American Film Theatre

Raymond Benson summarized, "The American Film Theatre could probably never be repeated, especially within the economic structure that exists in the motion picture industry today.

It’s a shame, for even though the AFT was not a perfect product, it was a bold and fascinating experiment that attempted to blend the stage with cinema.

Landau was able to convince leading playwrights, actors, and directors to offer their work at minimal rates.

The American Express company developed a direct mail and newspaper sales campaign that cost $2.5 million, and yielded about 500,000 subscriptions for the first season.

For the second season, the major studios apparently began to exert pressure on these theaters to withdraw from American Film Theatre.

In January 1975, the month the second season began, American Film Theatre filed an antitrust lawsuit against six of the major studios alleging that they were "coercing exhibitors into canceling scheduled AFT playdates or transferring them to theatres different from those designated to subscribers when they signed up for the AFT series".