Cinema: Supply & Demand

"Isn't it true," complained Writer-Director Joseph (A Letter to Three Wives) Mankiewicz, "that a real-estate operator whose chief concern should be taking gum off carpets and checking adolescent love-making in the balcony—isn't it true that this man is in control [of] ... the motion-picture industry?"

With 17 others who work in the movies or feel strongly about them. Mankiewicz was sounding off on his favorite subject. The sounding board: LIFE'S Round Table on Hollywood. For 2½ days at San Bernardino, Calif., some 100,000 words flew around the table between scholars, actors, technicians, a critic, a moviegoer, and some of the best U.S. moviemaking talent: 20th Century-Fox's Mankiewicz, M-G-M Production Chief Dore Senary, Warner's Jerry Wald, Independents John Huston, Hal B. Wallis and Robert Rossen.

In its current issue, LIFE reports on the ideas that went round & round. Samples: ¶Creativeness in Hollywood is stifled by U.S. theater owners, who control the industry, reap most of its profits, and want nothing from it but, in Mankiewicz's phrase, "400 items of salable merchandise every year." The creators may get their big chance when the Government finally splits theater ownership from production. ¶The moviemakers recognize that a low-budget "special audience" film, e.g., Home of the Brave, can turn a profit without a mass audience, but Hollywood is geared to supply the bigger audience, where the bigger profit lies. ¶Hollywood clings to its self-censoring

Production Code to forestall harsher action by public censors. The pressure group it fears most is the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency ("a C rating for a picture is death"). One speaker (protectively anonymous in the report) said: "[The Legion] is something that Hollywood should have fought and didn't ... for the same reasons that they have never fought anything: they didn't want to stop the flow of film for one week." ¶The U.S. mass audience, even the moviemakers admitted, is more grownup in its tastes than the run of movies are, and would support more adult pictures. But the men from Hollywood did some buck-passing to the audience, too: the public perpetuates the star system, which keeps budgets high and originality at a low ebb; it sometimes passes up good pictures, e.g., The Search, and flocks to trash starring big names; it needles Hollywood for kowtowing to pressure groups, but never organizes to help keep the screen free.

Concluded LIFE: "The moviemakers, as the Round Table Editors met them, were earnest and thoughtful men, who represented the good Hollywood . . . The movies need . . . 'more freedom for more men of talent' . . . But [it] must be fought for by the good Hollywood and by the people who believe in freedom . . . From this Hollywood . . . these people can get movies as good as they demand—but demand them they must."