118. Memorandum From the Director, Motion Picture and Television Service, United States Information Agency (Stevens) to the Director (Marks)1
I wish I could put a red star on this memo or clip to it a little tag saying “this is the heart of the matter”, or even if necessary employ State Department jargon and say “this is the gut issue”.
There is a decreasing interest in the best USIA motion pictures and it results from a shift in Agency policy.
The popular word today is “targeted”, meaning that a communication is designed to implement a precise “country objective” and that in the judgment of some country expert it does so. I don’t believe that this is a sound approach for a propaganda agency which serves a hundred and some odd countries. You cannot attract the manpower to USIA which can implement such a highly diverse and specialized communications program. By distributing the responsibility for content and style to lower echelons, as is necessary if each country or desk is to shape its own product, you ultimately rely on lesser quality individuals, not well trained or particularly talented, to make the decisions and shape the style and content of media products.
I will give you one example because it is small and simple. I could give you 50.
The attached report2 from Bangkok is typical of a growing trend. It is the response to three films distributed by the Agency, two of which were produced by IMV at the request of and in consultation with all area and policy offices.
Transportation USA and Celebration are dismissed by USIS Bangkok as “not suitable for the village audiences” in Thailand. No prints were ordered. They consider the village audiences important yet they do not intend to show them two principal Agency products.
This is not as you might argue, a matter of taste. It is a matter of policy and Agency direction. The attitude in Bangkok, and at an increasing number of other posts, is that the only materials to be distributed are ones which they view as having “direct program value”, “applying to country objectives”, “carrying the freight”, or whatever slogan is presently in vogue. It is not that the slogans are so bad, rather that the interpretation is rapidly narrowing.
[Page 363]USIS Bangkok can express it another way, and would if asked say that the Agency has no business making “Transportation USA” or “Celebration” (or any other number of our best works). I happen to think they are wrong. However, if they are right, and the Agency must make a policy decision on this, we have no business running a top-flight documentary motion picture and television operation.
I can show you in elaborate detail that the two films in question are serving us throughout the world with great effectiveness, wherever they are given the opportunity.
Someone must say, beyond funding and approving these and like projects, “part of USIA’s business is to communicate the American spirit. It is part of our job to let people around the world know that the United States is an extraordinary and wonderful country inhabited by some damn fine people.”
Your regional advisors do not see this as important work; or in the current gobbledygook of the trade, they argue that they have a country plan and post objectives which must come first.
I believe that this philosophy has never been more wrong than it is today at a time when the motives and morals of this country, its President and its people are being castigated in every corner of the earth. Our associates would disagree. Yet, whether their targeted propaganda blatantly presented persuades anyone is seldom measured, or more urgently whether it offends anyone is hardly considered.
Coincident with the field message rejecting two powerful films about the American people for Thailand audiences (who, it appears, are going to have to adjust to living alongside Americans in uniform) I received the Saturday Review.3 Here its comments on the film showing in New York, Eyewitness . . . North Vietnam:
“The most powerful impression of all is made by the faces of the people, for these faces . . . are the faces of human beings . . . and their beauty is sometimes throat-catching. This is the film’s major comment . . . the viewer can decide for himself whether he likes the idea of these people being killed for the reasons of policy.”4
I know the writer. He is not a declaimer of our policy in Vietnam. Yet he was propagandized, not by political argumentation, rather by scenes dealing with people in human terms. Your advisors reject as unproductive our efforts in that direction. Consider the irony that [Page 364] communist states, long ridiculed for their dreary heavy handed approach to propaganda, have become more sophisticated and clever than USIA by using techniques which I am being urged to abandon.
And how hypocritical are we, basking in Time Magazine’s praise words—“swinging”, “new sound”, “vigorous, amusing, avant-garde—the first with the latest”—while the policy shifts. The new Worldwide English was done, in truth, behind the backs of the area people. If they could intercept VOA like they do films, they would not use it. They would say “get rid of Sinatra,5 Fatha Hines,6 Willis Conover7 and Jazz. Give us the freight . . . hit the ‘post objectives’.”
With the aforementioned communication from Bangkok came another demanding that the successful Thai Report television series be adjusted to contain 100% freight rather than 50% freight. . . . “we seek to minimize the merely amusing or frivolous—as folk songs, dances, sports or tourism”. USIS Thailand is saying to us, we’ll get it on television and slug the yellow jerks with freight . . . fill their bamboo living rooms with U.S. country objectives.
And you say to me that we must rely on the area people (presumably without regard to their quality of mind) on all such matters.
I respectfully suggest that you cannot say that we must rely completely on the people in the field. Policy, philosophy and direction are determined in Washington and there has been a drift in direction. The Agency is losing sight of the forest for the trees. The people in the field must be led, not followed.
If a change cannot take place my advice to you must be that the filmmaking money is going largely to waste because our distribution is badly managed; that the pendulum is ready to swing back to the films of Turner Shelton8 (over which the foreign service expressed no serious discontent); and that you should accede to the Area Directors’ pressures and shift so-called worldwide funds to targeted programming.
Then let the “specialist” mentality harden up the content, without skill or sensitivity, and let USIA continue to veer off course toward a style which shares more in common with Peking than with the American Dream.
- Source: National Archives, RG 306, Director’s Subject Files, 1963–1967, Entry UD WW 101, Box 5, Motion Pictures & Television—General 1966. No classification marking.↩
- Not found attached.↩
- Popular American magazine.↩
- Reference is to the 1966 documentary film, “Eyewitness . . . North Vietnam,” made by a British journalist, James Cameron. The film was shot in North Vietnam as “an undoctored glimpse of such places as Hanoi, Haiphong, and Cam Pha, with all the public manifestations of what is obviously a Marxist society.” See Hollis Alpert, “Know the Enemy,” Saturday Review, December 10, 1966, p. 65.↩
- American singer and actor, Frank Sinatra.↩
- American jazz musician Earl “Fatha” Hines.↩
- VOA broadcaster, Willis Clark Conover, who hosted a popular jazz program for the radio network.↩
- The Director of Motion Picture Service at the United States Information Agency from 1954 to 1961.↩
- Stevens signed “George” above this typed signature.↩