2 (Winter 1984): 41–72 Robert Anderson, ‘The Motion Picture Patents Company: A Re-evaluation,’ in Tino Balio, ed., The American Film Industry, 2 nd ed. For earlier invaluable studies, see also Janet Staiger, ‘Combination and Litigation: Structures of US Film Distribution, 1891-1917,’ Cinema Journal 23, no. 2 (2019): 1–31.ħ Richard Abel, Americanizing the Movies and “Movie-Mad” Audiences, 1910-1914 (Berkley: University of California Press, 2005): 15. Moore, ‘“Bought, Sold, Exchanged and Rented”: The Early Film Exchange and the Market in Secondhand Films in New York Clipper Classified Ads,’ Film History 31, no. For an excellent recent analysis of this move to vertical integration, see Lee Grieveson, Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018).Ħ Paul S. An even earlier editorial claimed that “the middleman or distributor is virtually the regulator of supply and demand”-'The Open Market,’ Exhibitors’ Times (July 1913): 1.Ĥ For a succinct and still relevant summary of that history, see ‘Appendix B: A brief synopsis of the structure of the United States film industry, 1896-1960,’ in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Modes of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 397–399.ĥ For the concept of “regulatory infrastructure,” see Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski’s ‘Introduction,’ in their edited collection, Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructure (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 6.
Cohn, ‘The Middleman of the Movies,’ Photoplay Magazine (March 1917), 75–80, specifically 75. The ad likely hid any sign of desperation within a year, Triangle would cease making and releasing films.Ģ ‘Charlotte Ranks Second in South in Film Agencies,’ Charlotte Observer (9 November 1916): 9.ģ Alfred A. Although exchanges offered many employment opportunities for young women, those opportunities often were limited to film inspection and repair, tasks that were extremely dangerous and often paid a relatively low wage.ġ Triangle Distributing Corporation ad, Moving Picture World (): 1070. Third, the essay investigates several individual exchanges, in a kind of guided tour, that explores the systematised work of their departments and classifies their employees. While they served as profitable business models with economic benefits for communities, they also forced authorities to enact stricter fire regulations and to cope with increasing unionisation efforts and strikes. Second, it examines large and small exchanges operating at the local/regional level in two dozen cities identified as centres of film distribution. Here, film exchanges formed a key nodal point that used scientific management strategies of efficiency to put manufacturers’ ephemeral commodities into circulation for the entertainment of mass audiences. First, it looks at the exchange branch offices operated by a number of studios at the national level. To support that argument, it offers a model of historiographical research by putting in play overlapping, multiple histories of the exchange and its operations from 1915 through 1919.
This essay argues that the US film rental exchange-too often neglected in cinema histories-served as an essential link that ensured the efficient distribution of motion pictures, from production to exhibition.
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