Page "History of film" Paragraph 67

The litigation over patents between all the major American film-making companies had continued, and at the end of 1908 they decided to pool their patents and form a trust to use them to control the American film business.

The companies concerned were Pathé, Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph, Lubin, Selig, Essanay, Kalem, and the Kleine Optical Company, a major importer of European films.

The George Eastman company, the only manufacturer of film stock in the United States, was also part of the combine, which was called the Motion Picture Patents Company ( MPPC ), and Eastman Kodak agreed to only supply the members with film stock.

License fees for distributing and projecting films were extracted from all distributors and exhibitors.

The producing companies that were part of the trust were allocated production quotas ( two reels, i. e. films, a week for the biggest ones, one reel a week for the smaller ), which were supposed to be enough to fill the programmes of the licensed exhibitors.

Vitagraph and Edison already had multiple production units, and so had no difficulty meeting their quota, but in 1908 Biograph lost their one working director.

They offered the job of making their films to D. W. Griffith, an unimportant actor and playwright, who took up the job, and found he had a gift for it.

Alone he made all the Biograph films from 1908 to 1910.

This amounted to 30 minutes of screen time a week.