The Studio System

Vertical integration: one company holding production, distribution, and exhibition together. By 1930, eight companies controlled 95% of American film production. Genre was the assembly line of this factory. Behind it sat a business practice called block booking — a theater that wanted to show one big picture was forced to buy a bundle of cheap films along with it. This is the very structure that mass-produced low-quality westerns. The end date is exact. On May 3, 1948, the Supreme Court's Paramount decision (334 U.S. 131) banned block booking and ordered the studios to divest their theater chains. When the business changed, the aesthetics of genre changed with it — twenty years later, New Hollywood would arrive on the wreckage of the factory.