Nowadays, if someone says the phase “double feature,” any number of things may come to mind. Maybe you remember seeing a double-bill of movies at a second-run theater or drive-in in your younger days; maybe it makes you think of amusingly schlocky horror like “I Was a Teenage Frankenstein”; or maybe it gets you humming the opening to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. All of these have one thing in common: poppy nostalgia. Watching two movies back-to-back seems sort of adorably retro as a concept (we say, as Netflix pops up to ask if we’re still awake after episode #6 in a row of Samurai Gourmet).

But for decades in movie theaters around America, double features (also called “dual bills” or “double bills”) were very nearly a fact of life. They became popular during the Depression era, for obvious reasons: two films for the price of one, in one sitting, equals more bang for your limited buck. And the industry only grew from there; by the 1930s, cinema had firmly established itself in American entertainment and routinely drew tens of millions of viewers weekly. According to media historian Ulf Jonas Bjork, the industry was happy to keep up with demand.

“Together, the eight major companies and the three small independents (the B studios) produced 455 feature films in 1938, close to nine a week,” Bjork writes in a study of movie showings in Seattle during that year. But simple, practical budgeting meant that producers could not and did not want to spend the same on every film they made. So,

films were divided into two categories, A and B, depending on the budgets each had to work with. At the major studios, an A movie would cost anything between $300,000 and $1 million in 1938, while a B product was supposed to stay around $100,000…. A B studio release could even cost as little as $10,000.

By the middle of the 1930s, writes film scholar Gary D. Rhodes, the double feature was “standard programming practice.” Citing figures published in Film Daily in September 1936, Rhodes notes that “8,000 out of approximately 15,000 theatres in the United States regularly featured double bills.”

In such double features, the more lavish “A” film would be paired with a “B” release of lesser status or cost, usually requiring that patrons sit through the underpublicized latter to get to what they’d come for. Rhodes writes that while the double feature was popular, not everyone was an eager adopter. During the ’30s and ’40s, almost everyone in the cinema ecosystem had a reason to roll their eyes at a movie marathon.

Quoting Frank H. Ricketson, Jr.’s 1938 book, The Management of Motion Picture Theatres, Rhodes writes that

double bills came into the industry without a friend. Producers and distributors have fought the idea as the worst evil of exhibition. Union employees and theatre staffs have opposed them because they mean longer working hours. Legislation against double features has been instituted in some cities.… Children have objected to double bills because they abolish short subjects such as comedies, cartoons, and novelty reels. Exhibitors, individually and through their organizations, have condemned the practice because it means additional film rental and added programme cost.

There were patrons who indeed liked spending the better part of an afternoon at the movies. Some people liked getting a lot of value for their money. Others hated having to sit through an unknown B movie to see the film they actually wanted to watch. And some viewers just thought the B titles were generally horrible. Bjork recounts that, after a “particularly long and dismal night at the local theater,” two young men from Nutley, New Jersey, “decided to form the ‘Anti-Double Feature League of America.’”

Nonetheless, the market for B pics was solid through the 1930s and into the ’40s. There was a very clear reason for this: the vertically integrated Hollywood studio system, through which the major players owned not only the machinery of film production, but of distribution and exhibition of movies across the country. Relying on double feature showings and a sales process known as “block booking,” the studios made sure that they had to keep cranking out material.

Block booking, in short, meant that distributors would bundle movies together in groups for rental to theaters—buy one, you have to buy them all, write Roy W. Kenney and Benjamin Klein in their 1983 analysis of the economics behind the practice. First-run theaters owned by or friendly to the studios themselves would be exempt from the block booking requirement or might receive their B films from the studios’ own production units. Local or unaffiliated venues had to take on B films in a block to keep their doors open. What this meant, practically, is that if a theater wanted an A-list studio banger, it usually had to agree to also show a handful of B-list films, too—usually without knowing what those titles would be ahead of time. Film scholar Maureen Rogers explains that such “protectionist measures propped up the majors’ control of the first-run marketplace but they also fostered a significant demand for product, since the majors and major-minors could not produce enough films for all dual bills across the country.”

Smaller independent B-movie producers worked to fill in where the studios left room and to supply unaffiliated and “nabe,” or neighborhood, theaters nationwide. Many of them had dubious reputations for being able to deliver on time and on budget, so the business could be volatile. Many of these came to be known as “Poverty Row” studios, making B-list films on a flat-fee basis rather than relying on packaging or percentage deals. Rogers explains that “Poverty Row B films were typically characterized by their brevity (55 to 75 minutes), lack of major stars, low budgets, abbreviated shooting schedules, flat-fee rental system, and distribution on the lower slot of the double bill.”

Whether it was a major production, a Poverty Row drama, or a “Lazy A” feature that attempted to bridge the gap, “B-movie” came to mean anything that could be made cheaply and had (or at least attempted to have) some excitement. This included a wide range of stories, from Westerns and detective drama to monster films, character serials or melodramas. A certain rag-tag element became part of the charm over time (and with some rose-colored retrospect): think of movies like The Mad Monster, a 1942 Poverty Row picture; or the films of eccentric director Arthur Terry, whose 1931 film The King of Shamokin involved production numbers with snappy titles like “Imbedded in Kelp,” “Hey! What’s That Smell?” and “With a Tongue Like That You’ll Go Far.” Some of these B films, which were often re-cut and re-mixed in distribution, survive as artifacts of “exploitation” cinema and so-called “race film” features intended for Black audiences and theaters.

In the end it was American business and antitrust law that hit the double feature where it hurt. The years-long Paramount Case, litigated before the Supreme Court on Sherman Act antitrust grounds, ultimately put an end to the vertical integration system and broke the studios’ control over filmmaking. While the case was pending throughout the 1940s, various interim settlements whittled away at studio practices; after a 1940 consent decree attacked the practice of block booking, the major studios generally abandoned their B-units as not worth the cost.

They may have been second thoughts for many industry players and theatergoers in the first half of the twentieth century, but B-movies arguably had the last laugh. Their budget sensibility, eccentricity, and tendency to grow a cult following have not only given the films long life, but inspired generations of modern filmmakers and fans.

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