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A Word from the Censor
By Eakle Phares
The photoplay writer who has received only rejections for his "realistic" scenarios, or his scripts telling a story tinged with "realism," may learn something of a way to dodge rejections from the Censors. Dr. Ellis P. Oberholtzer, of the Pennsylvania State Board of Motion Picture Censors, when interviewed by a Pittsburgh GazetteTimes reporter, mentioned a few of the reasons why the Board had to condemn scripts — and naturally those which would be condemned by them would hardly pass the script reader.
"When it is possible, we always have regard for the art in a film, if it has any art in it, and for the story which the writer and the stage director are trying to tell. But some things are impossible. We are constantly condemning or making cut-outs in white slave and drug pictures. Warden McKenty of the Eastern Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, recently said that moving pictures brought more men into his prison than any other influence. He can prove it by the statements of the men themselves. We try to take out of pictures everything which can give an onlooker a hint or suggestion as to the method of committing a crime. Then we also eliminate grewsome and horrible scenes. "
Again: "Lately, in talking to some of our inspectors, who see films constantly in our projection rooms, I said that one-half of the pictures seemed to be under the old dime-novel influence. They thought this estimate was too small. Just recently we have ordered out of pictures scenes showing men strapped to logs to be minced up in moving saw mills, tied to railroad irons in front of moving trains, held in traps for wolves to devour, or to be stung by serpents, buried alive, etc. Do any of us know ladies who keep revolvers in their boudoir table drawers, or carry pistols and knives abroad in their blouses for instant use, or men who strike each other and wrestle on the floor? I fancy not. Yet disturbance and violence are everywhere in film. We have something in our Rules and Standards about creating a 'false glamour' and setting up 'false standards of conduct.' What numbers of pictures violate this rule!"
This last paragraph, while being strict in the sense that it places another limitation on the imagination of photoplaywrights, is food for thought for the photoplaywright who would sell the scripts he writes. We could answer Dr. Oberholtzer by saying that no one knew such a person as Margot in Maupassant's "Margot's Tapers," but no one doubts that such a person might have existed. Dr. Oberholtzer forgets that the photoplaywright, as well as the fiction writer, is entitled to exaggerate his conditions. Pictures as well as stories would become " dry" if they were built only on things and incidents which we know. Our own scope of friends and adventures is narrow, it is the dreamer