Business screen magazine (1946)

The production of corporate public relations films is at an all time high and growing, according to Mr. Smith, who cites a "glaring lack of selling effort on the part of business film producers" as perhaps one of the reasons there are not even more being made. PR FILMSCOMING OR GOING? EASTMAN KODAK Company recently made a film titled, Movies Move People and certainly no one, especially competent and knowledgeable public relations people, will quarrel with the well-known fact set forth in this brief but meaningful title. It has been true since the silent film days and the earliest sound films such as Al Jolson's "The Jazz Singer" and Cecil B. DeMille's great spectacular. The King of Kings which the author saw at its premiere showing in Grauman's Chinese Theatre, May 1, 1927. But it was not until television brought movies into the living room that the full impact of films really made itself felt. TV has changed the living habits of the average American family to a degree few realize. Because of this and other revolutionary developments already in the prototype stage future generations will be much better informed and more sophisticated. In fact, as one political analyst put it when remarking about the huge amount spent on TV in the last election, "the first voters this time grew up on their bellies in front of a television set. They've been brainwashed with audio visuals and that's the way its going to be from now on." Kodak's promotional brochure on "Movies Move People" says it is fairly common knowledge that film can store events for the future, make it possible to project information again and again without any change in meaning, allows the salesman selling turbines or bridge beams to demonstrate them without carting them along with him, offers a convenience to the executive too busy to address his far-flung operations in person, can deliver the world, and now even the moon, or any part thereof, to any single location. Film can be used to demonstrate, display and teach in color, black-and-white, with sound or without, in wide screen, split By SHIRLEY SMITH Vice President Assistant to Executive Association-Sterling Films or un-split screen, through animation, dramatization, or documentation and in 70, 35, 16 or super 8 mm. Film can be seen in the home, office, store, assembly line, school, exhibit, and in the church, theatre, on television. In point of fact, it can be seen everywhere. All of these are salable facts, and while they are important and "old hat" to film professionals, they are not always the most compelling reasons for those who want to communicate effectively in the most forceful manner through film. Film, by its very nature, provides the user the incomparable opportunity to be unusually persuasive. It is the one and only medium through which it becomes possible to reach a target audience by way of all of its emotions at once. Shock, tears, laughter, concern and apprehension, uncertainty, relief— all can carry a message, and all are reproducible on film. Film turns an idea, a concept, fact or what-have-you, into a very personal — and often memorable — experience. This alone sets it aside as a uniquely potent tool of effective communications. Hugh Marlowe, who narrates Eastman's film about film, establishes this concept in his introduction. He states that film can "intercept the senses, lull and electrify them: that it has the power to embed an idea or change one: provoke shouts or a memory" — all through the evocation of desire, regret, joy or revulsion. Entirely unlike other media, film can communicate on many levels simultaneously. It can channel information through receptive climates generated by dramatization or comedy, by the subtleties of plotting, stylization and timing; by the techniques of animation, special effects and documentation. It grabs the viewer, shakes him out of his apathy and alerts him to feel a connection and involvement with the material being shown on the screen. There is a sharp difference between this approach and the miasma of words so often encountered in other methods of communication. Film can be most emphatically believable and this is vital because credibility is the potent essential in the solicitation of understanding. Film, as Mr. Marlowe concludes in his introduction to Movies Move People, is "a substance on which to reason directly — with sound or fury, or silence. It is a method to make thoughts understood." Those in the production and distribution of business films will all lay claim to knowing what Mr. Marlowe, and the Eastman film, so effectively set forth, but many of them feel, and so express themselves, that "public relations people do not understand what a potent tool film is and are not taking anywhere near full advantage of its potential to help them do a better job of communicating." However, the record does not support this contention. A recent survey conducted for the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers by Thomas Hpoe, also of Eastman Kodak, shows that the non-theatrical motion picture and audio visual business is now more than a billion-dollar industry. The latest available figures (for 1967) show a total of 12,750 non-theatrical films made that year — 7,500 of which were produced by and for business and industrial firms. Business and industry spent $241,000,000 on films during the year with costs per film ranging from less than $10,000 to $500,000 spent on a 40-minute corporate film by a major company. A sizeable percentage of the income of business film producers and no less than 75% of the income of distributors of such films comes from public relations budgets. The important influence of public relations thinking and practice in business film production is clearly demonstrated in the low key commercialism of the average corporate film today as compared with the trend only a few years ago when the firm's logo and president's name (and often, picture) had to appear every few hundred feet to gain official approval. Business films are now so tastefully done as to commercialism that they are finding fertile exposure possibilities both on television and in the nation's theaters. Kaiser Aluminum's Why Man Creates won an Academy Award last year as the best short subject. It is a magnificent film, produced by Saul Bass, and is not about aluminum, industry, the Kaiser family or the company's record of progress. It was the original "brain child" of Robert Sandberg, the company's vice president of public relations and advertising, and was inspired by the themes of three issues of the famous Kaiser Magazine. At the first film festival ever held by the Public Relations Society, during its annual conference last November in Los Angeles, Mobil Oil Corporation's unique film A Fable, starring Marcel Marceau, famous French mime, won the grand award. Without a spoken word and with background Continued on page 36 34 BUSINESS SCREEN