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84 A HISTORY OF THE MOVIES
make money, licensed manufacturers would earn reasonable profits, patents owners would receive proper royalties.
Quantity, based on the assumption of maintenance of standard quality, being the essence of mass production, the only method of dealing in pictures at this time was the footage system. The studios produced films by the reel of one thousand feet, and this unit was the foundation of operations among manufacturers, distributors, and playhouses. The exhibitor paid a rental fee for so many reels a day, and the studio's price to the distributor was measured in the reels, or the footage, of positive prints (the copies) taken by the exchanges.
The patents company and General Film fixed a price of ten cents per foot for the positive prints supplied by each of its producers. If, for example, fifty copies of a one-reel negative were used by the exchanges, the producer received approximately $100 per copy, or a total of about $5,000; if enough playhouses rented General Film's service, the demand might run to seventy-five, or one hundred, or even a larger number of prints, but the price of ten cents a foot did not vary. This figure of ten cents had not been determined arbitrarily; it represented the average costs of experienced producers plus an attainable commercial profit, and was based on wage scales that presumably would remain at about the existing levels, or would advance no more rapidly than wage scales in other industries.
The scale of rentals paid by exhibitors being similarly fixed, there was no elasticity, and producers had to regulate their studio costs to conform to earnings. Although too many human, material, climatic, and chemical conditions enter into the expense of pictures to permit perfect standardization, General Film manufacturers usually spent five hundred to a thousand dollars a reel in producing their negatives, and they had to keep pretty close to these figures or endanger their profits.
Competing producers, operating at least in theory on the General Film system of renting a daily program, and following approximately its scale of rentals, nevertheless were free to dicker and bargain with exhibitors. If an independent hit upon a popu