Motion Picture Commission : hearings before the Committee on Education, House of Representatives, Sixty-third Congress, second session, on bills to establish a Federal Motion Picture Commission (1978)

b MOTION PICTURE COMMISSION. There is a great abundance of argument for such a board. The pictures are visited, we are told, by fully 5,000,000 of people, and 25 per cent of them are young persons, children, boys, and girls in their adolescent years. It is a vast interstate business affecting a larger number of our people than any other thing before us to-day, and there is a crying need for censorship in order to avoid the presenta- tion of pictures that are not suitable in character. I will read you a statement by Judge Edward Swan in the New York World of March 15, 1914: " I have had many young people of both sexes tell me that they got their first suggestion to commit crime from scenes portrayed in motion pictures." This is simply rep- resentative of the many statements that could be supplied showing the effect of a criminal scene upon a lot of boys when it is repre- sented in an improper way. The natural tendency under such cir- cumstances is for them to want to get a pistol and shoot somebody in order to mak6 life interesting. When an indecent dance or an inde- cent scene is represented, it is very natural for adolescent boys and girls to go out and imitate it. And so, just as the board of education looks after education and sees that it is carried on in the right way, so this board would deal with this question of securing the presenta- tion of proper pictures. I think it would add great dignity to the motion-picture business to have the pictures supervised by a division of the Bureau of Education. The public would recognize the fact that the pictures to be pre- sented would be of real educational force, and it would incline, in my opinion, a great many more of the thoughtful mothers to take their children to moving-picture shows. Thej' Avould feel, if the business was under the supervision of the board of education, that it was a safe place for them and their children to attend, and the moving- picture men themselves would gain dignity in the business. They would gain patronage from among the solid class of citizens which would more than offset any loss there might be from the riffraff who might have attended a salacious picture that had been cut out. At any rate, they recognize that censorship of some sort, or licensing of pictures, which is the preferable way to do it. is a coming event. Now, as to the money features of the bill. Of course, we want to emphasize to Members of Congress that this bill is going to cost Con- gress nothing. The moving-picture men have said to me that they are entirely Avilling to pay the bills. The president of the New York Moving Picture Co. told nie that they were willing to pay $3 a film, so that I can not be said to have invented that. It came from him. But it has been suggested that $1 is enough, and that even that may be cut down after the work is well under way. especially if the manu- facturers and exhil)it()rs came heartily into the scheme and reduced the difficulty of enforcement. But the men are willing to pay the bills. The moving-picture men desire one censorship that will take the j)laco of the vexatious State and local censorships, the feeling being that after a while this board will make it unnecessary to have a board of censorship in every city and town, and that if that condi- tion takes place they will not have to pay for 50 vexatious examina- tions, but for one. Therefore they say they are willing to pay the actual cost of the reasonable enforcement of this provision. The Chairman. This national supervisi6n would not in any way conflict with the several States?