When pix nixed 'block' mix

Film biz previously bundling pics

By GABRIEL SNYDER

It happened more than 50 years ago, but the film business went through its own a la carte fight.

Before it was ended by the Paramount consent decree in 1948, Hollywood studios widely used "block booking" to sell a year or more worth of films to theaters.

By bundling their pics, studios got guaranteed distribution for all their titles, the classics along with the stinkers. In the 1930s, studio slates could be as many as 50 pics per year. Leverage with exhibs also allowed them to produce shorts like cartoons and newsreels, which were booked via "full-line forcing."

Independent exhibs, which were forced to pay for lousy pictures, and indie producers, who thought they were being squeezed out of the market, hated block booking.

The practice was also decried by activists who thought films were corrupting society. Testifying before Congress in 1926, William Shaefe Chase, who headed the religious-backed Federal Motion Picture Council, called for legislation to block the practice.

According to "Hollywood Censored" by Gregory D. Black, Chase believed local theaters would decline to play the smutty stuff if they could choose pictures individually.

Eventually the activist crowd focused on establishing a production code that took effect in the 1930s. But the campaign against block booking was taken up by the Department of Justice's studio antitrust investigation, which culminated in the Paramount decree. As well as forcing studios to divest their theaters, the rule prevented bundling pictures.

Under the new system, production slates plummeted to around 20 pics per year, says UCLA film professor Jonathan Kuntz, as studios strived to make each pic profitable rather than let the winners subsidize the losers. And, of course, all the programmers -- the sub-B movies, the Bugs Bunny cartoons and the newsreels -- were eventually phased out.