Independent Exhibitors Film Bulletin (1956)

DbMILLE thrusts golden calf (Continued from Page 4) to the public on special projecting machines running at 60 feet a minute, instead of the present 90, that makes great artists jump about like Woody Woodpecker. This industry will not come of age until it makes a determined effort to keep its own great classics alive — and to present them regularly to the public in a manner worthy of their merit and worthy of the great names of those who made them. Among the host of names, there is one that towers like a mountain. His spirit and influence are present in every gathering of motion picture people. His hand can be seen in every motion picture that is made — David Wark Griffith. Many years ago, some people used to flatter me by saying that Griffith and I were rivals. Griffith had no rivals. He was the teacher of us all. He was the first to realize fully their dramatic value, the first to raise them to the level of a fine art, the first to give the motion picture camera its own unique and fluent language. Griffith was the first to photograph thought. We all learned that from him and — we have been using it ever since. But if we are the heirs of Griffith and the other pioneers, we have inherited also a great responsibility. We should be humble when we hear learned students of the arts maintain that motion pictures are or can be the highest form of art the world has ever known. It is still more humbling to realize the undoubted fact that motion pictures are far and away the most popular art the world has ever known. Worldwide Impact Only music approaches motion pictures in universal appeal— and not even music has the worldwide impact that our pictures have. Mr. Freeman has told us the astonishing figures of world attendance at deMille pictures. That figure is dwarfed when you add to it the gigantic totals of attendance at your pictures. The figures alone are staggering — but the imagination falters completely when we try to assess the influence of our pictures upon the billions who see them. Your mail undoubtedly brings you the same testimony that mine brings me. Within the past two years, four Prime Ministers, of four increasingly important countries, have told me of the influence our pictures have had on them personally, when they were growing up. Here is part of a letter I received while I was in Egypt, from the Prime Minister of Pakistan, concerning "The Ten Commandments" : It is a sobering thought that the decisions we make at our desks in Hollywood may intimately affect the lives of human beings, men, women, and children throughout the world. As I see it, our responsibility is twofold. We are responsible as artists and as molders of men's thoughts. We have a duty to our art and a duty to the audiences for whom we make our pictures. We must keep those two responsibilities clearly in view all the time. If we do that we may be able to keep our industry free of the forces which threaten to corrupt it from within and the forces which threaten to cramp and stifle it from without. Our greatest danger from within the industry is the worship of the golden calf — the temptation to care nothing about what we put on the screen as long as it makes money. Of course any business must make a profit. Sir Henry Irving one of the greatest artists of the stage said the theatre "must be carried on as a business or it will fail as an art". Responsibility as Artists But we betray our responsibility as artists and as molders of thought if money-making is the only goal we seek in the making of our pictures. Perhaps we think that vice sells at a higher price than virtue. Unfortunately it often does in this world. Perhaps we think it is easier to draw a crowd by pandering to their lowest tastes than by inspiring their highest ideals. It is easier and cheaper — cheaper in every way that you can think of. But it is treason to the human spirit — and treason to the art we serve. And we are simply stupid if we have not learned that, in motion pictures, dirt is not necessarily pay dirt. Take three of the biggest grossing pictures ever made — "Gone With The Wind", "Going My Way", and "The Greatest Show On Earth". Any one of them is a picture to which you could take your children without having to brainwash them afterwards. There is another way also in which the golden calf rears his head in our industry — the tendency of some of us to pull apart instead of pulling together, the tendency of groups within the industry to grab all they can for themselves without regard for the industry as a whole. No industry can survive being pulled apart and constantly bled by selfish interests within it. And this industry will not survive if management tries to run it without regard for labor — or if labor tries to wreck its economic structure by unrealistic and unreasonable demands — or if agents misuse the power which their control of talent gives them — or if exhibitors forget that they are showmen and that good exhibition demands as much showmanship as good production does. A man is no better than what he leaves behind him. If we leave behind us an industry broken by greed or even a commercially successful industry built on filth, and false values, distortion of the truth, and glorification of the (Continued on Page 26) Page 24 Film BULLETIN February 6 1954