B Movies (Hollywood Golden Age) - Rise of The Double Feature: 1930s

Rise of The Double Feature: 1930s

The major companies upon which the Hollywood studio system was built had been resistant to the B-movie trend, but they soon adapted. All ultimately established "B units" to provide films for the expanding second-feature market. Block booking increasingly became standard practice: in order to get access to a studio's attractive A pictures, many theaters were obliged to rent the company's entire output for a season. With the B films rented at a flat fee (rather than the box office percentage basis of A films), rates could be set that essentially guaranteed the profitability of every B movie. Blind bidding, which grew in parallel with block booking, meant that the majors didn't have to worry over much about the quality of their B's—even when booking in less than seasonal blocks, exhibitors had to buy most pictures sight unseen. The five largest studios—MGM, Paramount, Fox Film Corporation (Twentieth Century Fox as of 1935), Warner Bros., and RKO Radio Pictures (descendant of FBO)—had the additional advantage of being part of companies that also owned sizable theater chains, further securing the bottom line.

Poverty Row studios, from modest outfits like Mascot Pictures, Tiffany Studios, and Sono Art-World Wide Pictures on down to shoestring operations, made exclusively B movies, serials, and other shorts. They also distributed totally independent productions and imported films. These studios were in no position to directly block book; instead, they mostly sold regional distribution exclusivity to "states rights" distributors, who would in turn peddle blocks of films to exhibitors, typically six or more movies featuring the same star (a relative status on Poverty Row). Two studios in the middle—the "major-minors" Universal and Columbia, moving up in rank—had production lines roughly similar to the top Poverty Row concerns, if somewhat better endowed in general, and with a few up-market productions each year as well. They had few or no theaters, but they did have major-league-level distribution exchanges.

In the model that would be standard during the Golden Age, the industry's top product, its A films, would premiere at a select number of deluxe first-run metropolitan cinemas, located in U.S. cities with populations in the range of 100,000 and above. There were fewer than 500 of these downtown movie palaces; in 1934, 77 percent of them were under the control of one or the other of the leading studios, the "Big Five." As a whole, the first-run circuit comprised the palaces and another 900 or so houses covering North America's 400 largest municipalities. Double features, though sometimes employed, were the rule at few if any of these prestigious venues. As described by historian Edward Jay Epstein, "During the first runs, films got their reviews, garnered publicity, and generated the word of mouth that served as the principal form of advertising." After a film's opening run, it was off to the nabes and the hinterland, the subsequent-run market where the double feature prevailed. At the larger local venues controlled by the majors, movies might turn over on a weekly basis. At the thousands of small theaters that belonged to independent chains or were individually owned, programs often changed two or three time a week, sometimes even faster. To keep up with the constant demand for new B product, the low end of Poverty Row turned out a stream of micro-budget movies rarely much more than sixty minutes long; these were known as "quickies" for their tight production schedules—a week's shooting was about average, just four days was not unheard of. As historian Brian Taves describes, "Many of the poorest theaters, such as the 'grind houses' in the larger cities, screened a continuous program emphasizing action with no specific schedule, sometimes offering six quickies for a nickel in an all-night show that changed daily." Many small theaters never saw a big-studio A film, getting their movies from the states rights concerns that handled almost exclusively Poverty Row product. Millions of Americans went to their local theaters as a matter of course: for an A picture, along with the trailers, or screen previews, that had presaged its arrival, "he new film's title on the marquee and the listings for it in the local newspaper constituted all the advertising most movies got." Aside from at the theater itself, B films might not be advertised at all.

The introduction of sound had driven costs higher. In 1930, the beginning of the Golden Age's first full decade, the average U.S. feature film cost $375,000 to produce. A broad range of Hollywood motion pictures occupied the B-movie category: The leading studios made not only clear-cut A and B films, but also movies classifiable as "programmers" (also "in-betweeners" or "intermediates"). These were films that "straddle the A-B boundary," in Taves's description. During the era of the double feature, "epending on the prestige of the theater and the other material on the double bill, a programmer could show up at the top or bottom of the marquee." On Poverty Row, many B's were made on budgets that would have barely covered petty cash on a major's A film, with costs at the bottom of the industry running as low as $5,000. By the middle of the 1930s, the double feature was the dominant exhibition model across the country, and the majors responded. In 1935, B-movie production at Warner Bros. was raised from 12 to 50 percent of the studio's total output. The unit was headed by Bryan Foy, known as the "Keeper of the B's." At Fox, which also shifted half of its production line into B territory, Sol M. Wurtzel was similarly in charge of more than twenty movies a year during the late 1930s. Loew's, the parent company of MGM, announced in 1935 that it would run double features at all of its subsequent-run theaters. A low-cost production unit was established at the studio under Lucien Hubbard, "although the term B movie was strictly taboo at Metro." Columbia, which primarily served the B-movie market, expanded annual production from thirty pictures to more than forty.

A number of the top Poverty Row firms were consolidating: Sono Art joined with another company to create Monogram Pictures early in the decade. In 1935, Monogram, Mascot, and several smaller studios merged to form Republic Pictures. After little more than a year, the heads of Monogram pulled out and revived their company. Into the 1950s, Republic and Monogram released films that tended to be roughly on par with the low end of the majors' output. Less sturdy Poverty Row concerns—with a penchant for grand sobriquets like Conquest, Empire, Imperial, Supreme Pictures and Peerless—continued to churn out dirt-cheap quickies. As the majors increased their B-level production and Republic and Monogram began to dominate Poverty Row, many of these smaller outfits folded by 1937. Joel Finler has analyzed the average length of feature film releases from the various Hollywood studios in 1938, which indicates the degree to which each emphasized the production of B films (United Artists directly produced no features, focusing instead on the distribution of prestigious films made by independent outfits):

Taves estimates that half of the films produced by the eight majors in the 1930s were B movies. Calculating in the three hundred or so films made annually by the many Poverty Row firms, approximately 75 percent of Hollywood movies from the decade, more than four thousand pictures, are classifiable as B's. Outside of the highly standardized realm of the series picture, studio executives saw developmental opportunities in their B lines of production. In 1937, RKO production chief Sam Briskin described his company's B films as "a testing ground for new names, and experiments in story and treatment."