Playing the Percentages: How Film Distribution Made the Hollywood Studio System

In his introduction to Playing the Percentages: How Film Distribution Made the Hollywood Studio System, Derek Long clearly sets his focus, starting with several well-founded working assumptions about classic Hollywood as a complex business enterprise. Chief among them is that “distribution remains the least understood sector of the American film industry” (4). However, Long also bluntly asks, and not simply rhetorically, “[W]hy do we need a book about distribution in the ‘old medium’ of cinema?” (4). Such is the central, underlying question running through Playing the Percentages, something that the author never quite answers satisfactorily, despite his considerable research and writing work. Long is candid about the steep odds he faced in undertaking an accurate study of not only an arcane financial subject, but also one that has been uniquely underexamined. Having worked on his project for ten years, he confesses he now understands why “no one has yet written a book solely dedicated to the history of film distribution in the United States” (13).He prefaces his endeavor with a handful of bold, counterintuitive premises. As anyone with a film studies background might tell you, Hollywood studio history of the 1920s through the 1950s “Golden Age” is among the most scrutinized, if not overanalyzed, subject in moving image and popular culture studies. Whether drawn to the mythic, star-studded glamour (and tawdry drama) of classic Hollywood, or perhaps owing to nostalgic affection, writers have packed bookshelves and journals with innumerable studies of the industry's famous players, film factories, and in the memorable words of French critic André Bazin, the overall “genius of the system.” Yet, as Long stresses, those studies have overwhelmingly put the spotlight on Los Angeles–area producing studios and their respective films and filmmakers.Thus, while observers cite the romanticized old Hollywood of the five “majors” (MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., Fox, RKO) and three “minors” (Columbia, Universal, United Artists) as a quintessential example of a vertically integrated “mature oligopoly” (1), they invariably dwell on the production component. While there certainly have been books and articles on the various exhibition elements (e.g., “picture palaces,” drive-ins, revolutions in sound and widescreen projection), rarer still have been consequential studies on the nitty-gritty of getting the traditional 35 mm film prints and studio marketing material out to those venues and, most importantly, how much to charge for them—and the under-the-radar star of that show is distribution. Furthermore, while writers and film historians invariably focus on the tyrannical, larger-than-life Hollywood moguls (from MGM's Louis B. Mayer to Columbia's Harry Cohn), curiously few profiles have analyzed the Wall Street CEOs who decided and distributed the yearly production budgets for the Mayers and Cohns out in Hollywood.In charting his course, Long acknowledges contemporary academics who have sought to pull away from the “dream factory” mindset. For instance, Richard Maltby in his 2011 article on “New Cinema Histories” urged a “shift away from film contents to consider their circulation and consumption . . . as social and cultural exchange” (10). Following suit, Long investigates distribution; for example, he writes that “over the course of the 1910s and 1920s, the marketing and sales practices that governed the commercial distribution of films to theatrical venues in the United States developed in a nonlinear way” (2). Long's granular approach provides insight into the murky processes by which the early film distributors packaged and sold their wares to the new motion-picture theaters (succeeding the small storefront nickelodeons) then sprouting all over the United States. He sheds light on the variegated rates and policies in place during the period, and in doing so, he supplies a nuanced alternative to the standard, simplistic notion that the studios’ only rental scheme was hard-sell “block booking,” which pitched titles in studio-bunched batches rather than individually. Over the decades, block booking has been broadly cited as prompting the Justice Department's antitrust case, which eventually led to the momentous 1948 Paramount “consent decree” that would curtail the studios’ oligopolistic power and set off their general descent into dire financial straits by the 1960s.Deeper into distribution analysis, Long's study takes an unusual turn as he chooses to focus on obscure, largely forgotten features and performers. He opts to accord scant space to the well-known, artistically notable works of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and D. W. Griffith, for example, and instead examines the distribution patterns of The Life of Our Savior (Maurice Maître, 1914), an Easter-time religious drama that was a box office disaster, despite its presentation as a premium “roadshow” engagement in larger cities. Perhaps Long thought that a novel distribution analysis of such important silent titles as Griffith's incendiary The Birth of a Nation (1915), the influential Italian epic Quo Vadis? (Enrico Guazzoni, 1912), Chaplin's The Gold Rush (1925), or even director King Vidor's daring The Crowd (1928) would seem a derivative sequel to earlier scholarship from key modern forerunners such as Tino Balio (The American Film Industry), Richard Koszarski (An Evening's Entertainment), Eileen Bowser (The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1917), Janet Wasko (Movies and Money), and John Izod (Hollywood and the Box Office, 1895–1986).Playing the Percentages leans heavily on industry jargon as well as self-created terms. Long provides a glossary of much, but not all, of the torrent of period distribution lingo, which includes “state rights,” “idiosyncratic” and “programmatic” releasing, the “run/zone/clearance” system, “open” and “selective” booking, and “variety programs” (as well as block booking). It is ironic, then, that the author oddly calls out Paramount founding father Adolph Zukor for his “throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall” (52) distribution strategies when a similar sort of rhetorical tactic appears in this work. Long's barrage of facts and figures also would have benefited from some attempt to arrange them into more visual presentations—for example, through simplifying charts.In his epilogue, the author fast-forwards to contemporary movie distribution and touches on the current transitional crisis of the evolving—perhaps devolving—legacy studios. In the face of brutal twenty-first-century media competition, the erstwhile “film” studios are facing an uncertain future comparable to the existential box-office challenge posed by network television in the 1950s. Here is where the concept of distribution as one of the three legs of the commercial US film industry looms tall. While the surviving studios (now including new powerhouse Disney) still have the money and resources to produce their new, digital-era movies, the Internet and its “streaming” capabilities have radically disrupted the entire business model. Not only are traditional cinemas sidelined, but streaming also circumvents the old film distribution channels by delivering content directly to viewers—both when and where they want it. This process further rocks the established studios since the streaming services are now producing their own big-budget, star-studded (and censor-lite) content, both long-form and short. Combine that with the threat posed by now-monolithic home-entertainment rivals such as Internet-based gaming and video-sharing sites such as YouTube, and it is no wonder why many business investors are betting against the long-term health of Hollywood's numbers game.Therefore, while the author successfully demonstrates that US film distribution developed in a “nonlinear way” on the yellow brick road to classic Hollywood's oligopolistic dominance, today it appears obvious that those same studios will never control their own product anywhere close to 100 percent again, let alone their entire, ever-metamorphosing “moving-picture” industry.