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10 The Kinematograph Year Book.
With so great a proportion of houses paying heavy instahiients on their talking picture equipment and looking forward to a long period punctuated by regular payments in this direction, the terms of film hire were felt to be very onerous, and during the year it was necessary for the renters to take vigorous action in certain cases where the returns had been falsely made.
The Battle of the Guarantees
There were regrettable lapses which marked a not too peaceful period. The big fight between the distributing and the exhibiting sides of the business was on the subject of guarantees and disc charges. The growing dissatisfaction felt by exhibitors with the system under which films were booked on sharing terms with a guaranteed minimum payment culminated in a definite and unanimous resolution, taken at the Summer Conference of the C.E.A., to refuse business with firms making this demand.
Feeling was very strong upon this point, and the question of disc charges was allied to it in the agitation, for there was a distinct sense of grievance when a man who had hired a picture was called upon to pay a separate sum for the record which was actually an integral part of the show.
The two points were linked together in the campaign which was inaugurated in July and culminated in a series of visits paid by an exhibitors' deputation to all the renting firms. In almost every case the result was a satisfactory agreement, one or two firms — of which Wardour was the first — announcing their decision to drop these features even before they were approached. Paramount, on the other hand, declined to come into line and quite late in the year reaffirmed its determination to adhere to its demand for guarantees on account of its commitments with American headquarters.
Despite this clash, and the continued inability to see eye to eye on the matter of prices, the two branches of the Trade worked well together during the year, and as it drew to a close there were evidences of a rather unusual spirit of co-operation being brought about. The Renters' Sound Inspection Committee, thanks to which we may say that reproduction achieved its maximum of quality in remarkably little time in every wired house throughout the country, has a successor in the shape of a joint committee formed towards the end of the year to adjust differences between the two sides.
So long had people been talking in a general way about the gettogether spirit that many felt a genuine co-operative action to be a Utopian hope rather than an obvious need. It is therefore highly satisfactory to chronicle the birth of this committee and the broadminded attitude w^hich brought it into active operation.
Under the title of the Joint Investigation Committee its function is to adjust those difficulties which must arise between buyers and sellers, particularly in so involved a trade as ours, when conditions vary from district to district and bargaining is the basis of the whole business.