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By way of background, I should point out that the American Film Institute was created in 1967 by the National Endowment for the Arts, following a commitment made by President Lyndon B. Johnson when he signed the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965.

President Johnson said at the signing ceremony:

We will create an American Film Institute, bringing together leading artists of the film industry, outstanding educators and young men and women who wish to pursue this 20th century art form as their life's work.

With the assistance of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Institute has been capably pursuing the goals enunciated by President Johnson..

Among the Institute's accomplishments to date have been :

The preservation in the Library of Congress of over 9,500 American films, including the original negatives of "Birth of a Nation," which might otherwise have been lost;

The completion of two volumes of a 19-volume catalog of American films;

The opening, in the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, of the American Film Institute Theatre; and

The establishment of the AFI Center for Advanced Film
Studies in Los Angeles.

But because of the importance of the Institute's work, as well as of the unique American contribution to the film art, some of us in Congress believe that the time has come to consider establishing the Institute on a statutory base of its own.

We are, therefore, holding these hearings in order to examine closely the Institute's accomplishments and future plans.

Briefly, H.R. 17021 would create an independent American Film Institute under the direction of a 23-member board of trustees made up of Federal officials and private citizens.

The bill authorizes to be appropriated such sums as may be necessary to carry out the purposes of the act, but specifies that Federal funds may be utilized to cover no more than two-thirds of the costs of the Institute's activities, and that the Institute must raise the remaining one-third from private sources.

On our witness list this morning is a distinguished cross-section of individuals concerned with the film art.

We shall hear first from Academy Award winner Charlton Heston, chairman of the American Film Institute's board of trustees.

We shall hear as well from John A. Schneider, president of the CBS Broadcast group; Ms. Nancy Hanks, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts; and George Stevens, Jr., director of the Institute.

Following this testimony, we shall hear from a panel composed of John Culkin, director of the Center for Understanding Media in New York; Willard Van Dyke, chairman of the Film Department, New York State University at Purchase, New York; and Ed Lynch, president, Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers, Inc., of New York.

The Chair would also ask unanimous consent at this time to place in the record the text of two telegrams endorsing this legislation from Mr. James Cagney and Miss Rosalind Russell, member National Council on the Arts.

[The documents referred to follow:]

[Telegram]

BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF.

Hon. JOHN BRADEMAS,

House Select Subcommittee on Education,

Washington, D.C.

I would like to salute the Members of Congress who have introduced the legislation to provide for a permanent existence of the American Film Institute. As one who has spent 40 active years in film, I urge the passage of this bill knowing intimately the cultural value of an institution such as the AFI. I have observed the work of the American Film Institute both in Hollywood and also in Washington through my present appointment on the National Council on the Arts. Our country, more than any other in the world, is known for its capacity to both entertain and educate through the film medium and the most qualified institution to maintain these principles is the American Film Institute. I urge that this legislation be passed for the growth of each individual and of our Nation. ROSALIND RUSSELL.

[Telegram]

STANFORDVILLE, N.Y.

Hon. JOHN BRADEMAS,

Select Subcommittee on Education,
Washington, D.C.

DEAR CONGRESSMAN BRADEMAS: My association with the American Film Institute was a most satisfactory one and their aims in promoting films as an art form seemed to me most worthy. That the films of the past and the present be preserved for future viewers is also a happy aim and your help in nurturing so meaningful an effort would be truly appreciated by serious students of film everywhere. All good wishes.

Sincerely,

JAMES CAGNEY.

We are very pleased to welcome to the hearing Mr. Charlton Heston, who in addition to being a distinguished.actor, has, as chairman of the American Film Institute board of trustees, devoted an enormous amount of his time and energy to the work of the institute and this particularly American art form, film.

Mr. Heston, we are very pleased to have you with us, and you may proceed, sir.

STATEMENT OF CHARLTON HESTON, CHAIRMAN, THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE BOARD OF TRUSTEES

Mr. HESTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Ladies and gentlemen, for the record, my name is Charlton Heston. I've been a professional actor all my adult life, and I have done time on the boards of most of the organizations serving the performing arts: The National Council on the Arts, the Centre Theatre Group, the Screen Actors Guild, and the American Film Institute, of which I am currently chairman, and on whose behalf I appear today.

The 14 years during which I have been doing chores for these bodies have seen a remarkable change in the American attitude toward the arts though I'm not necessarily suggesting the two circumstances are related. It is no longer necessary to persuade anyone in or out of government that the arts are important to this country, that indeed. they are central to what has come to be called the quality of life.

I certainly don't need to argue that case with you. You in the Congress have demonstrated your conviction by voting larger sums each year to support the arts with public moneys. I think you are right to do this, even as our national priorities tighten, because the public funds you spend in this way go not just to the arts, or to the men and

women who serve them, but through them to all Americans, in aid of what Thomas Jefferson called the pursuit of happiness.

Federal funding for the arts, of course, has been largely channeled through the agency created for that purpose in 1965, the National Council on the Arts. I served a term as trustee on the council and have watched with enormous pride and pleasure the way it has grown. from its modest beginnings and even more modest budget, when the first chairman, Roger Stevens, carefully stretched some $4 million to cover all the arts programs in the country.

Today, under the able guidance of Nancy Hanks, a budget 10 times that sum is allocated to a richly varied program of cultural grants covering every aspect of every art in the land, from poetry to potmaking and from symphonies to street dancing.

One of the first projects funded by the council on the arts, as your Chairman mentioned, and indeed the only project mandated by President Johnson, when he signed the bill creating the council, was the American Film Institute. "There will be an American film institute." he said. And there is. As a filmmaker, I might add, "high time, too." Though we are clearly doing our best in this country to catch up, it is nevertheless true that our country has lagged sadly behind other nations in its support for the arts. Not long ago, Clive Barnes of the New York Times testified before Congress that the city of Hamburg gave more money to its opera and ballet company than this country gave to all the performing arts in our Nation.

As an actor, this concerns me. As chairman of the American Film Institute, I am convinced it indicates a priority that must be reexamined. If it is appropriate to respond to the growing need on the part of our countrymen to have arts function in their lives, it is also necessary to recognize that, of all the arts, the one most significantly of our time and of our Nation is film.

This is not to denigrate the other arts. Architecture and painting have shaped the world's culture for 2,000 years, the novel and opera for several hundred.

A national culture cannot exist without them, or their sister arts as well. Of all the arts, the youngest is film. It was born in this country, and in this century, it has come to dominate it culturally.

More than any other art, it can leap national boundaries, break through language barriers. Indeed, it has done so. People everywhere see more films in a year than they read books or listen to music or look at paintings in a decade, perhaps in a lifetime. I am not saying this is good or bad. I am simply saying that it is true. Film is the art form of the twentieth century.

If it is the art of our time, I think it is also the art of our country. American artists have contributed more significantly to world cinema than they have to any other art form. We share with England the language that remains essentially the lingua franca of film. The preeminent artists of American film significantly shape the work of the great filmmakers of all nations, while Americn financing and film technology of course remain dominant. In a very real sense, American films speak for our Nation more clearly, communicate more tellingly than any ambassador we can send to the rest of the world.

Our films function for us across the world not only as ambassadors, but as consistent black ink entries in our balance of trade. This may

seem a crass reference to make in the midst of a statement so relentlessly cultural in tone, but the condition of our economy today demands that I point out that American films are successfully exported all over the world. The only natural resource they deplete is the talent of our filmmakers. This resource, we are constantly replenishing. It is infinitely replenishable.

This is precisely the responsibility of the AFI: To replenish and protect this rich, vital cultural resource that has given so much to this country and to the world. Our charter says we are "to preserve what is great in the past of the American film and support what can be great in its future." Other witnesses at these hearings will testify as to how we try to do this and how much better we could do it if our desperately meager resources were augmented.

You will also hear comments about why it is no longer feasible for the AFI to carry out its mandate under the umbrella of the Council on the Arts. I would like to speak to a further point: Why it is necessary for us now to go our own way, under the terms of the bill you are now considering. It was the chairman of the national council who first suggested that we seek a separate identity, and of course, she was right.

I have made films all over the world, and in every one of the many countries I have visited with national film institutes, each institute was a separate government-supported agency, designed much as this bill would structure the AFI. Under its terms, the AFI would then have the autonomy a national organization requires as well as the importance film deserves as our prime cultural asset and a national resource of enormous value.

If you will allow me an ad-lib parenthesis here on an area that other witnesses will testify to on the specifics of some of our programs, we just opened for the academic year our Center for Advance Film Studies at Graystone in Hollywood, where some 52 fellows are studying filmmaking with access to the enormously rich pool of professional filmmakers that we are able to call on without charge. It is an enormously inspiring thing, if you care at all about film, to recognize how film, not only in its appeal to audiences, but in the kinds of people it draws as filmmakers, as apprentices, if you will, how those 52 fellows represent every color, age, social, and economic background in a way that I think it is difficult for the other arts to do.

It is clearly the art of our time, and to see them interreact as I have in, for example, recent seminars we had with the distinguished British Film Director David Lean, who was a little apprehensive about what he somehow envisioned as a confrontation with the classic cliché of the revolutionary student generation that we came to apprehend in the sixties, and he said to me:

I suppose they will think me terribly old fashioned, won't they?
And I said:

David, they won't. These fellows have been doing nothing for the past 2 weeks but looking at your films. They have seen all of them and know them cut for cut, and all they want to do is listen to you talk about them.

Of course, that was true, and to see the way this works in a unique way at that center is a very exciting thing, and you can clearly perceive that the future of film is, I think, sprouting seeds right there.

Of course, I am pleading a special case, from a position of deep commitment, both as a filmaker and for the American Film Institute. I am a biased witness. I believe in film. It is indeed an idea whose time has come.

Others will speak to you from our blueprints; let me speak from the passion of that belief. We have really only begun to see what film can do to enrich the lives and expand the opportunities for the American people-all the American people. It will write the poetry of our time, and it will serve as a tool as well to build bridges for us to the rest of the world.

I think it is clear I believe in this bill. I hope the committee sees fit to endorse it and the Congress passes it into law. I thank you. Mr. BRADEMAS. Thank you very much, Mr. Heston, for a most useful opening statement.

I have a number of questions to put to you that involve some of the criticisms that have been made of the work of the AFI, and perhaps you could give us your comments from your vantage point on the board.

One of them has to do with the financial difficulties that the Institute has experienced since its inception, and I wonder if you could comment on any new developments in this area that might give some promise for the future?

Mr. HESTON. Yes; I think that we have indeed had enormous financial difficulties. I would be distressed if we didn't have financial difficulties, because I would think we were not attempting to do as much as we should.

Given the fact we are a young organization, attempting somehow to cover a national responsibility, both archival and educational, and to establish direct lines of communication with film audiences, we could, of course, use 10 times the budget we have. We have had considerable difficulties raising the budget that we have allocated.

It would be impossible to do what we have done without the enormous and understanding cooperation of Nancy Hanks and her council. I think it is also important to underscore that, in my opinion and in the opinion, I think, of everybody involved at the AFI, it would be a mistake for us to depend entirely on the private sector, entirely on the professional filmmaking community, or entirely on the Government. Either total relationship, it seems to me, would compromise us in an unfortunate way.

We could, perhaps, seek out a more embracing relationship with the professional filmmaking community. As you all know, the studios have experienced considerable economic difficulties from which they are perhaps just beginning to emerge. The past 10 or 15 years have been a rather bleak picture, financially, for them. It is not easy to get funds from them.

Nevertheless, all of the studios have given us contributions, as have the networks, as have various organizations such as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. We have had support from the foundations. But I would hesitate to accept total support from any single source. For example, if, in the unlikely eventuality that the Association of Motion Picture Producers came to us and said, "Look, let us undertake your whole budget and put some more of our people on your Board," I would be uneasy about that relationship, because our re

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