Art vs. Censorship

“TOTEMS”- MENSA OF WESTERN WASHINGTON – NOVEMBER 2008 – VOLUME 33 – # 11

“Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa: The Foreign Film In America,”

Mensa member beats Film Censorship in Supreme Court

by James N. Selvidge

(ISBN 978-0-9818679-0-8).

A TRIUMPH OF ART OVER CENSORSHIP

Tangent to my father, I began seeing from eight to twelve movies per week in 1936, when I was 8. Today, I’m at 30,000 and counting. While in college in the late 1940′s, I viewed the scattered foreign films that played at the Metropolitan Theater in the Olympic Hotel. This greatly expanded during the Korean War, and, on discharge and returning to the University of Washington for a second degree, I managed the Varsity Theater in the University District.

This was the “home” for J. Arthur Rank, Eagle Lion, Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers (and a host of great British classics). Three times, a foreign film was booked into a seven-day “hole.” The films, I thought, were terrific; but they all tanked at the box office. Naive or not I believed that Seattle would support a foreign language theater. At the time, there were such in New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and San Francisco, the theaters owned by several New York importers.

Today, the 1950′s and 1960′s are considered to be the “Golden Age of Foreign Films.” But at the time Hollywood had decided that these films would not be shown in the United States and the theater circuits they controlled concurred. Unanimously, they said, “Americans will not pay to see films in a foreign language with subtitles.”

So, I leased the Ridgemont Theater, and went to New York to buy film. My first obstacle was convincing them that Seattle was not still fighting Indian wars, and that the streets didn’t roll up at dusk. Seattle wound up City No. 6

I had 800 names, garnered from the Varsity years. Planning on a film quarterly, I hoped that word of mouth would prove Hollywood wrong. Alas, I soon learned the underlying reason for their boycott. Followers of Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society had a common mantra: All foreign films were part of the Communist conspiracy. This led to the necessity of cleaning broken light bulbs and eggs from the theater front and excrement off the doors and box office exterior. This extended to three arson attempts, and my losing my front windshield to a shotgun blast while driving to Olympia on I-5.

The above became the least of my problems. I had absolutely no awareness that, since WWII, Seattle had become the XXX-porno production center of the United States, creating what was known as the “pan-am” industry, a multimillion-dollar business in 1950′s money. To protect their legislated “industry” after a Federal “bust” of an employee, they granted they created the Seattle Board of Theater Supervisors in 1954 whose job was to view every prono film (“loop”), codify it, and pronounce it as “not obscene.” As a result, no prosecutions in Seattle or per other metropolitan cities they supplied for two decades.

Probably coincidence, the board chairman and most members were Catholic, so they were determined that no conventional theaters should be allowed to play foreign films rated “R” by the Legion of Decency. This translated to Most films as to the legion, “Heresy” was on the same level as “sex” (a bare breast in a Swedish or French comedy). They became known, nationally, as the most insidious censor board in America. They hated Ingmar Bergman.

The Ridgemont and I survived due to one man, William L. Dwyer, my attorney and lifelong friend. (Bill was the only Democrat appointed to the Federal bench by Ronald Regan in his eight years as president, and in 2002 was named by The Seattle Times as one of the 150 greastest citizens in Washington’s 150 years of statehood.) Initially, I was called monthly before the Seattle City Council for a “show cause” hearing, as to why my license should not be rescinded. Each month Bill got a vote in my favor.

When they condemned Bergman’s “The Silence,” I brought suit against the City of Seattle, the Seattle City Council, and the theater Board Challenging the constitutionality of the network of ordinances that structured the porn business and created the theater board. We won the case the city appealed. The Supreme Court upheld in our favor 9-0. Bill was immediately on retainer to the movie industry’s MPAA, and the studios created a “war chest” to finance my taking the censorship fight to other jurisdictions. By 1970, America’s movie screens were “free.”

As for me, I was privileged to won a circuit of “art theaters” (as the media dubbed them at the time”, and handled distribution out West for Janus Films and 20 other New York importers. When the “Golden Age” terminated suddenly by sale and realty trade, with a friend we owned all the theaters in Grays Harbor county, including the drive-in with the highest per capita concessions sales in the United States, showing basically G and PG films (and “Beach Blanket Bingo,” etc. in the Harbor Drive-In).

I served a decade or more on the Board of Theater Owners of Washington, was on the Board of Allied Arts of Seattle with Zollie Volchuk and Fred Danz booked the performing arts for the Seattle World’s fair. At the start, in the East Seattle was considered a “farm town,” far from”cosmopolitan.” Ultimately, my Film Quarterly reached 20,000 circulation. Modesty aside, I would cite the Ridgemont as the trigger that led to Seattle’s current reputation in Hollywood for the “hippest audiences,” the place to go if you want to “test” a film.

By James N. Selvidge, MWW member