Motion Picture Commission : hearings before the Committee on Education, House of Representatives, Sixty-third Congress, second session, on bills to establish a Federal Motion Picture Commission (1978)

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MOTION PICTUEE COMMISSION. 5 one of them is as expensive as if the whole country was being taken care of. Ohio, Kansas, Penns3dvania, and California have official censorships. Then there are many cities, including San Francisco and, I think, Chicago and Cleveland, that have boards of censorship. The number is multiplying in the various States and cities, and on account of this the moving-picture men themselves are coming to feel that while they are not in favor of what they call censorships, they would rather haA'e one censorship than the inevitable multi- plicity of State and local censorships. A film is an article which is essentially an article of interstate commerce. I do not know of anything in the United States that is more essentially and exclusively an article of interstate commerce than a motion picture film. Of course, some of them are only used in a single State, but the greater proportion of them are made to go from town to town across the whole country. It is preeminently a question of interstate commerce, and here at Washington is the nor- mal and natural point for handling the qu.estion of censorship. Furthermore, the films have to come here for a copyright. I have been consulting with the Librarian of Congress, and he tells rne that all films are sent here for copyrighting, and it would put no additional transportation expense upon the men who manufacture them to first send them to the motion-picture commission of the Bureau of Education, after which they could be copyrighted unless prevented by being refused a license. There is an unofficial board of censors in New York, but they have no authority to compel film manufacturers to submit any pictures unless they choose to do so. Therefore, the worst pictures are not sent there, and, furthermore, they have no adequate funds to do the work, and the State and local boards have turned down a great many of the pictures which they have passed. The country in general is not satisfied with this unofficial nominal board. What I want especially to emphasize here is that this is distinctly and preeminently an interstate-commerce business. A picture is made at great cost, sometimes as high as $50,000 being spent on one picture. Men are sent far ofi", to Burma, to the polar regions, or to the battlefields of Greece to make pictures, and they necessarily must have a wide constituency, and are as well adapted to one State as to another. They must come to Washington to start with, and then go out on,their national journey. It is the most logical and normal thing to have them sent here for the purpose of being licensed or re- fused a license. Another very interesting precedent—for I am talking more par- ticularly about precedents at the beginning of this hearing—is in regard "to the copyrights. I think the most valuable feature in this whole matter is that the films will get no copyright unless they have passed this board and have received a license. And that is in accord- ance with the precedent which Mr. Putnam, of the Library, gave me, that while they do not ordinarily exercise any judgment in granting a copyright to anything, whether good, bad, or indifferent, there was this one exception, that when a book has been declared obscene by the courts it can not get a copyright in the United States. So that anything that has been rejected by this board can be refused a copy- right on the same grounds.