In 1937, Paramount News assignment editor William Montague gave a talk about the nascent ethics being developed surrounding his profession’s form of news-gathering that was reprinted in World Film and Television magazine.

Montague’s talk also included the editorial decisions Paramount made regarding a story known as the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre that one of his cameramen, Orlando Lippert, filmed and thirty-five years later Fred Friendly would state that “every newsroom and journalism or law class that can beg, borrow or purchase the footage ought to make it required viewing” in an editorial written in the Columbia Journalism Review in the aftermath of the United States v. Caldwell decision.

The question most frequently asked me when someone discovers that I am in the newsreel business is, “Why are the newsreels so uninteresting? Why do they run so many battleships and bathing beauties and baseball pictures and baby parades?” The answer is that we do our best to find pictures of greater interest to our theater audiences than these, but we have also learned that these trite pictures do have a sure-fire interest value.

I have a budget of $20,000 a week to spend in making newsreel pictures. I have cameramen in every country of the world sitting up nights watching for interesting things to photograph. They will risk their lives to get a picture; in fact, they have done so more than once. I remember the greatest newsreel picture ever made. A cameraman was on the Lusitania after it was torpedoed. Survivors told how he rushed here and there, getting the women and children being loaded into the life-boats. He got the stokers pouring out from below decks. He climbed on to the bridge and got the Captain standing by the controls. He got the ship as she tilted over further and further. And then the Lusitania sank — and the cameraman forgot to jump. That was one picture that was never shown, and another cameraman who got carried away by his story.

The press, with its written account, cannot duplicate the talking picture, certainly the radio cannot. One of the greatest newsreel pictures of all times was that of an eight-year-old New Jersey youngster who had rescued his two little brothers from a burning house, and was sitting there on the ruins sobbing over the remnants of his bicycle. He explained quite intimately into the camera that it had been burned while he was saving his brothers, that it was what he valued most — and how was he to earn enough money to get another? It just got them in the theaters; it even got three different bicycle manufacturers who all sent the child new bicycles.

But, as I say, along with this flower of intimacy there are limitations — the limitations of the workings of a motion picture camera and of a news organization trying to use it to catch its news on the fly. We have had to work out our own rules for handling and editing what news pictures we get. We have here a new medium, differing widely in many respects from radio and the press. We have had to work out our own code. It cannot be a hard-and-fast one that you can set down on paper. Rather it is a responsible editorial policy dictated by long distance planning in the field of human relations.

The newsreels are just about thirty years old, and according to experience it is just about that time after an invention that the social influences of an invention begin to make themselves felt. As most of you know, they started as actual newsreels, that is, one-reelers given over entirely to a news spectacle, such as a Durbar, the inauguration of a President, or a prize-fight.

Like the news pamphlet — the forerunner of the newspaper — they were originally not a regular release, but a reel made up and spot booked whenever a likely subject occurred. The Pathe brothers started the first regular newsreel release over here in 1910, and at first had hard going. Nearly anything photographic went into it in order to get out one regular reel a week — a fire engine on the run, a cornerstone-laying or an Elks’ parade. Cheap footage was the prime requisite.

That the newsreel idea was a sound one was quickly proved by the popularity of the reels in the theaters, and within a couple of years Hearst had launched one, and two or three other companies foundered in and out of the field. The war came along and forced the consolidation of the reels into one reel, run more or less from Washington for purposes of national defense and propaganda; but immediately after the Armistice they were separated and by 1927 there were six newsreels — Pathe, Fox, Universal, Kinograms, Hearst and Paramount.

The modern newsreel is generally divided into two major departments — assignment and make-up. The assignment department makes the pictures; the make-up department edits them for the screen.

An assignment editor has a set-up much like that of a newspaper. He has assistants who correspond roughly to the cable editors, wire editors and city editors, each watching a particular territory for news stories and assigning the cameramen in his province.

Most of the newsreels have working arrangements with one or another of the big news agencies, Associated Press, United Press or International News. A flash or an earthquake in India comes through. The cable editor sends a cable, moves a pin on a big map of the men around the world, and perhaps a cameraman climbs out of bed in Vienna and rushes off a thousand miles by plane for the disaster.

Once the film reaches New York, the make-up department takes it over. Dozens of stories arrive daily. The make-up editor and his assistants spend nearly the entire day in the showrooms, screening the material. What is considered the best is immediately selected for release in the newsreel. One man takes the negative and cuts it into a story. Another goes outside to his typewriter and writes the titles and off-stage lines for it. The film passes up to the synchronizing department. Here thousands of feet of original sound are cataloged and filed. Here you can find eight varieties of women’s screams, one or a thousand Javanese talking, a hen cackling or a tri-motored plane with one motor missing. Where the original sound on the negative is good or where a speech has been recorded it is preserved. Where the original sound does not complement the story it is wiped out and new sound from the library added to replace it or augment the original.

At the same time, the off-stage voice commentator adds his lines, and his words carefully counted to synchronize with the action on the screen. Musical underlay is added if it will increase the effectiveness of the picture.

The whole is mixed in the right proportions by the monitor man and out comes a newsreel sound track. Working at really top speed, practically a belt conveyor system, the process takes around six hours.

Once the finished negative is made, it is given to the laboratory for printing. Here is the really big time lag of newsreels over newspapers. With the highest speed printing equipment that it has been possible to devise, it takes a newsreel twenty-four hours to print its edition. A newsreel makes three to five hundred prints of each edition, or around a thousand prints a week. This compares with a hundred prints made of a feature picture. As each newsreel print is a thousand feet long it is easy to see that each newsreel company is turning out around a million feet of film a week. That is a lot of footage. The five newsreels go to about 16,000 theaters a week. They are seen by approximately eighty million people a week — and that is in this country alone.

Most of the American newsreels own or are associated with newsreels in England, on the Continent, South America, Africa, Australia and Japan. The material is shipped from this country on every boat leaving here. In Europe the offstage voice is added in the language of the country in which it is to be distributed. These foreign newsreels in turn are continually sending the films made abroad to this country. It is a tremendous worldwide news coverage and distribution, mainly controlled by the American reels. An American made newsreel picture may easily have a distribution double that of America alone, and will probably far outrun the distribution of the average feature picture.

The early newsreels went in for any pictures that could be grabbed on the run. For instance, the obvious pictorial matter, such as bathing beauties, battleships, baby shows, cornerstone layings, and marching troops. Unfortunately, they are still forced to turn to a certain amount of such material. The early producers discovered, however, when there wasn’t any pictorial news, it was possible to create it. Pathe on its second issue was approached by a man who wanted to jump off a roof with a parachute. And while the jump was not a success, the picture was exciting. It looked like news — and that inaugurated the stunt period era.

Back in those days we used to make one or two stunt pictures a week. Why we didn’t liquidate the entire breed of stunt men and get sued out of business by a suffering world, I don’t know. In those days we used to roller skate along building ledges, slide across Broadway on tight ropes, ride over cliffs on motor-cycles, crash planes, land blimps on roofs, railroad trains, boats, lay smoke screens around anything and everything and go to any extremes that might prove exciting.

Wars were also exciting things that we pursued avidly. One enterprising Chicago firm is supposed to have paid Pancho Villa $30,000 for the exclusive picture rights of his revolution. This firm is said to have insisted that his battles be fought to suit the photographic light and camera locations. Ever since we have chased wars, not entirely from a news point of view, but also from a pictorial one. As a result the tradition of the demon cameraman was built up — the Richard Harding Davis type who followed the wars around the world with leather puttees, reversed cap and a camera.

During these experimental years the tradition of tremendous rivalry between newsreels was built up. Back in those days no amount of money was too great to spend in reaching Broadway first with nearly any news picture. Planes, not one but two, three or four, would be used to insure getting the picture through. Special trains would be hired when the planes could not fly.

Do you remember back in 1928 when the German plane Bremen came down on Greenly Island off Labrador, after the first east to west trans-Atlantic flight? The newsreels spent as high as $520,000 for a few hours beat on Broadway with the story. One enterprising cameraman bought over $1,000 worth of gasoline as he flew down the Canadian coast, burning it as he purchased it so that his competitors could not get any and so refuel their planes and follow him through to Greenly Island.

Around the time of the depression, and President Roosevelt’s first term, the newsreels started going broke. They discovered that while spending all this money was very exciting and lots of fun, at the same time the people in the theaters did not really care whether they saw the news picture in the theater on Monday or Friday. They had already read about it in the newspapers and heard about it over the radio several days before.

The newsreels then started a period of experimenting. Some went on the idea that the people were poor and wanted dollar and cents news. We tried everything — learned studies by college professors, with animated diagrams as to why stocks went down and food prices up. We got long-winded comment from the man in the street who was not an authority but at the same time had a human intimacy. We studied the newspapers and picked up some of their crusades, going after the Klu Klux Klan, patent medicine manufacturers, prison labor — anything that was sensational.

Here is the problem the newsreels are faced with. They have the prerogatives of a news agency and hence the social obligations of a news disseminating organization. At the same time, their audience will only accept their product if it is entertaining — good theater. We are driven into the corner of having to combine the two factors, and our policy, as worked out roughly, has become, “Give as much real news as can really be interestingly told with motion pictures.”

Actually, when we got right down to work and examined the problem, we found tremendous possibilities. We found that nearly any major problem in human relations has an angle of popular interest. Perhaps our coverage is a superficial one; perhaps we approach important social news from an entertainment rather than an educational one. But at least we tackle it, get it into the theaters and before the eyes of twenty-eight million people every week.

An obligation rests with the newsreels if they are to consider themselves a news medium. That is to edit the news, and to edit it with a far-sighted view to its ultimate effect on human relations. If we were purely an entertainment medium, we would run anything that was exciting, spectacular or amusing.

I remember a number of years ago when the son of a wealthy department store owner in San Jose, California, was kidnapped and murdered. A couple of suspects were arrested and put in the San Jose jail. It was a tremendous story at the time, and with the assistance of the police, we picturized the story and reenacted the kidnapping and how the man was thrown off the bridge and shot as he fell. It was a fair enough dramatization of the circumstances, but I guess we just weren’t very good editors — we had not realized the power and intimacy of the medium with which we were working. We rushed the pictures out. They reached the theaters in San Jose in time for the morning show. That very same night a mob battered down the San Jose jail and lynched those two suspects. We got the pictures of the lynching, too, but when we saw them we realized that we had failed miserably in our responsibility as editors.

A few weeks ago I had a phone call from our Chicago cameraman. He was about to leave for Indianapolis along with the rest of the opposition cameramen to cover the big auto races. They are always a sure-fire thrill and good entertainment and, as you know, practically routine coverage for every newsreel. Our cameraman wanted to go along with the gang — it’s always a swell party — but he did begrudgingly mention that he had been out at the Republic Steel plant that day and things looked tough. Well, it was quite a gamble to take, but we pulled him off those auto races and sent him back to the steel plant. And in doing so we got a rather famous riot picture. We also got complaints from a good many thousands of people, on one side or the other. Finally, the entire situation pretty well crystallized in our minds a policy of editorial obligation.

Well, we made the riot story, screened it, and immediately realized the problem on our hands. Several paths were open to us. We could have killed the story and no one would have been the wiser. Newsreel film is tricky stuff to work with. Quite a lot is often no good and if it had been reported technically defective we would have been out of the jam.

Or, again, we could have simply gone along as entirely an entertainment medium and said that we had a spectacle like the assassination of a king, or a war, and released the story, letting the theaters run it or not, depending on whether it had box-office value in that particular community.

Instead, we got socially conscious. We realized that we had to assume the obligations of a news organization. We had to act as editors and consider the ultimate consequences of what we released. We had to remember what had happened when we released that kidnapping picture.

When we saw the picture that day we were as indignant as anyone. After all, we are all people who work for a living, and I suppose most people in the newsreel business, being former newspaper people, are moderately liberal. But we also sort of grew up and realized that we had a social duty in regard to our jobs.

Consider the situation at that time. The picture we had was a good picture, but not a great one. There have been better. It was its timeliness that made it dangerous. It was at the very climax of the steel strike. Seventy thousand men were out on strike, battling non-strikers in seven states at every morning and evening shift in the plants.

We had something which, if we let it go, would have blocked any peaceable settlement of the steel strike. In fact, the bitterness and indignation it would have stirred up certainly would have led to added fighting. Out in the steel states — Michigan, Indiana, Illinois — there were bound to be riots in theaters which, perhaps, might even possibly have led to more deaths.

Paramount did not suppress the Chicago riot pictures. Instead, it voluntarily turned them over to the LaFollette Senate Committee investigating the situation, to make what use it could of them in behalf of public welfare. They immediately became part of the record of the proceedings, but in a way that insured no harm to the general public.

Orlando Lippert testifying at the LaFollette Senate Committee

Senator LaFollette expressed his appreciation for the stand that Paramount had taken, and finally after the film had been used as evidence, recommended the release of the pictures. By that time the industrial situation had quieted down and there was no danger of riots developing, and Paramount sent the complete and unexpurgated pictures out to every one of its exchanges.

The riot pictures more or less crystallize the problem of the newsreels — are they to be wholly an entertainment medium or are they to assume their obligations as a news medium?

Our answer, when faced with the hard facts of being a theatrical medium, is that we must combine the two. We are a new news medium. We are working out a code of ethics of our own. While we are handicapped by the necessity of always being amusing and interesting, at the same time we believe we are successfully presenting to our audiences the world over their news situations and helping them interpret these problems in terms of sound human relationships.

Note: A portion of Orlando Lippert’s footage of the Memorial Day Massacre can be viewed here.

The cameraman who died during the sinking of the Lusitania that Montague spoke about name was Patrick L. Jones and he was employed by the Hearst-Selig newsreel.