Every once in a while a motion picture flashes across the horizon to prove our industry an instrumentality of human enlightenment. When such a picture is combined with the gamut of entertainment, we have a box office success. Unless we have a picture which appeals to the greatest volume of our people, we frequently lose the purpose for which the production was designed.
This is true regardless of the fact that we like to place art above financial returns.
Yet it is the number of admission tickets sold which ultimately determines the greatness of a film, for in the motion picture we have the foremost of the three great mediums of communication—press and radio are the others—and our aims can be defeated unless we reach and appeal to the masses with our product.
I know that when Walt Disney decided to make the screen version of Major Alexander P. de Seversky's best selling and controversial book, "Victory Through Air Power," he was motivated not by the promise of financial reward but by a sincere desire to place before our people a theory which he believed as firmly as the author.
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