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T im #*##/ T opirs
UROPE is at war.
That statement, screamed from the headlines of the nation's newspapers, has given the studio world a fair start toward a panic. It indicates — so many cautious folk argue — that the vital forty per cent of film grosses contributed by the foreign market would he cut off, or at least materially reduced. Accordingly there has been a great deal of very loose and panicky talk of “retrenchment” — of big productions indefinitely postponed — o f slashed budgets — of widespread salary reductions.
We cannot join in the general jitters. As we see things, neither logic nor the past experience of our industry can support the present panic. On the contrary, both could very easily prophesy a boom of unprecedented dimensions.
Let's look at the worst side of the ledger first. A glance at any war-map of Europe shows that one group of belligerents will be definitely blockaded. The other, due to the submarine, may find foreign commerce hampered, but hardly cut off. We in Hollywood may therefore expect to continue to send films — if there remains a demand for them — to the latter countries; we cannot expect to send them to the former group, if the blockade is anywhere near effective.
But now a glance at the ledgers of most of our major producing and distributing firms will reveal the fact that for several years Hollywood has sent virtually no films to Germany and Italy, while Great Britain. France, and
to a lesser extent the other and (at this writing) neutral countries of Europe have formed a lucrative market for Hollywood’s product.
So what?
The market which for several years Hollywood didn’t have— did not perhaps even want to have — has been made inaccessible by war. The rest of the European market — a field which in spite of quotas and absurd nationalistic restrictions, has for years showed a marked preference for Hollywood-made pictures — remains open to us. Due to wartime conditions it may he more difficult to transport our product to this market — but the market is still there, and open to us.
Point two in the arguments of our Caspar Milquetoast brigade is that any nation engaged in a serious war would have less need of movies — would, in fact, be likely to close all theatres as a measure of wartime safety. Therefore, even if we could get our films to those theatres, they could not get any playing time.
To all of which we'd like to reply “poppycock!” If these people were alive during the last war. they certainly heard the word morale very frequently. Translated into simple English, it means the spirit of a people. If that people is at war. it needs entertainment— something far removed from the harrowing seriousness of war — to keep up those spirits. Experience has proved that the greatest booster of mass morale is the movie. It reaches more people more completely than any other medium.
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