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)

188 MOTION PICTURE COMMISSION. cadets getting "easy money" in great plenty from seducing and sell- ing girls. In that audience, presumably, there were men of the type that became burglars and on them this exhibition of " easy money " would be likely to ha^e a bad influence. A woman would be left 5 or G minutes locked in a room with a white slaver while other pictures were shown. Virtue would always ti-iumph in the end. but men of the type I have mentioned Avould not think of triumphant virtue but of the money made out of such crimes. The commission might indorse certain films as suitable for all and others for restricted audiences, leaving it to State laws and local ordinances to say this distinction shoulcl be respected, for the Federal censors could have no control of local attendance. Both kinds of films would have to be allowed copyrights and interstate commerce privileges unconditionally. The main thing under this bill is to get a censorship that will pro- tect the children. A speaker representing motion-picture theaters has said that children are shut out of motion-picture halls in this Capital City, " down town." Why are they shut out? Is it because there is something unwholesome? And if so. whv are thev not shut out also in the residential districts? In most of the motion-pic- ture halls of our land there is no shutting out. I have not been in an audience anywhere where children were shut out. The children were not even shut out from seeing '' The Traffic in Souls." There is no place in the United States that I know of where film exhibitors have shut out children, and they are said to make up fully 25 per cent of the motions-picture audiences. Many of the people attending these theaters are raw country people who are taken with these cheap theaters: and immigrants just from the old world, who have not been used to this sort of thing. In Oklahoma, at a motion-picture show, I saw a man come down ever the tender of an engine to rob a train. Think of such a film being exhibited in a region where train robberies were occurring fre- quently. The}' have been occurring almost daily of late, because of such incentives in contagious pictures, including too vivid word pic- tures in the press. That motion-picture hall Avas nothing more or less than a school of robbery, and I could cite to you a hundred such film lessons in crime that were cut out in Chicago after the films had passed the New York censors who call themselves " The National Board of Censorship," though not in any true sense national either in membership or in the standards. The Chairman. As I understand it the gentlemen have agreed that you were to have the closing 30 minutes, and Mr. Schechter is to have an hour and a half on Tuesday. Dr. Crafts. I hope he will cut his remarks to less than an hour and a half. Mr. Schechter. I might say that Dr. Chase has already had quite a lot of time, and this gentlenuin has occupied almost a half hour, to all of which T have made no objection. I do not want it to appear that I am unduly insisting upon time, but I want time enough in which to present the case for the people I represent. I think they are the persons concerned and not so much you people who are mov-