Motion Picture Magazine, May 1914 (1914)

TEE FINAL WORD ON CENSORSHIP 103 sen's Fairy Tales, and you or I can read Rabelais, if Nye want. But in Motion Pictures everybody must read Epictetus, or everybody must read Theodore Roosevelt, everybody must read Andersen or Rabelais\everybody must smoke either Havana \igars or Pittsburgh cheroots; everybody must wear either velvet or ginghan\ At the best, all the producer or filmxex- change or exhibitor can. do is to give each member of the audience a com^ posite dose of Epictetus and Roose- velt, and of velvet and gingham. The trouble with Motion Pictures now is that the whole art is on a sort of horizontal dead-level plane. There are no heights or depths to it. Silly people cannot get what they want, and wise people have to get a mixture of the silly in every program. This is a real condition; but how on earth is censorship — any possible censor- ship — going to remedy it 1 Mo- tion Pictures are already pressed down to a sort of drab average of everybody's likes and dislikes and wisdom and foolishness, and Canon Chase proposes to cure this condition by running a rock- crusher or lawn-mower of legal een* sorship over the film business, to flatten it or crop it still more. This is a curious situation, for Canon Chase is voicing only what a million or more people are thinking and saying. The very conditions which make censorship futile and foolish are the ones which excite a cry for censorship. Because the same film goes to everybody everywhere, thoughtless people say, "Give us a censorship." But because the same film goes to everybody everywhere these same or other people will say, "Down with the censor!" as soon as he begins work. A censor can work efficiently only if he can specify that a given film must go to a given audience, and nothing that Canon Chase or any other advocate of cen- sorship has ever proposed will give the legal censor this power. Now, Canon Chase, and perhaps President Dyer too, will turn the question on me. They will say, Does not the same argument put your National Board of Censorship out of court? For the National Board of Censorship has no more power than any legal censor to say that this or that film shall go to this or that \audience in particular. It, like a legal censor, censors the same film for every- body everywhere. Now, a careful thinker will sudden- ly discover, just at this point, the reason for the existence of the Na- tional Board of Censorship, and the reason why it is of value to the public and to the film art. In the first place, be it un- derstood that the National Board of Censorship does not try to do. what Canon Chase thinks a legal censor ought to do, namely, to reduce every Motion Picture film to the level of the youngest and most morally unstable child in the audience. The Board deserves Canon Chase's criticisms, or would deserve them if it agreed with his standards of censorship. But the Board funda- mentally disagrees with such stand- ards, and insists that, so long as Mo- tion Pictures are, going to every- body everywhere, they must be cen- sored not for the exceptional, un- stable child, but for the vast audience of wage-earning men and women, the eager adolescents and the normal children who attend the shows with their parents. The National Board, being free from political interference, is in a position to continue this work, even tho a fairly large and noisy minority of the public disapprove it. This noisy minority has to be simply borne with by the National Board of "Legal censorship would re- duce every Motion Picture to the level of the youngest child— they are already pressed down to a sort of drab average of everybody's likes and dislikes."