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566 HARVARD BUSINESS REPORTS
The uniform contract used by all distributors provided, however, that each exhibitor was to select a date for showing each picture within a specified length of time after a print of that picture had become available to him. When a print of a picture was received by an exchange, it was at once made available for showing by the theater which had contracted for its first run. It was available for the second-run theaters at the expiration of the first-run protection. In like manner it became available for subsequent runs at later dates. If an exhibitor did not select dates for showing within the time specified in the contract, the exchange was entitled to set a date for the showing of the picture and to require the exhibitor to show it at that time.6 In actual practice, however, the exhibitors were not forced by distributors to date in all their pictures within the prescribed time.
Frequently exhibitors operating first-run theaters were permitted to delay several weeks, and sometimes several months, before showing some of the pictures. When they did so, the second-run theaters were delayed in showing such pictures and forced to select their programs from the pictures already shown by the first-run theaters. When a picture was thus delayed by a first-run theater and in like manner by the second and third-run theaters, the fourth and fifth-run theaters received the picture for showing long after much of the value of its popularity and timeliness had been lost.7 Often several pictures that had been delayed in various ways would be made available to the fourthand fifth-run theaters in such numbers that the theaters could not show them all, while at other times these theaters would be without pictures and forced to "spot book" in order to maintain their usual programs. To spot book was to buy an individual picture to fill a certain play date when for some reason the picture scheduled for that day was not available. Spot booking was usually an emergency measure on the part of the exhibitor. Pictures available for spot booking as a rule were the less popular ones, which had not been purchased by any theater in the purchasing exhibitor's zone.
Since exhibitors paid for pictures at the time they showed them, unstandardized protection brought the exchanges an
6 See Arbitration in the Motion Picture Industry, page 642, for provision in Standard Exhibition Contract for designation of play dates.
7 Cf. footnote 3, page 88.