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Block Booking ^> ^> ^> ^ ^> ^> ^> 149
in blocks was simply a wholesale type of selling as opposed to the alternative method of selling each picture individually. Although the different pictures were not precisely similar to each other as were the different units of most commodities, it was claimed that block booking had the characteristics of wholesaling in that it involved the sale of quantities of pictures at lower prices per picture than if they were sold individually.
The distributors maintained that block booking, by increasing the size of the average order from each exhibitor, enabled them to send salesmen to the smallest exhibitors. The block purchases of even the smallest exhibitors were sufficiently large to warrant the necessary sales expense. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that if pictures were sold individually, and a salesman sent to an exhibitor each time a new picture was released, the selling expense in the case of the small rural theaters would be more than the rentals received. Many small rural theaters paid as little as $7.50 per week for features. Without block booking distributors would have been reluctant to serve such theaters. The statement was made by an executive of a large distributing company that it cost at least $10 to make a call on a theater.
C. C. Pettijohn, general counsel for the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Incorporated, an association of which the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation was a member, said at the hearing on the Brookhart bill: 5
A further effect of abolishing this sales system would be to increase the price of the pictures. It is elementary to say that one can wholesale his product more cheaply than he can retail it.
A distributor can make a better price on a group or block of pictures than on one or two, since the sales cost is thereby diminished. The selling of motion pictures, one at a time, at such prices as $7.50, $10, and $12.50 for feature pictures, cannot be continued if this bill becomes law. The traveling expenses of a salesman alone, to a theater 50 miles from an exchange center, would be greater than any rental
5 Report of hearing on Brookhart bill, p. 183.