Word: blocking
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...merchant attempted to force his clients to purchase a number of his products each time they desired one of them, he would most certainly fail, yet this is just the type of selling which is embodied in the current practice of block booking of movies. The producers force the exhibitors to contract for a whole block of pictures which they must accept regardless of their merits. The theater owners are unable to oppose this system for they must have a frequent change of program and delays in the arrival of film are fatal to them...
...vast movie industry is controlled by a few major producers who are enabled by the practice of block booking to free themselves from the annoying stimulation of competition, and to sell pictures which neither pay the exhibitors nor please the public. A few excellent pictures which the public demands are sufficient to force the purchase of miles of rot. That the huge majority of movies is unpopular and unprofitable does not affect the producers, secure behind the walls of their monopoly, yet the studies continue to gush forth their maudlin mush oblivious of the fate of the exhibitors...
...women's clubs and the other groups, so that we shall have the force of widespread concerted public opinion behind our efforts." Immediate plans of the M. P. R. C.: a $2 to $100 per year membership drive to replenish the exhausted Payne Fund; a campaign to end "block booking." To observers familiar with the cinema industry, the M. P. R. C.'s objections to block booking seemed a bad omen. Block booking is the system whereby exhibitors rent pictures in job lots instead of singly. It gives producers an outlet for their unpopular pictures; it gives exhibitors...
...families pack into one flat. In summer the heat is stifling. In winter icicles from burst plumbing form on the hall ceilings. Refuse piles up in airshafts 15 feet deep. Basements are cluttered with rags and tinder. The better tenements have one toilet to a floor, but when one block was recently razed, the only sanitary facility discovered was a row of holes in a board in the backyard. Garbage is tossed out windows. In some, a match struck in the halls will illumine the foul air as if it were a fog. Death, pestilence, starvation and crime scurry unchecked...
...infamous "Lung Block" near Alfred Emanuel Smith's birthplace on the Lower East Side, 360 of the 386 evicted families promptly settled down in squalor within two blocks of their old homes. If whole areas are reclaimed, slumdwellers swarm into whole new areas, blighting them like locusts. Nevertheless, the PWA has earmarked $25,000,000 for Manhattan slum-clearance -a very small drop in a billion-dollar bucket. The State has authorized the setting up of a Municipal Housing Authority and 5,000 CWA workers in an exhaustive survey spent the winter slumming. No plans have yet been adopted...