Box Office Receipts Research Articles

Les chemins de la création cinématographique : une impasse dans le P.A.F. ?

From the turn of the century to the 80's, the economy of the film industry rested on the dynamic union between the movie and the movie-theatre. The fall in cinema attendance centered particularly on the French movie (whereas during the same time attendance at American movies remained steady) entailed a shaip decline in cinema box-office receipts : from this point on the French movie has needed to find financial resources other than the box-office. This evolution has entailed a new power-sharing in the decision making processes of creative film making. T.V. men now govern and impose their priorities.

The Children's Art Theatre of Shanghai

The Children's Art Theatre of Shanghai

A guide to the literature on aggressive behavior

A guide to the literature on aggressive behavior

Sydney Cinema Box Office Receipts

Sydney Cinema Box Office Receipts

"Lili Marleen": Fascism and the Film Industry

Filmmaking in West Germany since the late 1960s has a complex background. Its current high productivity follows twenty-five exceptionally arid years, a moribund period for the country's commercial film industry. Hollywood's particularly ruthless exploitation policy as applied to the West German market meant the enforcement by distributors of block-booking and other nearmonopolistic practices. The Germans, unlike the French or British, were unable to protect their own private industry through legislation. Import quotas and the freezing of box-office receipts the two most frequently applied trade barriers of the 1950s and '60s proved politically unacceptable in the face of the massive lobbying undertaken by the U.S. State Department on behalf of the Motion Picture Export Association during the Adenauer era. The decline was slow since West Germany did grant subsidies to its ailing industry. A combination of fiscal measures (reduced entertainment tax on films of cultural value) and a levy on all box-office receipts sustained production. The industry remained undercapitalized, however, existing from hand to mouth, from film to film. The general slide into insignificance of other European film industries during the 1960s demonstrated the inadequacy of purely economic incentives. The Hollywood product was superior in almost every respect and the attempt to compete by means of exploitation pictures brought some producers shortterm profits but ruined the already volatile market. The loss of the popular audiences was followed by the disaffection of the more serious ones. It was perhaps the very thoroughness with which the Americans cleaned up in West Germany that opened the way for a different concept of filmmaking. How did Europe's most sophisticated and entangled system of government subsidized filmmaking come into existence? It derived partly from the defensive posture of the German industrial establishment in response to the postwar

Subsidization of art as social policy

Subsidy of the arts has arrived belatedly in this country as a matter of national policy and action. Only in recent years, mainly since 1965 when the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was established, has the subsidy of art in this country become an official policy. For nearly the entire two centuries of our existence as a nation, the arts have depended on a combination of private philanthropy and individual sacrifice to carry on their various activities. The fact that they have developed and flourished demonstrates that in the arts, as elsewhere, our country has people who possess extraordinary initiative, dedication, talent, and a capacity for self-sacrifice. Yet this policy, like any policy, has encouraged some forms of activity and not others. It has produced a free enterprise economy of the arts, bestowing rewards for successful entrepreneurship, for anticipating and supplying fashionable tastes. In general this has meant support for art that could either magnetize a mass audience, like film or pop music, or that could attract sufficient personal affluence to support major events of high culture, such as opera, theater, and concerts of music and dance, usually with a major performer as the principal drawing power. Even here, the cost of large organizations was never met by box office receipts, and the private patron became the sustaining force in such endeavors. This was a system that bred the entrepreneur, the impresario, and the star, and also a supporting cast of ragged artists, who often could sustain themselves only through alternative employment, and who subsidized the arts through their acceptance of a minimal income. In recent years this has changed, largely through the growth of collective action and support. Subscription series have created regular audiences and assured the financing of seasonal programming. Guaranteed employment for full seasons and professional associations that have taken the economic leadership in bargaining have made the condition of performing artists somewhat more stable. Efforts are being made to extend the royalty system to creative artists not previously covered by it, such as painters and sculptors. And with federal subsidies, most notably through the NEA and its correlative state councils, along with increased private foundation and corporate support,

“The Second Chronicler”: A Tentative Identification of the Unknown Hand in The MS. Diaries of the Drury Lane Theatre

Among the important collections of memorabilia concerning eighteenth-century London playhouses is that known as The Ms. Diaries of the Drury Lane Theatre, thirteen manuscript notebooks or theatrical calendars of quarto size among the holdings of The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. While there is a gap of two seasons, 1760–1762, and another of four seasons, 1764–1768, these documents are valued for their chronological record of theatrical seasons at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, throughout the management of David Garrick and his partner James Lacy, 1747–1776. Each night's reckoning is set down with the plays and entertainments produced, the box office receipts in round numbers, the numerical position of the performance in the particular season, and very often the prompter's notations concerning anything unusual about production, performers, the temper of the audience, or merely “the way things went” on a particular evening. Together with Course of Plays, 1740–1742, a similar calendar of the 1740–1741 season at Covent Garden Theatre and the 1741–1742 season at Drury Lane attributed to Richard Cross, these diaries have become known popularly as The Cross-Hopkins Diaries, after the two Drury Lane prompters, Richard Cross and William Hopkins, acknowledged compilers of the greater part of the series.

The German Film: Comeback or Setback?

motion-picture industry which today threatens to outproduce every other country in western Europe. Little wonder that one of the several hundred postwar-production and distribution companies of Western Germany calls itself Phoenix Film. This celluloid bird is already flapping its wings, testing its strength, and hoping to take a nip at the box-office receipts of the Americans, French, and Italians, who have long considered the European market their special sanctuary. A glance at the production record from 1947 to 1954 quickly confirms Western Germany's spectacular rate of climb: Year Number of films 1947* 9 1948 23 1949 62 1950 82 1951 6

Progress Committee Report

The Year 1952 will be marked as a milestone in the history of motion-picture production and presentation. At a time when the motion-picture industry was beset with depressing reports of poor box-office receipts from the best product that the industry could produce, there appeared on the screen two epoch-making presentations that have revitalized the motion-picture business. The reference is, of course, to the presentation of Cinerama in New York and the showing of Bwana Devil, the 3-D production of Arch Oboler, in Los Angeles. In compiling the Progress Report for 1952 it would seem logical, therefore, that these two presentations should be reported upon first.

The Documentary Dilemma

But at the same time, the new uses and new techniques involved new methods of diffusion. It was a case of new producers creating a new market based not on box-office receipts, but on audience needs and audience reaction. In fact, a new system has been involved in which the finance of production has no direct relation to the system of distribution, and the cost of making the film is not recouped from the people who see it. In this case, therefore, the film maker seeks subvention more from those who seek to disseminate ideas than from those who seek the direct sale of commodities. He is concerned with infor-

Television and the Future of Motion Picture Exhibition

SPOKESMEN for United States motion picture exhibitors have been sounding recurrent alarms about decreased box office receipts ever since the peak business of 1946 failed to play a return engagement. With the passage of time, however, even impartial observers have expressed growing concern about the present and future status of the exhibition branch of the motion picture industry. Various members of the industry have cited admission tax data, attendance figures, box office receipts, audience studies, and other evidence to prove that theater gross receipts have declined from 15 to 40 per cent since 1946. Fortune magazine felt reasonably safe last year in predicting that the movies had reached the end of an era. This year, Abram Myers, chairman of the board of the Allied States Association of Motion Picture Exhibitors, reported that between 5 and 0o per cent of the nation's theaters had been forced out of business. Another measure of the seriousness of the situa-

Effect of Television on Motion Picture Attendance<!--<xref ref-type="other" rid="fn1-10.5594_J12565">*</xref>-->

The purpose of this study is to obtain an indication of the effect of television upon motion picture attendance habits. Such a study could suggest the extent to which television will affect box-office receipts when set ownership has become more widespread than it is at present. Telephone numbers of 550 owners of home television sets were selected at random from the four major boroughs of New York City. Interviews were completed with 415 owners of sets presently in working order.

The Screen—A Projectionist's Problem

The importance of the projection screen as affecting the visibility of the projected picture and the box-office receipts of the theater is briefly discussed. In addition, the paper presents various phases with which those who are concerned with the selection and installation of screens should be acquainted, points out the difficulties attendant on the deterioration of the screen surface, and the additional cost of operation produced thereby.