Hollywood off Camera

...He begins with the simple premise that, despite Hollywood's predominant position in the demonologies of Right and Left, its industry is neither a great art form perverted by greedy and vulgar c1oak-and-suiters, nor a new and more powerful opium for the masses...

...He is even able to arrive at a fair and unemotional opinion of such a controversial institution at the Legion of Decency, stating that its power "has made it an instrument of fear in Hollywood and New York," yet at the same time pointing out that "many important non Catholic groups aided in its organization...

...It's the early Christian who gets the fattest lion.' " In my own opinion, some of the watchdogs have bad some merit, while others have ruined countless lives by malicious or indiscriminate use of the blacklists (one such list, in use by one of our largest agencies back in '53, included the name of almost every prominent Broadway playwright, and was referred to, in my presence, to check on the status of D. H. Lawrence...

...Commenting on its Section I, he asks, "Who shall say whether a movie about crime will "inspire others with a desire for imitation...

...able sub-industries on Hollywood's fringe, the "nudies," or "skin-pictures," in the pleasantly bemused and civilized manner of a good reporter commenting on some garish new line in toys or novelties...

...It differs from other industries mainly in the minor but spectacular detail of having also to concern itself with such volatile and unstable raw materials as talent, glamour and inspiration...

...The job is practically done for you...

...The Face all the Cutting Room Floor (a title which does less than justice to the book's 'seriousness) is one of the most constructive critiques yet written of our fantastically influential mass-entertainment complex...

...In view of the potential social damage done by the watchdog forces, Schumach's exhaustive, witty and fairminded book appears to me considerably more than a sledgehammer taken to a walnut...

...The film was Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs...

...If they weren't, the studios wouldn't keep them in business...

...And it is in this area, of course, that the mass of ignorant or wellmeaning outside pressures do the most damage...

...Likewise, his manner of relating the history of the three big scandals which led to the establishment of Hollywood's self-censorship could stand as a model for a balanced account of a sordid and sensational story, giving every detail necessary for an adult to make up his own mind, and not one designed to entertain us cheaply at someone else's expense...

...Bringing some welcome illumination to subjects which, until now, have rarely been discussed with anything but heat, Schumach is able even to write about one of the recently-arisen and vastly profit...

...Schumach has nobly resisted all temptations to set up fat sitting ducks to shoot at, and in the process has shown himself to be not only a first-rate newspaperman, but also (despite the squeak of outrage the book has received from the Screen Producers Guild) one of the best friends Hollywood, and its customers, ever had...

...By and large, Schumach is right on target when he drily suggests: "The movie industry could engrave, as its motto, the advice of Saki: 'Never be a pioneer...

...Schumach is one of the very few students of the Hollywood scene who have understood and accepted that the production of mass-entertainment is an industry, though possibly neither pure nor simple...

...After all, Hollywood's own censorship arm, the Motion Picture Producers' Association, consists largely of sophisticated, realistic, and tolerant men...

...There one can find a clipping about a youth who murdered his teenage date while they were necking in a car shortly after seeing a movie...

...But while he is never less than fair to the men whose task it is to enforce (sometimes with remarkable inconsistency) the Motion Picture Production Code, Schumach (with the majority of Hollywood's creative people) has little more than pity and contempt for the psychological and sociologcal naivete of the Code itself...

...The real censors, whom the MPPA was hopefully intended to neutralize, are a multitude of crude or subtle pressure groups which have managed, with very little effective opposition, to foist upon executive and creative personnel an atmosphere of timidity and self-censorship which can make a story conference involving a multi-mill ion-dollar project sound as hallucinatory as anything out of Alice in Wonderland...

...A classic example is on file at the offices of the movie censors...

...author of the forthcoming Broadway play, "The Windows of Heaven" No great exertion of wit or ingenuity is needed to score points for cleverness by attacking mass-produced entertainment on the basis of its contents...

...In consequence, tons of books have accurately and amusingly recorded what S. J. Perelman once summed up as the old-time major studios' unique atmosphere of "fatuity, balderdash and self-abasement...

...it is what you are never allowed to see...

...However, while the dramatic or humorous contents of most films and TV shows may be of negligible critical (or entertainment) value, what really keeps them from achieving a reasonable potential is not so much what they put in as what they leave out...

...The word "censorship" does not even begin to cover the subject...

...Being an industry, it is obliged, for the most elementary reasons, to observe most of the laws of supply and demand governing any other large, profit-making enterprise, and is every bit as vulnerable as cigarettes, deodorants or automobiles to consumer acceptance, as well as to the depredations of parasites, imitators, competitors and incompetents...

...Nor are minority groups themselves, as Schumach points out, altogether blameless in this regard -though I would suggest that their concern about being misrepresented (or ignored) on the screen is a good deal more defensible...

...These groups appear determined to inhibit not subversive, lascivious or unconventional thought, but any thought at aLL For the money you spend at the box office, or as indirect tax on advertised goods, it is not what you see on the screen that's the cheat...

...And while that alone may not seem like much of a deprivation (especially to those of us who have other resources for obtaining information, pleasure, mental exercise or daydreams), there is, I believe, a genuine danger in the way a censorship-oriented mentality will, by omission, subtly and almost unconsciously affect its vast audience's attitudes (and perhaps actions) in regard to sex, brutality, foreign relations, minority rights, consumer fraud, political corruption, etc., not to mention the little matter of war and peace...

...If you must regard it in metaphorical terms, think of it as a pacifier, normally harmless, devoid of nourishment, and, by turns, mildly stimulating or mildly sedative...