Wilbur & Westward

The Motion Picture Research Council was formed in Manhattan in 1927 to study the cinema, try to improve its morals. Last spring, after publishing the results of its studies in nine volumes, the Council elected Mrs. August Belmont president to replace Harvard's aging A. Lawrence Lowell, announced that it would try to make active use of its enormous background of information in actually improving the cinema. Last week the Motion Picture Research Council bestirred itself again and 1) elected Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur, long, lean, pouch-eyed President of Stanford University and one-time (1929-33) Secretary of the Interior, president to replace Mrs. Belmont who resigned last June; 2) announced that it would move its main offices westward to San Francisco in order to be near (i.e. 350 mi.) the centre of cinema production. Said an ungrammatical Council bulletin:

"Everyone agrees that pictures are much improved and no one more freely than the Motion Picture Research Council. As to what our part has been is of little consequence--but the result is plain to all. Dr. A. Lawrence Lowell, our former president, has an apt way of saying, 'You can't both do a thing and get credit for it and that describes our attitude. . . . The success of such films as David Copperfield and Les Miserables and of many other fine pictures is certainly a sign of progress."

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