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)

MOT](«N PICTURE COMMISSION. 211 theaters have to a very large extent made their own steady patrons by reaching millions who seldom, if ever, attended the ordinary shows. A sheet of canvas, a box of films, and a machine have brought the wonders of nature, the triumphs of science and invention, the daily happenings of the world. Quo Vadis, and Sarah Bernhardt to thou- sands of small towns and country villages. The possibilities of moving pictures are endless and unlimited from the standpoint both of financial gain and of entertainment and enlightenment. Some years ago I had an experience which impressed me in a way not yet forgotten with the equally large possibilities for evil in the movies. At that time I was superintendent of schools in a small western city. The community was terrorized by a series of myste- rious burglaries which took place every night for about a month. The police were unable to catch the offenders. Finally the probation officer of the Juvenile Court of which I had charge learned by chance of some negro boys who were buying large quantities of candy. When the gang w-as caught it turned out to be made up of four negroes, the oldest of which was 17 and the youngest, who was the leader, was 14. The leader planned in advance the burglaries to be committed each night. Though only a boy in knickerbockers in the fifth grade of the public schools he accomplished successfully prac- tically every " job '* undertaken, and baffled the whole police force. These boys were all sent to the State house of correction. Before their departure, I said to the leader, " I want to know where you got your ideas about these things." " Why," he said, " I found out how to do them in this way: I went to moving-picture shows and saw a lot of burglaries, and I saw how it was done in these moving pic- tures, and I thought I could do the same thing, and so I came back, and I got my gang together, and we did the work." No one who investigates the film business can fail to be impressed with the great good in the widening and enriching of life for millions of our people which they have already accomplished and are yet to accomplish in far greater degree and with the great loss to personal and civic well-being which would result from undue restriction which would either destroy the business or prevent its rapid and proper development in legitimate ways. Nor on the other hand can he fail to realize the danger that an imperfect or unsatisfactory censorship may make some moving pictures a far-reaching source of false standards of conduct, vulgarity, immorality, and crime. The prob- lem is to conserve the undoubted benefits of moving pictures while at the same time safeguarding them from what it must be admitted are undoubted possibilities of evil. There were two motives lying back of the establishment of the National Censorship Board in Ncav York City six years ago. From many quarters indignant protests were made against the character of many of the pictures which promised to result both in loss of patronage and regulation by State laws. In the absence of any general censorship, cities and towns here and there attempted in a crude way to establish some local plan of license and inspection. This not only brought confusion which injured the business but often made the local m(>ving-picture men the victims of the greed and corruption of officers who used the plan as a means of intimida- tion and extortion.