Independents' Day

Cried one Hollywoodian: "We've been hit on the head with a baseball bat." He could have made it stronger. Hollywood's major studios were hit on the head last week by an assortment of baseball bats, and they were swung by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Independent producers have long found it hard to peddle their pictures. The big studios preferred to put their own pictures in theater chains and they could do it; the big studios owned the chains. For the same reason, independent theater owners had found it almost as hard to book the big studios' best pictures, except on the big studios' own hard terms. Among the terms: "block booking," i.e., buying movies in blocks of five or more (often four poor movies for every good one).

Clean Sweep. In 1938, the antitrust division of the Department of Justice set out to end such tie-in sales. It filed suit against Paramount, Loew's Inc.(M-G-M), RKO, Warner Bros, and 20th Century-Fox to have block booking declared illegal. But in the labyrinth of deals and counter-deals in Hollywood, the antitrust division found that it had to go farther. The same suit named Columbia, United Artists and Universal. It buttressed its case with suits against Griffith Amusement Co. (with theaters in 85 towns in Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico) and the Stanley Co. Also sued was Schine Theater Co. (150 theaters in six states), owned by J. Myer Schine (TIME, Dec. 23, 1946), a small-town boy who still lives at Gloversville, N.Y. (pop.: 23,000). (In his spare time, Schine also put together a chain of nine hotels, including Florida's swank Boca Raton Club and Los Angeles Ambassador Hotel.)

For ten years Hollywood stalled off judgment day by consent decrees (which later lapsed) and legal shadow boxing in the lower courts. But last week, when the final decisions in four cases came in the Supreme Court, antitrust won almost all its points. The court:

P:Outlawed block booking and the fixing of minimum admission prices as a condition of rental. It also ordered the film companies to eliminate unreasonable "clearances," i.e., the period that must elapse between the time a picture is shown in a first-run house and its appearance in neighboring theaters.

P:Ordered the theater-owning companies to stop "pooling" the receipts of two or more normally competitive theaters.

P:Held that the Griffith, Schine and Stanley chains had monopolized the movie business in their areas, and ordered the district court to pronounce a judgment that will strip the defendants of "the full dividends of their monopolistic practices." In effect, a ceiling was put on the growth of regional chains.

Get Tough. One important point was not quite decided. The lower court had carefully sidestepped the antitrust division's principal demand: force the producing companies to sell their theater holdings and divorce themselves entirely from film distribution. Instead the lower court merely ordered the companies to 1) stop buying theaters and 2) give independents a chance at first crack at topflight pictures by auctioning them off through competitive bidding. That order, said the Supreme Court, failed to strike at the core of the present cases. It sent the decision back to the lower court for a tougher ruling. To many a lawyer, it looked as if the Supreme Court wanted complete divorcement.

It didn't look that bad to 20th Century-Fox's Darryl F. Zanuck, who managed to smile bravely under the thumping. The court, said he, obviously had no thought of divorcement. "Movie stocks only dropped a point or so," said Zanuck. "If divorcement had been ordered, stocks would have gone down ten points."

Better Pictures? To Sam Goldwyn, the No.1 independent, this was whistling past the graveyard. Goldwyn, who has been fighting the booking practices of the big studios on his own, thought the independents had won all down the line. The court, said he, had "clearly recognized the monopoly exercised by the major companies in the first-run field." He was sure that the lower court would order divorcement. Moreover, added Sam, well aware of the closeness of many moviemakers, "it will be necessary to see that divorcement means more than just a transfer of circuit control from one set of hands to another."

To moviegoers, the decisions meant that they would get first-run pictures quicker in neighborhood houses at lower prices, and perhaps better movies. Without block booking as an automatic sales device for bad movies, Hollywood would have to jack up its standards all around.

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