Abstract
When the Motion Picture Patents Company set up its operation it assumed that a number of factors would protect its business. It expected the exhibitors it did not license would lie down and die; it believed that cornering virtually the entire American market for raw film stock would kill off any attempt to compete in production; and it appears to have thought of film as a commodity to all the qualities of which the public was quite indifferent. In the event it proved to be wrong in all these assumptions.
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Notes and References
Anthony Slide, Early American Cinema (London: A. Zwemmer, 1970) pp. 96–7.
Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979) p. 10.
Mae D. Huettig, Economic Control of the Motion Picture Industry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944), p. 25;
Gorham Kindern (ed.), The American Movie Industry (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1982) pp. 80–2. Kindern notes that Trust members Vitagraph and Edison imitated Laemmle’s initiative quickly; other Trust members held back.
Timothy James Lyons, The Silent Partner (New York: Arno Press, 1974) p. 30.
Janet Wasko, Movies and Money (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1982) p. 9.
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© 1988 Kenneth John Izod
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Izod, J. (1988). Independents, Innovation and the Beginnings of Hollywood, 1908–15. In: Hollywood and the Box Office, 1895–1986. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19324-0_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19324-0_4
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