Motion Picture Herald (Nov-Dec 1944)

MOTION PICTURE HERALD COLVIN BROWN, Publisher Vol. 157, No. 7 MARTIN QUIGLEY President and Editor-in-Chief OP TERRY RAMSAYE, Editor November 18, 1944 INDUSTRY ON NOTICE MR. JAMES CAESAR PETRILLO has declared himself, and has prevailed, as dictator of the industry and art of music in these United States. He has done this by flat and in a sort of defiance of Government. He has become government, and proves it by the imposition of an excise, a national excise, on recorded music. Previously, by the Constitution, the right to impose national excises had been retained by the Government of the United States. Mr. Petrillo by accomplished fact, is a government ruling the employment of a union membership of about a quarter of a million and therefore affecting the lives and fortunes of about a million persons, directly. By his excise on phonograph records he taxes the entire citizenry. This became fact last weekend when the recording subsidiaries of the Radio Corporation of America and the Columbia Broadcasting System, in last resort to continue in business, bowed to Petrillo's demands. The tax runs on a scale indicated by a quarter of a cent on a 35-cent record to 2 cents on a $2 record. The take is estimated as $4,000,000 a year. None of this goes to performing musicians. It is to accumulate for a spell and after a while Mr. Petrillo will have a meeting, he says, to decide what to do with the money. He has indicated that it might be spent for the spreading of musical culture and the extension of employment for musicians. Caesar only knows. The motion picture industry, which is so much a business of recorded music, may well regard the development with concern. Mr. Petrillo, as recorded by this publication long ago, has been regarding the motion picture as an early next for attention. There is interested, intensely interested, interior speculation. The motion picture has had certain experiences, and paid. THE fact that Mr. Petrillo has driven across his ukase and excise In defiance of the War Labor Board and in the face of a request from the President of the United States would ostensibly make the current eventuation a failure of government — the most strongly centralized government this nation has seen. Alarm spreads across American industry. The conservatively careful New York Times editorializes: "But the record is not simply one of Government weakness or inaction. Mr. Petrillo's irresponsible private dictatorship has been made possible by positive Government help. Congress and the Supreme Court between them have put into effect sweeping immunities which make it perfectly legal for union officials to commit anti-social acts which would be illegal if committed by anyone else. As long as this situation lasts, the Petrillos will move from victory to victory." NATIONAL FILM LIBRARY SOMETHING is afoot again in the much whispered project for a National Film Library. It starts now with a Sunday article in the Washington Post with a lot of official quotations. It may have been inspired by sources anywhere from "the highest authority" to any of the several other parties at interest in Washington. On the other hand, it may be just a newspaper editor's notion for an article. One of the reports had it that the Post undertook the movement "after discovering that lack of care had rendered useless footage made of General Pershing in the last war". A girl reporter was sent about getting statements, and it is reported that she explained, "We're going to start something." She did not say who for. Meanwhile, the article and subsequent attentions elsewhere in the press take no cognizance of the fact that a rather fully formulated plan, with, it is said, White House approval, providing for a three million dollar extension of the film capacities of the existing National Archives, a plan contemplating some relation, too, to the interests of the Library of Congress, is now, and for a spell has been, awaiting suitable period for a presentation to Congress. The hooptedo about the loss of valuable film archives of the First World War is not too well supported by the facts. A preponderance of the official film made both by the U. S. Signal Corps and by military photographers of the Allies was examined during and immediately after the war by your editor. He was engaged in assembling and editing films for the U. S. Treasury Department and enjoyed official access. Out of the entire array for some hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of feet of miscellany there was little more than enough vital material to make a six-reel feature. The fact is that the military and naval authorities of the First World War knew nothing of the motion picture, saw no utility in it and did as little about it as convenient. About 1935 the War Department turned over Its World War films to the U. S. Archives, and there they are. THERE is another state of mind today in our war machine concerning the motion picture, and it will continue its interest in films which it considers contributory to its combat function. Pictures that pass into history will go to the Archives, which exists as a service agency. So far, so good, but inevitably federal motion picture activity is ever to be a part of Administration — as we have seen with such efforts as the propagandizing U. S. Motion Picture Service; hence, the current manifestation can be the trial balloon of a movement. This comes, interestingly and coincidentally, with the development of the project known as Hemisphere Films, a non-profit educational and propaganda film project, which our news pages this week reveal as sharing the participations and attentions of major motion picture corporations, the Rockefeller interests tied with the office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and the Government. UP at Kodak Park in Rochester the Eastman workers have a Pioneer Club including fifty-two members who have forty-year records with the company. They were there when the raw stock for "The Great Train Robbery" was made. A fortnight hence 301 new members, employees who have completed twenty-five years at "The Park", will be inducted. There are 1,783 members, all of whom have grown up in this industry and with hands in its progress. There is a picture of stable organization. — Terry Ramsaye