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THE MOTION PICTURES PATENTS COMPANY 71
changed daily, was $100 to $125 a week for theaters in the best locations, graduating downward to $15 for small or out-of-theway houses. Release dates were to be rigidly observed, and violation of this rule would result in instant withdrawal of film service.
No theater was to use projection machines or films made by any manufacturer not a member of the patents-film combination, and to make sure that no "outlaw" apparatus or pictures appeared in houses using its products, the trust announced that each exhibitor would be licensed, at a cost of two dollars a week. This license fee, unique in American business practice, was a successful method of money-gathering. One of the auditors of General Film told me that he used clothes-baskets to receive the twodollar bills and money orders as mail clerks opened the weekly envelopes from ten thousand exhibitors. Eventually the number of contributors was more than twelve thousand, and the total yield amounted to twenty to twenty-five thousand dollars a week — a million or a million and a quarter a year — for license fees, exclusive of film rental bills.
The managers of General Film were too well acquainted with motion picture conditions to expect a calm acceptance of their dictates. They knew that a struggle would be necessary before they could harness the turbulent industry to sober business methods — and they were not disappointed. When the news of the trust's creation spread through the film world an instantaneous clamor arose. Manufacturers not included in the merger denounced the damnable octopus, and declared that not all its powerful tentacles could choke them. They would sue it for damages, they would form alliances with distributors and exhibitors, and they would manufacture cameras, projectors, and films and sell them in spite of all the threats that lawyers could invent.
The two-dollar-a-week tribute infuriated the theater owners. Much as the stamp tax levied on American colonies was in itself not a large thing, but produced the Boston Tea Party and kindled the flames that spread into the Revolutionary War, so the patents-trust license fee was regarded by exhibitors as an arro