Cinema: Movies for Armies

Last week, Hollywood brayed happily as it contemplated its first assignment in the colossal epic of national defense. Announced by the War Department was a $200,000 allotment for Hollywood-made training films—ten-minute shorts to educate doughboys on how to greet an officer, how to don a gas mask, how to load a howitzer, other essentials of soldiering. Picking up its cue like a trooper, the industry called out its restless, time-marking, six-month-old Motion Picture Defense Committee, headed by Paramount Vice President Y. Frank Freeman.

The Army wants from Hollywood within a year 100 reels, for which it may eventually spend up to $5,000,000. Chairman Freeman drafted kinetic little Darryl Zanuck to boss production, Frank Capra to direct directors, Edward Arnold to handle actors, Sheridan Gibney to watch writers, Fox’s Alfred Newman to superintend music. Under this imposing superstructure, whose services go free, the industry’s younger, less expensive workmen will labor for pay in cooperation with the Army’s Signal Corps to turn out the product.

It is all a strictly non-profit enterprise, said Hollywood; the films are to be distributed free for exhibition in the movie theatres to be built at all training camps. Major Nathan Levinson of the Signal Corps Reserve put it more bluntly, growled: “Nobody’s going to make a dime out of this, and if they think they are, they’d better pull their horns in right now.”