So here would be your first trouble: _How would you tell which pictures would please your audiences most?_ Maybe your own taste would run to outdoor adventure stories—stories of the Texas border, and range riders, and tales of the Northwest Mounted Police. But if your theater happened to be, let us say, in a factory town where the majority of your patrons were mill-hands, it might be that you would find they did not like “Westerns” half as well as what are usually called “Society” films, which showed millionaires’ homes, and Wally-haired heroes who did their best work driving sport-model automobiles. Moreover, you might find that, because your customers actually knew so little about the home life of American millionaires that they liked to watch, utterly inaccurate “Society dramas” with a strong melodramatic flavor, possibly of the kind known as “Heart interest” would “get across” better, and draw bigger audiences, and make more money for you, than more accurate pictures with less melodramatic “pep” in them. What would you do then? The average movie exhibitor buys (or more properly rents) his films through what is called a local “Exchange.” It gets its name from the fact that films are continually exchanged there—the old ones that have already been run for the new ones that have been rented for the next night or next week. There may be several different exchanges in the town where the exhibitor goes to do his movie shopping. Indeed, there usually are, for each big distributing company has its own local office or “branch exchange” in every important center throughout the United States—the larger exchanges, covering perhaps a territory of several States, supplying their own smaller branch exchanges in that territory, and these in turn supplying the still smaller local exchanges, and these supplying the exhibitors direct. Then, in addition to the big distributing companies, there are usually small or “independent” concerns also offering films to the exhibitors—usually of the poorer and cheaper variety. So, when you came to do your film shopping you would have perhaps a dozen different places to go to, and each of these places would have a whole lot of films for you to choose from.