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)

216 MOTION PICTURE COMMISSION, Federal censorshii) must come first, then national cooperation of school boards, parents and teachers' association.-), preachers' meet- ings, and the like will surely follow. It is not enough merely to announce fragmentary ''educational films" as for rent on unco- ordinated orders. It will be necessary to form a nation-wide circuit of exliibitions that are above suspicion of vicious or criminal tend- ency. ^ye shall expect sincere efforts of the best film makers and exhibitors to go even further than censors can go in cutting out trash as well as vice and crime, and making the moving j^ictures as true in tlieir pictures of life and as uplifting in influence as the plays of Shakespeare arid the novels of Howells. It is the firm belief of tlie advocates of this bill that tlie financial gains brought by Federal censorship will offset the financial losses; but financial loss must be borne, if necessary, rather than the loss of the moral fiber of our children. We are asked to allow " the com- mon man" to censor for himself, but the important point is that the audiences are not made up of fully-developed adults, but largely of children, including many grown-up children. It is admitted by the " national board " that the motion picture " reaches the impression- able classes of the Nation, including perhaps a million children in daily attendance." That was two years ago. It is much more than a million now. Shall these children be their own censors^ The issue raised by the introduction in Congress of the Smith- Hughes Motion Picture Commission bill is not whether there shall be censorship. There is censorship now, official and unofficial, and no party to this controversy expects it will cease or even diminish. All signs are that it will rather increase in multiplied local and State boards unless this bill is passed to provide an adequate cen- sorship. Much time of this hearing has been wasted in a self- destroying argument in which the opponents of Federal censorship have argued, first, there should be no censorship; sec<md, the unofficial " National Board of Censorship" is a good thing, and sufficient. The issue is not whether there shall be "' national" censorship. The motion-picture makers recognized years ago that the popular demand for censorship must be met in some way, and are themselves paying most of the expenses of an unofficial, advisory '* national board of censorship," wiiich is really a New York board, save 300 distant correspondents who have no real part in the censoring, but receive its verdicts with a view to enforcing them in their own towns and cities. Those manufacturers who produced high-grade films saw the need of cen.sorship to prevent this new annisement from sharing the fate of horse racing and boxing, by getting a bad name through abuses and bad associations; and those film makers who w^anted no censorshij) felt constrained to acce]>t it to placate the public; and so, from various motives, film makers claiming to control DC) per cent of the films (until recently the claim was 08) allow the unofficial "'na- tional board " to censor such films as its un[)aid censors have time to examine. It is no( claimed that 0() per cent are actually censored, ^^Jld it is admitted tliat the i i)er cent that can not be censored by the unofficial " national board" are the very ones that most need censoring and censuring. It has been said again and again by the attorney of the Universal Film Co. in this heai'ing that complaint has been made by the advocates of Federal censorshii) only " against