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)

220 MOTION PICTURE COMMISSION. can be trusted to appoint—men of psychological skill, who know the xiifference in the effect upon an audience of a murder in Hamlet and a wholesale shooting by fake cowboys in a motion-picture drama that libels the western half of our Nation and tends to keep families from settling there by pictures of supposed red and white savages engaged in wholesale murder that also makes crime seem heroic. Those daily papers that carry much advertising of motion-picture corporations should not allow themselves to be coerced into raising the sophistic cry that the censorship of films will lead to dangerous " censorship of the press." That is a very different proposition. The Post Office now has some reserved powers against indecency in literature, which is in the nature of censorship, and has not been abused. But the papers and the people can be trustetl to see that proper freedom of public discussion shall never be taken away. Only fools will be fooled Avhen defenders of films that promote crime and vice drag in these scarecrow^s about " censoring the press.'' We thank our opponents for their labored argument that $40,000 named in this bill will not be enough to do the needed censoring well. They so prove conclusively that the unofficial "National Board of Censorship " can not do it with its meager thriteen thousand a year. Whatever it costs to protect the children of the Republic the people can afford to pay. That is the meaning of the increased ap- propriation for the Children's Bureau, which will naturally aid in the application of this new law. Whatever it costs for Federal cen- sorship, it would cost forty-eight times as much to do it l)y States, for each State would have practically all the films to examine, but would not have the copyright and interstate powers to enforce its decrees. Successful Federal censorship at New York & W^'ashing- ton for the whole Nation need not cost any more than successful censorship for Chicago alone, for practically all the Hlnis go to Chicago. The bill provides that the cost, whatever it is, shall be paid by a small fee for examination of each film, a fee to be reduced if found to be more than enough for the expense of the commission, which will encourage film makers and exhibitors to make as little trouble as possible. The deputies that aid the chief commissioners may be in part philanthropic persons having other means of livli- liood who oet a small honorarium for viewing films in liesure hours; and the bill provides for unlimited assistants, who will serve with- out pay, as do most of the censors now at work, who will probably become connected in this way—including the New York board— with the Federal commission. Some of those connected with the motion-picture business favor this bill for various reasons, and others of prominence say they would do so if they could be persuaded it would save them from the vexation of many censorships of varying standards, which also duplicate taxation. We have good reason to expect there would be but one censorship when the new Federal commission had gotten into satisfactory working order. There would be need of a local committee of tlie city council or of citizens in each city to see that the local motion-picture theaters were properly seated, lighted, and ventilated, and that the Federal conamission's decrees were not evaded; but it is not reasonable to suppose that the verdicts of a