A Veteran's View of Hollywood Authenticity

FOR THE greater number of producers in Hollywood, authenticity has become a byword. This has come about primarily because of the endless stream of letters that once arrived from all parts of the world protesting and criticizing misrepresentations, anachorisms, anachronisms, and other blunders committed in the making of motion pictures. In the infancy of the motion picture industry, the property boy, the costumer, the art department, and everyone else concerned with the making of a picture, relied on his own imagination and his own individual conceptions in establishing the locale of a motion picture story. The box office was of prime importance; anything else was secondary. Authenticity was of no importance at all. The general attitude was, "Who knows what is right or wrong, anyway?" However, the number of letters proved that many knew. So the major corporations began to invest in research departments and materials.