“The Entire Motion Picture Industry Presents”: The World Is Ours (1938)

In September 1938, the American film industry launched Motion Pictures’ Greatest Year, a four-month public relations campaign designed to combat falling attendance and revenues by reviving the public’s allegiance to “the movies.” The campaign grew out of fears that it was not the current recession keeping audiences away from theaters but rather that bad publicity and a spate of bad films had made the public angry with Hollywood. Executives and commentators in the trade press deplored a barrage of criticism generated from within the industry. In April, Samuel Goldwyn lambasted the poor product coming out of Hollywood and proclaimed the public “on strike” against the movies; within two weeks, a group of independent exhibitors published a notorious ad that called several of Hollywood’s most famous stars “poison at the box office”; in June, Harry Warner accused his peers of withholding their important pictures until the fall, thereby creating “a famine in grade A entertainment.”¹ These stories publicizing the inferiority of Hollywood films and the unpopularity of its stars were reported in the nation’s newspapers, with the “box-office poison” controversy receiving particularly widespread coverage. To make matters worse, they coincided with several weeks of feeble releases, “about the worst pictures Hollywood has turned out in many years,” according to the Hollywood Reporter.² As a result of the bad publicity and bad films, public feeling toward the film industry was thought to have soured: the trade press noted the public’s “antagonism,” “disgust,” and even “nausea,” while Oscar Doob, head of advertising at Loew’s, identified a new “nationwide . . . pessimism about the movies.”³

To combat these troubles, the film industry came together in an extraordinary show of unity. The Motion Pictures’ Greatest Year campaign involved not only the eight major companies and Monogram, a poverty row studio, but also many independent exhibitors who contributed ten cents a seat to spread the word that “Motion Pictures Are Your Best Entertainment.” Almost $1 million was raised for projects that included a $250,000 movie quiz contest, organized around ninety-four releases; an institutional advertising campaign that ran in virtually every daily newspaper in North America; and a promotional short, The World Is Ours (1938), which brought the industry’s public relations message directly into movie theaters. This twenty-minute film never refers to the campaign or contest. It tells the story of “a typical American family” that watches movies in their community and travels to Hollywood to find out how they are made. We learn about the importance of the movies to local economies as well as to the entertainment and edification of moviegoers. Recently rediscovered and screened at the 2012 Orphan Film Symposium, The World Is Ours is a fascinating document whose story tells us a great deal about Hollywood on the brink of what is generally considered its annus mirabilis of 1939, toward the end of what was truly an annus horribilis. It reveals as much about Hollywood’s insecurities and failings as it does about its successes and hopes for the future.⁴

One thousand prints of The World Is Ours were planned; four prints have been located, but at least three are not original. Dan Streible uncovered two at Fox: a few years ago, archivists there found a 35mm composite fine-grain master in the vaults and produced a new dupe negative and check print. Unfortunately, the audio is poor, and they had no information about the date of the master. Two additional 16mm prints of The World Is Ours are in the William K. Everson Archive at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University (NYU). The British-born Everson was a former theater manager, a movie publicist, and, later, a celebrated film historian and professor of cinema studies at NYU. According to the online description, his was “one of the largest private film collections in the world,” and the archive has more than fifty-three hundred titles, all 16mm prints, the majority of which are American and British films from the first half of the twentieth century.⁵ Most of the film...