SENSE AND CENSORSHIP

On the ballot to be voted November seventh, together with a list of candidates, will appear four referendum questions. "Referendum Question No. 3" is on the censorship of moving pictures.

Since the World War the question of censorship has been in the air. It began with governmental supervision of the mails, to be followed by unofficial censorship of books, of plays, and recently of the moving pictures. Of them all, none, even that of the "movies", has been effective or even useful, because none can accomplish its purpose.

The moving picture standards, at present, are very low. Everyone grants that; most excuse it on the grounds of war conditions and post-war hysteria. The "movies" have not returned to "normalcy". For the last three years, the average level of production has not been much higher than the earliest days, when a picture showing action, mere movements of a man walking, was novel enough to succeed. The pictures of today, most of them, are in story and development hardly more advanced than the early cowboy and Indian stories, where the only difference in plots all of a pattern, the prairie schooner, the attack by Indians, and the rescue by the cowboys and by soldiers from the fort.--was the change in costume worn by the principals. Plots of today are inane and get nowhere; but how the censorship can help raise the level is difficult to see.

According to statistics in an article in Collier's Weekly, the American public has paid $100,000,000 less this year to see "movies" than they did the year previous. Theatre, concert, and various patronage in this period has increased.

The conclusion is obvious. People are beginning to find a real dissatisfaction with the predigested syrups that the moving pictures have been feeding them without a let-up. In this discovery, lies the only real remedy. Censorship by a few cannot help being prejudiced and narrowed by environment; but a wholesale spontaneous boycott of the "movies" by the people en masse,--and at present 20,000,000 attend the "pictures" in one week,--will bring up the level of production as nothing else can. The producers can take their choice of cutting out the usual aimless bromides, and bringing up the average to the standard now set by a few brilliant exceptions, or of going out of business entirely. Censorship will be hopelessly inadequate; the only effective substitute is now being applied by the huge moving picture public, on a massive, slow-but-sure scale.