Block Booking - Origins in The Silent Era

Origins in The Silent Era

Paramount Pictures, under Adolph Zukor's leadership, was largely responsible for introducing the practice of block booking to Hollywood:

At a time when star prominence was the single most important factor determining a film's box-office success, Zukor had cornered the market. In a 1918 popularity poll...the six top stars on the list—Mary Pickford, Marguerite Clark, Douglas Fairbanks, Harold Lockwood, William S. Hart, and Wallace Reid—were all under contract to Zukor.
Using this leverage, Paramount was able to insist that prospective exhibitors interested in, say, the Pickford films, acquire them in large blocks along with a quantity of less attractive titles. These block-booking arrangements typically included groups of from 13 to 52 or even 104 titles. Paramount salesmen offered a variety of different product lines, from the top-quality Artcraft releases of Pickford, Fairbanks, and Hart to the more modest Realart productions, in which stars such as Bebe Daniels were being developed. Because these films had not yet been produced, exhibitors were required to "buy blind" from a sketchy prospectus or campaign book.

All of the other major studios, with the exception of United Artists, ultimately copied these policies to varying degrees. For much of the 1920s, Paramount and growing Warner Bros., in particular, "relied heavily on block booking and blind bidding." Already, in 1921 the Federal Trade Commission had launched an investigation of the studios' booking practices that would last for eleven years. A 1927 cease-and-desist order was disregarded by the majors.