Cinema: Codist Lowell

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Last week Harvard's famed President Emeritus Abbott Lawrence Lowell found himself flanked in the news by Comedians Marie Dressier and Eddie Cantor. All three had been added to the board of ten producers and distributors whose duty it is to enforce the cinema code when it goes into effect this week. The choice of Marie Dressier and Eddie Cantor to represent the industry's performers was easy to understand. Comedian Dressier is a White House intimate of the Roosevelt family. Comedian Cantor visited Warm Springs last fortnight as representative of Hollywood's newly-formed Actors' Guild. More startling was the appointment of prim little Dr. Lowell. His job will be to superintend the efforts of the Hays organization to regulate the industry's moral flavor from within.

Dr. Lowell's interest in the cinema started last summer when he was chosen to succeed Princeton's late John Grier Hibben as chairman of the Motion Picture Research Council, which attempts to elevate the moral tone of the cinema industry. Last month, his name popped into Variety for the first time when he requested President Roosevelt to include in the cinema code a provision against "block-booking," whereby producers require exhibitors to take pictures by groups instead of singly. Block-booking is the most familiar alibi of exhibitors who show morally deleterious films. Their real reason for disliking block-booking is that it compels them to take pictures on which they cannot make money. In the squabbles that preceded the signing of the code, Dr. Lowell and his allies among the exhibitors were unsuccessful. The code contains tentative sections forbidding "star-raiding," "excessive" salaries to actors, but not one word on block-booking.