Richard Maltby—Mixed Economies

Richard Maltby
Harmless Entertainment: Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus
(1983)

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CHAPTER 3

MIXED ECONOMIES

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[65]

TELEVISION AND THE NEIGHBORHOOD THEATRES

It is not possible to attribute the subsequent developments in the American film industry wholly to the effects of the Paramount decrees, but their influence was of greater consequence in the restructuring of the industry in the post-war period than any other single factor. By comparison, the impact of television on the studios has been exaggerated . Undoubtedly, the main reason for the decline in audience attendance over the period from 1947 to 1962 was the availability of television as an alternative form of entertainment. But during those fifteen years the methods of American production underwent a major reorganization which was only in part the consequence of falling attendance. It is more accurate to suggest that the effects of the Paramount decrees were exacerbated and accelerated by the immediate financial pressures imposed on the studios by audience defections.

[66]

The initial decline in audience attendance in the immediate post-war period had little to do with television. After the peak attendance year of 1946, a fall to pre-war levels was perhaps to be expected, independent of other influences. That natural fall in audience numbers was aggravated by the post-war restructuring of the national economy, as wartime production resources were diverted into the manufacture of consumer goods. Returning servicemen married, started families, and acquired consumer durables, which both reduced the amount of money available for leisure-time spending and tied families to their homes. When box-office receipts began to decline in the 1947 season, there were fewer television sets in America than there were cinemas. Television, indeed, was one of the major beneficiaries of this redirection of the economy into the production of consumer goods, as the movies suffered from its concomitant concentration of financial resources on the nuclear unit, the suburban family home. The growth of television sales, television's enormous penetration of the American market in the ten years after 1948, and the nature of its content intensified the already existent tendency of the family audience to find its entertainment at home rather than going out to the movies to find it. That this tendency was, however, independent of television itself can be seen in the rise of book sales and the growth of the magazine industry in the immediate post- war period.

Most of the misconceptions about the relationship between the American film industry and the society in which it operates stem from the widespread acceptance of the myth of the undifferentiated mass audience. In the discussion of television's effect on audience decline this myth has been particularly important in imposing a simplistic causal relationship where in fact a much more complex process of interaction was taking place. By 1957, the "mass audience" had ceased to exist. An Opinion Research Corporation survey in that year found that only 15 per cent of the American public attended the cinema as often as once a week, and that this group accounted for 62 per cent of total admissions. But if the audience was no longer a mass, it still seemed to be socially heterogeneous. Apart from establishing that 72.2 per cent of cinema-goers were under 30, the survey failed to find significant variation in attendance on the basis of income, education or sex. However, even without precise demographic statistics to locate exactly which sections of the audience stopped going to the cinema, conclusions can be drawn from, for example, the pattern of theatre closures.

[67]

Viewed from a distance, the statistical evidence would appear to indicate a severe general decline in film attendance and in theatre seating in the first post-war decade. There was a drop in seating capacity of 18 per cent, from 12.5 million seats in 1948 to 10.6 million in 1954. In the decade after 1946, 4,120 theatres closed altogether. Another 5,200 theatres were operating at a loss by 1956, while 5,700 were breaking even. Of the 19,000 cinemas operating in the United States, 56 per cent were failing to make a pro-fit, and it was estimated that, as a whole, the exhibition sector was making a net loss of $11.8 million.

Frederic Stuart argues cogently that television was responsible for 80 per cent of the decline in audience attendance between 1948 and 1956, basing his conclusion on a state-by-state study of box-office receipts and theatre closures. While the evidence he presents would appear overwhelming, his statistical data conceal the extent to which the theatre closures constituted a structural reorganization of the exhibition industry, and the way the production companies' response to the Paramount decrees and the threat of television exacerbated the initial decline in overall attendance. The vast majority of the theatres that closed, and a very high proportion of those doing poorly, were small, late-run houses in neighborhood areas, used to changing their programs at least twice a week and gaining their support from a small proportion of the local community who attended regularly. These were the theatres that had made two staple Hollywood products--the family film and the B-feature--profitable concerns. They catered to the middle-class family audiences who had "gone to the movies" once or twice a week, rather than specifically going to see an individual film. But despite their numbers and the size of their audiences, these theatres had not, even in the 1930s, comprised a particularly important source of revenue to distributors, because of the relatively low rentals they were charged. In the post-war economic atmosphere, their share of the market was steadily diminishing. In 1951 the 8,000 small theatres at the bottom of the exhibition ladder produced only 20 per cent of gross domestic rental income.

Even the demise of the small neighborhood theatre cannot be attributed entirely to television. Rather, it was the result of a set of interlocking and cumulative pressures--of which television was one--and has to be seen in the light of other developments in exhibition. ...