Harrison's Reports (1939)

36 HARRISON'S REPORTS March 4, 1939 "Federal Bureau investigators were on the ground probing the circumstances under which the act was adopted. The interest of the Federal government is tied up with its antitrust suit against the major distributors in New York, plus the fact that Nortli Dakota was the first state to adopt an act which prohibited display of pictures by film owners or distributors within its borders." The same issue of this paper, in informing the industry of the interest the Department of Justice has taken in the case to the extent of calling up on the telephone Governor Moses to make the position of the Department known, cpjotes a member of the staff of the Attorney General as follows : "We, at the Department, do not feel the Federal Government has a right to do that [to ask the Governor to delay his signature to give the U. S. Supreme Court a chance to act]. We merely stated the fact that the Supreme Court was sitting in the case and that a repeal at this time would be a tacit break for us, but did not ask him to act one way or the other." Explanations intended by Governor Moses to serve as a justification for his signing the repeal bill are coming in: Film Daily of February 23, states the following : "Reliable sources indicated that the repeal was the result of retaliation measures by the present administration in North Dakota, aimed at former Governor Lang's regime. It was said that Governor Moses' administration sought to repeal many of the laws passed by the previous regime and that the divorcement law was one of them." If tli is purported explanation represents the only motive for the passage of the divorcement bill, why should the leaders of the present North Dakota Legislature have said that the bill had been passed under "peculiar" circumstances, and that the legislators had voted for the bill under a misapprehension, with no idea that the divorcement act was involved ? If the present regime had voted in retaliation against its predecessor, there certainly would have been no "misapprehension" or "misunderstanding" as to the nature of their actions. In the same issue of the Film Daily, Governor Moses is reported as having said, when he signed the repeal bill : "Since this law already cost $2,000 in taxpayers' money, and may cost several thousand more, I can see no apparent reason or benefit to the state for further expenditures along this line. While this may inconvenience the federal government, it will not end their case, so I sign this bill after careful study." The purported reason of the Governor, too, seems peculiar. He sets the cost of the divorcement law to the State of North Dakota at $2,000, which amount would include all the expenses connected with the law from the time of its introduction to the Legislature as a bill, to its present status in the U. S. Supreme Court, where its constitutionality was to have been determined. Certainly, if the cost to date had been only $2,000, the additional cost to conclude the test of the law's constitutionality, a matter only of appearing before the Court to argue the case, should have been but a small fraction of $2,000, and not, as the Governor says, "several thousands more." It is significant also that, although the Governor mentions the possible inconvenience to the federal government, he fails to mention the embarrassment and the resentment of the Legislature, which was bound to result from the Governor's having made their mistake irrevocable. After all, the situation was, in substance, that the Legislature had passed an act through a mistaken idea of its nature and purpose ; the Legislators wanted to rectify their mistake, but the Governor, by signing the bill, made this impossible. And so, as predicted by Harrison's Reports, words are being spoken about the North Dakota repeal measure, but it seems as if much more is yet to come. EXAGGERATED ADVERTISING The February 16 issue of Motion Picture Herald contains a four-page insert advertising Paramount films. The first page is devoted to advertising "One-Third of a Nation," the picture that wasn't produced by Paramount but is released by this company. The advertisement consists of the reproduction of a still, taken on the night of the opening of the picture, with the following wording : "Crowds jam Broadway as Paramount's ' . . . one third of a nation . . . ' starts off world premiere at popular prices at New York Rivoli Theatre." Those who will examine the reproduction carefully will see two significant things: few persons seem to be buying tickets, for the faces of the people on either side of the box office are turned outward, evidently watching either the camera or the arrival of some celebrities ; and some people are holding umbrellas over their heads, indicating plainly that it was raining, and that they and others had gone under the marquee presumably to avoid the rain. At the premiere showing of a picture, large numbers of curious people gather in front of the theatre to watch the celebrities going in. The still Paramount took and reproduced on the tradepaper pages had two advantages : it was taken on the opening night of the picture, and it was raining. Incidentally, the picture "One-Third of a Nation" played only one week. There was a time when a statement from Paramount meant something — an exhibitor could rely on it. Times haves changed, however, if Paramount resorts to an advertising expedient such as described, in order to lead the exhibitors to believe that certain of its pictures draw when they really should be tucked away on the shelves of a film vault. WHAT ONE OF THE SKOURAS BROTHERS THINKS OF DARRYL ZANUCK'S MOVE Mr. Spyros Skouras, President of National Theatres,, had this to say about Mr. Zanuck's action of taking Tyrone Power off radio : "I am greatly in favor of Mr. Zanuck's action. I only hope the movement will spread. There are entirely too many picture stars appearing on the air at the present time. Theatres are badly hit, especially on Sunday, the day that most theatres depend upon for 40% to 50% of their week's gross. It is high time that the studios realize that the exhibitors, their customers, are the chief sufferers of the avalanche of film players on the air." Of course, the withdrawal of one motion picture star from the large number of radio programs employing almost every motion picture star of prominence can have little effect in remedying the evil against which Mr. Zanuck's action was directed. This evil can be remedied only by the withdrawal from radio programs of every important motion picture star, for so long as these stars remain on the air they will constitute the greatest competition with the theatres, the very medium through which the stars had originally become popular ; and should they lose their popularity through too frequent appearances on the radio they will find that the theatres have become powerless to help them regain it. The movement to withdraw movie stars from the radio, nowr gathering momentum, will, if carried out, prove beneficial, not only to the producers and to the exhibitors, but also to the stars themselves. "AMEN" SAY WE The following is copied from the February 18th issue of Welford Beaton's Hollywood Spectator: "Writing about film conditions in England, the editor of Film Weekly, London, makes some remarks which can be applied with equal pertinence to Hollywood : 'Now, more than ever, this country needs producers who can realize that films are made out of something more than a banker's note with a string of noughts on it. Anybody can make a bad film with a lot of money. Nobody can make a good film even without a lot of brains.' I might extend the remarks by stating that nobody with a lot of brains can make a good film even with a lot of money when he is under the domination of someone who lacks a lot of brains." The heading of this editorial is, "SAYING A MOUTHFUL." The editor could not have chosen better words toexpress this universal truth.