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Splitting the film hire costs between two or more venues, as both the Paragon and the Cinema House did, was a key part in the business model of many exhibitors.

The ‘change-over’ (as this practice was called) often happened without the renter’s knowledge, and was deemed illegitimate in the trade. It can, however, be seen as a new appearance of a well-known principle: maximising the exploitation of a print by taking it to a different location and audience. This form of localised micro-distribution allowed cinemas in the different tiers to limit their expenses and turn a profit. There were clear advantages for exhibitors who controlled more than one venue. The fact that a film can be screened many times in an evening was thus an encouragement for the concentration of ownership.

The traditional account of the development of the trade in Britain highlights the importance of large horizontally-integrated exhibition companies (i.e. cinema circuits), following the model of the music-hall circuit. In this narrative, a few English companies established during the early years of the cinema boom became the financial bedrock of the British film trade, and gave rise to various attempts at

vertical integration.⁴⁰ Some of those UK-wide circuits had Scottish venues:

Provincial Cinematograph Theatres Ltd (PCT) had Picture Houses in Edinburgh’s Princes Street and in Glasgow on Sauchiehall Street. These were large, well-appointed city-centre venues with first-run programmes that charged a minimum admission price of six pence. In contrast, Pringle’s Picture Palaces, a company established in the North of England by Ralph Pringle, a travelling exhibitor, located its Glasgow and Edinburgh venues in working-class areas on the edges of the city centre. Converted from music halls and skating rinks, these venues charged two pence for admission and showed films that were a couple of weeks old. These two chains had been amongst the pioneers of fixed-site exhibition in Scotland: Open in 1907, Pringle’s Queen Theatre was one of the first permanent cinemas in Glasgow, and PCT’s Picture House offered continuous shows and new standards of luxury on the high street from 1910. However, their presence in Scotland remained limited, never reaching beyond the main cities; the Scottish venues were the periphery of their circuit, and their film booking arrangements were coordinated centrally.

Burrows and Brown’s article on the financial aspects of the cinema boom challenged the preponderance of the big circuits in the expansion of permanent exhibition, pointing out that, after a brief flourishing of highly-capitalised company formation in 1908-9, the trade was dominated by smaller, private companies.⁴¹ The Scottish exhibition trade did not undergo such a dramatic spike in investment, as the largest circuits tended to expand only gradually and on the back of already-thriving concerns. By the start of the war, there were five Scottish companies that controlled

40 Low, The History of the British Film 1906-1914, pp. 20-22.

41 Burrows and Brown ‘Financing the Edwardian Cinema Boom’, p. 14.

six or more venues: B. B. Pictures, Green’s, G. U. Scott, R. C. Buchanan, and Bostock’s. Between them, they controlled more than fifty cinemas, mostly on the central belt. In contrast, at least twice as many venues were owned by a company controlling only one cinema, while almost half of the venues were coupled or part of a small local circuit.

Coupled venues, splitting hire costs and shuttling reels back and forth during the screenings, can be considered as the most basic case of horizontal integration in exhibition. There were several such cases around Scotland, such as Aberdeen Picture Palaces, a relatively small company that will make an appearance in later chapters, or the aforementioned R. V. Singleton. Such modest arrangements depended on close geographical proximity, not only for change-overs but also because they often shared a manager. The exhibition trade north of the border was thus dominated by local companies from an early point. While the stories of the two largest circuits, B. B. Pictures and Green’s, will be discussed in Chapter 5 in the context of their emergence as film renters, it is worth considering here other smaller cases. Lack of programme information, unfortunately, precludes a closer

examination of more rural circuits not centred upon a first-run metropolitan venue.

There are some interesting examples, such as the Elite Entertainments Syndicate in Aberdeenshire (Huntly, Nairn, Keith and Buckie) and T. J. Scott’s East Lothian circuit (Peebles, Dunbar, North Berwick, Linlithgow, and Haddington). Comprising mostly smaller public halls, these peripheral syndicates are an undocumented part of the landscape of the early Scottish trade. Meanwhile, the cases of the better-known urban circuits point to the diverse character of circuits, showing that the parallel

tracks and tensions that defined early exhibition were also expressed in their discourses and programming practice.

A fruitful comparison can be made, for instance, between the R. C.

Buchanan and E. H. Bostock circuits. R.C. Buchanan was an actor and theatre owner who took over music halls and theatres in Edinburgh, Dundee, Motherwell and Coatbridge. Initially hiring from a Glasgow renter (Bendon), programmes at Buchanan’s Edinburgh venues included prestigious first-run films, both at the central Princes cinema and at the more suburban ‘comfortable family house’, the Coliseum in Fountainbridge. E. H. Bostock was a very successful menagerie and circus showman from Buckinghamshire, who had started showing film as part of the variety entertainment at the Hamilton Hippodrome.⁴² By 1914, he controlled at least eight venues, mostly in old music halls or circuses, all within ten miles of Glasgow. At the Paisley Rink, the programme in January 1913 included second- and third-run pictures, supplied by Butcher’s Film Service, an important London distribution company that handled a wide range of American and Continental brands.⁴³

Contracting with a large London renter could be convenient for both parties:

The circuit could get films that local renters were not offering, and the renter got to do trade in Scotland without establishing a branch to organise circuits. Having a larger number of venues increased the exhibitors’ bargaining power in negotiating hire prices with the renters, and allowed them to present fairly new films even in suburban, low-priced venues. Furthermore, as the following chapter will show, after

42 ‘E.H. Bostock’, in Who’s who in Glasgow in 1909, Glasgow Digital Library http://gdl.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/eyrwho/eyrwho0331.htm viewed 2 April 2012.

43 ‘Items of Interest’, The Bioscope, 26 October 1911, p. 209.

a circuit reached a certain number of venues (about eight) it started to make more sense to own the films again. Even though the larger circuits comprised a relatively small proportion of the Scottish cinemas, the demand they created was particularly important given the relative scarcity of first-run prints. The 1913 sample shows very little overlapping of city-centre programmes, which suggests that renters sent only one or very few prints to Scotland. In the cases in which the snapshot shows two prints of a new release, they were never playing in the same city. In the four cases, furthermore, one of the prints was being shown at a cinema belonging to a circuit.

By buying their own first-run films, circuit cinemas increased the availability of second- and third-run films further down the line.

4.4. Conclusion

This chapter has charted the development of fixed-site exhibition across Scotland, and the emergence of programming and supply practices in this context. It has shown that the process tended to be cautious rather than speculative, driven by the gradual expansion of exhibition concerns with roots in earlier forms of

entertainment. These differences in background, strategy and available capital were amplified by the competitive conditions of the urban market, which became rapidly crowded but also fragmented. Bostock’s and Buchanan’s cases above illustrate how local distribution practices and the competition over first-run films encouraged some degree of concentration of ownership, but also enabled the circulation of relatively new films to suburban, working-class and peripheral venues. It soon became apparent that circuit owners that wanted to extract more revenue from films they had acquired for their own cinemas could rent them out simultaneously. Once

the link between exhibition and distribution was established, the dominance of the companies that were able to capitalise on it was secure.

The heterogeneity that had persisted in exhibition practices was enabled and mirrored by a diverse regional distribution sector, which also emerged organically and was deeply imbricated with exhibition circuits. The following chapter will start by introducing the two main stories of temporary success in this field, B. B. Pictures and Green’s, and will go on to describe the business practices and company

histories of the main figures in the distribution sector up to 1915.

Chapter 5

Rise of the middlemen: Scottish renters in the open-market years

Scotland […] has many distinctive claims to what we might term “special treatment”. Many, indeed the majority, of the Trade houses are of purely native origin, for it requires a Scot to fully understand the Scottish folk and their requirements.¹

In his study of London’s ‘flicker alley’ (Cecil Court, where many film-related businesses had offices from the late 1900s), Simon Brown argues that a shift took place in 1907 from the prevalence in the area of ‘cinematograph supply stores’ that stocked films and hardware for sale, towards ‘three new business areas, which were foreign film sales, the supply of equipment and furnishings for cinemas, and film rental.’² It is only a few years into this second wave of the film trade that Scottish companies came into the picture. As discussed in Chapter 3, film supply for itinerant exhibition was mostly in the hands of equipment dealers, and Scottish exhibitors obtained new films on visits to London and the North of England, from each other on the fairground circuits, from travelling representatives, or through catalogues.

1 ‘Our Scottish section’, The Bioscope, 29 April 1915, p. 379.

2 Simon Brown, ‘Flicker Alley: Cecil Court and the Emergence of the British Film Industry’, Film Studies.10 (2007), pp. 21-33 (p. 26).

Aside from second-hand dealing and topical work, the Scottish film trade was a client of London-based companies, which were in turn often agents for Continental European production companies. While such balance of trade was never overturned, during the cinema boom and the war years the Scottish film business developed at a remarkable rate. A group of local companies managed to capture some of the profits from the expanding market and to support the demands of Scottish exhibitors, while wrestling with the changing conditions of the British and global film trade. This chapter traces the early years of the most important of these local renters, from 1908 to around 1915. It starts with a comparison between the two largest regional distributors, B. B. Pictures and Green’s, to show how their business model was founded on an exhibition circuit, and how the companies’

background in different forms of showmanship translated to the new trade conditions. Smaller independent renters are discussed next, highlighting their reliance on open-market trading and their role in supplying exhibitors across a range of venue types and practices. Finally, the presence of branches of English or

international companies in Scotland is addressed briefly, considering the extent of their autonomy and their relationships to the Scottish trade. These studies of the working practices of open-market renters are mostly descriptive, but they set the stage for a further discussion of the consequences of supply modes for local programming and exhibition in the following chapter. For factual details and trade press references about the companies mentioned in this chapter, please open the interactive timeline included in the CD-ROM (timeline.html) using a web browser with an internet connection.