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MOTION PICTURES AND THE WAR 54I
when necessary. Our discussion had especially to do with male stars, and particularly with one star who, though no longer a young man, was determined to go into military service and who did so, taking the tough training in stride.
Our industry is one that never had to turn to the government for subsidy or loan. Quite the reverse: during the war it was able to give to the government and the military services, in goods and services, an estimated total of more than $40,000,000.
In an art industry built so largely on people, both as producers and consumers, statistics are anything but impersonal— especially to me, since I have known so many of these "statistics" as friends! In the most complete checkup ever made by government quizzers in the census, a "breath-taking comeback" had been made between 1937 and 1939: the dollar volume of our output went up 9 per cent to $215,000,000, from a 1937 total which had already gained 22 per cent over 1935. The number of separate establishments had doubled to a 1939 figure of 178.
The 1939 production budget had more than doubled since 1925, the year before sound appeared. And the total number of workers employed in the Los Angeles industrial area rose from 23,000 in 1935 to 30,000 in 1939, while the annual salary bill was rising from $98,000,000 to $130,000,000— with California accounting for 86 per cent of production. It is easy to see why "Hollywood" bulked so large in all our calculations and why I spent so many weeks there several times a year. With my "ranch" in Hidden Valley, California had become my second home.
As the world situation tightened up, we heard the phrase "subversive activities" more often, and sometimes the accusation was directed at pictures. The answer was rarely easy; the question continued to be one of the most difficult ones of this period. This was particularly so when the critic was one of the Association's long-time friends, like the International Federation of Catholic Alumnae.
I continued to receive objections, too, from organized groups who felt that their professional honor had been disregarded by one or another movie. Some of these cases would have been funny if they had not been so serious. And the newspapers could usually be counted on to see the ridiculous side. The Dayton (Ohio) News came out with an editorial to which Joe Breen and I could add a hearty "Amen!"— and I am a lawyer myself. It ran in part: "The American Bar Association, we hear, has notified Will Hays that the movies must be kind, hereafter, to the lawyers. No longer must they be pictured in any unpleasant light. . . . When the movies have thus been divested of everything anybody can take exception to, they'll be as interesting and significant as a glass of water, the multiplication table or the sighing of the breeze. Who'll go? Poor movies! Poor Will Hays!"