The Mental Age of Hollywoodland . . . a Beginner’s Guide.

Mr. Sam Silberstein, one of Hollywood’s leading producers, regarded him curiously.

    ‘The title of that movie I had altered. I couldn’t spell it, and anything I can’t spell our public can’t understand.’

    ‘Ah, of course, Mr. Silberstein, I have always understood that Hollywood films aimed at a public of a mental age of fifteen.’

    ‘Quite wrong! Any company which aimed at an age like that . . . it might just as well commit Mata Hari . . .  No, in our show we aim at a public of the mental age of twelve and a half. And if there’s any argument, we think of twelve years and five months rather than twelve and seven.’

(Later, the director of Mr. Silberstein’s film confides his view of the great producer’s imperious demands.)

    ‘The cinema is absurdly restricted by artificial limitations, from the Hays Office to the National League of Decency. The Hays Office issues a list of forbidden subjects, and of sacred and sexual problems that must never be mentioned. It decides how much of a girl’s legs shall be shown, and what proportion of her breasts shall be visible when she bends down. The effect is to limit production to a list of twenty or thirty subjects – Boy meets Girl, Fop hit by Custard Pie, Mother-love, Animals, Babies, Sex, Crime, Danger – obviously faked, yet pretending to be real.

    ‘We are hamstrung. And all the time we are catering for a great range of people.  I have to tell the same story to Americans, Europeans and Asiatics. Their ages range from one extreme to the other, physically and mentally. They are educated and illiterate. Thus, you see, I must stick to simple human emotions, which are understood by everybody.

    ‘Sam Silberstein talks about a mental age of twelve and half! If it was as high as that I would be happy.’*

Bernard Newman

The Spy in the Brown Derby

1946

* In January 1945, in a British court, the American military neuro-psychiatrist, Colonel Leopold Alexander, pronounced on GIs in Britain with this verdict: ‘The average mental age in the US Army today is about fourteen, excluding officers and NCOs. In World War One it was twelve.’