We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
18 TRADE PRACTICES IN MOTION-PICTURE INDUSTRY
good pictures or from making its choice effective by pressure upon the exhibitors of motion pictures.
Special empliasis at the hearings was laid upon the efforts of the responsible establishments in the industry to govern motion-picture production at its soiuxe to the morals of the American pubhc as <^xpressed by the public-welfare groups and in cooperation with such groups.
The relation of the measure to the morals of motion pictures is advanced in a tenuous hypothesis which argues that exhibitors, when approached by public-minded groups in any community to be brought to task for a picture claimed to be unsuitable, present the ahbi that they were forced to play such picture because they had contracted for it in a block without Icnowledge of its contents and could not be relieved of exhibiting the motion picture except on payment of the agi'eed price therefor, which they could not financially afford, and that such alibi stands in the way of freedom of com.munity selection. It seems too large a penalty to pay entirely to disrupt an important part of the Nation's economy, aware of its responsibilities, in order to isolate an exhibitor from what is franldy acknowledged to be an ahbi so as to expose him to a liigher degree of local responsibihty. Yet, in any event, the industry, according to testimony at the hearings, has undertaken presently to provide higher percentages of selectivity from their annual output contracts than now obtains, and furthermore to cancel any contract for any motion picture which is locally morally oftensive. This arrangement ought to be sufficient amply to detach exliibitors from their much abused alibi and permit them to be held accountable to the local communities in which they operate for the motion pictures exhibited by them, which could have been voluntarily canceled by them under the arrangements described.
Prominent persons foremost among the sponsors of this measure at the last session of Congress have addressed the committee, stating their desire now that the industry be given the chance of handling these problems ^\ithout legislation.
After careful study we cannot recommend a bill which it is conclusively sho-wTi would not work out in actual practice, and which would do injustice to one of America's most important and essential arts and industries.
E. D. Smith.
Wallace H. White, Jr.
Chan Gurney.
/-V