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CHAPTER 31
Foreign Relations
AMERICAN films have not always entered other countries through the wide, unguarded 'open door" by which the films of other nations have come to us. Too often we have had to knock at doors on which someone— usually a government film commission of one sort or another— had tacked up a sign reading "Not Welcome— Unless," the warning usually being followed by various terms and taxes. It was one of my most interesting responsibilities to find out the reasons for those conditions, to carry on negotiations to lighten or remove them, and, with the active co-operation of our own State Department, to get new signs put up reading "Welcome, If"— with the "ifs" as few as possible.
But this was no one-man job, as I realized within a few days after taking office. Mexico's sharp complaint of April 1922, amounting to a virtual ban on all American pictures, was a dramatic warning that we would need to maintain an active Foreign Department that would keep producers and distributors in touch with conditions in other countries. This we proceeded to do without delay, and we were fortunate in finding as its director Lieutenant Colonel Frederick L. Herron, a man of wide experience in both civil and military affairs, who remained in this helpful position until 1941, when he returned to military service. Before long, regional offices were established in Paris and London.
An amazing volume and variety of business passed through this department during the years that I was so vitally interested in it. And even the later change in its name meant something. In 1943 we changed the name from Foreign to International Department. The world was moving fast during these years, and we wanted to emphasize the fact that we considered that motion pictures had become a vital, almost universal, international medium of communication, and that no nation was "foreign" to their sphere of influence.
The interest of the MPPDA in international relations was simply a continuation of an interest already keenly felt in the industry before 1922. Among most of America's industrial enterprises, the "foreign" or export side is a comparatively minor factor in relation to gross income; export often becomes merely an added "department." But not so with