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)

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34 MOTIOX PICTURE COMMISSIOX. Mr. CiTASi:. Well. I was going to speak about that. Peisoiially I would favor larger salaries. Mr. Treadway. And a smaller board '. Mr. Chase. And I should be in favor of a smaller board and have larger salaries, because of the graft i)roposition in connection with this. The dangers of that are tremendous. The money that is made from motion pictures is a tremendous amount, 'i'hey spend $100,000 in the production of one film. Of course, college professors get no more than $3,500, and from that educational standpoint, perhaps, to ])ay $0,000 or $7,000 would seem a large sum. But I would like to have men of a caliber whose judgment and poise in these matters, judgment of art and literature, and of general education should be sufficiently high to command the respect at least of the motion- picture business. Therefore I wish it could be arranged to have sal- aries such as would command men of the right caliber, and then make them feel that they coidd live projierly upon them and resist the temptation of, perhaps, a $50,000 bribe to pass an objectionable film like the Inside of the White-Slave Traffic. Mr. DouGHTON. Would not that discredit their work? Mr. Chase. Yes. Mr. DouGHTOK. They would destroy themselves at the first step. They could not stand up under anything like that, it would destroy them. Mr. Chase. You have better judgment with reference to that. I do not like to enter an objection to it, but I do feel that $25,000 is small for traveling expenses and everything else. One of the ques- tions will be whether this board wnll sit in Washington or New York City. You see, we have five commissioners at $3,000. Mr. Crafts. $3,500 for the chairman. Mr. Chase. Yes; and there is $15,500 in salaries, and there will be expenses- Mr. Abercrombie (interposing). And a secretary at $1,500, making $17,000. Mr. Chase. Yes. And then you have office expenses, traveling expenses, and various things, so that seems to be a small sum. It seems to me it would be better to make it $50,000. I suppose it is better to get right dow^n to the details of it rather than the general principles, but I want to call your attention to this fact, which I think will be helpful to the conuuittee, with reference to the general question of censorship. England, you know—or per- haps you may not know—censors every play that is produced in a theater. You may print a play, but the moment you Avant it pro- duced it nuist go before one man, and his one say-so is vital. You can not go behind him. He is the final authority. Now, that has been so ever since the beginning of the stage in England, and four times within the last half century Parliament has appointed a committee to investigate. So recently as 1909 the objections were so strong that they appointed a committee and investigated, and this was what they found: That the artists—that is, the literary men who wrote the dramas—were almost united against censorship, but that the owners of the theaters and the theater managers, and such men as the speaker of the House of Parliament, were very strongly in favor of retaining censorship. And the motion-picture film people in England have appointed a censorship like our national board of