LOST AND FOUND

...In the case of film, this had become progressively more difficult for the greater number of new viewers, who could not go to museums and film societies even if they so desired...

...A profound change in the relationship of the movies and television took place in 1955, after the gates were opened releasing floods of feature movies for televised reproduction...

...To the seeming corroboration of those who blame television for all the economic evils of the movie industry, great chunks of the core audience have broken away from the theaters, returning only irregularly, apparently for what cannot be duplicated on the screens at home...

...Habitual moviegoers are picked by whatever currents are passing, and carried along wherever they go...

...Calling upon producers to create better films, and upon exhibitors to present them intelligently to people of intelligence, and not as if all movies are to be merchandised with identical flackery, Starr asserted that the lost audience ". . . need not be permanently lost to motion pictures...

...For one thing, it is questionable whether the majority of producers really conceive their potential audience to be more worldly than it used to be—or whether they understand the nature and size of this audience to begin with...

...Only a few libraries in 'the country make it possible for specialists to see films they require for serious work, in the manner of reference Even watching ancient trash can throw new light on new trash...

...The common producers' notion that they are making films for the largest possible audience is demonstrably unrealistic, as the actual audience is only a fragment—as much a special coterie as is the elite of highbrows or eggheads for whom it is supposedly uneconomical to make movies...

...Several American films have taken advantage of this circuit, demonstrating that production of off-beat, mature films is economically practicable even in the United States...

...Some aspects of the film society movement are not praiseworthy...

...But something else may be happening that can have revolutionary effects upon appreciation and production of films in the future...

...From the end of World War II to 1952, an estimated 40 million persons, who had been attending the movies several times a month, steadily withdrew from the theaters...

...Hence it comes about here, as in so many other aspects of our popular culture, that the pampered disaffections of immaturity determine much of what is produced...

...In any case, a library of films is quite different from one of books...

...During that time, we have eard constant reiterations of indus-y anguish over the defection of asses of paying pleasure seekers television, and frequent admoni-ons that the most powerful defenses gainst the attractions of free medially are to be found not in elabor-Led gimmickry, but in better quality, What has reached the distended heater screens, however, generally as not been more mature—although may be granted that there has been burnishing of a veneer of sophisti-ation, so as to require changes in he Production Code of the Motion Picture Association of America, for lie first time since its adoption in 930...

...That these millions have not lost interest in films, but only in bad films, and actually may be seeking to express their interest in ways beyond the conventional movie pattern of sensationalized triviality, may be the meaning of certain signs of serious cinema enthusiasm...

...That it was not merely attracted to other mass media is the crucial consideration in support of this optimistic view...

...For, millions of viewers now seeing the old movies for the first time are taking an intensive course, as it were, in the "literature" of the screen...

...The same method is being used for Lust for Life, in which Kirk Douglas plays Vincent Van Gogh: a film that seriously attempts, at least, to portray a great painter, and which never could have been made with ordinary mass distribution in mind, except as a dead-loss, self-indicted "prestige" picture...

...This figure is generally accepted by the well informed, such as Gilbert Seldes and Arthur Mayer...

...But it can be argued that a wartime peak is an unfair norm, and that the real potential is smaller...

...The notion, moreover, is fundamentally fallacious, as the assertory maximum audience of 25 million has been established post hoc, after at least an equal, and probably a much larger, number of people have left the theaters because the great majority of films simply were not worth seeing...

...Some groups breathlessly advertise the "restricted" nature of their showings, in which medical, psychiatric, and erotica\lly "experimental" films are presented to titillate audiences ostensibly jaded by the blatant sensationalism of theatrical movies...

...But it would be unwise 6 hope for any spectacular elevation >f the general level of movie matur-ty, under the impetus of mere per-ilission to be less naive...

...When the maximum audience of 25 million does go to see a film, it forms around a core of habitual movie goers, principally young people under 30, the most faithful of whom are under 20...

...But their existence makes possible a different form of distribution, allowing unusual films to build up their audiences gradually, and to circulate for long periods of time...

...The films newly available to television were mostly old—and mostly terrible...

...Since response to entertainment on the part of this audience is largely a matter of habit, it is not surprising that an easier, cheaper way of satisfying the addiction should be attractive...

...Religious epics like The Robe, Quo Vadis, and The Ten Commandments are exceptions, drawing large numbers of church-goers and others who attend the movies only infrequently—and hence cannot be counted as either a lost or found audience, as far as regular patronage is concerned...

...the special success made possible the later, general success...

...Colleges and universities are showing an enormous interest in the movies, particularly in increasing numbers of courses dealing with audio-visual methods of teaching and communication...

...These people make up the real audience the movies lost through deliberate immaturity and proliferated mediocrity—beginning some time before the obtrusion of television...

...The considered assumption in the industry is that an audience of 25 million is about the largest that can be attracted in this country by a popular feature film...

...Treating Lili as if it were foreign made, M-G-M arranged for a showcase run in a New York art theater that went on for more than two years...

...When a famous old film ran on television, the infamous new films in the theaters did not draw...

...The late Alfred Starr, who was Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Theatre Owners of America, and one of the most intelligently articulate representatives of the exhibition end of the movie business, made what he called a "safe guess" of the size of the lost audience, writing in Variety in January, 1934: "They are 25,000,000 people who like and need entertainment and who, by and large, are well able to pay for it...

...But the tremors may have been effective in disturbing the geology of our culture along the fault plane of the movies, as the movement of millions suggests...

...But many had been famous hits in their day, and were a part of tire cinematic tradition...

...The most conservative estimate, however, must still bulk very large, compared to the true size of the hard core of regulars, led by adolescents, who are apprehensively catered to by producers and exhibitors—favor that is appreciated, incidentally, by a degree of vandalism that has become nothing less than a national calamity for theater owners...

...The same may hold, too, for unusual, specially presented spectaculars, like Cinerama, Around the World In 80 Days, and other rarities...

...Mo^t significant is the growth of the circuit ol wM "art" theaters which show foreign films, documentaries, and others outside the regular commercial categories of the industry...

...To be literate in any literature requires conversance with the past...

...This happened largely according to a consent decree in a government anti-trust suit against the major film companies on the grounds of refusal to license the exhibition of 16mm prints where this might compete with regular 35mm exhibition in theaters...

...The present surfeit of films of glorified violence, horrific fantasy, and rock-'n-roll frenzy at once ensures the attendance of the chronologically and perpetually immature, and reinforces the discouragement with the movies of the vastly larger, truly potential audience for better, more mature films...

...The movies have always emphasized the immediately novel...

...Television itself has suffered greatly because of its new wealth of old material, that almost everywhere overwhelmed what was left of live production...

...By the summer of 1955, about 600 groups were counted in the formation of the American Federation of Film Societies...

...One Hollywood company, Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, recently queried 300 institutions on whether they would be interested in a study project for classroom use following the details of production of a film to be directed by Alexander Mackend-rick of George Bernard Shaw's The Devil's Disciple...

...Effects upon theater attendance were immediately apparent...

...The move to modify the Code may lave something to do with the desire o recapture those whom television las lured away from regular movie rttendance...

...And so increasingly vast an audience will not be hard for film makers to find, if they care to try hard enough in their seeking...

...If a new cinematic literacy does emerge from the rehearsal of filmic tradition on television, it will itself reach for literacy and maturity in new works for the screen...

...During the past ten years, the growth of serious film groups—some associated with museums or college*,' and all freely dedicated—has been erratic, occasionally spectacular, and always significant...

...There was a volcanic upthrust of the educational level of a large portion of the population—significantly exemplified by the tens of millions of veterans who took advantage of the first and Korean GI Bills of Rights...

...This permitted a respectable tour of the regular circuits that would have been initially impossible for so atypical a film—besides building appeal for Leslie Caron, whose charms do not lend themselves to conventional Hackery...

...It is as if the writings of the Nineteenth Century, hitherto only remembered by those who were living when they appeared, were suddenly made available to readers of our time...

...There are frequent tendencies, for example, towards deliberate cultivation of an elite mentality that is inevitably spurious...

...This last consideration may suggest a reason for the sudden troubles of many film societies in the last year or so—as well as a final, fascinating possibility that the potential audience for better, mature films may increase, albeit without deliberate cultivation...

...Marty, for example, began its memorably successful cycle of exhibition in art theaters...

...Nearly a dozen books dealing with film history or aesthetics are presently in various stages of production: another sign of serious cinema enthusiasm...

...However, most of those who attend film society screenings are seeking the serious and unusual: fundamentally the experience of cinema as an art—and one with a tradition, that can be appreciated in the rehearsal of old films of historical and aesthetic significance...

...The lost audience for good movies may have new recruits, in an ever proliferating supply...

...A movie cannot simply be taken down from a shelf for leisurely study...

...The moment one feels outside the current, as in watching a movie out of an obviously different time and place, one has begun to criticize rather than blindly experience, and a critical attitude developing towards a continuity of experiences is one facet of maturity...

...It is surely early to evaluate the cultural effects of the educational seismism that continues to shake our society...

...The period following World War II was not only the time during which television became practical and practically universal...

...It is thereby ssured, we may well fear, that ilms treating these subjects may dis-ourage the practice of evil as effectively as have those multitudes of movie noralities proving, in delicious detail, hat brutality is wicked and that crime ioes not pay...

...These people have been literally driven out of the motion picture theater by the industry's insistence on aiming most of its products at the lowest level, and by its failure to devise a system of adequate communciation with its potential audience...

...It is now permissible, at least, or films to recognize that drug ad-diction, prostitution, abortion, and idnapping do exist—although ad-nirably specific strictures are put upon their portrayal...

...Almost 200 replied in the affirmative, and Professor Kenneth MarGowan of the Department of Theater Arts at IJ.C.L.A., who used to be a producer in Hollywood, has been appointed to supervise the project...

...The loyal remainder—still large, albeit relatively depleted—is dominated, in numbers and therefore in preferences, by adolescents...

...There are now more than 450—a small proportion of the total of 24,000 movie theaters in the country, to be sure...

...Effects were soon felt, too, in many film societies, as the range of historically significant material available on home screens now extended from the earliest days of silent films to the very recent products of independent producers, who often sold television exhibition rights a scant year or so after a film had had its initial theatrical circulation...