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)

120 MOTION PICTURE COMMISSION. place where men come with their Avives, a place to come for amuse- ment and not for nastiness, and it is an element in uplift rather than downfall, and the exhibitor has the sense to know it. As for our attitude toward unofficial censorship and official censor- ship, I tried to explain that, that we dp not feel the unofficial censor- ship is reall}^ consor, because it does not play any material part in our business, but the censorship is regarded, m the institution we main- tain, as a matter for our own consciences, to keep up the standard of the business and avoid the misdeeds of any interlopers who try to bring about its downfall. My conclusion is just this: A censorship law is not analogous to any law forl)idding the transportation through the mails of fraudu- lent matter or indecent matter, because the courts have held you can not keep things out of the mails which you can not ordinarily keep €ut of interstate commerce. It is not analogous to the laws which forbid the transportation in interstate commerce of obscene matter. They cover motion pictures as well as everything else. They do not provide that everything shall be submitted to censors Ijeforehand. It is the judgment of the jury and not the judgment of the censor which determines the propriety or impropriety of the shipment. They are not analogous in any way even to the prize-fight laws. In the law which says that no prize fight shall be shown there is a specific thing pointed out which you may not show, and no one Avill go to the trouble of making an investment in a prize-fight film simply for the purpose of testing the law. It is not analogous to the inspection law, because those laws estab- lish fixed standards and not standards that depend on education and training and personal bias. And we come right back to the point with which I began my argument and which has been manifest through this discussion and which is really the basis of this desire for censorship—a desire to protect the people. We have no indecent pictures in New York, and we have a law which forbids the admis- sion of minors under 16 to motion-picture theaters unless accom- panied by their guardians, and that laAV is enforced. I have figures showing there Avere 35 convictions in 1011, about 43 in 1912. and about 46 in 1913. They enforced it so rigorouslv when they first put the section into the penal code that the motion-picture exhibitors are very careful to obey it. They first fined them $10, and then $25; then they began to fine $50, and then a dozen men got $100. and when thev cauglit a second or third offender they fined him $200 or $300, which put him out of business. Those are the figures for 1911. I have not been able to get the figures for later years. That is the way the law looks after the motion-jucture places in New York, That happens to be the way the State of New York deems it best to pro- tect its youth. As to" whether the age limit is too low or too high is clearly a question of local jurisdiction. The law can be enforced and it is enforced. A large number of organizations in the interest of children are per- petually on the lookout to see it is enforced, and it seems to me that is the way to keep any possibilities of harm away from the children and at the same time accomplish your result without contravening the constitutional provisions and without contravening what seems to us to be a fundamental theory on which our Government is based.