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ChapTer 3 Peak Achievements, 1946–1950 A Short-Lived Boom F ox’s profits were impressive in the immediate post–World War II period, continuing and even accelerating the wartime trend. In 1946 the studio earned a profit of $22.6 million, by far the largest figure in the young company’s history, and in 1947 profits were a still-robust $14 million.1 Both returning servicemen and home-front workers had money to spend, and they were pouring money into first-run movie theaters. Also, foreign markets had opened up, which meant that older films, which had completed their North American runs, suddenly had new territories for distribution. Adjusting to the boom, Fox focused on A films, raising the average budget of a Fox film to a very high $2.328 million in 1947.2 B films were farmed out to independent producers, meaning that Fox would have lower fixed costs (especially labor costs) than in the past. The run of expensive features also corresponded to a new industry-wide emphasis on longer runs for the top features, and as a result nine Fox films earned $3 million or more in 1946—Leave Her to Heaven, Margie, Smoky, Anna and the King of Siam, Centennial Summer, Do You Love Me?, Dragonwyck, Sentimental Journey, and Three Little Girls in Blue.3 Six of these films were in Technicolor, and indeed Fox produced more color features than any other studio in the 1940s. In 1947 Fox made five additional films that earned $3 million or more in domestic rentals, three in Technicolor (Forever Amber, Mother Wore Tights, and I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now) and two in black and white (The Razor’s Edge, The Foxes of Harrow). If the immediate postwar period was a good time to produce A pictures, it was an even better time to own a chain of first-run theaters. Film historian Thomas Schatz notes that for the five vertically integrated studios, most of the profits went to the theater chains, not the production units. It is thus not surprising that Paramount, the most profitable studio of the 1940s, was 103 peak achievements, 1946–1950 the one with by far the largest theater chain—more than 1,200 theaters. Fox (600 theaters), Warner Bros. (475 theaters), and Loew’s/MGM (150 theaters) followed Paramount in profits; the Loew’s chain was relatively small, but half its theaters were in the lucrative New York City market. RKO (100 theaters) lagged behind, and the nonvertically integrated Columbia and Universal were barely profitable.4 The higher ticket prices and longer runs of the postwar period benefited the theater chains, and for an integrated company it did not matter where the profits came from. A production unit that broke even but supplied high-quality pictures to a profitable theater chain within the same corporation was a perfectly reasonable outcome. The excellent results of the war years and immediate postwar years caused Twentieth Century-Fox to invest heavily in its theater chain. Most of Fox’s theaters were bundled together in NationalTheaters, which covered the West and Midwest. Fox West Coast Theaters (now the name for a component of NationalTheaters) was centered in California, and California was booming— for example, the population of Los Angeles rose by 300,000 people during World War II.5 It made sense for Fox West Coast, the dominant theater chain in the region, to make postwar investments to better serve this growing population. Also, the Skouras brothers were first and foremost exhibitors, so it was not surprising that in good times they would plough money back into the part of the film industry they knew best. Charles Skouras, head of National Theaters, launched an impressive campaign of new construction and renovation in the late 1940s. This was to some extent a reprise of the building campaign of 1939–1941 (see Chapter 2), cut short by Pearl Harbor, but after the war Fox had more money and more confidence, and so a major investment was made in renovation and in some new construction. According to theater historian Preston J. Kaufmann, about 200 Fox West Coast theaters were renovated, or “Skouras-ized,” between 1945 and 1954, and “a number of new theaters” were built as well.6 The investment in theaters focused mainly on California, but Kaufmann also discusses built or rebuilt theaters in Seattle, Portland, Denver,Tucson, and Billings. Fox West Coast achieved important cost savings by having most projects designed by an in-house...

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