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460 MOTION PICTURES I922-I945
suits, and so many other things. Anyone who has lived 30 years or more could make an impressive list of menaces which we have somehow managed to survive.
Many social scientists were equally unwilling to accept findings in conflict with their own observation. One of the best objective opinions was found in the concise statement of Dr. George W. Kirchwey, formerly warden of Sing Sing Prison: "In so far as motion pictures have any direct effect, they do not encourage crime, they discourage it." And an even more striking bit of evidence was given by Mr. Joseph F. Fishman, formerly United States Inspector of Prisons, writing in Harper's magazine for July 1933: "To these films belongs entirely the credit for the public understanding of, and revulsion against, gang rule today." This was the sort of public education I had always believed the screen could render.
Though I never believed that either the public or the industry had to be "lawed" into line, there were plenty of people, both in and out of courts, who continued to take the opposite view. Their endless activities added to our problems. The doctrine of 'government regulation" was growing. NRA was with us until its demise in May of 1935. The New Deal weather was developing some aspects that seemed to me, as applied to our industry, hardly healthful. But my personal relations with the administration sometimes aided the consideration of our special problems.
Though legislative matters were the concern of the companies rather than of the Association, they did determine the ' climate" in which we lived and worked: one of the trade papers reported over 50 "anti-pix" bills under consideration early in 1935. Owing to changing concepts of government, it was a period of legislative uncertainties, and the law at times took a rather dim view of certain forms of co-operation which had grown up quite naturally. Such customs as block-booking and clearance (the time elapsing between the first and second run of a picture), though admitted to be advantageous, were declared to be technically illegal, according to existing statutes. To me, this was an illogical situation; it was the reason I so often pleaded for the revision of outdated laws, many of which had been passed before motion pictures had ever reached the screen.
The year 1936 gave the industry some relief. The final report on NRA had urged federal control of our industry, but we saw no immediate effects. Soon afterward, the Sabbath film probe was halted by the plea of Joseph P. Kennedy. And in June we were informed that no film bills had been passed by the Seventy-fourth Congress. Within our own industry the process of 'conciliation"— somewhat different from arbitration—was beginning to operate in all key centers.
But during the following year— 1937— pressure increased again, in spite of undeniably improved picture production! Since the Associ