Harrison's Reports (1929)

12 HARRISON’S REPORTS sell them in a group. If this bill had been enacted into a law, it would have ended agitation against motion pictures with the consequent reaction to the box office, because it would make the exhibitor in each locality responsible to his public for the character of pictures he would show. Under such a law, he could no longer find an excuse why he would not be showing the pictures his customers wanted. But what happened? The producers fought this bill savagely. Mr. Hays himself did the fighting, through his lieutenant, C. C. Pettijohn ; he moved heaven and earth to prove to the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce that this bill would ruin the motion picture industry. Thus we found ourselves before the strange sight of a great church leader fighting a bill that, if it were enacted into a law, would have put the moral quality of motion pictures on a higher level, a thing which would have been the answer to the prayers of millions of mothers. He fought as savagely, through his lieutenants, at the Trade Practice Conference, too, where a proposal was made to abolish blockbooking. Let the industry beware! Unless it puts through reforms of its own volition, reforms wiil be forced on it from the outside. And history has proved that when reforms are forced upon an industry from the outside, they often become obnoxious, and even crushing. If the selling system is not changed, making it possible for the big cities to have their sex pictures and the rural districts their clean pictures, there is bound to be Federal censorship. The only pitiful part about it will be that we shall have censorship but no improvement in the quality of pictures : censorship does not make for improvement; it retards it: it does not help art; it stifles it. We shall thus be compelled to pay the price of the present filth but shall receive no benefit in return. P. S. HARRISON. WHAT IS ART? All the great dramatists state that death in drama must be justified. In other words, when the protagonist must kill a particular character, that character must by his acts deserve death. Likewise any great punishment inflicted by the protagonist on any of the characters must have justification in the deeds of him who is punished. In “West of Zanzibar,” the protagonist (Lon Chaney) feels that he had been wronged greatly by the villain of the piece; his wife had disappeared, and because he believed that she had run away with the villain, he plans to “get even” with him. According to the laws of the drama, the punishment should have been visited on the villain. But what happens? Lon Chaney takes an innocent child, a girl, and puts her in a dive in Zanzibar, so that, by destroying her virtue, and by causing her to contract an unspeakable disease, he might have his revenge. But what had the little girl to do with the wrong, even if she were the offspring of an illi January 19, 1929 cit union of his wife and of the villain, which she is not? She had done nothing to deserve the horrible punishment. So the construction of the plot does not follow the laws of the drama, and therefore “West of Zanizbar” is not a piece of art. It is not the cruelty and the horribleness of the act that makes the picture repulsive; in Gouxerneur Morris’s “Behind the Door,” produced by Famous Players-Lasky several years ago, an act more cruel than this was committed and yet it was not repulsive to the spectator ; the villain was skinned alive by the hero. But the act was justified; the villain had done so great a wrong to the hero that the spectator did not revolt at the thought of seeing such a punishment visit him. I am giving you this opinion so that the distributor may not induce you to play this picture under the pretext that it is a piece of art. FRANK REMBUSCH’S GLASSES Frank Rembusch, the great publicity hound from Indiana, has issued a statement in the trade press condemning the Brookhart Bill. Since Frank received $22,000 to settle out of court his case against a number of producer-distributors, members of the Hays organization,, his glasses, or his eyes (I don’t know which), have grown dim ; he can no longer see the Brookhart Bill. At the hearing of this bill by the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce, his glasses, and his eyes, were one hundred per cent, perfect. I heard him tell Senator Watson, Chairman of the Committee, that he could get no film at all, and that the enactment of the Brookhart Bill into a law was essential if he were to keep his theatres going. But Frank has changed his mind. And he, as a free American citizen, has a perfect right to change his mind whenever he feels that it needs changing. Let Frank’s change of mind, however, not cause you a sleepless night ; for Frank, despite all the publicity that has surrounded his name, has no power, for the reason that he has no following; he has been a leader without “lead”; a general without an army. The real organization in Indiana is Associate Theatre Owners of Indiana. I have yet to see Frank do a single constructive thing; all he has done for all these years of his connection with organizations is to change his mind and to shout. Frank is liable to start talking to exhibitors about the need of organizaion and end urging them to join the Chinese revolution. There is just one man in the ranks of the producers that deserves our thanks for helping us to distinguish the goat from the sheep ; it is our old friend C. C. Pettijohn. Behind this act of Frank’s, we see shadowed forth the form of Pettijohnism, its hand stretched out for the purpose of obstructing the progress of Mr. Myers, the new independent exhibitor leader. But in vain 1 In my opinion, Frank has been a liability to the organized cause rather than an asset. Good riddance !