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Block Booking' <^> <^> <^ -^> <^ ^> ^> 151
distributors, who thereby were enabled to stabilize their programs, but many distributors maintained that it also benefited exhibitors. Producers operating under these conditions would find it possible, having a definite minimum income with which to work, to make pictures of higher average quality than they would make if they had no assured income. While some pictures undoubtedly would fall below the level of standard of the group, distributors maintained that these pictures probably would be fewer in number under this system than under any other.
On this particular point Mr. 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 that 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.
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 every possible effort to effect a