An Alliance of Convenience: Independent Exhibitors and Purity Crusaders Battle Hollywood, 1920–1940 (original) (raw)

here are moral issues behind block booking, blind booking, the uniform "T contract, arbitrations, and all other trade practices," motion picture reformer Catheryne Cooke Gilman explained to a colleague in 1927.' So-called "purity crusaders" lobbied in the 1920s and '30s against what they perceived to be the undermining of traditional moral values by the film industry. Other critics, such as independent movie exhibitors who resented the iron control motion picture producers wielded over the industry, spoke from economic concerns. Historians have amply described the antitrust and censorship assaults on Hollywood during this time, which were an outgrowth of other reform efforts of the Progressive Era that preceded World War 1. But while scholars have acknowledged the Progressive Era roots of motion picture reformers, the relationship between market-oriented activists and moral purity crusaders needs to be explored further. The present essay describes the development of the tenuous and fluctuating anti-Hollywood alliance between these two groups of reformers that emerged after 1920. It attempts to assess their success in tying industry practices such as "block booking" to the moral quality of film content, and further suggests how the liaison between economic and moral protesters offers significant insights into the cultural conflicts that accompanied the growth of a corporate and consumer-oriented economy and society. Capitalized at over $1 billion, motion pictures constituted one of the nation's leading industries by 1920. Eight corporate giants accounted for 90 percent of the 800 films produced each year in the United States. Funds from leading investment firms enabled Hollywood studios to integrate operations and dramatically increase their ownership of motion picture theaters across the country in the decade after World War I. Centralized booking, national advertising, and system-wide accounting provided enormous cost advantages to companies such as Paramount, Warner Bros., RKO, the Fox syndicate, and Loew's-MGM. By the 1930s, when 23,000 film