Business screen magazine (1946)

BLACK, GRAY continued During a discussion of tiie filming of "A IVlatter of Opportunity, Mike Gray (left) and Chuck Olin make a point. Because the AMA, like Gray, is deeply concerned with social problems. The AMA knows that there is a desperate need for blacks in the medical and paramedical professions and has launched a massive campaign to recruit young blacks. But the AMA's standard recruitment film is aimed at an all-white, middle class audience. The kind of film where the kid takes off his letter sweater and tells dad, who's washing the family station wagon, that he's decided to become a doctor. Clearly, the AMA needed a different type of film to interest black high school and college students in medicine. Dick DuMont and Denny Cavan of the AMA's TV-RadioMotion Picture Department decided they needed Mike Gray whose reputation for being able to relate to blacks is considerable. "Caven knew that the black man has received shirt shrift," said Jim Dennett, Gray's production manager, "and to get it together you couldn't do a glossy, half-hour television drama about how everything is really cool. You've got to really get down there and find out what the problems are and what can be done about them." So Gray and his crew took the question of black recruitment to black doctors and medical students. They shot almost ten hours of film at Howard University in Washington, the National Institute of Health, and the University of Pennsylvania. The "sets" were dorms, labs, administrative offices . . . even operating rooms. The final print of A Matter of Opportunity (The title is from Hipprocrates; "Healing is a matter of time, but also a matter of opportunity") enumerates the opportunities for blacks in paramedicine. But it stresses the need for black doctors and the brutual odds against them ever making it. A Matter of Opportunity is done in chiaroscuro; the personalities are black but the subject is definitely white. The film shouts to the medical Establishment, "Look what's going on! This is what you look like from the outside.!" The view is disturbing. Students and doctors recount the inequities of the medical school aptitude test, financial aid programs, recruitment programs; even the high school's lack of information on admission procedures. And the view is distorted. Many blacks never see a black doctor and the medical profession is something beyond their experience. Those blacks who are interested in medicine are often discouraged by high Denny Cavan of the AMA TV/ Radio/ Motion Picture Department wanted a film that related to blacks. school and college counselors — white and black — who fear that the financial and academic demands of med school are too difficult. Few of the un-black, un-poor. and un-young really understand how serious the difficulty of getting into med school is for blacks, people who, literally, come from a different culture. But Gray and the AMA understand. Their film is about 30 BUSINESS SCREEN