Scouts. She is also a member of the executive board of the National Committee for Better Films. She says: The proponents of this bill, known as House bill 6233, "To create a commission to be known as the Federal Motion Picture Commission, and defining its powers and duties," are pleased to call it a measure for the Federal" regulation " of motion pictures, but it is a censorship bill in its every phase. It provides for politically appointed paid censors to serve at salaries of $9,000 a year with $10,000 provided for the chairman of the committee, constituted with arbitrary power which affords opportunity for political patronage. It would be subject to the same prejudices which have characterized the work of the State censorship boards, no two of which have agreed on eliminations in pictures. All contention about motion pictures grows out of a difference of opinion-a difference of opinion which is not sectional but universal, and with which no board of censors, Federal, State, or city, can satisfactorily cope. On the other hand, an enlightened public opinion will serve as an effective guide, coupled as it is with the statutory laws to protect the morals of the communities. Thank you very much. FLORENCE BRAGG (Mrs. LOUIS G.) MYERS. Mr. CONNOLLY. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, we would just like to get the dictionary definition of the word "censor" in the record. I am quoting from Webster's Dictionary. The proponents of this bill claim that it is not a censorship bill. I would like to give you the definition of censor." 66 This is Webster's definition: Censor: One of two magistrates of ancient Rome who imposed taxes and regulated the morals and manners of the community; an official appointed to examine books, manuscripts, plays, etc., prior to publication or performance to ascertain whether there is anything immoral or offensive in them; a critic. Another dictionary, Funk and Wagnalls, gives the definition of censor" as follows: An official examiner of manuscripts and plays empowered to prohibit their performance or publication. I now want to call our last witness, Col. Jason Joy. Colonel Joy is director of the department of public relations of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributers of America. STATEMENT OF JASON S. JOY, DIRECTOR OF THE DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC RELATIONS OF THE MOTION PICTURE PRODUCERS AND DISTRIBUTORS OF AMERICA Mr. Joy. Mr Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, before I start I want to say as last speaker that we appreciate the very courteous and patient and long-suffering hearing that you have given us. It has been a great pleasure to sit here and listen to all the things that have been said. I think it has been a real service, and I hope that the members of the committee have profited from it as much as we have. I want to say in the beginning that the few remarks that I want to make will be confined mostly to what we are doing as an industry concerning motion pictures and their use, rather than concerning censorship, because I want you to know our plans and our purposes so that you may have in mind, as you deliberate this question, whether or not we are ourselves with the help of the vast majority of the people in the country, actually doing the things that we ought to be doing in this connection. Let me say, just in passing, concerning censorship, that it is in my opinion un-American, unwise, and impractical in this connection that the only way the pictures may be changed is by those who make them, where they are made and when they are made and in no other way, by no other people, and no other time. I would like to say to you that before I became director of the department of public relations, I was executive secretary of the committee of public relations, which was in existence for the first three years of the so-called Hays organization, and before that I had been in other forms of social and public life. I have been enthusiastic about the organization and its real purposes ever since I have been engaged in anything connected with it; and I am very proud to be able to say, although I am only four years in this service, that I am connected with the motion-picture industry because I know, having been there for those years and having watched it as closely as I have, that it is doing a great thing; it is doing a piece of business that ought to be done in a very fine manner. I do not claim for it nearly 100 per cent perfection. If we had reached perfection we would be on very dangerous ground. Mr. Hays said to us often, as we tried to improve the quality of pictures: 66 Remember, boys, that this year a lot of really good pictures will come out and also a lot of poor ones. It is very easy for you to sit back and say, There, at last, we have reached our goal. Every picture, from now on, will be the kind of picture that I would like to take my wife and two daughters to," and let it go at that, and expect that from now on they will all be of the same character. They won't be. We have to exercise eternal vigilance all the time in order that we may strive to reach our goal that we expect to reach and that the people of the country have a right to demand of us. Let me speak for a moment concerning the relation between children and the movies. It has been brought out here over and over again, and properly so, that the motion pictures are made primarily for adults. Its primary function is the amusement of adults cleanly. That is its primary or major function. There are many other byproducts, but I shall speak on them later. We are engaged primarily in amusing adults cleanly. The question is: How shall we take care of the casual child or habitual child in motion pictures? This was the thing that we did in searching for the answer: We discovered that there are eight States in this country which have legal provisions against the attending upon motion pictures of children under either 14 or 16 years of age, depending upon the State, except those accompanied by parents or legal guardians. Then we went to those States ourselves often or by carefully trained emissaries, and we actually counted the children who were attending motion pictures in those States and in those cities, in different types of theaters, unaccompanied. We discovered-this is not my own statement-children beating their way in in one way or another, attaching themselves to good-natured adult persons or going in casually or getting some one of the exhibitors to help them in, etc. I think it is fair to say that as many children under the ages of 15 and 16 attend the motion pictures in the States where there are laws against their attending as there are children attending in other States where there are no such laws. Mrs. KAHN. Then those laws are practically inoperative. Mr. Joy. They are practically inoperative. They are certainly not in effect so far as my observation has been able to indicate. Mrs. KAHN. Does that apply to children day and night? Mr. Joy. It applies to children day and night; in the evening in the larger districts more than in the daytime, and in the afternoon more generally in the suburban districts. Our next task-this is not alone of our own determination-to get at the root of this situation-because I say to you that it is a very important problem for us as well as it is for the public--we selected a few exhibitors who might be depended upon to use the demonstration carefully and honestly, and we asked them to experiment for us in either announcing publicly or privately, when a picture came along, that the children ought not to see it; and they promised us to actually turn back from the door children when they came along to those pictures. We selected 33 exhibitors in 33 different cities in 11 States and tried the experiment. We had threatened-we had no actual-we had threatened a good many lawsuits and we had a good deal of difficult argumentation, because when a parent suggested to a child that it can go to the movies, that parent resented having the manager say to that child, "You can not go." In other words, a parent who sent a child or allowed a child to go was in his mind a better judge of what that child should see than the exhibitor. We discovered very quickly that that sort of thing would not go. The exhibitor in my own home town-a little town of only 6,000 of us. all known in the community-tried to tell us and I say that we all know each other mostly by our first names-prints a little dodger on the first of each month advertising the pictures he is going to have; and we got in the Sunday paper, the first Sunday of the month, inserted that such-and-such a picture is not designed for children. Now, that was better advertising for that picture than it was against it. I really was innocent, but they didn't believe it. Our neighbors thought that I was trying to pump them. So that didn't go. We had to cut out that kind of answer to the problem. Our next attempt to solve the problem was an attempt to initiate special performances for children. Now, right here lies the eventual answer. It is not worked out satisfactorily yet for reasons which I will explain. We let it be known very generally in a good many localities that certain pictures selected very carefully would do all right for children of certain ages; that they were geared up to the psychology of the child, for their enjoyment and their entertainment; and if those pictures were selected and put on especially on Saturday morning, the children would like them and everybody would be satisfied. The great difficulty was that the word got out that certain pictures were available and that that kind of program was the sort of program to follow, and ambitious mothers, teachers, and parents, as well as exhibitors, thinking that here at last was the solution of the whole problem, a great many started out on that series of Saturday morning movies and selected the same picture that we had selected; but, unfortunately, many of them thought that they knew more about it than we did, with very sad results. Just as one ridiculous example, which could be repeated over and over again, but not in quite such a funny way, I will tell you this: The principal of a junior girls' high school in Wisconsin-this I know to be true 22126 26-23 asked our local exhibitor to run a special performance for children on Saturday morning, and he agreed readily and said that he would be glad to do so. He said to her, "What kind of pictures do you want?" She said, "I don't know pictures very well"-at that time there were a lot of animal pictures, such as Hunting Wild African Beasts or Trailing Wild Animals in Africa, and a lot of those things and she says, "There is a picture about some black oxen. things-and How would that be?" You have read The Buck. For the benefit of Canon Chase, I will say that The Buck deals with a bad situation. It is an old man and monkey glands and a young girl and all that sort of thing; it isn't the sort of thing that kids ought to go to. Our next job in trying to solve the difficulty of that situation was that we actually did arrange a series of special performances for children—and before I leave that subject I want to say that I believe that special performances for children when people are informed is, of course, the answer. Let me also say to you that during the interim of the three years we have been aware of this, that the percentage of pictures in the regular current output available for children has increased just 400 per cent, according to our own observations. Mrs. KAHN. Haven't you found that children are not satisfied to go to one performance a week? They go to that one and then they insist upon going to others. Mr. Joy. That is true, of course, in a great many instances. Mrs. KAHN. I know a great many parents who will not allow their children to go to the movies except to this kind of performance. Mr. Joy. I know a great many children that go as often as possible. You have those two extremes. It is the average that we are trying to reach. That is the situation we have to deal with. We arranged a program of 52 performances, one for each Saturday of the year, a balanced ration. This program contains a travelogue or educational or instructional film, a reel or two; a four or five or six reel feature with all the padding struck out, reedited and retitled whenever necessary; and a couple of reels of comedy. Depending upon the character of the feature the rest of the reels are added. Every one of those eight reels is inclosed in one can, a shipping case, so that there may be no difficulty about the whole program arriving, so that an exhibitor does not have to rent the feature from one company, the travelogue from this company, and the comedy from that company, and so that there may be no temptation on the part of any exhibitor to use his own short subjects in connection with the longer feature and thereby fill in on his program. We started out with this thing in June of last year experimentally. We selected the Eastman Theater in Rochester as the place of beginning or demonstration. Mr. Eastman was very much interested. The director of the theater and the director of the orchastra were also very much interested. They wanted to experiment a little bit with music for children, and they undertook the program with the assistance and active cooperation of the Rochester Women's Clubs as well as the Parents and Teachers Association. On the first Saturday-the theater holds a little over 3,000-on the first Saturday 2,709 children attended. On the next Saturday, 3,709. I was there on the next Saturday, and the kids reminded me of a layer cake, and yet they were standing up all around, and there were a thousand outside that could not get in, and the afternoon was a bright, sunshiny day. They discontinued this during the summer months and began on the first week after school opened in the fall. They have carried on with an average attendance of 1,865; and I have it by word-of-mouth testimony and printed that the president of the Rochester Women's Club and the president of the Rochester Parents' and Teachers' Association and several ministers and the superintendent of public instruction and a lot of other people that I have made contact with to find out whether this was really a real experiment, and they stated that it has solved absolutely the problem of the child in the movie in Rochester. Mrs. KAHN. Do you think the program makes any difference? Mrs. KAHN. Or do they just go because it is children's day? Mrs. KAHN. We used to have a lot of Charlie Chaplin films that I have heard were popular with children and such films as Jackie Coogan. I was wondering whether there was a bigger attendance on days when such films were shown. Mr. Joy. It makes a lot of difference; very much. The girls come in vast majority on some Saturday mornings and the boys come in vast majority on some other Saturdays. I want to say that kids-I am speaking of children under 16; I don't know how far down I am talking about; because it is hard to tell-kids are better sharpers for pictures than grown-ups. They know a whole lot more than grown-ups about these things. I have a daughter 11 and a daughter of 4. I am really very much surprised every once in a while when I am at home to find out that my daughter knows about pictures coming out and what happens to the stars long before I know them, and I am in a better position to get information than she is. 66 Mr. LOWREY. That makes me think of what the little girl said to her mother. She said, 'Mama, I think you had better let me go with Captain Nelson to see this picture. I think that this is not the kind of a picture that you ought to see." Mr. Joy. I haven't the slightest idea about that, sir. The CHAIRMAN. May I interrupt at this time? I went to my home town, where, of course, I think I know everybody and, of course, everybody knows me. My little fellow has a piping voice. There was a bathing scene and a lot of bathing beauties. He spoke up in his piping voice and said, "Father, don't you wish you were in there too?" [Laughter.] It is Mr. Joy. They are very wise and very constant. They have decided prejudices for and against certain people and certain types of things. You can't fool them and you can't drive them to see a picture which they don't want to see and all that sort of thing. a pretty delicate situation. All the forcing, except the home atmosphere, that I know of, fails in coping with the situation. You have got to come back to our own home. We have got to do in this regard as we have done in others. I am sure. We have got to train |