That is where advertising has come to play such an important part in the film business to-day. An exhibitor, who gets very likely a good deal of his advance information about films from the trade journal that he has to subscribe to to keep posted about what’s what, reads that “Precious Polly” is one of the funnest films that has ever been made. Or that “Saved by an Inch” is sure to make a big hit with any audience. Or that “The Fatal Hour” played to capacity business in a big New York or Chicago theater. In each case he is reading an advertisement—but it influences him nevertheless. He can’t look at _all_ the films that are available at the different exchanges; it would be a physical impossibility. So, naturally, he decides to look at the one he has read about, rather than another that he has never heard of. Wouldn’t you? And in the end he probably decided to take, even if it isn’t very good and doesn’t in the least come up to what he had expected from the advertisement—until he had learned to discount everything he read in film advertisements—the film that he has spent an hour looking at, rather than go on hunting, on the slim chance that he might find a better one if he looked long enough. Just as you would in his place. What is the result? The distributors pay a great deal of money for advertising to sell their films to the exhibitors. Again and again they claim that the new films they are distributing are the best that have ever been made. And a poor film, or possibly a very cheap film, with say a hundred thousand dollars worth of advertising behind it, will do more business, and make more money for the distributor, than a better film that has only five thousand dollars worth of advertising. Suppose a picture costs a hundred thousand dollars to produce. The additional prints that have to be made and sent to the different exchanges to supply all the theaters that want to use the picture cost perhaps $20,000 more. Fifty thousand more is spent in a big advertising campaign. For the service of distribution, the distributing company takes thirty-five or forty per cent. of the receipts that come in. The picture has to take in, from exhibitors, _three times what it costs to make it_, before there is a cent of profit for the producer. Another thing: besides advertising, the distributing companies can reach exhibitors through _salesmen_. In the small town, or the big city, where you have your theater, we will say, a movie salesman visits you. He is a persuasive talker, and convinces you that if you run the latest film of his company, you will “make a clean-up.” So you sign up for it, and pay perhaps a third of the rental in advance.