23, 1956, 39. 21. Murray Schumach, “Seven Arts Films Vending Culture,” New York Times, May 2, 1961, 44.

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22. Although UAA and Seven Arts Productions were technically separate, United Artists documents discuss the two together. Seymour M. Peyser et al. to Arthur B. Krim re: Eliot Hyman (draft), n.d., folder 15, “Eliot Hyman–Ray Stark Deals,” box 4, United Artists Collection (1951–76 accession), WCFTR. 23. The two lawsuits are discussed in Henry J. Zittau to Herbert T. Schottenfeld re: Alcott v. Eliot Hyman, January 23, 1962, folder 15, “Eliot Hyman–Ray Stark Deals,” box 4, United Artists Collection (1951–76 accession), WCFTR. 24. Thomas M. Pryor, “Dorothy M’Guire to Star in Movie,” New York Times, February 12, 1959, 24, discusses the initial Hyman-Stark split; “Hyman Absorbs Stark on Stock: Terms Carry ‘Suzie Wong,’ Services,” Variety, March 29, 1961, 5, discusses Hyman and Stark’s Seven Arts reunion. 25. In July 1960, Warner Bros. licensed Seven Arts the distribution rights to 122 post-1949 films in exchange for an eleven-million-dollar minimum guarantee. “Digest—Television Exhibition License Agreement, 13 July 1960, between Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc., and Creative Telefilm & Artists, Ltd.—Distributor,” folder F002390, “Post 1949 Photoplays, July 13, 1960 Agreement,” box 12817B, WBA. In October 1962, Warner Bros. licensed another forty-eight films to Seven Arts for a $5,525,000 minimum guarantee. Seven Arts charged a 30 percent distribution fee, and once the minimum guarantee had been recouped, the two firms divided net profits on a fifty–fifty basis. Agreement between Warner Bros. Pictures Inc. and Seven Arts Associated Corp., October 4, 1962, folder F002256, “Television License 48 Photoplays October 4, 1962,” box 12817B, WBA. 26. “Fox Film and MCA Unit Release 443 Movies to Seven Arts for TV,” Wall Street Journal, July 17, 1963, 12. 27. Arnold Jacobs to Sam Wheeler, July 22, 1964, folder F002376, “Wheeler Film Company 1964,” box 14960, WBA. 28. H. E. McKenna to Arnold Jacobs, March 1, 1962, folder F002343, “Screen Guild Productions of Oklahoma, Inc.,” box 14960, WBA. 29. Bob Rich to Kirk Torney, June 14, 1961, folder F002381, “TV Distribution: Films of the Fifties,” box 14866, WBA. 30. Jack Heim to George B. Burnette, March 15, 1961, folder F002381, “TV Distribution: Films of the Fifties,” box 14866, WBA. 31. Thomas B. Chisman (WVED TV, Norfolk and Hampton, Virginia) to Jack Heim, January 26, 1962, folder F002381, “TV Distribution: Films of the Fifties,” box 14866, WBA. 32. In 1962, Seven Arts grossed $93,271 from theatrically distributing twenty-six Twentieth Century–Fox reissues. This amounts to an average of only $3,553 per film. Seven Arts theatrical reissue business never appears to have neared one million dollars in gross revenue. Arnold Jacobs to Norman Solomon, February 13, 1963, “Theatrical Income and Expenses,” folder F002346, “Seven Arts Prod. Canada,” box 14960, WBA. 33. Eliot Hyman to Don Klauber, Phil Rich, et al., July 13, 1964, Eliot Hyman, F005305, 14961B, WBA. 34. In 1967, the Variety columnist A. D. Murphy analyzed a Warner Bros.– Seven Arts proxy to explain Seven Arts’ need to acquire a studio lest it lose its

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leadership position as a film-to-TV distributor: “Proxy notes that ‘the prospect of Seven Arts hereafter obtaining film libraries or groups of films, especially produced in the United States, is limited.’ Later, observing that ‘all’ major producers now sell pix-to-tv directly, ‘there is no assurance that rights which Seven Arts now holds in many films can be renewed on the same basis as in the past. . . .’ . . . As a matter of fact, in the next six years, 684 films, now in the Seven Arts library on license from owners for U.S. tv, will revert, unless renewals can be effected. The above quote puts a downbeat light on this, however. This 684-pix block amounts to just half of the 1,296 films which Seven Arts may sell to U.S. tv. . . . Proxy also notes that direct theatrical distribution has been ‘disappointing,’ and that consideration was being given to scrapping it.” Murphy, “One of 7 Arts Company Evinced Was Knowledge of When to Acquire WB,” Daily Variety, June 22, 1967. 35. “As We See It,” TV Guide, November 5, 1960, 3. 36. “For the Record,” TV Guide, November 6, 1965, A-1. 37. Otto Preminger v. Columbia Pictures Corporation et al., 49 Misc. 2d 363; 267 N.Y.S. 2d 594. See also “For the Record,” TV Guide, November 6, 1965, A-1. 38. Marilyn Ann Moss, Giant: George Stevens, a Life on Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 141–76. 39. “Complaint for Injunction, Damages and Declaratory Judgment,” October 1965, George Stevens v. National Broadcasting Company et al., Los Angeles Superior Court, case number 871182, folder 2891, George Stevens Papers, AMPAS. 40. Preliminary injunction, February 15, 1966, George Stevens v. National Broadcasting Company et al., Los Angeles Superior Court, case number 871182, folder 2918, George Stevens Papers, AMPAS. 41. Peter Decherney, Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 108–54. 42. “Memorandum Decision Re Contempt,” June 3, 1966, George Stevens v. National Broadcasting Company et al., Los Angeles Superior Court, case number 871182, folder 2918, George Stevens Papers, AMPAS. 43. “Judge Holds ‘Strength’ of Film Eclipsed Those 33 Commercials,” Washington Post, June 4, 1966, D20; “NBC Cleared of Contempt in TV Movie,” Chicago Tribune, June 4, 1966, 12; “NBC Didn’t Knowingly Distort Movie Shown on TV, Judge Decides,” Wall Street Journal, June 6, 1966, 17. 44. Hal Humphrey, “Film Hopes Flicker in Video Victory,” Los Angeles Times, June 8, 1966, D14. 45. “TV Film Shows Popular,” Baltimore Sun, December 3, 1950, C28; “Are All TV Movies More than Thirty Years Old?,” Hartford Courant, June 16, 1952, 8. 46. Harry Purvis, “Forgettable Moments from Late Movies,” TV Guide, January 7, 1967, 27. 47. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Picador, 2001), 292.

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48. For reappraisals of Sontag and camp, see, e.g., Moe Meyer, ed., The Politics and Poetics of Camp (London: Routledge, 1994). 49. “Old Movies Are Boon to Inveterate TV Viewers,” Daytona Beach Morning Journal, June 22, 1957, 2. 50. “Skiatron Chief Tells How Pay TV Will Work in L.A.,” Los Angeles Times, July 31, 1957, 5. 51. Michael D’Antonio, Forever Blue: The True Story of Walter O’Malley, Baseball’s Most Controversial Owner, and the Dodgers of Brooklyn and Los Angeles (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009), 256. 52. J. A. Livingston, “Skiatron’s Record Called Gullible’s Travels,” Washington Post, May 13, 1960, C10. 53. “Matty Fox” (obituary), Variety, June 3, 1964, 87. 54. See n. 24 above. 55. “Para., Stark Call Off Talks on Affiliation,” Hollywood Reporter, June 29, 1965; “Stark to Continue Making Pictures for Seven Arts,” Hollywood Reporter, July 16, 1965; “If Ray Stark Keeps WB ‘Eye’ on Budget, He Gets $62,500 Extra,” Daily Variety, October 14, 1966. 56. Paul Monaco, The Sixties, 1960–1969 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001), 33. 57. “7 Arts Buying Out Warner,” Variety, November 16, 1966, 5; Ronald Gold, “Will Cost 7 Arts $178,122,000 to Complete WB Purchase,” Daily Variety, June 21, 1967, 1, 4. 58. Gustafson, “ ‘What’s Happening to Our Pix Biz?,’ ” 576. 59. “Ken Hyman WB-7A Prod’n Chief,” Daily Variety, July 25, 1967, 1; “M. K. Hyman Is Named Warner Bros.–Seven Arts Production Chief,” Wall Street Journal, July 25, 1967, 17. 60. Gustafson, “ ‘What’s Happening to Our Pix Biz?,’ ” 575–76. 61. Robert J. Cole, “Warner Backing Bid from Kinney,” New York Times, February 26, 1969, 61. 62. “Warner Picks New Chief Officer and Head of Board,” New York Times, August 5, 1969, 41. 63. Ronald Gold, “WB-7A Assets Total $254 Mil,” Variety, June 21, 1967, 1. 64. Jennifer Holt, Empires of Entertainment: Media Industries and the Politics of Deregulation, 1980–1996 (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 122–26. 65. Megan Mullen, The Rise of Cable Programming in the United States: Revolution or Evolution? (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 8–9. 66. Lionsgate, “Annual Report—Fiscal Year 2009” (August 17, 2009). 67. “The Late Show as History,” Time, June 28, 1968, 32–33.

epilogue 1. Joshua M. Greenberg, From Betamax to Blockbuster: Video Stores and the Invention of Movies on Video (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Lucas Hilderbrand, Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright

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(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Paul McDonald, Video and DVD Industries (London: British Film Institute, 2007); Frederick Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001). 2. Jessica Litman, Digital Copyright (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2001), 35–69. 3. Peter Decherney, “Auteurism on Trial: Moral Rights and Films on Television,” Wisconsin Law Review 2011, no. 2 (2011): 273–330. 4. “Big Frog,” Time, January 13, 1947, 83. 5. Edward Jay Epstein, “Hollywood’s Profits, Demystified,” Slate, August 8, 2005, www.slate.com/id/2124078/ (accessed February 7, 2012). 6. Claudia Eller, “MGM Passes Audit, Says It’s in ‘Full Compliance’ with Debt Requirements,” Los Angeles Times, July 16, 2009, http://articles.latimes. com/2009/jul/16/business/fi-ct-mgm16 (accessed October 20, 2009). 7. Mike Spector and Lauren A. E. Schuker, “Auction Alone Unlikely to Resolve MGM Woes,” Wall Street Journal, January 22, 2010, B3; Spector and Schuker, “MGM Debt Drama Nears a Climax,” Wall Street Journal, October 28, 2010, A1; Ben Fritz and Claudia Eller, “MGM, in Deal, Files for Chap. 11,” Los Angeles Times, November 4, 2010, B1; Erica Orden, “For MGM, a Tighter Focus,” Wall Street Journal, December 27, 2011, B1. 8. Dave McNary, “MGM’s Gary Barber Now Sole Chairman,” Variety, October 3, 2012, http://variety.com/2012/film/news/mgm-s-gary-barber-nowsole-chairman-1118060215/ (accessed October 1, 2013); Orden, “For MGM, a Tighter Focus,” B1. 9. Diane Garrett, “Big Budget Bang-Ups,” Variety, April 20, 2007, http:// variety.com/2007/more/news/big-budget-bang-ups-1117963551/ (accessed October 9, 2013). 10. Claudia Eller, “Life on the Edge at MGM,” Los Angeles Times, February 26, 2010, D1. 11. Orden, “For MGM, a Tighter Focus,” B1. 12. These monies serve as a revolving credit facility for the studio, from which it draws by using its television contracts and library assets as the borrowing base. Rachel Abrams, “Financiers Bank on Healthier Lion,” Daily Variety, February 2, 2012, 1, 19. 13. Dave McNary, “MGM Earnings More than Double for First Quarter,” Variety, May 16, 2013, http://variety.com/2013/film/news/mgmearnings-more-than-double-for-first-quarter-1200482706/ (accessed October 1, 2013). 14. Ben Fritz, “Hollywood’s New Star Has a Classic Look: Studios Dig into Their Vaults for DVD and Blu-Ray Releases as Disc Sales Tumble for New Movies,” Wall Street Journal, April 22, 2013, B1. 15. March Graser, “Cyber-Bidding War,” Variety, December 5, 2011, 1, 35. 16. Lauren A. E. Schuker, “Hollywood Outsiders to Buy Miramax,” Wall Street Journal, July 31, 2010, B1; Rachel Abrams, “Mining Digital Gold,” Daily Variety, November 22, 2011, 1.

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17. Amol Sharma, “How Netflix Is Shaking Up Hollywood,” Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2013, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324251 504578581330740965110.html (accessed July 29, 2013). 18. Ben Fritz and Joe Flint, “Netflix Takes Disney Pay-TV Rights from Starz,” Los Angeles Times, December 4, 2012, http://articles.latimes.com/2012/dec/04 /entertainment/la-et-ct-netflix-takes-disney-pay-tv-rights-from-starz-20121204 (accessed July 28, 2013). 19. Bryan Bishop, “Netflix Losing Almost 1,800 Titles from Its Streaming Library,” Verge, April 30, 2013, www.theverge.com/2013/4/30/4287902 /netflix-losing-almost-1800-titles-from-its-streaming-library-starting-tomorrow (accessed October 8, 2013); Sam Adams, “The Great Netflix Purge,” Slate, April 30, 2013, www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/04/30/netflix_queue_to_ become_netflix_list_maybe_also_many_movies_no_longer_streaming.html (accessed October 8, 2013). 20. Paul Goldstein, Copyright’s Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox, rev. ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 187. 21. Graser, “Cyber-Bidding War,” 1, 35. 22. Ben Fritz, “Can Online Film Sales Reboot?,” Los Angeles Times, October 19, 2010, B1. 23. Ethan Tussey, “5 Things to Know about Content Libraries,” Media Industries Project, August 5, 2011, http://dev.carseywolf.ucsb.edu/mip/blog /5-things-know-about-content-libraries (accessed February 29, 2012); Marc Graser, “Small Crowd for UV Cloud,” Daily Variety, October 10, 2011, 1, 13. 24. Michelle Kung and Michael Bustillo, “Wal-Mart to Give Hollywood a Hand,” Wall Street Journal, February 28, 2012, B10.

Bibliography

archival collections Los Angeles County Superior Court Record Center Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland National Archives and Records Administration, Northeast Region, New York City National Archives and Records Administration, Pacific Region, Riverside, California New York County Clerk Records Center School of Cinematic Arts Library Special Collections, University of Southern California Seaver Center for Western History Research, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles Texas State Archives, Austin Warner Bros. Archives, University of Southern California Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin– Madison Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison

film and television industry trade papers Billboard Broadcasting Daily Variety Educational Screen Exhibitor’s Trade Review Film Daily Harrison’s Reports Hollywood Reporter

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Independent Film Journal Kalem Kalendar Motion Picture Daily Motion Picture Herald Motion Picture News Moving Picture World Photoplay Screen Writer Sponsor Telefilm TV Guide Variety

newspapers and magazines American Legion Baltimore Sun Barron’s National Business and Financial Weekly Better Homes and Gardens Boston Globe Chicago Daily Tribune Collier’s Educational Screen Forbes Fortune Hartford Courant Life Los Angeles Examiner Los Angeles Times Manchester Guardian Mirror (Los Angeles) New Haven Register New York Times San Diego Union Time Toledo Blade Wall Street Journal Washington Afro-American Washington Post

published court decisions and laws Caselotti v. Walt Disney Productions, Ltd., et al., 21 N.Y.S. 2d 321 (NY 1940) Copyright Law of the United States, U.S. Code 17, § 106 (available at www. copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#106)

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Edison v. Lubin, 122 F. 240 (3rd Cir. 1903) Fairbanks v. Winik, 206 A.D. 449 (NY App. Div. 1923) Fox Film Corp. v. FTC, 296 Fed. 353 (CCA 2, 1924) FTC v. Famous Players–Lasky Corp., 11 FTC 17 (1927) FTC v. Klesner, 280 U.S. 19 (U.S. 1929) FTC v. Paramount–Famous Players–Lasky Corp., 57 Fed. (2d) 152 (1932) Kalem Company. v. Harper Brothers., 222 U.S. 55 (U.S. 1911) Otto Preminger v. Columbia Pictures Corporation et al., 49 Misc. 2d 363; 267 N.Y.S. 2d 594 Sears, Roebuck & Co. v. Federal Trade Commission, 258 F. 307 (7th Cir. 1919) U.S. v. Loew’s Inc. et al., 371 U.S. 38 (U.S. 1962) U.S. v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., 334 U.S. 131 (U.S. 1948)

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Index

AAP (Associated Artists Productions), 158, 160, 163, 164; and block booking lawsuit, 178; and United Artists, 175—77, 182, 183, 192; and Warner Bros. library, 171—73, 237n97. See also Eliot Hyman Abbott, Bud, 131 ABC, 148, 149, 174, 175; movies on prime-time, 181, 189 Academies of Proven Hits, 117, 118, 140 access to film history, 14; MoMA Film Library, 66, 99, 100; reissues, 140, 141; television, 145, 194, 200 accounting, 2, 17—18, 48, 206n5, 220n64 Acland, Charles, 140 Adventures of Robin Hood, The, 173 advertising on television: 145, 146, 150, 172; and C&C TV, 166, 167; and film packages, 163, 172, 174, 178; growth of, 142, 143; three forms of, 152—54 AFM (American Federation of Musicians), 121, 137, 138 Aitken, Harry, 8, 11, 17, 56; financial fraud, 46—49, 212nn85,88; Mutual management, 26, 208n31; sale of story rights, 80; Triangle management, 26—28; Tri-Stone management, 57; and Western Import, 31, 32, 39, 211n83

Aitken, Roy, 26, 31, 39, 211n83; financial fraud, 46—49, 212nn85,88 affiliates, 145, 151, 152, 167, 187 AFL (American Federation of Labor), 120, 122, 123 African American organizations, 155 Alexander, William, 61, 62 Amazon Instant Video, 48, 68, 199 American Federation of Labor (AFL) Hollywood Film Council, 120, 122, 123 American Federation of Musicians (AFM), 121, 137, 138 Anatomy of a Murder, 186 Anderson, Christopher, 144, 146, 149 Annenberg, Walter, 166 Apartment, The, 186 Apostle of Vengeance, The, 45 arbitrage, 2, 134, 135, 196 archives, 83; of legal documents, 85, 86, 170; and MoMA Film Library, 99, 100; and research, 6, 12, 43, 101, 123 Arch of Triumph, 151 Arliss, George, 82 Artcraft, 28, 54; and William S. Hart, 29, 39, 40, 45, 58, 59 art house theaters, 118 artist rights lawsuits, 59—61, 186—88 Ashley Famous Agency, 192 Ashley, Ted, 192 Astaire, Fred, 162

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Index

Astor Pictures, 9, 114—16, 125, 129, 224n26 audience: demand for reissues, 9, 42—46, 118, 119, 139; and digital marketplace, 201, 202; on old movies in theaters, 12, 67, 68; on old movies on television, 145, 155—57, 179, 188—90 backlist, 7, 8, 13, 51—56, 73, 78, 115 Bain, Elizabeth, 167 Balaban and Katz, 54 Balio, Tino, 92, 181 Baltimore Sun, 65, 67, 125 Bambi, 106, 107 Bandit and the Preacher, The, 32 Bank of America, 151, 163 Barber, Gary, 197, 198 barriers to entry, 53—54 Barry, Iris, 66, 99, 100 B pictures, 77, 82, 92, 93, 123; television packages, 178; Universal, 130; World War II decrease in production, 111, 113 baseball, 190 Batman franchise, 198 Bauman, Charlie, 26 Beau Brummell, 66 Beautiful and Damned, The, 101 Beerbohm-Tree, Herbert, 27, 47 Behold This Woman, 101 Bell & Howell Film-o-sound Library, 134, 136, 159 Bells of St. Mary’s, The, 125 Ben-Hur: Kalem v. Harper, 19, 20; MGM reissue, 86—88, 95 Benjamin, Robert, 176 Beresford, Gerry, 170 Bergman, Ingrid, 120, 125 Betrayal from the East, 155 “Big Five” studios, 55, 97, 111—13, 127 Big Parade, The, 86—88 Big Stampede, The, 82, 83, 170 Billboard, 160, 171 Biograph, 22, 25, 26, 56, 60 Birnbaum, Roger, 197, 198

Birth of a Nation, The, 25—27, 86 Bishop, Henry, 37 Black Cat, The, 133 blacklist, 112, 120 Black Narcissus, 151 Blackwell, Carlyle, 25 block booking: television distribution, 145, 157, 158, 174, 178; theatrical distribution, 53, 54, 63, 112 Blumberg, Lew, 164 Blumberg, Nate J., 131, 164 Blu-ray, 199, 201 Boddy, William, 144, 152, 153, 233n30 Bogart, Humphrey, 173 book industry, 75; economics of, 52, 53, 73; reprints, 52, 90; See also backlist Boom Town, 126, 127 Bordertown, 89, 93 Bosko’s Knight-Mare, 77 Breen, Joseph, 90—92, 219n53 Bridge on the River Kwai, The, 189 Broadcasting, 150, 165, 172 Broder, Jack, 132 Brown, Johnny Mack, 131, 138 business buyers, 4—7, 9, 10, 15; cable television, 195. See also exhibitors; television stations cable television, 1, 193, 195, 198—200 C&C Television, 72; block booking lawsuit, 178; sales strategy, 165—67, 171, 172; United Artists purchase of, 175—77 Cagney, James, 93, 113, 114, 227n70 camp sensibility, 188—90 canonization, 65, 99 Canyon Passage, 133 Capra, Frank, 187 Captain Blood, 82 cartoons, 7, 77, 137, 139, 169—71 Casablanca, 15, 125, 148, 168 Caselotti, Adriana, 108 Cash Parish’s Pal, 32 Castle Films, 135—37, 159, 196 catalog. See library, film Catchings, Waddill, 76 Caves, Richard E., 5, 6

Index CBS, 145, 146, 152, 182; movies on prime-time, 181, 200; and Twentieth Century-Fox, 148, 149 censorship, 90—92, 114 Champ, The, 88table Chaplin, Charles, 24, 34, 41, 49; City Lights reissue, 119 Charge of the Light Brigade, The, 93 Cheney, O.H., 52, 53, 73, 90 Chesler, Louis, 169, 175, 176 Cheyenne, 148 Chicago Tribune, The, 156, 188 Christmas Carol, A, 163 CinemaScope, 147, 148 Citizen Kane, 162 City Lights, 119 classics, 1; Disney, 106; literary, 52, 53, 90, 118; motion picture, 87 Cleopatra, 182 Colbert, Claudette, 80 Cold Mountain, 199 collectors, 72, 135, 199 Cole, Lester, 10, 106 colleges, 10, 98, 100, 118 colorization, 1, 4, 7, 60, 187, 195 Columbia, 80; remakes, 81; reissues, 129; 16mm film, 96, 135, 157; television, 139, 174, 176 Comcast, 1, 2 commercials, 60, 68, 155, 156, 186—8 Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), 112, 120 conglomerate, 3, 9, 14, 135, 144; takeovers, 179, 191—93; Warner Bros. as, 75—77 contracts, 20, 84—86; and film destruction, 103—5; reissues, 123, 130; television, 129, 145, 169—71 Convention City, 91 convergence, 75, 78, 193 Conversion of Frosty Blake, The, 32, 33 Convert, The, 32 copyright: British laws, 51—52; and film destruction, 74, 102—5; and re-titled films, 33—36; and ownership rights, 7, 8, 76, 84; U.S. laws, 7, 8, 18—20, 49, 105, 195

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261

Costello, Lou, 131 Cotten, Joseph, 130 Covered Wagon, The, 71 critics, 9, 12, 13; on movies on television, 154—7, 188, 189, 194; on reissues, 64—67, 119, 120, 139, 140; on remakes, 82 Crosby, Bing, 130 Crowther, Bosley, 106, 107, 119, 120, 140, 154 cultural value of film, 99, 100; and postwar reissue boom, 118, 119, 140, 141; and television, 194 Curtis, Scott, 22, 77 Daily Variety, 94, 106, 115, 230n116 Dales, Jack, 179, 180 Darkening Trail, The, 32 D’Artagnan, 61—63 David Copperfield, 52, 88table, 90, 98 Davis, Bette, 89, 93 Davis, Owen, 84 Dawn Patrol, The, 77 Death Wish, 197 Decherney, Peter, 19, 140, 187 DeMille, Cecil B., 114 Department of Justice (DOJ), 98, 112, 123, 127, 192; television, 145, 146, 152, 157, 158, 178, 184 depreciation. See accounting. derivatives: contemporary Hollywood, 197, 198; and copies, compared, 12, 74; film destruction, 101, 102; film production, 78—86, 195; rights ownership of, 7, 20; television production, 148—49 Desert Man, The, 43 Desmond, William, 86 destruction of films, 12, 16, 17, 21, 58, 73; and remakes, 81, 102; and Warner Bros., 74, 100—105, 196 Destry Rides Again, 131 Devil Dogs of the Air, 93, 113 digital distribution, 196—201 directors, 10, 14; lawsuits concerning television, 179, 186

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Index

Directors Guild of America (DGA): 180, 186—8 Dish Ran Away with the Spoon, The, 77 Disney: digital distribution, 200, 201; reissue policy, 4; Snow White reissue, 95, 106—109 Disney, Walt, 107—109, 147 Disraeli, 75, 81, 82, 89, 101 distribution, 21; assessing reissue value, 101; digital, 196—201; innovation of rental model, 22—25, 195; international, 95, 96; specialty reissue distributors, 113, 114, 129; states rights, 31, 32, 94, 114, 132, 173; studio policies, 93, 94, 128; windows, 2, 181, 182. See also reissues; 16mm; television, movies on Divine Lady, 82 Dominant Pictures, 173 Donaldson v. Beckett, 51 Double Crossed, 32 double features, 68, 74, 92—94, 173; of reissues, 115, 117, 129—31 Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Presents, 163 Douglas, Kirk, 183 Dracula, 131 Drew, William M., 59 drive-in theaters, 148, 173, 184 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 91 Duffy’s Tavern, 164 Dumbo, 106 DuMont Network, 151 Durbin, Al, 77 DVD, 1, 2, 106; residuals, 180; sales decline, 195—99, 201, 22 Eagle-Lion, 149, 160 Eastman Kodak, 22, 53, 70, 71, 97 Edison, Thomas, 18, 22, 25 Edison v. Lubin, 18 editing old movies: 46; for reissue, 59—61; for television, 186—8. See also Production Code Administration educational films, 25, 72, 97, 133, 134, 137

8mm film, 10 Elmer the Great, 81 Empress Theatre (Toledo, Ohio), 41 Encore Theatres, 117 England, 66, 95, 131, 154, 155 Epstein, Edward Jay, 1, 2 EST (electronic sell-through), 201 exhibition: art houses, 118; drive-ins, 148, 173, 184; Loew’s, 124, 127—9; revival theaters, 117, 118, 140; unauthorized 16mm screenings, 136, 137; vertical integration, 54—57, 112, 127; World War II box office, 110, 111 exhibitors, 9; demand for reissues, 21, 40—42, 74, 86, 93, 109, 113, 116, 139; demand for revivals, 92—94, 150; little cinema movement, 66, 67; opposition to 16mm film, 71, 72, 97, 98; opposition to television, 117, 140, 149; opposition to United World, 135—9; “snipers,” 11, 16, 40, 61—64, 94 Essanay, 22, 25, 34, 56 Exhibitor’s Trade Review, 16, 35, 58 Everett, Wright, 188 Ezzes, Erwin “Buzz,” 165—7 Fairbanks, Douglas, 10, 49, 87, 125; FTC case, 61—63; Hyman Winik litigation, 59—61, 187; nontheatrical film, 69; Triangle, 27—31, 66 Fairbanks v. Winik, 59—61 Fame, 197, 198 Famous Artists Corporation, 183 Famous Players-Lasky, 27, 28, 50, 54, 76 fans, 9, 11, 14, 48, 64; and Kodascope Library, 70, 71; and movies on television, 155—157, 189—90; and reissues, 65—68, 118, 119; and William S. Hart, 33, 42—46 Fantasia, 106, 107 Fargo, 197 Fast Company, 81 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 143, 145, 146, 149, 152; and pay television, 146, 158, 165

Index Federal Trade Commission. See FTC Feiner, Dick, 161 Fiesta, 127 Film Classics, 114—17, 125, 129, 132 Film Daily, 59 Film Distributors League, 57, 61—63, 70 film library. See library, film Films Inc., 96—98, 128, 134, 135, 137, 157 fires, 21, 73, 74, 100, 101, 104 First National, 55, 74, 76, 79, 80, 82; destruction of films, 100—104 First National Bank of Boston, 132, 163 Flamingo Films, 160 Flatow, Samuel, 158 Flesh and the Devil, 63 Flying Down to Rio, 92 Flynn, Errol, 82, 93 Footlight Parade, 77 Forbidden Paradise, 71 Foreign Correspondent, 160 foreign films, 66, 118, 126, 199, 200 For Sale, 1924 Fortune, 162 42nd Street, 77, 168 Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The, 215n71 Fox Film Corporation, 50, 54; investment in sound, 76; MoMA Film Library, 99, 100; nontheatrical film, 71; remakes of silent films, 80, 81; retitling reissues, 63. See also Twentieth Century-Fox Fox Film Corp. v. FTC, 63 Fox, Matthew (Matty), 3, 8, 9, 13; and AAP potential merger, 142—45; background, 131, 132; legacy, 193, 194, 196; and MPTV, 158—62; and Realart deal, 131—33; and RKO library, 72, 73, 162—67, 171, 173; and United Artists, 160, 175—77; and Skiatron, 147, 190; and United World, 134—39 Francis, Kay, 89, 170 Franey, James, 134, 135

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263

Frank, Bert, 83, 102 Frankenstein, 131 fraud, financial, 11, 46—50, 183, 190 Freeman, Y. Frank, 149 Frick, Caroline, 17 fringe time, 150, 151, 153, 181 Frontier Gal, 133 FSA (Film Service Association), 23 FTC (Federal Trade Commission), 11, 16, 46, 58, 123, 133; Film Distributors League reissue, 61—63; W.H. Productions reissues, 36, 38—42, 87, 195; Mothers of Liberty reissue, 36—38 FTC v. Film Distributors League, 61—63 FTC v. Joseph Simmonds, 36, 38—42, 87, 195 FTC v. Royal Cinema Corp., 36—38, 46 FTC v. Lasso Pictures Corp., 39, 46 Gable, Clark, 80, 89, 91, 155 Gaines, Jane, 18 Gardner, Gerald, 188 Gaslight, 125 General Teleradio, 151, 163—67, 176 General Tire and Rubber Company, 151, 164 Germany, 66, 110, 163, 206n4 GFC (General Film Company), 23—25, 54, 56 Giffen, R.L., 80 Gilbert, John, 63 Gish, Lillian, 25 Goetz, William, 130 GoldenEye, 199 Goldman Sachs, 76 Goldstein, Joseph M., 39 Goldwyn, Samuel, 147 Gomery, Douglas, 76, 144 Gone with the Wind, 15, 116, 126, 127 Good Will Hunting, 199 Gould, Jack, 154, 155, 181, 189 Gould, Symon, 66 Govil, Nitin, 115 “great giveaway,” 180, 186

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Index

Great Waltz, 127 Griffith, D.W., 25, 26, 60 Grossman, Bill, 32, 33, 43, 46 Guild Films, 164 Gun Runners, The, 183 Gustafson, Robert, 191 Hammett, Dashiell, 82 Hampton, Benjamin, 76 Harris-Broder Pictures, 131 Harris, Joseph, 142, 160 Harris, Paul, 132 Harrison’s Reports, 117, 138 Hart, Lorenz, 84 Hart, William S., 8, 11, 16, 17, 31, 37, 49, 66; and fans, 42—46; and FTC case, 36, 38—42, 195; and legal injunctions, 58, 64, 125, 187; and nontheatrical film, 69, 70; and Triangle, 24, 28, 29; and Tumbleweeds reissue, 87, 119; and W.H. Productions, 32—36, 48, 211n83 Hartford Courant, 120 Haunted Gold, 82 Hawks, Howard, 183 Hays, Will, 98 HBO, 193, 199 Hell Divers, 88table Hellhound of Alaska, The, 32 Hell’s Angels, 114, 224n26 Hell’s Hinges, 29 Here Comes the Navy, 93, 113 Hilmes, Michele, 144, 146 Hitchcock, Alfred, 130 Hobbit trilogy, 197 Hodkinson, William, 30 Hollinger, Hy, 147 Hollywood Reporter, 166, 174 Hollywood film industry: conglomerate takeovers, 191—93; legacy of Matty Fox and Eliot Hyman, 193, 194; independent producers, 149—51; library as profit center, 109, 115, 124; logics of reuse, 75, 78; nontheatrical film, 69—72; production process, 78, 79, 110;

television distribution, 174, 175, 181, 182, 190; television investment and production, 144—6, 148, 149. See also distribution; exhibition; labor; vertical integration Holt, Jennifer, 193 home cinema, 51, 68—72, 135, 196—200 Hope, Bob, 180 Horne, Jennifer, 25 Hot Tub Time Machine, 197 House of Cards, 200 House on 56th Street, The, 89 Hoxie, Jack, 86 Hughes, Howard, 114, 162—4, 224n26 Hugo, 17 Hulu, 199 Humphrey, Hal, 154, 155, 188, 189 Huston, John, 82, 160 Hyams, Phillip, 131 Hyams, Sydney, 131 Hyman, Eliot, 3, 9, 13, 14, 57, 198; AAP, 158, 160, 163, 164; C&C TV potential merger, 142—45; legacy, 193, 194, 196; MGM library, 175; MPTV, 160—63; Seven Arts, 179, 182—85, 190—93; United Artists, 175—77; Warner Bros. library, 86, 167—74 Hyman, Kenneth, 191—93 Hyndman, Donald, 97 I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, 75 International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), 112, 120, 180 If I Had My Way, 130 If I Were King, 80 Ince, Thomas, 24, 26—29, 35, 61 Independent Film Journal, 138, 139 Independent Motion Pictures Producers Association, 116 Indonesia, 142, 159, 235n64 Informer, The, 92 Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 168, 237n97

Index International Latex, 166, 172 International Pictures, 130 Intolerance, 27 irony, 60, 67, 83, 188—90 It Happened One Night, 80 Jacobs, Arnold, 184 Jacobs, Herb, 178 Jacobs, Lea, 64 Japan, 96, 110 Japanese American Citizens League, 155 Jazz Singer, The, 76, 89 Jean, Gloria, 130 Jewell, Richard B., 78, 89 Joy, Alice, 25 Julian, Rupert, 37 Kaiser, The, 37 Kalem Company, 19, 20, 22, 25, 56 Kalem Company v. Harper Brothers, 19, 20, 79 Kalmenson, Benjamin, 171 Keenan, Frank, 31, 69 Kent, S.R., 71 Kerkorian, Kirk, 1, 193 Kessel, Adam, 26 Keystone, 24, 27, 57, 104; and nontheatrical film, 69; and W.H. Productions reissues, 34, 35, 38, 39, 47, 48, 211n83 King Kong, 15, 90—92, 95, 162, 219n53 King, Rob, 27 King’s Row, 148, 173 Kinney National, 14, 179, 192, 193 Klauber, Donald, 172 Kleine, George, 22, 25 Kodascope Library, 10, 53, 70—72, 101 Korda, Alexander, 117 Koszarski, Richard, 27 labor: and jurisdictional disputes, 111, 112, 123; and 1960 SAG contract, 179, 180; and residuals, 10, 48, 106, 108, 109, 112, 121, 149, 195; and

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265

reissues, 10, 11, 13, 120, 121—123, 139; and World War II, 110 Lafferty, William, 144, 181 Lahue, Kalton, 35, 47, 208n31 lampooning old movies, 60, 67, 83, 188—90 Land beyond the Law, 82, 83 Lasky, Jesse, 54 Lasso Pictures, 39, 46 Late Shows, 150, 156, 157, 189, 194, 196 Lazarus, Paul N., 117 Lemmon, Jack, 186 Lenox Little Theatre, 66 LeRoy, Mervyn, 77 Lesser, Sol, 103 Liberace, 164 Liberty Films, 186—88 library, film: and backlist, compared, 51—56; and cannibalization of revenue streams, 50, 51, 110, 116; and cultural significance, 5, 99, 100, 140, 141, 194; definition of, 2, 69, 100; as engine for studio, 143, 144, 160, 171, 176, 182, 183; financial uses of, 9, 30, 31, 44, 48, 129, 176, 194; laws governing, 18—20, 33, 39; need for fresh material, 57, 196, 197; nontheatrical, 69—72, 134—39; as profit center, 13, 52, 53, 109, 115, 124, 196; taxation of, 168, 169, 237n97; technology and, 3—4, 12, 139, 140; uses of, 6—10; valuation of, 2, 17, 18, 48, 83. See also reissues; television, movies on Library of Congress, 18 Life, 119 Lionsgate, 30, 193, 194, 197 Lipton, David, 130 Little Caesar, 91 little cinema movement, 66, 67 Little Foxes, 147 “Little Three” studios, 8, 129 Little Women, 52, 53, 90, 92, 95 local television stations. See television stations

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Index

Loew’s, 55, 76, 124, 127—29; and television, 175, 178. See also MGM Long Voyage Home, The, 123 Los Angeles Superior Court, 64, 187 Los Angeles Times, 154, 188 Lost Patrol, The, 95 Lost Squadron, The, 95 Lothbury Syndicate, 47 Love Me Tender, 184 Loy, Myrna, 89, 90 Lubin, Sigmund, 18, 22, 25 Lynch, Stephen A., 30, 31, 44, 48 Madonna of the Streets, 102 Magic Town, 151 Maltese Falcon, The, 82 Manchester Guardian, 65 Manhandled, 71 Manhattan Melodrama, 88—91 Marsh, Mae, 25 Marx Brothers, 119 Masterpiece Productions, 129 Maynard, Ken, 82, 83, 170 Mayer, Louis B., 103 MCA, 168, 175, 184 McCord, H.J., 91, 92 McElwee, John P., 87 McGannon, Donald, 166 McIntire, William C., 16, 17, 58 MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), 63, 80, 140; and DOJ, 112, 127, 157; and Goofy Movies, 83; and MoMA Film Library, 99, 100; and postbankruptcy management, 197—99; and reissues, 13, 87—91, 95, 109, 110, 113, 116, 120, 124—28, 215n71; and remakes of silent films, 81; and 16mm film, 96—98, 128, 129, 228n84; and television, 148, 149, 174—76; and Ted Turner, 1, 193, 195; and 2004 leveraged buyout, 1, 2, 196, 197 MGM Parade, 148, 149, 175 Million Dollar Movie, The, 151, 163, 164 Misfits, The, 183 Mister Roberts, 168 Meet Me in St. Louis, 1

Mencken, H.L., 64 Merrie Melodies, 77 Millionaire, The, 81, 82 Miramax, 199 Mirror (Los Angeles), 154 Moby Dick, 101 MoMA Film Library. See Museum of Modern Art Film Library Monogram Pictures, 160 Monopole Pictures, 37 Montgomery, Robert, 120, 125 Moore, Own, 60 Morey, Anne, 4, 66 Mothers of Liberty, 37 Motion Picture Herald, 92, 97, 123, 127, 168 Motion Picture Industry Council, 123 Motion Picture News, 32, 35, 36, 50 Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), 21—25, 54, 207n16 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), 90, 98 Motion Picture Producers Association, 122 Motion Pictures for Television (MPTV), 142, 143, 150, 158—65, 171 Moulin Rouge, 160 Movie Album, The, 83, 102 Movie Memories, 83, 102 Moving Picture World, 32, 35 MPPC (Motion Picture Patents Company), 21—25, 54, 207n16 MPTV (Motion Pictures for Television), 142, 143, 150, 158—165, 171 Mullen, Megan, 193 Museum of Modern Art Film Library (MoMA Film Library), 10, 12, 66, 74; and Hollywood studios, 95, 98—100 museums, 98—100, 118, 194 music, 40, 41; industry, 19, 75—77, 195; labor, 121; on television, 121, 137, 138

Index Music Publishers Holding Corporation, 75—77 Mutiny on the Bounty, 88table, 90 Mutual, 24, 26, 35, 208n31 M. Witmark and Sons, 75—77 My Four Years in Germany, 104 My Lady’s Latchkey, 102 My Official Wife, 83 Mystery Science Theater 3000, 83 National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters, 157, 172 National General Corporation, 192 National Television Associates (NTA), 174, 178, 183, 184 National Theatres, 163 Naughty Marietta, 88table, 124 Navy, Blue and Gold, 113 NBC, 145, 146; and advertising, 152— 54; and George Stevens lawsuit, 186—88; and Saturday Night at the Movies, 180—82, 200 negative, film, 26, 29—31, 52, 86; destruction of, 12, 73, 74, 81, 94, 95, 100—105; ownership of, 33, 36, 37, 57; and piracy, 35; valuation of 11, 17—22, 47—50, 115, 159, 195 Netflix, 14, 48, 68, 199—202 NetMovies, 199 networks, 144—47, 233n30; advertising, 152—54; movies on prime-time, 179—82 News Corp., 197 New York State Supreme Court, 186 New York Times, 73, 106, 122, 154, 181 Nickelette, The, 83, 102 nickelodeon, 20, 22, 41, 59 9.5mm film, 12, 51, 70 nitrate film, 73, 75, 97, 102 Noah’s Ark, 104 nontheatrical film, 6, 10, 53, 123, 140; studio policies, 69—72, 95—97. See also 16mm film nostalgia, 13, 102; and World War II, 107, 109, 118, 119 Notorious Affair, 170

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267

NTA (National Television Associates), 174, 178, 183, 184 NYMP (New York Motion Picture Company), 26, 28, 29, 31, 44, 48 O’Brien, Pat, 113 Odlum, Floyd, 162 Of Human Bondage, 95 Oklahoma Kid, The, 114 O’Malley, Walter, 190 O’Neil, Thomas, 151, 164, 165 One Way Passage, 89, 92 On the Night Stage, 32 Ordeal, The, 37 organized crime, 162, 169, 237n102 Our Gang, 155 Outside the Law, 65 packages of films for television, 144, 172, 173, 178, 182, 196, 197 Page Miss Glory, 170 paper prints, 18 Paramount, 50, 94, 129; and DOJ, 112, 157; and George Sevens lawsuit, 186—88; and Gulf and Western sale, 179, 191; and MCA sale, 168, 175; and MoMA Film Library, 99, 100; and remakes, 80, 81; and reissues, 113, 114, 215n71; and 16mm film, 71, 97; and television, 139, 144, 146, 147, 149; and vertical integration, 54—57 Park Row, 163 Pathé, 69 Pathéscope, 69, 70 Pathex, 70 pay-per-view, 193 pay television, 9, 143—47, 193, 199; and Matty Fox, 158, 164 , 165, 175, 190 PCA (Production Code Administration), 90—92, 114 Phair, George E., 106 Phantom of the Opera, The, 86 Phonevision, 147 Photoplay, 64, 65 Pickford, Mary, 28, 29, 37, 60

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Index

Pictorial Films, 157 Picture Snatcher, 91 Pierce, David, 104, 139, 144, 149, 223n94 Pinocchio, 107 piracy, 18; and 16mm film, 97, 136; and W.H. Productions, 34, 35, 39, 94 Place in the Sun, A, 186—88 Polan, Dana, 140 Poltergeist, 197 Porter, Michael, 5, 6 Posner, Leonard, 157, 158 Poverty Row, 92 Powell, William, 89—91 preservation. See survival of films Price, Oscar, 57 PRM, 169, 170, 175, 237n97. See also AAP Procter and Gamble, 153 Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), 132 Production Code Administration(PCA), 90—92, 114 public domain, 7, 51, 52, 61 Publisher’s Circular, 52 publishing industry. See backlist; book industry Pulp Fiction, 199 Purvis, Harry, 188, 189 Quinn, Michael, 24 Quirk, James, 64, 65 quota laws, 96, 111 racist stereotypes on television, 155 radio, 71, 75, 84, 121, 146 Rage in Heaven, 120, 124, 125, 127 Rank, J. Arthur, 139, 155, 230n116 Rathbone, Basil, 170 RCA, 78, 108, 145, 146 Reagan, Ronald, 179, 180 Realart, 131—33, 159, 173 reboots, 198 recycling of film, 17, 92, 100, 104, 206n4 Red Dawn, 198 Reformed Outlaw, 32

regulation. See DOJ; FCC; FTC reissues, 3, 4, 11, 74, 149, 170; critics on, 64—67, 119—120; definition of, 86; drive-in theaters, 148; and exhibitor demand, 16, 21, 39—42, 74, 86, 93, 109, 113, 116, 139, 220n61; fans on, 42—46, 67, 68; industry regulation of, 58—64; international, 95, 96, 221n68; and labor, 121—124; literary classics, 52, 53, 90; MGM, 124—129; and PCA, 90—92, 219n53; quantity, 115, 225n37; re-titling problems, 34—42, 58—64; silent films in sound era, 75, 86—89; Snow White, 106—109; specialty distributors, 113, 114; and television revenue, compared, 173, 174table, 184, 185; trade press on, 35, 36, 50, 115; Universal, 129—133; World War II, 112, 113, 196 remakes, 3, 74, 112, 113; and AAP, 168, 171, 176; in contemporary Hollywood, 197, 198; and destruction of films, 102; of silent films, 12, 79—83; and ownership of rights, 7, 20; and Seven Arts, 183 Republic, 157 reruns, 152, 153 residuals, 10, 11, 108, 109; and reissues, 13, 112, 121, 139; and television, 14, 122, 179, 180 Return of Draw Egan, The, 29, 43, 44, 57, 70 revivals, 13, 74, 140; definition of, 86, 113; exhibitor demand, 92—94; little cinema movement, 66, 67; revenue, 220n64 revival theaters, 10, 117, 118, 140 Rich, Bob, 172, 176 Richey, Henderson M., 125 Ride ‘Em Cowboy, 82, 170 Ritter, Tex, 131 RKO, 55, 72, 78, 127; Betrayal from the East, 155; and C&C sale, 9, 13, 142—4, 165—167, 171, 190, 194; and DOJ, 112, 157; and General Teleradio sale, 151, 161—164; and

Index reissues, 90, 92, 95, 113, 115, 149, 219n53; and remakes, 81; and 16mm film, 97, 98, 135; Snow White, 106— 109; and Ted Turner, 1, 193 Roach, Hal, 155 Roach, Hal, Jr., 164 RoboCop, 197 Rodgers, Richard, 84 Rogers, Ginger, 162 Rooney, Mickey, 180 Rose Marie, 88table Ross, Steven, 193 Royal Cinema Corporation, 37, 38 Russo, Alexander, 172 Sabatini, Rafael, 82 Salome, 66 San Francisco, 88table, 90, 126 Sanjek, Russell, 76 Sarnoff, David, 152, 154, 180 Saturday Night at the Movies, 180 Savini, Bob, 114. See also Astor Pictures Saw, 194 Scarface, 114, 224n26 Scarlet Pimpernel, 117 Schatz, Thomas, 110, 115 Schechter, J., 32, 33 Schlesinger, Leon, 77, 82, 83, 89, 170 Scorsese, Martin, 151 Scourge of the Desert, 32 Screen Actors Guild (SAG), 108, 109; and residuals, 120—122, 179, 180, 186 Screen Cartoonists Guild, 109 Screen Gems, 157, 174, 175; block booking lawsuit, 178 Screen Writer, 106, 121 Screen Writers Guild, 10, 106, 109, 120—122 Sea Hawk, The, 82 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 47, 190 Segrave, Kerry, 3, 4, 144 Selisberg, Walter, 38, 39 Selznick, David O., 156 Semenenko, Serge, 132, 163, 169

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269

Sennett, Mack, 26, 27, 35, 57 Seven Arts, 14, 172, 177, 179, 241n25; legacy, 193—95; reissues and television, compared, 184, 185; and United Artists, 176, 182—84; and Warner Bros. purchase, 190—93, 241n34 Shadow of a Doubt, 130 Sheik, The, 56, 71, 215n71 short films, 22; derivatives, 7, 83—85, 102, 189; nontheatrical, 70, 134, 135; reissues, 32—36, 40—42, 56, 59, 60; television, 137, 168—171 Showtime, 193 Shuffle Off to Buffalo, 77 Sign of the Cross, The, 114 Silence of the Lambs, The, 197 silent films: destruction of, 100—105; reissues in sound era of, 75, 86—89; sound remakes of, 12, 79—83 Silver Dollar, 89 Simmonds, Joseph H., 32, 35; and financial fraud, 46—49; and FTC, 38—40 Singer, Ben, 40, 68 Singing Fool, The, 101, 104 “16mm case,” 157 16mm film, 6, 8, 10, 12, 51, 74, 104, 117; importance for television, 72, 157, 161, 172, 176; Kodascope Library, 70—72; residuals, 109, 121; studio policies, 95—98, 124, 128, 129; Universal, 110, 132, 134—9, 159, 196; World War II, 133, 134 Skiatron, 143, 147, 158, 164, 165, 175, 193 Skouras, Spyros, 148 Skouras theater chain, 131 Sky Devils, 114, 224n26 Skyfall, 197 Smilin’ Through, 88table Smith, Pete, 83 Snow White, 95, 106—9, 114—16 Some of the Best, 125 Somewhere in Sonora, 82 Song of the South, 147 Son of the Sheik, The, 119

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Index

Sontag, Susan, 189 Sony, 1, 2, 198 sound, transition to, 3, 12, 51, 73, 74, 76, 195; and talent contracts, 84, 85; and remakes of silent films, 79—83 Spain, 96, 196 Spanish-language movies, 163, 167 Spider-Man franchise, 198 Spirit of ‘76, The, 65 Spitz, Leo, 130 Spring Is Here, 84 sponsors, 152—54, 172, 173, 184. spot advertising, 143, 152—54; C&C TV barter deal, 166, 167, 171 Spyglass, 197 Stagecoach, 89, 123, 160, 170 Staking His Life, 32, 211n83 Stamp, Shelley, 63 Standard Exhibition Contract, 63 Stanley Warner, 163 Stark, Ray, 176, 182—84, 190, 191 stars, 10, 12; loan outs, 79, 80, 228n84; profit participation, 58, 59, 123; reputations of, 59—61; value of 16, 17, 20, 21, 22 star system, 20, 21, 195 Starz, 193, 199 station representatives, 153, 154, 167, 172, 178 Stevens, George, 61, 186—8 stock footage, 7, 12, 74; and Warner Bros., 82, 83, 102, 171 Stockwell, Harry, 108 Stolkin, Ralph, 162, 163 subscription television. See pay television Superpictures, 30 survival of films, 18, 35, 83, 103—5, 223n94; and contracts, 85, 86 SVOD (subscription video on demand), 198—201 Sweeney, Al, 155 Swing Shift Theatre, 150 Talmadge, Norma, 31, 69 Tarzan, the Ape Man, 95 taste culture, 50, 63—68, 188, 189

taxation, 168, 169, 237n97 technology, 146—8, 179, 195; animation, 107; and film libraries, 3—4, 12, 139, 140; nontheatrical, 68—72; sound film, 3, 12, 51, 73, 74, 76 Telemeter, 147 television, 111; color, 179, 181; marketplace growth of, 142, 143, 146, 147, 198; theater, 145—47. See also advertising on television television, movies on, 3, 68, 117, 140, 142—145; alterations, 46, 186—8; critics, 154—7, 188, 189; digital marketplace, 196—201; network prime-time, 179—182; reissues, compared, 173, 174t, 184, 185; residuals, 109, 121, 122, 179, 180; talent contracts, 84—85, 129, 145; Universal, 110, 124, 132, 137—139 television stations, 9, 13, 158; demand for movies, 144, 145, 150, 181, 197; licensing film packages, 172, 173, 178, 182; rental terms, 149, 161, 163, 165—6 television syndicators, 135, 149, 150; sales methods, 161. See also AAP; C&C Television; MPTV Terminator 2, 194 That’s Entertainment, 125, 149 Theatre Owners of America (TOA), 117, 135 theatrical reissues. See reissues Thin Man, 89 35mm film, 4, 97, 98, 104, 128; residuals, 109; theater television, 146 Thomas, Harry L., 116 Three Musketeers, The, 59, 61—63 Thrills of Yesterday, 83 Time, 119, 134 Time Inc., 193 Time Warner, 1, 193, 196 Tin Pan Alley, 75—77 To Have and Have Not, 183 trade papers, 32, 35, 36, 49, 64; on reissues, 50—52, 54, 89, 93; on television, 150, 162, 171

Index Trader Horn, 88table, 90 Treasure Island, 52, 88table, 90 Triangle Distributing Corporation, 30, 31, 44 Triangle Film Corporation, 1, 8, 11, 40, 44, 187, 195; early history, 26—30; financial fraud, 46—49; and Percy Waters, 50, 51, 55, 56; nontheatrical film licensing, 69—71; and piracy, 94, 104; reissues, 31, 50, 51, 55, 56, 58—63; and Warner Bros., 74, 103. See also W.H. Productions Triangle stations, 166 Triangle Studios, 78 True Story of Jesse James, The, 184 Tumbleweeds, 87, 119 Turner Broadcasting Systems, 1, 191 Turner Classic Movies, 149, 193 Turner, Ted, 1, 31, 193, 195 TV Guide, 181, 188 Twentieth Century-Fox: DOJ, 112, 157; 16mm film, 96, 97, 135; television, 139, 148, 149, 174, 184; theater ownership, 129. See also Fox Film Corporation Twentieth Century-Fox Theatre, 148 28mm film, 69, 70, 104 UHF, 147 UltraViolet, 201, 202 unfair competition, 36, 39, 61, 166—8 unions. See labor United Artists, 1, 117, 160; and AAP and C&C purchases, 175—7, 192; and conglomerate takeover, 14, 179; and FTC, 61—63; and Howard Hughes, 114; remakes, 80, 81; reissues, 115, 129; and Seven Arts, 182—4; television, 139, 172, 176, 178 United Artists Associated, 172, 176, 182 United Kingdom, 66, 95, 131, 154, 155 United Paramount, 163 United Projector Company, 69 United Safety Library, 69, 70

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United World, 72, 132, 134—9, 157, 159, 196, 230n116 Universal, 8, 13, 140, 159, 163; nontheatrical, 72, 97, 98, 131, 134— 139, 157, 163, 196; reissues, 50, 65, 86, 109, 110, 115, 129—133, 228n91; remakes, 81; television, 175, 184. See also United World Universal-International, 130—3 universities, 10, 98, 100, 118 U.S. Congress, 19, 36, 38 U.S. Senate, 154, 180 U.S. State Department, 159, 235n64 U.S. Supreme Court, 19, 178; U.S. v. Paramount, 112, 127, 146, 157 U.S. v. Loew’s, Inc., 178 U.S. v. Paramount, 112, 127, 146, 157 U.S. v. Twentieth Century-Fox, 157 Valentino, Rudolph, 56, 68, 71, 86, 215n71 Vanishing Body, The, 133 Variety, 38, 64, 96, 107; on digital distribution, 199; on movies on television, 162, 163, 165; on reissues, 50, 52, 54, 133; on remakes, 81; on revivals, 113 VHS, 53, 180, 195 Vitagraph, 22, 74, 76, 79, 82, 83; destruction of films, 100—104 Vitaphone, 83—85, 102 vertical integration, 12, 8, 49, 51, 69, 110, 198; and MGM, 13, 124, 127; and Paramount, 12, 54—57; and television, 146; and Triangle, 27; and Warner Bros., 76 VOD (video on demand), 193, 198, 201 Wallace, W.G., 102 Wallis, Hal, 78 Wall Street, 14, 109, 182; and MGM, 196—8; and Seven Arts, 179, 191— 3; and Warner Bros., 168, 169 Wall Street Journal, 162, 188 Walmart, 201, 202 Wanger, Walter, 123, 129, 159 WarGames, 197

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Index

War Labor Board, 109 Warner Bros., 9, 55, 127, 184; derivatives, 79—84; destruction of silent film library, 12, 74, 100—105; DOJ, 112, 157; John Wayne reissue deal, 123, 124, 227nn70,71; 196; MoMA Film Library, 99, 100; music and sound investments, 75—78; nontheatrical, 71; PRM sale, 13, 142—44, 155, 167—73, 228n84, 237nn97,98,99; Production Code Administration, 90—92; reissues, 87—89, 91—93, 95, 114, 221n68; Seven Arts sale, 179, 182, 191—94; 16mm film, 96, 97; Ted Turner, 1, 193; television production, 145, 146, 148, 149; Trust Department, 85, 86, 101—3, 170, 171 Warner Bros. Presents, 148 Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, 13, 191—93 Warner, Abe, 76, 168 Warner Communications Inc., 191, 193 Warner, Harry, 76, 168 Warner, Jack, 76, 168, 191 Warner, Sam, 76 War Production Board, 132, 159, 164 Warren, Harry, 77 Washington Afro-American, 155 Washington Post, 188 Wasson, Haidee, 53, 71, 72, 99, 140 Waterloo Bridge, 124 Waters, Percy, 50, 51, 56, 57 Wayne, John, 82, 83, 89, 170; Warner Bros. reissue deal, 123, 124, 227nn70,71 WCBS, 178 WDTV, 150 Weary River, 104 Weber, Lois, 63 Weinberg, Jacob, 39 West, Billy, 41 westerns, 114, 123; television, 137— 39, 148, 149, 158; and Universal, 86, 130, 131, 137—9; and Warner Bros., 80, 82, 83, 89, 170; and William S. Hart, 24, 28, 29

Western Import Company, 31, 32, 38; financial fraud, 46—49, 211n83, 212nn85,88 Westinghouse, 166 West, Mae, 94 West Side Story, 199 WGN, 166, 167 What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 185 When the Daltons Rode, 131 Whitney, John Hay, 98, 99 W.H. Productions, 17, 32—36, 58, 59, 63, 173; financial fraud, 46—49; FTC investigation, 38—43, 46, 87, 187; revenue estimate, 211n83 Wid’s, 35 Wilder, Billy, 186 Williams, Esther, 127 William S. Hart Productions, 34, 39, 58 Winik, Hyman, 31, 32, 38; Douglas Fairbanks litigation, 59—61; financial fraud, 46—49 Wizard of Oz, The, 1, 126 Wolper, David, 161 Women, The, 126 World Film Corporation, 74, 80, 103 World War I, 36, 37, 45, 64 World War II, 107; Hollywood film industry, 110—113; Matty Fox, 132; 16mm film industry, 133, 134, 137; war movies on television, 155 WOR-TV, 151, 163 Wright, Teresa, 130 Writers Guild of America, 180. See also Screen Writers Guild WSAZ-TV, 173 Wuthering Heights, 147 Wyler, William, 187 Yankee Doodle Dandy, 168 Young and Healthy, 77 Zanuck, Daryl F., 78 Zenith, 147 Ziv, Frederick, 150 Zoellner, William, 125 Zukor, Adolph, 27—29, 54