Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (1930-1949)

Record Details:

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MOTION PICTURE ARTS AND SCIENCES 437 expert to have an appreciation of screen drama. A mutual understanding facilitates communication and the cooperation that is so vital." It was with this idea as a keynote that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences undertook a unique, new activity recently which will continue this year over a period of about three months. I refer to the first cooperative all-industry school in the fundamentals of sound recording and reproduction, about which I will give more details in a moment. The school is designed to intensify one phase of the Academy's many sided work as the forum of the motion picture industry on the West Coast. The Academy is an experiment in organization engineering. It represents the increasingly successful attempt to combine in one unified body the members of the several associated but diversified creative arts on the basis of friendly cooperation for the common good. Its present membership of 388 includes nearly all of the principal actors, directors, producers, technicians, and writers in Hollywood. One of the most profitable of the Academy activities bearing on the technical side of the industry has been a long continued series of joint meetings among the different branches. On one night, for instance, directors will tell how they suffer between the eccentricities of the producers on the one hand and those of the microphone crew on the other. A subsequent meeting gives the sound men their inning and arc lights have seldom been needed to warm up the debate between sound men and directors or actors. At present in a number of general Academy meetings the recording experts are holding forth for the benefit of the nontechnical branches. "Artistic Possibilities of Acoustic Control," was discussed recently, and "Dubbing" (or re-recording) will be taken up this month. Getting nearer the laboratory itself, a joint committee of three producers and three technicians is now engaged in studying the possibility of a program of research along non-competitive lines for the benefit of the whole production industry. This will supplement the Technical Bureau of the Producer's Association and concern itself with problems of a somewhat different nature. Pending the first report of the committee no more specific announcement can be made. The present liaison work of the Academy on problems affecting theaters and studios arose from the occurrence of a semi-emergency,