Reel Pleasures. Laura Fair
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about the significance of local theaters to community life in African towns, this was “penny capitalism with a chubby face,” where cinema owners represented family-owned businesses deeply integrated into the social fabric of urban neighborhoods.33
Figure I.2 Sultana Cinema in Zanzibar, c. 1953. Photo by Ranchhod T. Oza, courtesy of Capital Art Studio, Zanzibar
Situating the business history of exhibition and distribution in Tanzania within a larger context highlights that there was nothing inherently generous about the cinema industry at large; the varieties of capitalism that permeated the business varied immensely across the globe, the continent, and even within Tanzania over time. In the United States, exhibition, distribution, and production became a vertically integrated industry dominated by a small oligarchy of players in the 1910s and 1920s. Indeed, five large monopoly producer-distributor-exhibition chains controlled 75 percent of box office receipts in the nation by 1930.34 In Britain, the industry was not quite so integrated, but three major exhibition circuits (Gaumont, ABC, and Odeon) controlled the rights for the first-run releases of all the major studios.35 In Australia and South Africa, vertical integration of distribution and exhibition also held sway. In South Africa, the industry came under the monopoly control of Isador William Schlesinger, an American-born Jewish immigrant who relocated to Johannesburg in 1894. Schlesinger made a quick fortune in insurance, real estate, and citrus before turning his attention to building an entertainment empire that eventually included film production as well as print and broadcast journalism.36 In 1913, Schlesinger began buying up South African theaters. He then moved to consolidate the seven independent suppliers of film in South Africa into one organization in which he was the dominant partner.37 He continued the process of centralizing the industry through the 1940s. According to David Gainer, by the time of World War II Schlesinger controlled the first-run release of nearly all the major British and American studios in South Africa; in addition, he owned the vast majority of the most lucrative theaters in the country and had exclusive distribution contracts with all but twenty of the four hundred cinemas outside the major metropolises.38 He also made valiant and repeated efforts to monopolize distribution across the entire African continent.
In South Africa, independent theaters and film importers had no chance against the economic and political power exercised by Schlesinger’s monopoly. He made a sport of forcing men out of business if they dared challenge his power to determine what films they screened or the terms of their rent.39 According to Gainer, if an exhibitor ever dared to show a film provided by an independent importer or did not follow the screening schedule set by Schlesinger, he would be “starved” of product until he left the business. Others were denied films because they dared to purchase new projectors from someone other than Schlesinger, who dominated equipment sales in South Africa as well.40 Even two of the major powerhouses from Hollywood—Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) and 20th Century Fox—fought lengthy, costly, and largely unsuccessful battles to break Schlesinger’s monopoly. By the late 1930s, both studios capitulated to Schlesinger’s terms, finding it more profitable and easier to work with him than against him. Together, “The Big Three” came to control 90 percent of the South African market, leaving little room for importers of films from India, continental Europe, or elsewhere.41 The monopoly capitalism and vertical integration of the Gilded Age was on full display in the cinema industry in many corners of the globe.
But the monopoly model was not the only way to organize the industry. Denmark, for one, took an aggressive stance against vertical integration, legally banning related practices in 1933.42 There, distributors were explicitly prohibited from owning cinemas. In India too, individual proprietorships held sway. In neither case did the lack of consolidation hinder the development of robust film production and exhibition industries. Actually, India has always rivaled, if not exceeded, Hollywood in terms of the number of films produced. By the mid-1920s, Indians were producing 100 films a year, a figure that grew to 300 per annum by the 1950s and peaked at more than 900 a year by 1985.43 The number of exhibitors, distributors, and producers in India was similarly large. By the late 1940s, there were more than 600 producers actively making films. In the 1990s, the number of producers was beyond count. As film distribution consolidated in the United States, it democratized in India, growing from 11 distributors in the 1920s to more than 800 in the 1940s to over 1,000 by the late 1950s.44 Exhibition has also been historically characterized by independently owned enterprises. In the 1950s, there was just a single vertically integrated production-distribution-exhibition company in India, but it controlled less than 1 percent of the nearly 4,300 permanent cinemas in the nation.45
Given the large number of distributors and independent exhibitors in India, the profits derived from ticket sales were much more widely shared there than in countries where the industry was monopolized by a few key players. The diversity of distributors in India also afforded greater power to exhibitors, giving them more room to negotiate for better films and film-rental terms.46 In India, exhibitors have historically enjoyed the most stable and consistent profits in the industry, whereas in the United States and South Africa, distributors swallowed the lion’s share of earnings. Block booking, a system whereby exhibitors were required to take a large number of low-quality films for the privilege of securing each hit they wanted, was a standard practice in the United States until outlawed in 1948, and it was a common element in Hollywood and South African international contracts for much longer than that.47 Exhibitors worked essentially as the servants of big distributors rather than as autonomous entrepreneurs. Today in India, Denmark, the Netherlands, and a host of other countries, independent theaters screening films from a range of producers and various national cinemas remain an important part of local and national cultural economies. Clearly, political and economic policies shape not only industrial forms and the accumulation of capital but also leisure and cultural options.
The exhibition and distribution industries in Tanzania occupied an intermediary zone between the Indian and American models and changed somewhat dramatically over time as new political regimes, guided by different economic goals, rose to power. During the colonial era, both the exhibition and distribution industries were run by independent, local entrepreneurs. With but a few exceptions, all the theaters in the nation were individually owned and run by local men who lived in the towns where their businesses operated. As in India, the state paid little heed to the development of these small enterprises. So long as the theater owners abided by fire codes and adhered to censorship rules and regulations, the state did little to govern, direct, or restrict how the industry developed. The colonial state considered most small businesses in Tanzania too petty to bother with, and cinemas, shops, fishmongers, and carpenters operated largely beyond the official gaze. Although colonial officials surely noted the large numbers of people streaming in and out of the cinemas each day, they somehow could not even imagine that it might be worth their while to tax admissions or business profits. There was a duty imposed on films as they entered the country, but no official attention was ever paid to what these films earned once imported.
The situation changed radically with independence. Rather quickly, the cinema industry was brought under state control. Movie theaters continued to be individually operated, but the buildings themselves were nationalized, in 1964 in Zanzibar and 1971 on the mainland. In the 1960s, the socialist state became increasingly directive about all aspects of the national economy. The 1967 Arusha Declaration marked the official beginning of the nationalization of key industries, banking, and trade. The following year, film distribution was formally nationalized. The impact this had on film imports and what was seen by urban audiences was less significant than those familiar with socialist film policy in the Soviet Union or Cuba might imagine, but the profits gleaned by monopolizing distribution were enormous (see chapter 8). Net profits recorded by the Tanzania Film Company Ltd. (TFC) grew from just under 400,000 shillings (TSh) two years after incorporation to nearly 8 million in 1985, a twentyfold increase in a fifteen-year period after adjusting for currency devaluations.48 Oddly, the nature of the industry came closest to the American and South African monopoly models of vertical integration under state socialism. Structural changes allowing