After more than two years of earnest fact-finding and many months of laborious lawmaking, the British Government last week breathed a sigh of accomplishment. They had just passed what they believed to be holeproof legislation to replace the punctured, lately-expired Cinematograph Films Act of 1927.
In 1927 aggressive Hollywood had knocked the cinema industry of the United Kingdom flatter than any British heavyweight. From Lands End to the Shetlands, British cinemas were showing 16 Hollywood films to England's one. To get the slumped industry back on its feet. Parliament enacted a ten-year plan that involved 1) making Hollywood invest in a number of British-made pictures according to quotas (determined by the number of Hollywood pictures distributed in the British Isles); and 2) making British cinema theatres show a similarly determined quota of British-made pictures. To effect this, Parliament set up a sliding scale of quota quantity required during the act's ten-year tenure. But what it neglected to establish was a standard of quality for quota films.
By last year the 1927 Films Act had proved a more colossal flop than anyone could have predicted. British producers had made an increasing number of sleazy, two-bit pictures—known as "quota quickies"—had pandered them at bargain prices ($10,000 to $25,000) to Hollywood, to be used as quota films. British audiences hissed and jeered them, and exhibitors, forced by law to show them, tried to palm them off at hours when their theatres were practically empty. Crawling with quota quickies, the British industry got a bad name at home and abroad. The mushroom growth of British films which had followed the promising early years of the ten-year plan began to wither. When the 1927 quota act expired on March 31, only three percent of the 640 British producers registered in the last ten years were still doing business. Of England's 10,000 cinema artisans, 8,000 were jobless.
Under the new act. Parliament hopes to invigorate the home industry by 1) upping the quota and 2) exterminating the quota quickie. Under the new sliding scale, Hollywood must this year produce 15 films in England for every 100 of its own it shows here. In hte next ten years the requirement will rise to 30 films per 100. But to qualify as a quota film under the new law, a production must represent at least $37,500 in British studio labor costs. Since labor is reckoned at about half the total cost of production, quota films in future will cost about $75,000. For films representing labor costs of $112,500, two quota credits will be allowed, and for labor costs of $187,500, three quota credits. For distribution of such films outside Britain additional credits accrue.
The multiple credit allowances were set up in the hope that Hollywood might thus be induced to produce in the United Kingdom for the world market. That $75,000 pictures could not be expected to compete in the world market with Hollywood's glossy, million-dollar exports Parliament knew quite well. But canny Britishers knew equally well that if Hollywood had to make between 75 and 150 quota pictures annually in the British Isles at a minimum cost of $75,000 each, it would undoubtedly find it good business to spend enough extra to insure a world-wide return on its investment.