We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
THE END OF 1930 A Note of Optimism
By S. G. Rayment, Editor, Kinematograph Weekly.
IN a year which the kinematograph business has devoted to consolidation and development rather than to the staging of spectacular upheavals, an extraordinarily difficult period, laoth in national and trade history, has been bridged over with amazing success.
Largely, no doubt, owing to the severe tests which had been inflicted during the previous two years, but also, of course, to a really strict attention to the demands of the public, it has been possible to maintain to some extent those increases of patronage which we all regarded as only temporary reactions to the novelty of the talkie appeal.
Naturally, the peak attendances of the days when talkies were in their first flush could not be held ; they were in any case almost fictitious, when due consideration was given to the fact that many people who crowded the newly-equipped houses did so at the expense of those which remained silent. These same people, by the way, were for a long time frankly contemptuous in their criticisms of the sound picture, but the tale the box-office told was final proof. The great point was that they came, and continued to come.
As a consequence the increase of business, if sUght, has been general, as distinct from the previous year's experience, when it was local. But any exhibitor in the land can prove by his figures that his outgoings have risen far more rapidly than his revenue, and to restore matters to a more generally equitable basis has been the anxious thought of all.
Of course the renter has been the first object in the search for a possible readjustment of terms which would enable the kinerna proprietor to keep his profits at something like the same ratio to his income ,as he had been accustomed to count upon.
There was at one time a widespread demand for a return to the old flat rate for booking pictures. The percentage system, however, proved itself, and must now be accepted as part of the normal machinery by which the Trade carries on.