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Production <^><^<^<^>^><^><^><^ 135
responsible for the service to sense events of public interest, the exhibitor and the patron are confronted by newsreels of very mediocre quality at times. Apparently the producer is in a position where he is compelled to get out an issue and he attains mere footage at the expense of quality and interest. Another reason for the deterioration of the newsreel has been given by someone in the industry.4
For a great many years newsreels suffered from a relative unappreciation at the hands of the trade. They were considerably more important to the more intelligent and influential fraction of the audience than the buyers of films were aware. With the coming of sound and talk an opportunity presented itself to reestablish newsreels on a new basis in the industry and to place them in an enhanced position with the public. Nothing of the kind happened.
The zest has gone out of the newsreel camera men and their editors chiefly because the fate of the product is being decided not by performances in the field of adventure and on the screen, but around the tables in sales conferences and trade-offs of playing time. The truth is that a really important feature picture can in a fashion drive through its own way to the screen and the market, but the best newsreel on earth could not importantly affect its gross by sheer quality of performance.
To meet the difficulties caused by intense competition, various persons have from time to time proposed an association of newsreels. The individual companies were to refrain from gathering their own news scenes, and an associated company was to organize a news picture gathering service throughout the world; each company could inspect the films and select from them the scenes which it wished to use. It would be at liberty to make up its own newsreels from these prints as it might see fit and sell them through its own distributing organization. Nothing has come of these proposals. Although the number of newsreels 5 in existence varies from time to time, those best known in the
4 Terry Ramsaye, in the Motion Picture Herald, November 14, 1931.
5 The experience of Allied States in the newsreel field is discussed elsewhere in this volume. Cf. Motion Picture Herald, Apr. 29, 1933, p. 7.
On March 1, 1932, an independent newsreel for the State Rights Market, the first of its kind, was announced under the name, The American Newsreel, edited by Lowell Thomas.