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FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION 235
On this particular point Mr. Felix Feist testified that in his opinion block booking was the only economical method of selling motion pictures that had been devised. Like wholesale selling it enabled the distributor to sell a number of pictures in one group at a much lower price than would have to be charged per picture if the pictures were sold individually. In actual practice a distributor would sell an entire block at a lower price per picture than he would charge for a few pictures from a block. This difference in price represented the additional expense of making individual sales. "From the producer's point of view, if you could not set up your program so you could produce a number of pictures, the price would go way up out of reason" to a point the exhibitor could not afford to pay.
Mr. R. H. Cochrane, vice president of the Universal Pictures Corporation, testified that his company offered to exhibitors in one block the pictures which the company expected to release during the year. In this manner the company's salesmen were able to sell the entire year's program of pictures at one call. He testified that he considered this method of selling comparable to wholesaling in other trades and that those exhibitors who bought the entire block were given the benefit of a wholesale price. The price per picture became higher and higher to those exhibitors who took fewer and fewer pictures. Mr. Cochrane further stated that, as practiced, block booking did not imply any element of compulsion; all salesmen exerted all possible efforts to effect a sale of the entire year's program of pictures with every exhibitor, and the final result depended upon the bargaining ability of the parties to the negotiation.
Mr. Cochrane testified that his company had tried to sell pictures individually but that this method " . . . ran up sales cost to such an extent that we simply could not go on with it. We had to charge so much for the pictures in order to cover the sales cost on the repeated trips of the salesmen to every exhibitor, and we had to go into block booking to get anything at all. The only place where we do that (sell individually) now is on what we call superfeatures — a picture that is big enough to justify a salesman on that particular picture." Mr. Cochrane said that the Universal Pictures Corporation produced from two to five superfeatures each year.