Movie theaters in the postwar period faced the problem of satisfying the growing appetites of Soviet audiences for films while dealing with the shortage of newly produced works from studios. In response, cinemas played the same films for months at a time, many of them the works of the late 1930s. Anything new drew millions of people to the box office, and many theaters screened foreign films to attract larger audiences. Most of these foreign films were "trophy films", two thousand films brought into the country by the Red Army after the occupation of Germany and Eastern Europe in World War II. In the top secret minutes for the CPSU Committee Meeting on August 31, 1948, the committee permitted the Minister of the Film Industry to release fifty of these films in the Soviet Union. Of these fifty, Bolshakov was only allowed to release twenty-four for screening to the general public, mainly films made in Germany, Austria, Italy, and France. The other twenty-six films, consisting almost entirely of American films, were only allowed to be shown in private screenings. The minutes also include a separate list of permitted German musical films, which were mainly German and Italian film adaptations of famous operas. Most of the trophy films were released in 1948–49, but somewhat strangely, compiled lists of the released films include ones not previously mentioned in the official minutes of the Central Committee.