Unravelling Australia’s ‘Infamous “Contract” System’: Evidence from Adelaide, 1942–1943

Dylan Walker () and Mike Walsh ()
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Mike Walsh: Flinders University

A chapter in Towards a Comparative Economic History of Cinema, 1930–1970, 2022, pp 185-216 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The conventional wisdom espoused by cultural nationalists in Australia is that Hollywood films dominated Australian screens by virtue of a powerful, inflexible block-booking system. Using a dataset of screenings from Adelaide, a second-tier capital city, this article seeks to replace such totalising generalisations with a more complex view of the diverse relations that constituted exhibition in Australia. Different exhibitors and distributors had a widely divergent set of tactical business arrangements, which conditioned the way films moved through the various phases of their release. Our study centres on the 1942–1943 financial year, for which we have specific box-office figures, thereby allowing us to check the accuracy of POPSTAT estimates.

Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-05770-0_7

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