finally to rural communities, playing in ever smaller (and less profitable) venues and taking upwards of six months to complete its run." The "clearance" policy prevented independent exhibitors' timely access to top-quality films as a matter of course; the second feature allowed them to promote quantity instead. The bottom-billed movie also gave the program "balance"—the practice of pairing different sorts of features suggested to potential customers that they could count on something of interest no matter what specifically was on the bill. As the president of one Poverty Row company would later put it, "Not everybody likes to eat cake. Some people like bread, and even a certain number of people like stale bread rather than fresh bread." The low-budget picture of the 1920s naturally transformed into the second feature, the B movie, of the 1930s and 1940s—the most reliable bread of Hollywood's Golden Age. Rise of the double feature: 1930s The major companies upon which the Hollywood studio system was built had been resistant to the B-movie trend, but they soon adapted. All ultimately established "B units" to provide films for the expanding second-feature market. Block booking increasingly became standard practice: in order to get access to a studio's attractive A pictures, many theaters were obliged to rent the company's entire output for a season. With the B films rented at a flat fee (rather than the box office percentage basis of A films), rates could be set that essentially guaranteed the profitability of every B movie. Blind bidding, which grew in parallel with block booking, meant that the majors didn't have to worry much about the quality of their B's—even when booking in less than seasonal blocks, exhibitors had to buy most pictures sight unseen. The five largest studios—MGM, Paramount, Fox Film Corporation (Twentieth Century Fox as of 1935), Warner Bros., and RKO Radio Pictures (descendant of Film Booking Offices of America)—had the additional advantage of being part of companies that also owned sizable theater chains, further securing the bottom line. Poverty Row studios, from modest outfits like Mascot Pictures, Tiffany Studios, and Sono Art-World Wide Pictures on down to shoestring operations, made exclusively B movies, serials, and other shorts. They also distributed totally independent productions and imported films. These studios were in no position to directly block book; instead, they mostly sold regional distribution exclusivity to "states rights" distributors, who would in turn peddle blocks of films