Double feature
The double feature is a motion picture industry phenomenon in which theatres would exhibit two films for the price of one, supplanting an earlier format in which the presentation of one feature film would be followed by various short subject reels.
This article is about film programming. For Susan Stroman's 2004 ballet, see Double Feature (ballet). For the American Horror Story season, see American Horror Story: Double Feature.Opera use[edit]
Opera houses staged two operas together for the sake of providing long performance for the audience. This was related to one-act or two-act short operas that were otherwise commercially hard to stage alone. A prominent example is the double-bill of Pagliacci with Cavalleria rusticana first staged on 22 December 1893 by the Met. The two operas have since been frequently performed as a double-bill, a pairing referred to in the operatic world colloquially as "Cav and Pag".[1]
The double feature originated in the later 1930s. Though the dominant presentation model, consisting of all or some of the following, continued well into the 1940s:
With the widespread arrival of sound film in American theaters in 1929, many independent exhibitors began dropping the then-dominant presentation model. Movie theaters suffered a downturn in business in the early years of the Great Depression.
Theater owners decided they could both attract more customers and save on costs if they offered two movies for the price of one. The tactic worked; audiences considered the cost of a theater ticket good value for several hours of escapist and varied entertainment and the practice became a standard pattern of programming.
In the typical 1930s double bill, the screening began with a variety program consisting of trailers, a newsreel, a cartoon and/or a short film preceding a low-budget second feature (the B movie), followed by a short interlude. Lastly, the high-budget main feature (the A movie) ran.
A neighborhood theatre running a double feature won out over a higher-priced first-run theatre with only one feature film. The major studios took note of this, and began making their own B features using the technicians and sets of the studio and featuring stars on their way up or on their way down. The major studios also made film series featuring recurring characters.
Although the double feature put many short comedy producers out of business, it was the primary source of revenue for smaller Hollywood studios, such as Republic and Monogram, that specialized in B movie production.
In 1910, double features were banned in France. The ban was lifted in 1953 but with one of the features having to be more than 10 years old.[2]
The double feature arose partly because of a studio practice known as "block booking," a form of tying, in which major Hollywood studios required theaters to buy B-movies along with the more desirable A-movies. In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the practice was illegal in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., contributing to the end of the studio system.
Without block booking, the studios no longer had an incentive to make their own B-features. But audiences at first-run movie palaces, neighborhood theatres, and drive-in theatres, still expected a program of two features. In 1948, nearly two-thirds of the movie houses in the United States were advertising double features.[3]
Following the Supreme Court ruling of 1948, known as the Paramount Consent Decree, the source for the second feature changed.[4] The second feature could be:
James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff formed American International Pictures in the mid-1950s to produce and distribute low-budget features. They discovered exhibitors were only interested in buying their pictures as supporting features (a B-movie) at a flat rate. Once Nicholson and Arkoff combined two features into a program, sold as a double bill, with each picture given equal billing in the advertising and backed up with an explosive advertising campaign, theaters were willing to exhibit them on a percentage basis.[5] The exhibitors may have kept a larger share of the box office than the major distributors demanded,[6] but AIP's share of the box office was enough to keep it from going out of business.
The double bill was sold on a percentage basis and each feature was given equal billing in newspaper advertisements and promotional materials. Since the trailers and advertising promoted the two titles, exhibitors were discouraged from separating the features in the package. To distributors and exhibitors, it was a substantially different policy than the standard double feature in that it was not a top-billed A feature combined with a minor-billed support feature sold at a flat rate (a B movie).
By the mid-1960s, double features had been mostly abandoned in non–drive-ins in favor of the modern single-feature screening, in which only one feature film is exhibited. However, double bills of popular series that had previously been run as a single feature, such as the James Bond and Matt Helm series in the superspy genre, and the Man with No Name and The Stranger spaghetti Westerns were re-released together by the main studios.
The end of the first-run double feature also saw the end of continuous screenings, an exhibition policy where a theater opened at 10:30 or 11:00 AM and ran the program without breaks until 12:00 midnight. Customers bought tickets and entered the theater at any time during the program.
While most cinemas have long discontinued the practice of showing the double feature, it has nostalgic appeal. The Astor Theatre in St. Kilda, Melbourne, Australia, established in 1936, continues the tradition of the double feature to this day. Many repertory houses continue to show two films, usually related in some way, back to back.
Short films still occasionally precede the feature presentation (Pixar films generally feature a short, for example), but the double feature is now effectively extinct in first-run movie theaters in the U.S.
Following the success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, three Roger Rabbit cartoon shorts were created to be shown as preludes to other Disney films, in an effort to revive the viewing of cartoon shorts before major films. Only three were made and the scheme failed.[7]
During the 1990s, many VHS cassettes that contained two films on the same tape (with the second often a sequel to the first) were described as "double features," a practice that was later extended to DVDs.