To prohibit and to prevent the trade practices known as "compulsory block-booking" and "blind selling" of motion-picture films in interstate and foreign commerce (1939)

TRADE PRACTICES IN MOTION-PICTURE INDUSTRY 5 be proportionate to the weakness of the family, school, church, and neighborhood. Where the institutions which have traditionally transmitted social attitudes and forms of conduct have broken down, as is usually the case in high-grade delinquency areas, motion pictures assume a greater importance as a source of ideas and schemes of life. The committee has had access to the record of the 1936 hearings on S. 3012 (the predecessor of the present bill) 8 in which Dr. Henry James Forman, author of a summary of the Payne Fund studies entitled "Our Movie Made Children/' describes the findings of those who conducted the studies as follows (pp. 96, 97): They found that the very youngest children, aged 8 or 9, remember of a picture about 60 percent as much as an adult would remember. Six weeks after seeing the picture those children still carried in their minds 91 percent of what they had borne away directly after seeing the picture. The visual images of the screen, reenforced by the auditory impressions of sound and speech, leave a powerful imprint upon those young minds all but indelible. Dean Claude A. Shull of a California teachers college in a letter to the chairman of the subcommittee, states that — when a questionnaire was sent by Roger W. Babson to the school principals in New England asking which had the greatest influence in molding the character of our young children — the school, the church, or the home — 70 percent of the principals scratched out all three and wrote in — the movies. Herbert Blumer, associate professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, in a book entitled "Movies and Conduct," page 196, says: * * * motion pictures are a genuine educational institution; not educational in the restricted and conventional sense of supplying to the adolescent some detached bit of knowledge * * * but educational in the truer sense of actually introducing him to and acquainting him with a type of life which has immediate, practical, and momentous significance. The representatives of the producers also bear witness to the power of the film. The secretary of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc. (the Hays association), Carl E. Milliken, as a prelude to his testimony, said: What I am going to talk about has to do only with the question of the wide public interest occasioned by the fact that the motion picture does, in addition to its function as a provider of entertainment, have a good deal to do with the ideas that people get, with the attitudes that they acquire. Cecil B. De Mille, a well-known director and producer of motion pictures, who recently spoke at Harvard, said: The great literature of the future is the literature of celluloid. The films may well take the place of the little red schoolbook. Motion pictures are both the greatest force for international good will and the greatest educational power in the world. Control of this vast agency for good and evil is vested in eight great corporations. Submitted to the subcommittee was a small volume, "Film and School," by Helen Rand and Richard Lewis. This book contains two charts which show the direct control over the film industry by the leading financial groups (p. 103) and the indirect control over the industry exercised by the financiers through their soundpatents monopoly (p. 104). In both charts the towering pillars from which the converging lines emanate are labeled "Morgan" and "Rockefeller." This textbook inquires, "Are the interests of your community represented in moving pictures you have seen?" This inquiry takes on 'In the 1936 bearings before the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce on H. R. CA72, p. 18, are printed the opinions of outstanding specialists on the effects of certain types of pictures on children.