Western Film Exchange was founded in Milwaukee in July 1906 by John R. Freuler and Harry E. Aitken for the purpose of mass producing and distributing Western films to movie theaters throughout the American midwest. One of over 100 such "exchanges," Western Film proved to be more successful than most, opening branch offices in several midwestern cities, including Chicago, St. Louis, and Joplin, Missouri. Exchanges would negotiate with film studios for the rights to a completed film production, and would distribute the product to nickelodeon movie theaters.
This business model, however, came to a halt in 1908 when the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC; commonly known as the Edison Trust) launched a wave of lawsuits against independent film studios on patent infringement grounds. Most studios did not have the means to stand against the Trust's onslaught, and were forced out of business. With fewer films being produced, Freuler and Aitken were soon faced with financial difficulties. In order to keep Western Film afloat, they formed a succession of independent studios expressly for the purpose of keeping Western Film supplied with new pictures. The first of these studios was the American Film Manufacturing Company, founded in 1910, which was soon joined by Majestic Film. Both Western Film and its various affiliated studios were targeted by the MPPC to little avail: so successful were Freuler and Aitken's ventures that in 1912 they founded a new corporation to unite all of their holdings. By 1914 this new company, Mutual Film Corporation, had superseded all branches of the Western Film Exchange, which effectively ceased to exist.
Famous quotes containing the words western, film and/or exchange:
“It’s a queer sensation, this secret belief that one stands on the brink of the world’s greatest catastrophe. For it means the fall of Western Europe, as it fell in the fourth century. It recurs to me every November, and culminates every December. I have to get over it as I can, and hide, for fear of being sent to an asylum.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“I’ll be right here.”
—Melissa Mathison, U.S. screenwriter, and Steven Spielberg. ET, ET The Extra-Terrestrial, saying goodbye to Elliot as he touches Elliot’s forehead—ET’s final words in the film (1982)
“I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)