Biography

The commercial renters' national trade body was founded in December 1915. Kinematograph Renters' Society of Great Britain and Ireland (KRS) was registered as a company limited by guarantee. Its stated aims were to watch, protect and represent its members' interests, including by co-operating with government and other trade bodies, and obtaining legal advice, railway concessions and other generic assistance which could be negotiated more effectively by consolidated action. There were ten founding member companies of KRS - Advance Film Service, Butcher's Film Service, Gaumont Film Hire Service, Globe Film Co, Green & Co, Ideal Film Renting Co, International Cine, Jury's Imperial Pictures, Pioneer Film Agency and Ruffell's Imperial Bioscope - but the member list expanded rapidly. Early KRS board meetings were concerned with thrashing out a viable mechanism for renting film prints and collecting payments and establishing professional standards for film presentation. Committed to building public audiences, distributors spent hours around the KRS table deliberating 'the long-term development and well-being of the industry'. This was the one place where competitors could meet as a group and discuss the needs of their evolving sector. By the 50 th anniversary of KRS in 1965, when its office was in Dean Street, all the US studios had well-established British off-shoots or joint-ventures based in Soho. KRS membership then numbered a broad church of familiar names: Warner-Pathé Distributors, Twentieth Century Fox Film Co., Walt Disney Productions, MGM Pictures, United Artists Corporation and Paramount Film Service, plus local firms including the Rank Organisation, BLC Films, Panton Film Distributors, Compton-Cameo Pictures and Romulus Films. The association was subsequently renamed the Society of Film Distributors, and in 2015 is called Film Distributors’ Association (FDA).

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