Content-Type: text/html
Myth of the Southern Box Office _
Myth of the Southern Box Office:
Lining Global Coffers with Domestic Prejudices
by
Elaine Walls Reed, Ph.D.
English Department
Kutztown University of Pennsylvania
Kutztown, PA 19530
Office telephone: 610-683-4353, -4354
Home telephone: 610-777-5686
Home fax: 610-777-1315
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
The myth of the Southern box office:
Lining global coffers with domestic prejudices
Although much-publicized negotiations between the MPPDA and the Catholic Church has spawned a proliferation of excellent scholarship examining the Hays Office, the Legion of Decency, and the Production Code Administration (PCA), only in more recent years has academic inquiry been sharply focused on the international market's role in influencing rules of representation during the years of the classic Hollywood cinema. This does not negate the role of the Catholic Church in determining film content; it simply provides another perspective in keeping with the concept of social totality[1] advanced by theorist Louis Althusser.
This willingness to accept several layers of determinants in shaping ideology was addressed by Robert B. Ray, author of A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema (1985), who wrestled with similar demons in first attempting to provide a single explanation for the evolution of the cinema in this country. As he abandoned the search for one factor and accepted the now-popular premise that motion pictures shape ideology through exclusion as well as through representation, he acknowledged the need for "an approach that would account for both a reflection more complicated than [he] had originally granted and an exclusion more systematic than [he] had reckoned on. In short [he] needed theories of overdetermination and transformation" (1985, p. 11). He grounded his approach in a synthesis of Althusserian Marxism, L‚vi-Strauss' myth study, and Freud's psychoanalysis. In his words,
Althusserian Marxism proposes that any phenomenon at any level of society results from multiple determinations (economic, cultural, political, personal, traditional, aesthetic). L‚vi-Strauss suggests that each version of a myth results from those multiple determinations that have shaped the rules of transformation-that flexibility which enables a single cultural anxiety to assume different shapes in response to an audience's changing needs. Freud refers to dream images as condensations and displacements resulting from multiple dream thoughts. (1985, p. 12)
The reader may hear echoes of L‚vi-Strauss and Freud in this examination of the role of the global market in determining the content of American films, but it is surely the voices of Althusser and Karl Marx which inform the dominant conversation.
Contemporary cultural theorist Stuart Ewen, whose recently released PR! A History of Spin enriched the final days of this dissertation process, also studied the relationship of early twentieth-century power structures and representation. "Within my historical study of public relations," he wrote, "I sought to make sense of the peculiar processes of representation and perception-the 'exchange of ideas,' as he [Edward Bernays] put it-that have come to distinguish cultural life in the era of mass communication" (p. 9). Later, in the same text, he said, "The rise and consequence of public relations within our world must also be placed in relation to the motives, the assumptions, and the history of power_" (1996, p. 33).
These ideas, which strongly echo the Althusserian social totality, were expressed to Ewen in a 1990 interview with Edward Bernays, widely credited as the first public relations practioner. Pointing out that corporate public relations rose to power because of a fear of democracy's empowerment of the less well-educated, Bernays wrote in Crystallizing Public Opinion, "The duty of the higher strata of society-the cultivated, the learned, the expert, the intellectual-is therefore clear. They must inject moral and spiritual motives into public opinion" (1923, p. 217). This was precisely the charge that motion picture czar Will Hays communicated to his peers at every public opportunity.
Even before the advent of "the talkies," the motion picture industry realized the power of the medium and its ability to convey cultural patterns, although Hays protested its intent to be the transmission of entertainment only until domestic and world events forced the inclusion of social issues onto his agenda. In Memoirs, Hays explained his perception of the influence of the silent picture upon its audience. It is a perception which reinforces Marx's maxim that the "ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force" (as cited in Ray, 1985, p. 13). It is also a perception which supports previous discussion of the nature of film's early audience. Hays said,
American films of the earliest silent picture era had to be designed to appeal to the less educated groups and to the large foreign-language sections of our own population. It was essential that the viewer should be able to follow the story whether understanding English or not. Hence, our silent pictures early developed a style and form that commended them to all races and groups of people, without the aid of words. (1955, p. 506)
And American films led the way in the global market, a fact Hays attributed to the ethnic origins of early film moguls. "Even before World War I, American pictures were making a bid for world supremacy," he argued, but Hays attributed this success not to a wealth of natural resources or a fortunate mix of creative genius. Instead, he placed the credit with Hollywood's Jews, who, as the first producers and exhibitors, were the most "internationally minded of all peoples" (Hays, 1955, p. 506).
Whether other members of the nation's cultural elite shared Hays' analysis is not the issue. What is relevant is that the federal government, more than a decade before the introduction of sound synchronization, recognized the industry's global force and used it in massive mobilization of American society for World War I. Acting on journalist Walter Lippmann's recommendation, George Creel (a former journalist and Woodrow Wilson's head of the Committee of Public Information) conscripted the industry into the effort by forcing exhibitors to sign contracts with the industry that forbade the airing of cinemas in any country hostile to the United States. In addition, Creel's office piggybacked short patriotic speeches prior to each viewing, dubbed "Four-Minute Men" speeches, into the domestic market. These speeches, given on site by respected members of the community, foreshadowed by 30 years Paul Lazarsfeld's diffusion theory, otherwise known as the two-step flow of communication, introduced in 1948. More importantly to this chapter, Creel's actions demonstrated early twentieth-century recognition of the importance of the industry and its relationships to both the domestic and the global markets.
Retrospection also enabled Hays to link his 1922 decision to head the MPPDA with events contemporary to his 1955 memoir publication. "I am sure," he said, "that one thing which impelled me to accept the Association presidency was the vision of motion pictures as a universal language. I believed that we were building not only for the United States but for the United Nations. That's why I always urged free trade in pictures" (Hays, 1955, p. 507). This vision propelled Hays to even higher aspirations for the film industry and its manufacturers' trade association: "To promote this international understanding by sympathetically telling the story of the nationals of every country to the nationals of all others is the determined purpose of this organization [the MPPDA]" (Hays, 1929, p. 532).
But neither free trade in the cinema nor international understanding was to be a reality. With the American motion picture industry relying on the foreign market for 35 to 40 percent of its costs (Moley, 1945, p. 169) and nationalism surging in most nation-states, including these United States, motion picture content quickly became an international tug-of-war with the Esperanto-loving Will Hays its referee. His very first meeting as "czar" of the MPPDA board-April 13, 1922-dealt with "a bitter protest from the Mexican government that American films were exploiting Mexicans as 'bad men' " (Hays, 1955, p. 333). Following a resolution prohibiting production of any film derogatory to Mexico and the dispatch of a personal representative to Mexico to "negotiate an understanding" (p. 333)-a process which consumed months and produced a formal treaty between the MPPDA and the Mexican government, Hays recognized the international role his leadership would play. "By that decision the organized industry plunged itself into the sphere of foreign relations," he acknowledged (p. 333). Scholar Ruth Vasey placed even greater import on the action, claiming "the MPPDA's handling of the affair formed a milestone in Hollywood's foreign policy by creating a precedent for the negotiation of trade agreement through concessions in representation" (1992, p. 618).
Always looking for the cloud's silver lining, or so it seems, Hays would later write, "To the public, it [the Mexican treaty] was fresh proof that films were something to be reckoned with_Do what we could, however, national feelings continued to disturb the foreign market" (Hays, 1955, p. 334). Later, in the same text, he would lament that the film industry's international popularity became "the sword of Damocles always hanging over our heads" because it necessitated assuaging foreign markets while maintaining "quality and quantity in production" (Hays, p. 507).
As industry ambassador, Hays took every opportunity to enlist soldiers for the cause. At a 1922 dinner introducing him to the industry, Hays addressed an audience of over 1500 industry representatives, including actors and actresses. Mindful of the nationalism that was resurging during the Progressive Era, he appealed to their patriotism and told them:
They were important to their country, as trade no longer followed the flag, it followed the films. If American pictures, shown everywhere, were to reflect credit on and not contempt of the American way of life, the ladies and gentlemen of Hollywood must henceforth regard themselves as ambassadors of Hollywood and of America. (Hays, 1955, pp. 347-348)
Many of these actors and actresses would be out of work in a few years, once sound production eliminated their box office draw. But in the 1920s, Hays could say, "The motion picture knows no barrier of language. We are apt to regard those who do not speak our own tongue as different and inimical. But a few thousand feet of celluloid film in a metal container can be sent to the ends of the earth to speak the language which everyone understands, civilized or savage-the language of pictures" (Hays, 1929, p. 52).[2]
In 1927 remarks to students at Harvard's School of Business, Hays foreshadowed by more than half a century the concept of the transnational marketplace, theories of cultural imperialism[3] and cultural synchronization.[4] Addressing the young men who would later lead this nation through a Second World War and into domestic prosperity, he stressed: "Far beyond this physical or commercial importance of motion pictures is their importance as an influence upon the ideas and ideals, upon the conduct and customs of those who see them_" (Kennedy, 1927, p. 32). In the same speech, part of a series about the role of the motion picture industry in American life, he would add: "Hollywood has become a tremendous influence upon the peoples of all the world_the motion picture is selling goods abroad for every American manufacturer. It will be of interest to you as students of business to give no small thought to the fact that 'Trade follows the film' " (Kennedy, p. 37).
And Hays later wrote, "In fact, the necessity of making pictures that would sell throughout the world kept prodding our companies to produce good pictures with universal appeal. The pictures that did best here were apt to do best abroad. They were entertainment pictures-fiction on the screen-and essentially free from propaganda" (Hays, 1955, p. 509). One cannot dispute the success of American movies abroad. But drawing a correlation between a picture's domestic success as an indicator of its likelihood of foreign success is misleading when one realizes that American pictures were crafted to avoid violation of foreign sensibilities. That they were successful in the domestic market follows from their lack of transgression of the global audience; it does not precede it.
To admit publicly this appeasement of foreign appetites at a time when the American middle class was growing increasingly suspect of corporate America, on the one hand, and immigrant neighbors, on the other, could have resulted in serious questions regarding film industry loyalty. These were questions that wealthy producers, most of whom were of eastern European origin, could ill afford. To deflect these questions, responsibility for decisions regarding representation was conveniently assigned to the box office, which Hays' biographer Raymond Moley termed the "high court with unlimited jurisdiction" which stands in judgment, the court from which there was no appeal (1945, p. 124). To make matters regarding the omniscient box office more believable, its "theater" was the South, and it was on the South's doorstep that most decisions regarding filmed representation of American life were placed.
Despite Moley's claim that the United States offered a "huge, homogeneous [italics added] and comparatively prosperous domestic market" (1945, p. 170), the film industry knew from its inception that the South was a more conservative market than the Northeast, for example. The existence of Jim Crow laws from the 1890s onward effectively segregated and "in most cases, barred from white places of indoor and outdoor commercial amusement" the African Americans who were a large portion of the potential viewing audience (Fuller, 1996, pp. 31-32). In her recent study of the Southern audience, Kathryn Fuller reported that the very construction of most Southern theaters skewed attendance and ironically discriminated against exhibitors attempting to procure first-run films for their small-town theaters.
The main reason was architectural. Rural Southern theaters were largely single-story buildings. As such, they lacked the balcony necessary for relegation of black spectators to accomplish Jim Crow separation from the white populace. Some towns compensated by stringing a clothesline down the center of the theater and placing black curtains on it so that the segregated audience could sit on benches on either side of the curtain without sharing the same viewing space, according to Pulitzer-Prize nominated, African-American author Clifford Taulbert, who shared his recollections during an informal conversation (C. Taulbert, personal communication, February 11, 1996). Other towns, lacking clothesline and curtain perhaps, simply refused admittance to African Americans. In Mississippi, for example, one exhibitor complained that his rates were based on a percentage of the town's census, which included blacks, but that blacks were barred from the theater. The net result was that blacks did not see films at all and whites could not view first-run films (Fuller, 1996, p. 32).
But the schism was not just racial. Fuller reported that, as early as the 1920s, which would be prior to the advent of sound recording, "rural evangelists saw the movies as visually representative of the decadence of the cities" (1996, p. 36). The classic need to protect one's flock from the omnipresent wolves of the big city, as well as a distrust, once again, of those who inhabited those cities-the immigrants-brought the twin protection of patriotism and religious fervor to control the content of domestic films. That responsibility rested largely upon the Studio Relations Committee, forerunner of the Production Code Administration. Explained Vasey, "In effect, it was the role of the Studio Relations Committee to determine what constituted the allowable limits of representation and to scrutinize the output of each studio on behalf of all the others" (1992, p. 622). But the lack of a truly homogeneous audience made the task difficult; the results were not only evident in terms of content which appealed to the lowest common denominator but also in terms of delays in the introduction of technological advances.
Neal Gabler, author of An Empire of Their Own, explained: "[Universal Studio's] audiences were largely rural, and its films were tailored to appeal to them. And while other studios rapidly converted to sound, Universal found itself a latecomer,[5] in part because the rural theaters that showed its films were the last to be rewired" (1988, p. 206).
Fuller added to the discussion:
Not only were the South's patterns of film exhibition and movie attendance distinctly different from those of urban areas, southern states had the lowest density of movie theaters of any other region during the silent film era. As late as 1930, Georgia had only one-third as many movie theater seats per thousand people as any state outside the region. Many Southerners, especially small-town and rural residents of the Deep South, were less exposed to movie shows than other Americans in the silent film era: The greater physical isolation and lower economic status of many rural Southerners, compared with those of their midwestern counterparts, kept many away from the movies. (1996, p. 30)
The film industry's fallback position that the Southern box office would kill some movies even if the story lines did pass review boards was a convenient subterfuge of protecting dominant domestic cultural values even though foreign economic markets were the larger concern. The international scope of American movie distribution clearly was becoming larger than one individual could administer on a case-by-case basis.
In the industry's early years, Will Hays handled many of the international concerns on an individual basis, but by the end of the 1920s, according to Vasey, "the MPPDA was managing to address recurrent public relations problems, including its relations with a foreign market, in a relatively systematic way" (1992, pp. 620-621). Governmental interaction increased, not just in the area of content control but also in the area of diplomatic relations:
Thoughtful administrators of the great nations of the world are coming more and more to realize the possibilities of the motion pictures and are lending their aid to it in important ways. Our own government is cooperating closely, and we are ourselves determined that at every opportunity a true portrayal of American life and ideals shall be given to the world and that to the nationals of all countries shall go a true picture of the lives of the nationals of all others. (Hays, 1927, pp. 52-53)
In the same article, Hays related with pride some background on the making of The Eternal City -background which likely created difficulty for him as the pre-World War II isolationist years approached. To illustrate the concept of seeking the good will of foreign powers, he explained how willing the Italian ambassador-Signor Caetani, "a most distinguished man, the richest man in Italy, a graduate of Columbia University who examined mines in this country, then went back to march beside Mussolini in a black shirt in Rome"-was to collaborate on a scenario which Hays would later label "thoroughly sympathetic and pleasing to Italy and a true story of things as they are" (Hays, 1929, p. 53). Again, the assurance that truth could have only one representation is a recurring theme in Hays' remarks and an unwitting affirmation of Karl Marx's comments on ruling classes and ruling ideology introduced earlier in this study.
The 1927 creation of a Studio Relation Committee, which could communicate with industry personnel pre-production, was part of this "systematic effort to address recurrent public relations problems" as was the Open Door public relations policy. As Hays shared in the article written for A Century of Industrial Progress, "A Studio Committee was organized, with a representative from every studio responsible for what goes into pictures. In advance of production expert advice is asked, from our State Department, from ambassadors from foreign countries" (Hays, 1929, p. 527.)
Pressure brought to bear by New York financiers the same year also was a primary motivator of the Studio Relations Committee's systematic approach. With the advent of sound, revising a film post-production was too expensive a proposition for most studios, so adhering to the "Don'ts and Be Carefuls" was an economic necessity-it was, at least, until the Depression and accompanying declines in box office revenue forced filmmakers to become more "daring" (Koppes & Black, 1987, p. 13).
The time period between 1930 and 1945 saw tremendous increases in movie attendance. Various estimates place the movies' popularity in the realm of 80 million viewers per week, a figure representing one-half to two-thirds of the United States' population during that time period. Approximately 83 cents of every American dollar spent on recreation was spent on the movies (Ray, 1985, pp. 25-26). A sound track had become the expectation rather than the exception, and with it, the vagaries of culture and politics began to intersect in a way that even the diplomatic Will Hays could not gloss over.
Some problems were fairly easy to resolve. When the industry first set its sights on the South American market, the problem of the number of Spanish dialects became apparent. What was colloquial in Venezuela, for example, might be almost unintelligible in Bolivia. Margaret Thorp, author of America at the Movies (1939), explained the solution: "If the scenes are set in the United States, it has been discovered, nobody worries; the United States is so extraordinary a country to the South American mind that anything which happens there is credible_" (pp. 116-117).
It was this willingness to believe that just about anything could happen in the States, coupled with the film industry's extreme economic sensitivity to the sensibilities of the foreign market, that may have helped to create the prototypical Hollywood villain as a white male. Ruth Vasey noted, "Ironically, therefore, the ethnic heterogeneity of Hollywood audience, both at home and abroad, encouraged the increasing homogeneity of the screen's cast of characters" (1992, p. 624). Hearkening to the Mexican government's 1922 protest over the depictions of its citizenry and entanglements with the French in 1928, America became not only the land of opportunity but the land of plausibility. The mythical homogeneous audience had created a homogenous and predictable screen.
The year 1934 was a turning point for Hollywood. New York financiers had much at stake when nationwide boycotts began to form against the MPPDA and its member theaters. But their concern was really of a more global nature since no studio could afford to lose its foreign market revenue. Therefore, films remained entertainment, but world affairs began to push Will Hays and the MPPDA toward films that took a stand on social and political issues. Again, however, it was economics that prompted the departure from the safe world of illusion.
Gabler reported that even the Nazi threat did not receive a high profile in the industry until it became an economic threat. He related the following commentary between Jewish screenwriters:
Maurice Rapf, "You have to face the fact that they [the motion picture industry] began to have a lot more zeal about the Nazis when the Nazis closed down distribution offices in Germany, which they did by about 1934." "It was a matter of business," Hy Kaft agreed. "The motion picture companies had large interests in Europe for distribution of their pictures. They tried to hold on as long as possible and Warner Brothers only closed its German office when a band of Nazi thugs chased and murdered its representative there, a Jew named Joe Kauffman. (1988, pp. 341-342)
The issue of global censorship was not suppressed from the American public in the popular press. Douglas W. Churchill, Hollywood correspondent for The New York Times, examined the role of foreign influence in the motion picture industry in an article aptly titled, "Hollywood's Censor Is All the World: The Cinema Capital, in Marketing Its Films, Must Consider Foreign Sensibilities" (1936, March 29). Writing as a film correspondent rather than as an academic, Churchill nonetheless observed, "So closely are the wheels of international trade, politics, manipulation and influence enmeshed in foreign parts that American producers are as subject to the dictation of French, British and Italian censors as they would be if their headquarters were in Paris, London or Rome." But Churchill accepted this as a positive influence on motion picture content in that fear of foreign censorship has taught Hollywood "what it can make successfully and with least chance of interference," citing the popularity of musical, biographies and historical subjects, "provided they raise no current issues."
The impetus for Churchill's article was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and MPPDA's suppression of the Sinclair Lewis novel It Can't Happen Here (1935). Seizing upon the title, Lewis accused Louis B. Mayer and Will Hays of acting at the behest of Hitler and Mussolini; he added, "Apparently, it can happen here." By estimating the likely financial loss to MGM had the film been made and subsequently banned in Germany, Italy, their allies, and England (which barred films about political unrest), Churchill termed the Mayer-Hays decision one that recognized production of It Can't Happen Here would be "carrying idealism and adherence to a principle too far. The film industry is a business, not a crusade."
What is intriguing about Churchill's article is that discussion of this topic was not framed in nationalistic terms, despite its 1936 publication. Instead, reference was made to "sensibilities" and "films which hurt their neighbors' feelings" as though a nation could gauge with certainty the reaction of another nation based upon such abstract assessments as "feelings." Other examples of anthropomorphism are found in Churchill's ascribing of "jealousy" to a nation: "Other nations are bound to be jealous of the huge salaries and huge profits of which they read in every Hollywood journal_." These observations notwithstanding, Churchill placed part of the blame for "censorship agitation" on Hollywood (also anthropomorphized) and its "ignorance of life in other lands," an interesting commentary about an industry which prided itself on insider information, often supplied by government operatives in foreign countries.
Throughout these critical years, the film industry maintained close ties with the federal government. Moley credited the Department of Commerce as a critical source of information for American film companies:
These men sent in reports which included much information useful to the foreign departments of the American companies. They also described local situations which might have a bearing on the success or failure of American pictures. Indirectly and informally they were often able to give support to the position of American interests abroad. (1945, p. 176)
The reader must remember that this statement was filtered through the cultural and political lenses of Raymond Moley, a New Dealer in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's think tank who later jumped political ship in favor of alignment with large corporate interests such as those of the MPPDA.
But relationships between the new Democratic administration and the Republican-headed MPPDA were not as smooth as they had once been, despite frequent friendly correspondence between their respective leaders. Federal antitrust legislation to dismantle the industry's vertical integration had been filed the same year, which, according to Vasey, was as significant a determinant of the industry's rules of representation as was the 1939 beginning of World War II in Europe. She said, "The evolution of a consistent mode of treatment had depended upon the relatively stable framework provided by the cooperative operation of large, vertically integrated companies" (1992, p. 638). When the stasis of that framework was disrupted by foreign war and domestic litigation, then corresponding "transformations, displacements, obfuscations, and ameliorations on the screens of the world" were the result (1992, p. 639).
Hays also cited 1938 as a pivotal year for the film industry, noting that the United States government "sent us an explicit warning" regarding to foreign market and "problems of rising nationalism, of quotas, discrimination, exchange restrictions and tariff barriers" (1955, p. 490). One solution was to look southward rather than to Europe, and the Hays Office did just that, seeking to enlarge the South American market for the motion picture industry to counteract the loss of what would soon be known as Axis powers in Europe (Thorp, 1939, pp. 163-164).
Ian Jarvie's Hollywood's Overseas Campaign: The North Atlantic Movie Trade 1920-1950 looked chronologically at the Canadian and British film markets to determine why their efforts to withstand the onslaught of American mass culture were failures. He credited the MPPDA's vertical integration and, using primary sources from industry and government, built a strong case that protection of the global market was always the goal of the MPPDA. Citing "recurrent concerns" of early twentieth-century overseas restrictions on American film, foreign efforts to market their products over those of American firms, and lack of organization among American industry, film companies and federal government (Jarvie, 1992, p. 279), he believed that these factors, rather than fear of federal government censorship, were the real reasons that the MPPDA was created. Like Vasey, he saw the 1938 antitrust action in dire terms, calling it "the most severe government challenge the industry had yet faced" (Jarvie, 1992, p. 349).
With war looming, Hays tried to keep the MPPDA from running afoul of the Neutrality Act, but several prominent members of the MPPDA were vociferously urging America, through choice of film production and public remarks, to enter the fray. Hays had good reason to favor neutrality. According to his memoirs, prior to the war American films had reached one-eighth of the human population (Hays, 1955, p. 557). Given his propensity to quote figures without citing or proving support, one cannot be sure of the accuracy of these figures, but the record supports a staggering worldwide viewership. As Axis powers strengthened their hold in Europe and Asia, these markets virtually disappeared and their debts became uncollectable. Holding on to the largest foreign market, Great Britain, which exercised strict censorship through its 1927 Cinematograph Film Act, reaffirmed in 1938, became paramount.
Ian Jarvie's 1992 study of the North Atlantic movie trade is without equal in its rigorous study of the politics and economics which guided development of American film exhibition in Canada and Great Britain. To attempt to find flaw in his collection of data or the conclusions he skillfully drew would be presumptuous in the scope of a dissertation. What would enrich such a study, however, by placing a human face within its mountainous terrain, would be the addition of a companion volume of anecdotes about specific movies which could demonstrate how American filmmakers altered content specifically to meet the demands of the British market. Many texts detail censorship efforts.[6]_ Few, however, discuss these efforts as economic measures designed to appease global markets. None to this writer's knowledge specifically looks at the treatment of one racial or ethnic group with regard to global economics as the agent of representation. For purposes of this study, generalized examples of the treatment of the African American will be used.
How Great Britain came to be such an important part of the motion picture industry's foreign market is easily explained by two factors. One factor, widely recognized, is the sheer geographic magnitude of its colonial empire. The second, which receives little attention, involves the transition from silent movies to "talkies."
Even silent movies required adaptation of their filmed subtitles when exported worldwide. The exception, of course, was export to Great Britain and its colonies, where reading knowledge on English was an assumed skill on the part of film editors. When sound was added, the problem became even more apparent and Great Britain, by extension, an even more valuable customer because films could be prepared for British distribution without the expense of sound dubbing, provided that the content of the film was acceptable to the British Board of Film Censors. This meant, according to Loren Miller, who cited "unwritten, but iron clad rules in the movie industry," that "films in which racial relationships are depicted show the white man as the overlord" (1934, p. 395). He placed the argument in economic terms as well: "One important factor in the preservation of the status quo is the continued subordination of the Negro people. White superiority has cash value to them" (1934, p. 397).
An interesting tangent regarding the impact of sound dubbing is provided in a 1995 Journal of Communication article by Muhlenberg College professor Marsha Seifert. She observed that, in addition to being visually excluded whenever possible, African Americans also suffered the double indignity of being dubbed when present because "their natural [own] voices and singing styles might also mark their ethnicity and therefore might limit the market for the film and sound track sales. Therefore, the sound dubbing helped the image pass into the white market for movie musicals and movie sound tracks" (p. 60).
The second factor, the effect of the extent of Great Britain's colonial empire, is more easily and frequently cited, although not necessarily in the same context as treatment of African Americans. Enlisting the sympathies of African Americans for support of war efforts was not easy, claimed Stuart Ewen, because racism was omnipresent in American society. George Creel, who organized the domestic Committee on Public Information prior to World War I, was informed that African Americans could not be assumed to be swayed by Four-Minute Men speeches and would require separate handling, a reaction Ewen attributed to the difficulty of "swallow[ing] the liberal rhetoric of the Committee on Public Information while they [African Americans] were burdened by entrenched patterns of racism" (Ewen, 1996, p. 118). Those patterns of racism were accomplished in the motion picture industry through both inclusion and exclusion.
Thomas Cripps, author of Slow Fade to Black and one of the first scholars to trace the history of African-American representation in the movies, claimed, "Women and children found easier access to white movies because American racial lore found black women benign, unthreatening, and earth-mother wise, and black children prepubescent boon companions" (1977, p. 135). African-American males, however, did not fare as well, subject to the stereotypes of inflated libido and deflated intelligence. Contemporary critic Lea Jacobs, whose Wages of Sin examined representations of sex and gender, documented correspondence between the MPPDA and Harold Hurley of Paramount's legal department which questioned whether the character of Helen (Marlene Dietrich) in the 1932 Blonde Venus should be permitted to perform for African Americans in a Harlem night club: "Mr. Hurley seems to share our feeling that this would be questionable, especially in Southern States where such equity is frowned upon" (as cited in Jacobs, 1991, p. 89).
As indicated, neither Great Britain nor other members of the MPPDA's foreign market were cited as the reason for this censorship. The dominant theme in the literature is that of the powerful Southern box office, a theme attributed earlier in this chapter to a conscious effort to divert concern about the foreign market because of isolationist tendencies in this county. As such, the Southern market resurfaces continually in articles discussing racial representation. The Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, in an attempt to explain why roles outside of stereotypes were not widely available, even to the likes of Paul Robeson and Ether Watters, stated,
Ignorance on the part of film producers and fear of offending white Southerners were the main reason for this treatment. After 1940, patriotic motives, stimulated by the growing war spirit, as well as definite pressure from the federal government, moved Hollywood to treat Negroes a little more favorably in the movies. (1944, p. 988)
And Hollywood Goes to War, echoed this sentiment:
Wanting to protect the box office from southern film censors, Hollywood adopted the region's white supremacist view, typified by the idealized plantation society in Gone With the Wind. Blacks had been relegated to the most degrading stereotypes, as represented by Stepin Fetchit and worse. (Koppes & Black, 1987, p. 85)
The movie trade press also embraced the stereotypes, inserting pointless articles about African-American actors and writing their remarks in dialect for the purported amusement of readers.[7]_
Vasey, however, widened the global focus of such stereotypes: "Just as the depiction of race relations in the United States could only take place within limits determined by the southern American states, the industry was bound to tacit, if not active, compliance with British notions of global white supremacy" (1992, p. 629). But surprisingly, the scholar who best addressed this issue was not a contemporary of Vasey's but of the subjects of her inquiry. Without advantage of hindsight or of access to recently opened archives, Margaret Thorp, a sociologist, was most perceptive in her 1939 assessment of the role of European censors in influencing film content. In addition, she touched upon several topics not duplicated in other, later studies: American admiration of British ideals and an undeveloped commentary on construction of "escape personalities."
Of British ideals, she enumerated:
Loyalty as the supreme virtue no matter to what you are loyal, courage, hard work, a creed in which noblesse oblige is the most intellectual conception; those ideas are easier to grasp and very much easier to dramatize on the screen than social responsibility, the relation of the individual to the state, the necessity for a pacifist to fight tyranny, the nature of democracy, and the similar problems with which intellectuals want the movies to deal.
The propaganda problem to be decided here is a question of date: In just what period are the eighty-five million American moviegoers living?_The intellectuals, living at the uttermost point of the present, consider it one of the functions of art and their artists to point the way to the future_.The producers_guess at the period in which the majority of the eighty-five million are living is about 1854. They do not actually express it, of course, in quite such concrete terms but obviously what they think their public believes in are the social ideals of the British Empire at the time of the Crimean War. (Thorpe, 1939, pp. 171-172)
Thorp's observations about the role of the "screen negro," despite their length, also deserve reproduction because of their implications for L‚vi-Strauss and Freudian analysis:
Then there is the case of the screen negro. The eighty-five million [Americans who attended movies weekly just prior to World War II) are primarily white and no white American, the industry maintains, would ever make his escape personality black. 'Stardom,' Terry Ramsaye wrote in the Motion Picture Herald (8th July 1939) is a job of vicarious attainment for the customers. The starring player becomes the agent-in-adventure for the box-office customer. The spectator tends to identify himself with the glamorous and triumphant player_Inevitably the motion picture tends to place the negro in the screen drama in the same relation as that which he occupies in the nation's social and economic picture. In other words, the screen public takes the negro as the average of 135,000,000 of him_The multitude can chuckle at Step'n Fetchit and laugh with Rochester, but they will woo and win with the Gables, the Taylors, and the Coopers. That's 'the major responsibility'-the white actor's burden. The producer is ready to protect the negro and avoid stirring race relations by keeping off the screen such villainous negroes as appeared in Griffith's Birth of a Nation, but the best he thinks he can do beyond that is to make the negro so amusing and agreeable that an audience is always pleased at the appearance of a black face. (1939, p. 83)
Further response to Thorp's assessments of either or both of these topics deserves additional investigation beyond the parameters of this dissertation. Writing on the eve of World War II, however, she revealed an unusual perspective not privileged by retrospection.
Returning to a brief history of the MPPDA and events leading to the United States' entrance into World War II, a writer would be remiss to ignore Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, who would father an American president and was a key figure in this struggle to appease the British film market. Jarvie's work provided meticulous record of the official role Kennedy filled in helping the MPPDA negotiate agreements with the British government's censors, whose main concern was the drain on the British economy created by the flow of as much as $30 million annually to American film companies. But Jarvie did not address a question of Kennedy's anti-Semitism raised by other scholars; he confined himself instead to matters of State Department and trade association records. Neal Gabler, however, credited Kennedy with 1940 promotion of a policy of neutrality bordering on intimidation, even toward Great Britain, about which he reminded industry representatives that, while Britain had not yet lost the war, it had not won it either. His remarks were in response to the Warner Studio's public offer to Roosevelt to assist in the war effort however possible. About this, American film hero Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. wrote Roosevelt: "[Jews] should stop making anti-Nazi pictures or using the film medium to promote or show sympathy to the cause of the 'democracies' versus the 'dictators'." Screenwriter Ben Hecht said, "As a result of Kennedy's cry for silence, all of Hollywood's top Jews went around with their grief hidden like a Jewish fox under their gentile vests" (Gabler, 1988, p. 344).
Many excellent articles and books chronicle Hollywood's entrance into World War II, including the aborted 1941 Senate hearings led by Burton Wheeler and Gerald Nye. The world became smaller for the MPPDA during and after World War II. Two years before Hays' 1945 retirement, the MPPDA's Foreign Department was renamed its International Department. Recalled Hays:
The world was moving fast during these years, and we wanted to emphasize the fact that motion pictures had become a vital, almost universal, international medium of communication, and that no nation was "foreign" to their sphere of influence.
The interest of the MPPDA in international relations was simply a continuation of an interest already keenly felt in the industry before 1922. Among most of America's industrial enterprises, the 'foreign" or export side is a comparatively minor factor in relation to gross income; export often becomes merely an added "department." But not so with motion pictures. Aside from the amazing fact that from 35 to 40 per cent of the industry's income is normally derived from foreign sources, the global ramifications of the screen make foreign relations a vital and integral part of the business. (Hays, 1955, p. 505)
For the purposes of this study on the global box office, however, the need to pursue the chronology ends with the United States' entrance into the war following Pearl Harbor. After this point, global markets took a back seat to survival of democracy. Unpopular, anti-Nazi positions became the popular expectation as the Office of War Information (OWI) enlisted the Hollywood studios in a massive propaganda campaign designed to avoid stereotypes and make the war "a people's war" with no evidence of class struggle (Koppes & Black, 1987, p. 67). The 1942 OWI guidebook provided addressed racial content within films; Variety magazine contrasted the racism of the enemy with the "all for one and one for all" mentality of Americans. It was a myth, of course, to think that American racism would disappear simply because a common threat had loomed, but the first step had been taken. Government and industry recognized the contradiction of fighting Aryan ideals abroad while exercising them at home. As the cartoon character Pogo offered, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
REFERENCES
Bernays, E. (1923). Crystallizing public opinion. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Campbell, E. (1981). The celluloid South: Hollywood and the Southern myth. Knoxville, Tennessee: The University of Tennessee Press.
Churchill, D. (1936, March 29). Hollywood's censor is all the world. The New York Times.
Cripps, T. (1977). Slow fade to black: The Negro in American film, 1900-1942. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ewen, S. (1996). PR: A social history of spin. New York; HarperCollins.
Fuller, K. (1996). At the picture show: Small-town audiences and the creation of movie fan culture. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.
Gabler, N. ( 1988). An empire of their own: How the Jews invented Hollywood. New York: Crown Publishers.
Hays, W. (1927) Supervision from within. In J. Kennedy (ed.), The story of the films (pp. 29-54). New York: A.W. Shaw Company.
Hays, W. (1955) The memoirs of Will H. Hays. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc.
Jacobs, L. (1991). The wages of sin: Censorship and the fallen woman film. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Jarvie, I. (1992). Hollywood's overseas campaign: The North Atlantic movie trade, 1920-1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Koppes, C. & Black, G. (1987). Hollywood goes to war: How politics, profits, and propaganda shaped world war II movies. New York: The Free Press.
Miller, R.M. (Ed.) (1978). Ethnic images in American film and television. Philadelphia: The Balch Institute.
Moley, R. (1945). The Hays office. New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Myrdal, G. (1944). An American dilemma: The Negro problem and modern democracy. USA: Harper and Row.
Ray, R. (1985). A certain tendency of the Hollywood cinema, 1930-1980. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Siefert, M. (1995). Image/music/voice: Song dubbing in hollywood musicals. Journal of Communication. 45 (2). 44-63.
Thorp, M. (1939). America at the movies. USA: Yale University Press.
Vasey, R. (1992). Foreign parts: Hollywood's global distribution and the representation of ethnicity. American Quarterly. 44 (4). 617-642.
The Will Hays papers (1922-1945). Cinema history microfilm series [Machine-readable data file]. University Publications of America.
PERSONAL COMMUNICATIONS
Taulbert, C. [Personal interview, February 11, 1997]
[1] This concept states that "the unity of a structured whole" may consist of various and distinct determinants "fixed in the last instance by the level or instance of the economy" (quoted in Ray, 1985, p. 9).
[2] Cultural anthropologists must have shaken their heads in disbelief at the naivet‚ of Hays' remarks, but he continued to espouse the peace-making and culture-homogenizing capacities of the motion picture until America teetered on the brink of World War II.
[3] The tendency for practices of a dominant, ruling culture to displace native, internal practices.
[4] A development theory which includes cultural imperialism as a subset but suggests that an imperialistic relationship is not a requirement, that cultures can adopt the practices of other cultures through a disproportionate flow of information in one direction.
[5] Because Universal made almost half its profits in the foreign market (Gabler, 1988, p. 207), a figure significantly higher than those of other studios, it had added reason not to rush to sound.
[6] _ See Richard S. Randall's Censorship of the Movies (1968); Gerald Gardner's The Censorship Papers (1987); Leonard Leff & Jerold Simmons' The Dame in the Kimono (1990) as examples.
[7] _ See Appendix C "Mr. Fetchit in Kansas City" (Variety, 1935, February 24) for an example of the double entendre wrapped in dialect to describe Fetchit's solution to America's race problem.