The Birmingham age-herald., 1909-05-02
CENSORSHIP FUR
 NEW YORK SHOWS Clean Entertainment for 250,-
 GOO People IN THE BIG METROPOLIS This Number Daily Patronizes the Moving Picture Theatres-Class
 of Shows to Be Raised
 Over Country.
IN THE BIG METROPOLIS
By JOHN COLLIER, Member Board of Censorship.

(ENclusiYe Service the Survey Press Blu
 reaW.
 There are all kinds and kinds of dram atic censorship! If MT Frohman and Mr. Belasco and Messrs. Klaw & Erlanger got together" and agreed on a minimum standard of dramatic purity and proceeded to enforce their standard on the play wrights who wrote their plays. this would not be called a censorship. but a mutual protective society. Actually they don't need to do this, because Messrs. Froh- man and Belasco and the other theatrical , syndicates have their plays written to order in large measure, and so are quite responsible for what is seen in their the atres.
 New York has a censorship It governs the 400 moving picture theatres of the metropolis with a strong hand, yet it has no authority in law. It came about like the fanciful case of Frohman and Belaseo. and this is the story:
 Moving pictures are running riot through New York, as through the rest of America. In ten years they have grown from nothing to thousands. New York $ moving picture theatres are crowded with i 250,000 people on week days and a half a million on Sundays, and third of these are children. No form of cheap theatrical amusement has proved able to compete with moving pictures in the crowded dis tricts, and the "nickelodeon" has become neighborhood institution and is more good than bad already, at that. Social workers who have studied the conditions believe that the mechanical theatre has an immense future and a great potential ity for good.
 But the lightning express growth of moving pictures has brought varied evils in its train. They thronged into tene- ment houses and into any vacant store, and they employ a highly infiammable material in the celluloid film through which the picture is projected, there was obvious danger from fire. Sanitary re- quirements were dsregarded police pro- tection was ignored and the programmes themselves were pretty much business of catch-as- catch-can.
 Then suddenly public opinion awoke, and this was not only true of New York, but of all the country. Non-regula- tion became regulation rendered excessive through excessive zeal. The cheap thea tres of>t.A old type-the vaudeville and the melodrama houses, and the syndi- cates that supply the one-night stands became aware that the moving picture, through competition. was threatening their very existence, and they reused themselves to a lively opposition to the moving picture, in press and legislature. And almost over night, in New York, the moving picture business, for years a ''Klondike' of commercial profit, found itself threatened with extinction. This is a matter of six months past; and in that time more than 100 shows have been closed by the action of local authorities.
 So the "nfckelodeons" learned what many bigger businesses have learned in late years, that public opinion is a dan gerous thing when aroused. And they hurried to placate public opinion. Out of this came the censorship; but to ex- plain the censorship other facts must be given.
 In the mushroom growth of the moving picture, not only in America, but through out the world, the emphasis has been laid rather on quantity than on quality of programme. Great factories make the pictures and they are scattered all the way from Chicago to Copenhagen, but all produce for the humblest "nickelodeon' in the humblest quarters of the Ghetto. For-separated from tffe public demand. the factories have had merely to infer the demand, and they have fallen vic tims to common if mistaken idea. That idea is, that the public craves low forms of entertainment; vulgarity and sensation aliSm. All along the factories have pro- duced a proportion of good pictures sur priSing in view of the general condition of the theatre, moral and artistic; but all along there has been a sprinkling of pie lures vulgar bloody and offensive in va rious ways, and this sprinkling has given a bad odor to the business As for the have been unorganized and have had to take what they could get; and to cap the climax the manufacturers have formed a combine which has resulted in forcing the theatres to take virtually all that one or the other faction of manufacturers has seen fit to produce. These factions are the Motion Picture Patents company and the Independent Manufacturers, and they have split the trade into sections and each other. This circumstance has enslaved the theatres, and has enslaved the public taste. It is the reverse of Frohmans and Belasco's situation. The playwrights dom- mate the theatrical managers completely.
 So the theatres in New York have or ganized to defend themselves against the playwright. The result is the moving pie ture censorship.
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