Pie-in-the-Face

France and the U. S. made their celluloid peace last week. Arbitrators were Under Secretary Andre Francois-Poncet of the Ministry of Fine Arts and Harold L. Smith of Will Hays's Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc. To the chief of the French Cinema Trust (Chambre Syndicale), industrious, scheming Jean Sapene, the peace was as distasteful as a hurtling Hollywood pie-in-the-face.

Ingredients of the pie, deftly inserted by Hollywood's Harold L. Smith:

1) The French Government abandons in principle though retaining temporarily the irksome quota system under which U. S. cinemakers have to buy one French film for every seven U. S. productions they sell in France, thus obliging them virtually to subsidize the French Cinema Trust.

2) A new French system of levying on U. S. films will be worked out and applied, but it is understood that this will be simply a straight import tax with no direct subsidy feature.

3) The present one-for-seven quota is to remain in force until Oct. 1, 1930 and, if agreement has not then been reached on the new levy, will be extended for another year.

Last March the U. S. cinema interests in France, well knowing that Cineman Sapene had all but persuaded the French Government to tighten the one-for-seven quota to a struggling one-for-four, retaliated by refusing to release any new films in France until this threat was removed. As a result hundreds of French exhibitors have been losing money all summer, since their patrons would not come in paying numbers to see U. S. films left over from last winter or the distinctly inferior products of the French Cinema Trust. Last week's truce was no sooner signed than representatives of all the big French exhibitors rushed to make new U. S. bookings, showed by enthusiastic comments that they are gladdest of all that Cineman Sapene got a pie-in-the-face.