Harrison's Reports (1933)

88 HARRISON’S REPORTS “Many other features of the article are fully as misleading, both for matters stated and matters concealed. Mr. Hapgood, in his reference to the Brookhart bill, stated Mr. Hays’s side of the controversy and omitted any reference to the arguments of those supporting the measure. I can not escape feeling that Mr. Hapgood was engaging in a hit of conscious propaganda. And he utterly failed to grasp the significance and effect of industry practices as ‘block-booking’ and ‘protection,’ to which he gave left-handed approval by dismissing them as unworthy of the serious attention of Congress. “Let us consider block-booking. This practice is not analogous to wholesaling or selling as practiced in other industries. It is true that a store keeper may not have the privilege of buying less than a crate of eggs, but he has a come-back if half of the eggs turn out to be putrid. One may not buy just a few articles or stories out of the Atlantic Monthly, but must take the whole volume, but no one is compellcfl to buy more than one issue, or to buy it at all, for that matter. Rut the operator of a theatre must have the better product of the better known producers, and to get any he must take all that each has to offer, or close his doors. . . . “Now let us look at Mr. Hapgood’s suggestion that the theatre owners are no better (perhaps not so well) cjualified to say what is suitable for their patrons than the producers. If the question were one of comparing the intellectual and cultural qualifications of the two classes of men, I would not enter upon the debate. This very suggestion, however, shows how little grasp Mr. Hapgood has of the technique of the industry as well as of the problems of social responsibility involved. Mr. Hapgood must know that different classes of patrons, with widely divergent tastes, attend the many theatres scattered throughout the United States. The persons atending the RKO Music Hall in New York have little in common with those attending the ‘opry’ house in some small town in Iowa. The producers, controlling a majority of the down-town first-run houses, naturally make pictures that will be pleasing to patrons of those houses. That is their right. Some, but not all, are appropriate to the neighborhood and small town houses catering to the family trade. Now it is obvious that the producers cannot and do not make pictures suitable to all classes of patrons. That being so, who is best qualified to choose pictures most suited to the patrons of a designated theatre, the operator or the production office on Ilroadway? “But let us go a step beyond this. Presumably the public has some choice in the matter. Certainly parents are becoming more and more concerned about the pictures exhibited to their children. Also they want pictures dealing with subjects within their grasp and enacted in a way they can understand. Many meritorious drawing room comedies fall flat in communities where conversation and deportment of the kind portrayed are wholly unfamiliar. The people in such communities are not entertained by these pictures and the exhibitor does not want to show them. The same is true of certain so-called horror pictures, gangster pictures, and even some of the musical pictures. There is no point of contact, clothed with discretion, between these patrons and the industry where they can make their wants known. The exhibitor has a perfect alibi because he must buy the pictures before they are made, and he has no right to selection and little or no right of cancellation. They cannot, in fairness, hold him responsible. “Now the very fact that the independent theatre owners arc demanding either the abolition of block-booking or an enlarged right of cancellation (there is some difference as to the method and means, not as to end) indicates that they are aware of a growing dissatisfaction on the part of theatre-goers and they are willing to shoulder a grave responsibility in overcoming it. In order that you may he assured of this, I am enclosing a copy of a resolution adopted by a mass meeting of such theatre owners at the Congress Hotel in Chicago on November 28 (1Q32). This resolution, with changes only as to time and place, was overwhelmingly adopted by a similar gathering at the Park Central Hotel in New York on December i (1932) . . “I think you will realize, therefore, that there is much more at issue than a mere trade squabble. Mr. Hapgood’s article conceals the social and economic factors underlying the practices he ignores or dismisses with a wave of the hand. Therefore, I think the subject is of such importance that a publication of the standing of the Atlantic Monthly can hardly bn content with the treatment Mr. Hapgood gives it. Mr. Hapgood undoubtedly is, as you say, a competent writer, but he obviously knows little a1>out the industry and has been willing to accept what was given him June 3, 1933 without any individual research and without exploring the effect on other branches of the industry and the public in general of the practices he either ignores or approves.” These statements come from a man who, when Qiairman of the Federal Trade Commission several years ago, called a Trade Practice Conference in New York City, at the Bar Association’s Building, (October 10, 1927,) in which was discussed the abolition of block-booking by agreement between exhibitors and producer-distributors under the protection of the United States Government. It was then that the producers for the first time agreed to permit the exhibitor to cancel ten per cent of his pictures upon payment of fifty per cent of film rentals, which was really no concession at all ; it was also then that the producers promised to refrain from compelling the theatre owners to buy short pictures, comedies, cartoons, scenics and the like, in order for them to obtain the features, a promise they did not keep. For more than two years he was president and general counsel of the exhibitor organization known as Allied States, and since his resignation as president he has been its counsel. So he ought to be in a position to know everything about block-booking. Mr. Myers says that block-booking exists, and that the independent theatre owners have repeatedly and strenuously endeavored to have it abolished, only to see their efforts neutralized by the political manipulations of Will Hays by means, as said, holy as well as unholy. And not only does block-booking exist as it has existed since 1914, fully eight years before Hays became head of the producer organization, but it exists in a more vicious form now. Today the producer inserts a provision in the contract giving him the right to designate as much as twenty-five per cent of his feature pictures on Saturdays and Sundays, which are considered as a rule the best days in an exhibitor’s week. And such a right he, the producer, exercises with the view of serving the interests, not of the people of the exhibitor’s community, but of his own ; he selects for Saturdays and Sundays, not the cleanest of the lot, but the pictures that will bring the biggest money at the box office, for he sells every one of such pictures on a percentage basis, and the more the box-office intake, the greater his share. The fact that a picture is too dirty for showing on these days, days on which the average mother or father will take his sons or daughters to the theatres since on other days the children must either go to bed early or employ their spare time to studying their lessons, makes no difference to the producer; he wants the biggest returns possible and hang the morals of the young. How can Hays stand up and tell you, without blushing, that block-booking does not exist? How can he allow such a statement to be put into writing when any one who knows the facts can challenge him and he will have no way of answering him? Has the protection of his own interests so blinded him that he will forget himself and allow such misleading statements to be sent out of his office? Has he no regard for the moral welfare of the children of all American citizens when he justifies block-booking, and moves heaven and earth to defeat the efforts of the independent owners to have it abolished, thus making the showing of such pictures as “The Story of Temple Drake” possible? Evidently he has not. To the good people from outside of the industry H.^PRTson’s Reports will say on behalf of the independent theatre owners whom it has served faithfully ever since it came into existence, that there is no way by which an improvement of the moral quality of motion pictures will be accomplished except by a law outlawing block-booking. Censorship will not do it ; censorship has not prevented Will Hays from having dirty pictures passed. A Federal commission will not do it ; a temptation for graft will be created that few people can resist. Only a law will do it. Our first efforts to have .such a law passed were defeated : but we have not given up hope — at the next session of Congress we are going to introduce another bill, for which we shall fight as we have not fought before. It is up to you. then, to help us put it through. The task is great ; but so is the principle. And principles always win in the end. {To the exhibitors: This is the last artiele of the series, zc’hich 7oas 7oritfen at the request of the editor of a prominent zveekly magazine. This friend asked me to reply to the Hays statements, and as I felt that other persons not conneeted zvith the industry could he enlightened by the marshalling of these facts on block-booking, I decided to print the reply in Harrison’s Reports. You should send a set of the fiz'e articles to ez'ery prominent person in your tozvn. Just send fifteen eents in stamps for ez’ery set you zcant sent and I can mail them front this office.)