Remaking the B Film in 1940s Hollywood: Producers Releasing Corporation and the Poverty Row Programmer

This essay contends that the 1940 consent decree, the compromise struck between the Justice Department and the film studios that briefly settled the Paramount case, pushed B studios toward the A-film practice of single-film selling, resulting in higher-budgeted, lazy A releases on Poverty Row. This industrial transformation is illustrated through a study of B studio Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), a company that moved upmarket during the 1940s through producing programmers, or midbudget releases that could play on either slot of the dual bill or alone on a single bill. PRC's upscaling efforts were part of a broader recalibration of the categories of A and B during the 1940s, as policies that institutionalized the B film in Hollywood were weakened.