Vertical integration

One company controlling more than one link of the chain at once. In the classical form it means production, distribution and exhibition under a single owner, so the company that makes the film also decides how it travels and where it plays.

The Philippine studios were integrated across production and their own labour and facilities, and had reliable access to release, which is why they could run at the volume they did. It is also why their failure took the whole structure down at once rather than one department at a time.

The concept is worth carrying forward for a reason that has nothing to do with the 1950s. Philippine cinema’s chronic problem is the opposite condition: production is separated from distribution and exhibition, and the people who own the later links are not in the film business at all.

Source: Structural term from industrial economics, used here descriptively rather than as any single scholar’s framework. The Philippine application is built from the studio-era account in Golden Age of Philippine cinema, Wikipedia and this course’s own chain analysis in Lesson 3.1. The contemporary exhibition picture it points at is handled with data in Lesson 3.7.

First used in: 3.3 · The one time a film worker had an employer