There had been an American presence in the British cinema industry since before the First World War: Essanay and Vitagraph were the first US film manufacturing companies to open offices in Britain in 1912. They were followed within a few years by the Fox Film Company (1916) and Famous-Lasky Film Service (1919). By the end of the 1920s six of the eight US majors – Paramount, Fox, MGM, Universal, Warner Bros. and United Artists – had British distribution arms and were responsible for around half of the total films offered for rental. It was in the 1930s that Hollywood began to invest in the British production sector as American companies would finance British films in order to meet their quota obligations under the Cinematograph Films Act of 1927. This was the context for the emergence of the notorious ‘quota quickies’ whereby, as Political and Economic Planning put it, ‘the American renters gradually became “sponsors” of a series of cheap films which had little or no entertainment value even for the meanest taste’. ‘By financing these “quota quickies”, which gave employment but no prestige to the British industry,’ it added, ‘the foreign renters fulfilled their quota obligations without impairing the competitive advantage of their own product.’ In fact, by no means all American-sponsored quota films were necessarily the cheap and shoddy affairs implied by the derogatory label of ‘quota quickies’. Warner Bros. established a permanent production facility at Teddington Studios in 1931 and Twentieth Century–Fox did likewise at Wembley in 1935. MGM proved the most ambitious of the Hollywood studios when it opened its British subsidiary at Denham Studios in 1937 in order to produce first-class ‘A’ features that would be shown on equal terms in the United States: it produced A Yank at Oxford, The Citadel and Goodbye Mr Chips until the studio's British operation was interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War.