Motion Picture Herald (Mar-Apr 1941)

MOTION PICTURE HERALD MARTIN QUIGLEY, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher Vol. 142, No. I I PREPAREDNESS THE War is a war of machines and metals. War demands and war metallurgy are reaching into every manufacturing plant, every technological industry in America. Exhibition and production of motion pictures, alike, depend inescapably on an intricate technology with many vital metallurgical requirements, absolute necessities. The part of America's mines, smelters, mills and machine shops in the war tends, at increasing pace — to be noted by days, not weeks — to divert, to war enterprises, both materials and facilities. It may just as well be said, plainly, and now, that if you want equipment, machines, parts, replacements, right about now and today is an excellent time to get them or arrange to get them. The indications are many, and on the whole explicit. Only the other day the wife of the President had a message to housewives about rationing themselves on such matters as aluminum pots and pans. Also it would take a rather obtuse reader not to discover in the advertising of General Motors a certain suggestion in an advertisement last week which remarked: "So you will get your Buicks ... as long as this squares with national safety; whenever it doesn't — well, we know that with you, as with us, the big idea is America first!" And Chrysler, too, was in the papers the other day suggesting that the company was right busy on national defense. Each day's news tells of priority orders. The public is hearing a lot about metals these days. Supplies of such items as magnesium, titanium, caesium, vanadium, tungsten are being made matters of public concern. These, and many others, pertain to all matters that are involved in sound and picture. There is probably plenty of grey cast iron, enough common low-carbon steel. There's plenty of silver, and far too much gold. But for what makes the more tiny and vital mechanisms click there's not too much. T is just a whimsical and irrelevant notion, but most of what we may be short of are those items which in the years of long agone when your editor was in technology were known as "fifth group" metals. They go into the fifth column of the chemist's periodic table. Certainly they bear watching. That's coincidence. The makers of motion picture equipment are, so far, having nothing to say about the subject, but it is more than obvious that the technology of the motion picture involves all of the skills and materials that are highly in demand in the technology of war. Also, while we are not supposed to know about it, there is more than one plant making picture and sound equipment today which can be approached only by special pass and entered only by key. Out of another field, the motor car again, came remarks the other day from an authority not to be put on the spot in print, who observed: "Probably this fall there'll be new cars enough, and probably prices will reflect only the increases in labour costs, but as to materials how are you going to be sure March 15, 1941 that you will be getting the same stuff that we are delivering for 1941 models?" And that reminds one that some of the radio set makers are saying about that same thing in almost equivalent words, about radio sets. Radio sets, you'll be knowing, have a lot in common, in material and technical requirements, with motion picture sound systems. In sum, it may be said that, if it's anything you want in metals and in manufacturing skill — very soon, if not now, War will be first. And this is set down in full consciousness that it is to be expected that government ruling will find maintenance of the motion picture, as medium and mechanism, essential to the naitonal welfare in this time and stress. That can not and will not alter the fact of special pressures and demands of war on both men and machines. When there is War, it is always first. AAA COLOUR FORECAST FOR some years now colour, and all kinds of it, has been ascendant. It seems to have begun back yonder about the time of the first flowering of the yellow-cabs and swept onward with light signs led off by flaming neon. The psychologists would have us believe that all this is intimately related to public states of mind; so now, with more interest than surprise, we read in "More Business", published under copyright of the American Photo-Engravers Association: "Today, with world conditions decidedly calamitous, and with people's nerves on the ragged edge, more color and better color is sure to be wanted. . . . This is likely to show most promptly in the decoration of places frequented by the most of us — theatres, hotels, all forms of transportation. Advertising, too, will be driven to compete with a sudden patriotic love of the flag colors. In consequence, printed matter, displays, show windows will begin to blaze forth. . . . Because we lead more exciting lives, the things we buy will have to be more exciting to our eyes. ..." AAA ONE MAN RIGHTS THE rights of the individual, which "no ruler or classes or majorities may annul," are discussed in the leading article of "Kodak," the Eastman house organ, for February, in an article made up of expressions from a brochure by H. W. Prentis, Jr., president of the Armstrong Cork Company and fo rmer president of the National Association of Manufacturers. "No government commission will ever write a great book; no committee . . . will ever paint a great picture; no labor union will ever compose a symphony; no chamber of commerce will ever invent a radio; no college faculty will ever conceive a theory of relativity. . . . The individual . . . accounts for all human progress. ..." And he adds: "Whoever tries to take away our right to argue will face a real argument. ..." — Terry Ramsaye