The Painless Plug

A big cigarette firm once paid a Hollywood studio a fat fee to produce a short film. The short was about freedom--the freedom to buy whatever the heart desired "in this democracy of ours," especially the sponsor's cigarettes. The movie was so bad that audiences booed and jeered. Since then, industrial films, which are financed by corporations to make their special pitches, have become so slick and painless that at times audiences hardly realize they are getting some propaganda with the entertainment.

More than 200 production outfits in the U.S. now compete for the $80 million annual gross of the industrial movie business. The movies vary from live-action shorts to animated cartoons, e.g., Walt Disney's How to Catch a Cold, which gives scientific advice on cold prevention (courtesy of Kleenex Tissues).

Last year Hollywood produced more than 250 shorts, about 30% of its 1935 peak, and hordes of industrial shorts were turned out in hope of creating a bigger demand. For the regular studios, the competition could be stiff. Reason: while they have to sell their shorts to make a profit, many major corporations are able to dump their industrial films on the general public by paying exhibitors $50 to $100 to show them for a week's run.

Some of the best of the industrial shorts are done by John E. Sutherland, 46, a onetime scriptwriter who worked for Walt Disney and made wartime training films for the Government. He does his 10-to-45-minute shorts at the rate of about 20 a year (at a cost to the sponsor of $50,000 to $300,000 each) for such varied industrial giants as General Electric (A Is for Atom), United Fruit (Bananas? Si, Senor), American Telephone & Telegraph (The Voice Beneath the Sea), Du Pont (The Spray's the Thing), the New York Stock Exchange (What Makes Us Tick). Sutherland gets his client's point of view across with suave indirection. He has found it no easy job persuading tycoons that moviegoers resent being pounded over the head with a sales spiel. Many sponsoring corporations have so enthusiastically adopted this concept of the non-irritating huckster that their names, as in Richfield Oil's 26-minute The Conservation Story, now playing in dozens of movie houses in Western states, are never mentioned in the body of the film. The corporation merely gets an opening credit, saying "So-and-So Presents . . ." --an almost infallible sign of the industrial movie.

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