“The universal appeal of pictures!” Mankind from the days when our ancestors sketched reindeer upon the walls of their caves has felt their appeal, but only recently has its universality become of crucial significance to the race. The printing-press, as we realized despairingly in 1914, has failed to save civilization from its recurrent attempts at suicide. Men read and talked, and, then, as had their illiterate progenitors, grasped their weapons and went to fighting. Neither from books nor from debates has mankind in the mass grasped that enlightenment which often comes to individuals but which is not sufficiently wide-spread and compelling to defend the race from constant reversions to brutish manifestations.
And now comes visualization—in movie theatres, in newspapers, in schools, colleges, churches—to mould, for good or evil, the plastic soul of Man. What will the harvest be? Who can say? Francis Bacon asserted that “reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.” Something more, as the centuries have proved, is necessary to make the human race what it should be. Is it not barely possible that some Bacon of the future will exultingly exclaim: “The screen maketh a civilized man!”?
CHAPTER XI
THE MOVIE AND THE COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC RELATIONS
The Screen Wins Powerful Friends—Societies Representing Sixty Million Americans Endorse it—Its Power for Good Recognized by Altruists—The Movie’s Allies Mobilized—The New Art is Backed by Old Philanthropies.
CHAPTER XI
THE MOVIE AND THE COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC RELATIONS
The conviction expressed at the end of the preceding chapter that in the screen civilization has finally found a medium through which Man’s loftiest ideals, hopes, dreams, visions and good resolutions may find a way to fulfillment has been vouchsafed a new raison d’être of late, the importance of which can not be overrated. The existing reasons for the belief that the movie is to be a weapon wielded in the cause of righteousness against the powers of darkness were greatly increased in number and force when representatives of sixty national civic, educational, social and religious organizations functioning in this country met, at the invitation of Will H. Hays, in June of 1922, to discuss with him the problems of the motion picture industry and to devise ways and means for bringing about a better situation therein. The outcome of this gathering was the formation of the Committee on Public Relations, for “the establishment of a channel of intercommunication between the agencies instrumental in forming and interpreting public opinion and the motion picture industry.” This committee, coöperating with the organization known as the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc., is wielding the influence begotten of a combined membership of 60,000,000 people, scattered throughout the whole country, in behalf of
the increased use of motion pictures as a force for good citizenship and a factor in social benefit; for the development of more intelligent coöperation between the public and the motion picture industry; to aid the coöperative movement instituted between the National Education Association and the motion picture producers for the making of pedagogic films and employing them effectively in schools; to encourage the effort to advance the usefulness of motion pictures as an instrument of international amity by correctly portraying American life, ideals and opportunities in pictures sent abroad and by properly depicting foreigners and foreign scenes in pictures presented here; to further, in general, all constructive methods for bringing about a sympathetic interest in the attainment and maintenance of high standards of art, entertainment, education and morals in motion pictures.