WILL HAYS SEES NEED OF PUBLIC SUPPORT IN PRODUCTION OF FILMS

Mr. Hays is now President of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, following his resignation from President Harding's cabinet last March. He has long been prominent as a constructive factor in the Republican party, having been Chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1918 to 1921.

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More and more men are being employed in the great business of motion pictures. Consider, for instance, the physical bulk of the motion picture industry in Los Angeles County; the third largest industry in that County is food production, with a weekly payroll in the neighborhood of a quarter million dollars; the second largest industry is petroleum, having a payroll a little larger than a third of a million; surpassing both of these in size is motion pictures with a combined weekly payroll, I am told, approaching a half million dollars. Of course this makes the motion picture industry of the very first importance commercially and places upon the industry a definite responsibility in the commercial and civic life of that section. I intend to leave nothing in my power undone to make certain that the industry discharges its duty in maintaining a model industrial community not only with regard to its own activities but in its relations to the splendid municipalities of which it is a part. The fact is that working conditions in the industry are now very good; I want that spirit to continue and to become increasingly productive of the very best relationship between producers themselves, between producers and employees, between the employees themselves, and finally between the coalesced industry and the public. I am looking forward to the fullest use of all the approved and recognized best methods in industrial community life with adequate facilities for housing, recreation, and so forth.

Is Social and Educational Factor

I look upon the motion picture as vastly more than a corner amusement device. It has a far greater significance than that. The following is a statement I have just dictated for the American Legion concerning Education Week.

"Countless years ago men began to utter disciplined sounds--to talk; long afterwards they began to fashion crude figures on stone or leather or papyrus--to write. The printing press came and added permanence to the thought of the moment. The typewriter followed--and the phonograph--and the camera. Now to photography, motion has been added. Already in the few short years of their existence they have made possible advantages that from our close viewpoint are almost incalculable. The actual scenes of the signing of the Magna Carta or of the landing of Christopher Columbus, or of the winter at Valley Forge are gone for all time; but every great event taking place now or hereafter will be preserved for succeeding generations exactly as it happened. Great masterpieces of literature, coming upon the screen are securing for themselves a clientele which the printed word has never given them. In our own neighborhoods at a trifling expense any of us may be carried to polar or equatorial regions where only explorers heretofore have penetrated. The humblest backwoodsman whose vision might otherwise not have gone beyond his country now may watch the march of events in distant hemispheres pass by the door.

We must be judged not by our prophecies or promises, but by our performances and our deliveries. It seems to me that the new productions now reaching the screen--some of which have been a year or more in the making--do show the results of what we have been trying to do. Not every picture will be flawless: not every one will please everybody, but the proportion of high grade pictures is definitely increasing: it will increase still more rapidly as the public awakens, as it is awakening, to the necessity of giving definite, affirmative, constructive support to those productions which do deserve it.