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92 JUVENILE DELINQUENCY STATEMENT OF RONALD REAGAN, FREE LANCE ACTOR, HOLLYWOOD, CALIF. Chairman KiiFAuvER. Mr. Ronald Reagan will be our next witness. Sit down, Mr. Reagan. How are you ? Mr. Reagan. Thank you. Chairman Kefauver. Mr. Reagan, we are glad to have you with us. Mr. Bobo, will you ask Mr. Reagan some preliminary questions^ Mr. BoBO. Mr. Reagan, would you tell us within what capacity you are associated with the motion picture industry • Mr. Reagan. I am wdiat is termed a free-lance actor. This is the status of most of the actors in the motion picture business. There is very little continued employment: only a few hundred out of our 8,000 actors are under contract with studios. The rest of us work when we in the studio and the producer get together on a script. In addition to that I have served as an officer and am presently serving as an officer of the Screen Actors Guild which is the actors union. Mr. BoBO. As an actor, Mr. Reagan, and in the motion picture in- dustry, I am sure you have heard recently of some of the complaints or suggestions about too much crime and violence or brutality within motion pictures. I wonder, would you give us your feelings on this subject as an actor ? Mr. Rp;agan. Well, ]\Ir. Bobo, if I could correct you slightly, I have been in the picture business since 1937 and I have never known a time at which the picture business wasn't being criticized for some- thing. Lately they seem to be dwelling more on crime and violence. I don't know how I could answer that without perhaps getting kind of lengthy or talking about personal references. I just finished a western movie in which I did a scene, T adminis- tered quite a drubbing to my partner in this picture. The story is about a misunderstanding between those of us—the two of us who are good friends. Now, a very great dramatic part of this picture depends in the fact I, misunderstanding my friend, start the fight and he won't fight back. My principal concern with pictures is tliat they are a part of the theater. They are theatrical entertainment, and while there are very few rules that hold for theatrical entertainment, one I have alw^ays subscribed to and I l)elieve is basic is that you cannot have success- ful theater unless your audience has an emotional experience of some kind. If it is comedy, they must laugh. If it is tragedy, they must cry. Now, I don't know how you can get over the dramatic point of a story of two partners who come to a misunderstanding that leads al- most to blood enmity or killing between them, and then find them or see them find their way back to their friendship, without showing the extent of their hatred at this one point for each other. And to do that we have a scene that, of course, will appear to be brutal. This is taken from a story by Bret Harte. I think Bret Harte was a pretty good writer of the particular period of the mining days in early California. I think the heritage of our country is based a great deal on those early days of violence here in the West. I don't know how you por- tray accurately without trying realistically to show what took place.