and RKO Pictures) and Little Three (Universal Pictures, Columbia Pictures, and United Artists) were named, and additional defendants included numerous subsidiaries and executives from each company. Separate cases were also filed against large independent chains, including the 148-theater Schine. The federal government's case was initially settled in 1940 in the District Court for the Southern District of New York with a consent decree, which allowed the government to resume prosecution if studios were noncompliant by November, 1943. Among other requirements, the District Court-imposed consent decree included the following conditions: The Big Five studios could no longer block-book short film subjects along with feature films (known as one-shot, or full force, block booking); The Big Five studios could continue to block-book features, but the block size would be limited to five films; Blind buying (buying of films by theater districts without seeing films beforehand) would be outlawed and replaced with "trade showing", special screenings every two weeks at which representatives of all 31 theater districts in the United States could see films before theatres decided to book a film; and The creation of an administration board to enforce these requirements. The studios did not fully comply with the consent decree. In 1942, they instead, with Allied Theatre Owners, proposed an alternate "Unity Plan". Under the Plan, larger blocks of theatres were blocked with the caveat of allowing theaters to reject films. Consequently, the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers (SIMPP) came into existence and thence filed a lawsuit against Paramount Detroit Theaters, representing the first major lawsuit of producers against exhibitors. The government declined to pursue the Unity proposal and instead, owing to noncompliance with the District Court's binding consent decree, resumed prosecution via the 1943 lawsuit. The 1943 case went to trial on October 8, 1945, one month and six days after the end of World War II. The District Court ruled in favor of the studios, and the government immediately appealed to the Supreme Court. The case reached the United States Supreme Court in 1948; their verdict went against the movie studios, forcing all of them to divest themselves of their movie theater chains. This, coupled with the advent of television and the attendance drop in movie ticket sales, brought about a severe slump in the movie business. The Paramount decision is a bedrock of corporate antitrust law and as such is cited in most cases where issues of