Juvenile delinquency (1955)

120 JUVENILE DELINQUENCY the greatest safeguard that the American motion pictures have today. God forbid that the time will ever come when the thinking of those people must be through a controlled channel, from whatever source it may originate. At that time you can rest assured the value, the effect of the motion picture ceases to exist, because the motion picture- is a medium of entertainment. It represents a field of entertainment for the great masses of the people of the world. They are the quickest, the people, and they recognize propaganda as such immediately and they are not interested. And wherever in any country there has been an attempt to base a control on pictures with propaganda on the pub- lic, they are not successful. I have found among these people that I have mentioned good men,, the great majority good, and some bad ones, as you will find in your hometown or in any city or any place you may go. I have found that the majority of these people recognize that when they come into the motion-picture industry they have accepted a trust, a trust that im- poses upon them an obligation much deeper than maybe the man, the average man in the street, or woman, layman, would feel they had, because through this medium that is at their disposal they recognize what they do, what they use in that medium can have its effect upon people throughout the world, and are finally conscious of this. I think we are the one industry that has a separate code, production code. I am a great admirer of people that administer that code. I think it is a safeguard to the public, that a great majority of motion pictures will be in an area that is acceptable, in good taste and, cer- tainly, never in an area where they simply know emotional impact or know excitement. If so, the picture, as Mr. Schary so aptly said, will not succeed, and the person Avho is responsible for the production of such pictures will soon be looking for another job. For anyone to sny that errors have not been made would be very foolish. They will continue to be made. The perfect man, as I un- derstand, has never been found, or the perfect administrator, nor the fellow who can maybe make all the decisions right. In the operation of the Paramount Studio it may differ somewhat from the operation of the Metro Studio, the same as Fox may differ, because there I do not have the experience that Mr. Schary has had in fields of writing and in actual production of motion pictures. My job has been as executive administrator, to employ the ]:)eople that are creative and to have as my right-hand assistant a man who furnishes, as Mr. Schary does, in the way of supervising the actual production of the pictures. However, no picture comes out of the Paramount Studios for which I can in any way deny responsibility. I have full charge of the studio and if an error is made, that error is mine, because I always have the right to say no, and I do not lay at the feet of the men who may make the picture a charge it was their fault or their responsibility. It is mine. I have made some mistakes, I have made many. I will con- tinue to make more. And tlie man that sits at the desk where I sit, with an allocation of $35 million to be used in the making of 18 or 20 motion pictures—we do not make as many as Metro^—having to reach a decision, and those pictures averaging anywhere from a million and a half to our latest one, which is $11 million, and make that decision upon a piece of paper which yet hasn't been developed into a screen- play or into a final motion picture, and spend that money that belongs