Motion Picture Herald (Jul-Aug 1936)

MOTION PICTURE HERALD Vol. 124, No. 4 QP July 25, 1936 FIGHT FILM AND THE LAW THE federal law against interstate traffic in prize fight pictures appears to have been repealed by public sentiment, or what passes for that, but it still stands futilely among the statutes. If the dignity of the law is to be maintained it would perhaps be reasonable of the national legislature to take steps to acknowledge the decision of the public and write off the decision. The law now on the books was written against John Arthur Johnson, negro, who ventured to become a champion, and its nullification has just been made conspicuously manifest, after twenty-four years, by the nationwide distribution and acceptance, without legal restraints, of the fall of Joe Louis, negro near-champion, before Max Schmeling. The story seems to be in the nature of a blackout. If we are to have, and it seems we are, a traffic in fight films, there is no service to the commonweal in driving the interstate movement of the pictures under ground. IT is to be realized the while that courts have repeatedly I held that it is not unlawful to exhibit fight pictures, no matter I how transported. This makes the matter of fight picture exhibition a policy question for each exhibitor, and each theatre. Reports on the Schmeling-Louis picture indicate that they have been helping many a boxoffice. FIGHT films of the period, however, as the pictures struggled up through the nickelodeon period, seemed to give the business no kudos or prestige. Prize fighting, cocktails and lotteries were not quite so respectable then. So it came that the Motion Picture Patents Company, newly formed federation of the masters of the movies, decided to buy, for control rather than for exploitation, the rights to the Johnson-Jeffries fight, scheduled for July 4, 1910, at Reno. A merry recollection comes of the curious session in which the late, august and dignified Mr. George Kleine found he had to negotiate with Mistah Johnson in a backstage crap game in a Philadelphia theatre. Commodore J. Stuart Blackton made the pictures at Reno — and they were preserved from the attentions of the "independents." JACK JOHNSON, it will be recalled, developed a heavy swagger, opened a Chicago cafe with silver cuspidors and gathered in a white wife. The public indignation came to flower in the Sims Bill, now the federal law against fight films, enacted July 31, 1912. A futile and considerably prosecuted effort was made to "optically import" the Willard-Johnson pictures, made in Havana July 4, 1915, by projecting them from film to film across the Canadian border. It made a story, but the pictures did not reach the American screen. Thereafter for several years assorted endeavours at evasion of the law were made, resulting at last in the rather tasty affair of the Dempsey-Carpentier fight pictures pre-viewed by a select Harding Administration audience at Edward B. McLean's little green house in Washington's "K" street, subsequent general release and an assortment of federal indictments and fines for the picture men concerned. PRIZE fights and fight films have had some important parts in picture development. James Corbett and Pete Courtenay in six one-minute rounds, fought on a flat car for the Edison Kinetoscope, started it all in 1894. That picture sent Otway and Grey Latham in pursuit of a projector, led to the race for screen presentation of the peep show movies, and brought all manner of consequences, including the formation of the American Biograph Company and the great patents war that raged from 1897 to 1909. The first camera equipped to take really long pictures was Enoch J. Rector's Veriscope, built to record the battle between Gentleman Jim Corbett and Ruby Robert Fitzsimmons in Reno on St. Patrick's Day of 1897. And that was the first picture to roll up a real gross, something close to three quarters of a million, so the story goes. Then the first motion picture to be made under electric lights was the Jeffries-Sharkey fight at Coney Island November 3, 1899, photographed by Mr. William Bitzer of Biograph, with enough arcs to fry the fighters. FOR the last several years there has been a substantially unhampered, unprosecuted, also considerably unmentioned, but decided national and international traffic in American fight pictures. How the lid came off is not of official record. The fact that the law still stands prevents the business of the fight picture from being precisely a business — which seems to be bad business. AAA THE Bar Association of Hudson County, in New Jersey, is resolving and deploring against the portrayal of crook lawyers on the screen. At such time as it is discovered that notorious criminals with money are unable to employ imposing attorneys for their defense or at such time as such defenses are conducted by counsel as "an officer of the court" instead of as an enemy of society, the protesting Bar Association will stand in sounder position. That will be quite a while yet. MOTION PICTURE HERALD MARTIN QUIGLEY, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher Incorporating Exhibitor's Herald, founded 1915; Motion Picture News, founded 1913; Moving Picture World, founded 1907; Motography, founded 1909; The Film Index, founded 1906. Published every Thursday by Quigiey Publishing Company, Rockefeller Center, New York City. Telephone Circle 7-3100. Cable address "Quigpubco, New York.' Martin Quigiey, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher; Colvin Brown, Vice-President and General Manager; Terry Rarr.saye, Editor; Ernest A. Rovelstad, Managing Editor; Chicago Bureau, 624 South Michigan Avenue, C. B. O'Neill, manager; Hollywood Bureau, Postal Union Life Building, Boone Mancall, manager; London Bureau, 4, Golden Square, London W I, Bruce Allan, cable Quigpubco London; Berlin Bureau, Berlin-Tempelhof, Kaiserin-Augustastrasse 28, Joachim K. Rutenberg, representative; Paris Bureau, 19, Rue de la Cour-des-Noues, Paris 20e, France, Pierre Autre, representative, cable Autre-Lacif ral-20 Paris; Rome Bureau, Viale Gorizia, Rome, Italy, Vittorio Malpassuti, representative, Italcable, Malpassuti, Rome; Melbourne Bureau, Regent Theatre, 191 Collins St., Melbourne, Australia, Cliff Holt, representative; Mexico City Bureau, Apartado 269, Mexico City, James Lockhart, representative; Prague Bureau, Uhelny trh 2, Prague I, Czechoslovakia, Harry Knopf, representative; Budapest Bureau, 3, Kaplar-u, Budapest, Hungary, Endre Hevesi, representative; Buenos Aires Bureau, Corrientes 2495, Dep. 8, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Natalio Bruski, representative; Shanghai Bureau, 142 Museum Road, Shanghai, L.nina, J. P. Koehler, representative; Tokyo Bureau, 880 Sasazuka, Ichikawa-shi, Chiba-Ken, Japan, H. Tominaga, representative; Rio de Janeiro Bureau, Caixa Postal 3358, Kio de Janeiro, Brazil, A. Weissmann, representative; Barcelona Bureau, Harry Chapin Plummer, Hotel Ritz, Plaza de las Cortes, Barcelona, Spain. India Bureau; K. G. Gidwaney, a?i t t Bunc!er Road. Karachi, India; Uruguay, P.O. Box 664, Montevideo, Uruguay, Paul Bodo, representative, cable Argus Montevideo. Member Audit Bureau of Circulations. All contents copyright 1936 by Quigley Publishing Company. Address all correspondence to the New York Office. Better Theatres, devoted to the construction, equipment and operalion ot theatres, is published every fourth week as section 2 of Motion Picture Herald. Other Quigley Publications: Motion Picture Daily, Teatro al Dia, Spanish language quarterly m the theatre and equipment field, and International Motion Picture Almanac and the Box Office Check-up, both published annually.