Independent Exhibitors Film Bulletin (1960)

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The question: "Are We Making the Most of Our Market?" was asked in a recent issue of Film BULLETIN. Some prominent readers have responded with firm and constructive opinions. We submit them herein. OUR MARKET: How To Get the Most Out of It ALEX HARRISON General Sales Mgr. 2<)ib Century-Fox You are an expert in asking loaded questions, but since you have asked the question, I am going to give you an answer. When you ask whether we are making the most of our market, I begin to wonder. You may be interested to know that we have a tremendous holiday attraction in JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH and we have probably the greatest TV trailers ever available to theatres for the exploitation of a motion picture. Our managers around the country have been attempting to interest exhibitors to share TV campaigns and aside from a half dozen exchange territories where exhibitors are still showmen, theatre operators have refused to participate in any TV participation. They believe this is the sole responsibility of the distributor. After this experience with some of the great showmen we have in the United States, I am beginning to wonder if your question was enough. We should also add, are we trying to destroy ourselves? SAMUEL ROSEN Executive Vice-President, Stanley Warner Corporation To your question "Are we making the most of our market" the answer is a big emphatic NO ! Even in the best days of our industry, we never really made the most of our market. We had then a practically exclusive product — (motion picture film), ample merchandise, almost complete domination of entertainment, publicity and the box-office stability of the public's movie going habit. A lush business. What did it matter if we didn't scoop in all the customers available at the boxoffice by pin-pointed selling? But the times are different now. Look at the contrast today. No more exclusivity. The theatre screen is in competition with the free living room screen. No more ample merchandise. Twothirds of our annual product then available has disappeared in the wake of divorcement. From a daily flood of news, feature stories and star layouts, this valuable publicity and public relations asset has been diverted to TV and our share is down to a trickle. The movie habit has been shifted from the theatre to the living room. Our attendance is sporadic depending entirely upon the public interest in individual features. As far as I know there is no longer a single house in the country with the possible exception of the Music Hall, which enjoys a natural draw. There is no bottom to the gross of a feature to which the public is indifferent either through lack of selling or lack of story appeal. Obviously, with so few features to book, we must act to incite a greater public appetite for fewer films or we cannot keep open even the reduced number of theatres presently in operation. You apparently believe that an important gain in selling power would result from a re-shuffling of distributor advertising and publicity departments; that a re-organization into two main merchandising units — one handling "blockbusters" and the other handling less than "blockbusters" would work boxoffice wonders. I cannot follow you in the hard-cover vs paperback book analog)'. So far as I can tell there are similarities and not fundamental likeness from which we can make helpful deductions for our own industry. How can you "maintain a separate organization for the marketing and promotion of pictures that do not achieve the status of "blockbusters" when you do not know in advance what pictures will achieve the status of blockbusters"? There are no rules, no guides, no formula — that will enable distributors or first-run exhibitors to decide, before exposure to the public, how a feature will perform at the boxoffice. Production money doesn't insure boxoffice. We've seen several S5, 000,000 flops in the past two years. Stars do not necessarily guarantee a profitable end result. The proof is available on the books of both distributor and exhibitor. Neither do production values or the more successful creative talent make profitable features a certainty. So that a mechanical division of merchandising effort in the Advertising Departments of the major studios is not the answer. The way I see it, there is logic in separate units only when it has been decided to launch a hard ticket, two-a-day operation. Such a venture requires bulk ticket selling and it is desirable to set up a unit, perhaps semi-autonomous, to direct this type of campaigning. Our studio merchandising departments have proved that they can plan and successfully execute campaigns for every type of film. What we need is not a change in the selling setup, but more selling of more pictures. No slant serves to sell all pictures w hether roadshow or grind. There is no panacea in "saturation" per se or TV, magazines, radio or any combination of media. There is no sure-fire short cut to successful selling. If the problem of getting sufficient admissions in the boxoffice was that simple, it would have been discovered long ago. We talk about latching on to our share of the entertainment dollar but the entertainment dollar no longer exists in its former sense. A new world of tempting diversions invites the public's increased leisure. There is no real shortage of dollars. What we need now is a pre-sold share of the customer's leisure time. (Continued on Page 15) Film BULLETIN January 4, 1940 Page 7