Content area
Full text
For several years New Line Cinema proudly advertised itself within the motion picture industry as "Solidly Independent."
Today New Line is a subsidiary of Turner Broadcasting System.
And so it goes, as American motion picture companies and their films increasingly become, in the trenchant words of the trade publication Variety, "mere cogs in global media machines
It was essentially that way in the beginning, too, since most of the major studios were founded by exhibitors seeking assured, steady sources of "product" for their theaters. MGM may indeed have had "more stars than there are in the heavens," but Louis B. Mayer answered not to the gods but to parent company Loew's Theaters in New York.
The antitrust decrees entered as a result of the Supreme Court's decision in US. v. Paramount (1948) temporarily separated production and distribution from exhibition, ushering in the era of independent, standalone motion picture companies. Primarily a phenomenon of the 1950s and 1960s, the standalone era ended slowly as the various studios were acquired, over time, by new parents in unrelated lines of business--e.g., the Gulf + Western conglomerate (Paramount), the Transamerica insurance company (United Artists), and The Coca-Cola Company (Columbia).
And then the studios changed hands again, as the new parents sold them off to newer parents. Today most studios are back in the hands of exhibitors, except this time "exhibitors" means not just theaterowners but also cable television programming services, consumer electronics manufacturers, television broadcasters, video retailers, and now even telephone companies.
Like the theaterowners earlier in the century, today's studio owners seek assured sources of "content" for their vast, worldwide distribution and exhibition pipelines. But the newest parents differ from the founding parents in one important respect: Given their voracious appetite for content, they are often less interested in the latest theatrical releases than in what financial analyst Harold L. Vogel calls the "substantial library assets" of the studios.
Ownership of film libraries also serves other corporate purposes. Wall Street loves libraries and weighs them heavily in valuing stock; banks and other lending institutions readily accept them as collateral; and the cash flow generated by their exploitation sometimes sustains companies through otherwise tough periods. And with the constant development of new media, film libraries have historically appreciated in...