This black & white film, one of the “Yesterday’s Newsreel” TV shows from the early 1950s, consists of newsreels about varying topics. No copyright but this is circa the early 1950s.
Opening titles: Yesterday’s Newsreel. Title: 1915-1922 – Hollywood’s Guiding Force
(:07-:35). An old nickelodeon theatre. Old western movie. People watch an old movie. Cisco Kid. American Film Company – one of the first film studios. People work on the studio grounds. This is during the silent era. Actors, extras, and filmmakers on the set. Actors dance. People wait in line at a theatre to see a movie. Will Hays in 1920. Hays shakes hands and hold a child. Hays becomes postmaster general in Pres. Hardings’ cabinet. He becomes the first chairman of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. Harold Lloyd shakes his hand. Cecil B. DeMille shows Hays to Hollywood, people are introduced to Hays (:36-4:36). Title: 1920 – Surplus for Sale. Old service ships from WWI are being sold to the highest bidder, men look over the ships. A boy looks around a ship. Plays with items on it. Surplus planes are for sale as well. Men review the planes. An auctioneer yells. A woman stands holding a sheet. Title: 1925 – Personalities. Lt. Commander Zachary Lansdowne stands. He puts on a snow hat. Actress Marion Davies, exits her swank Hollywood home in 1926. She meets a tennis player and holds a racket. Actor John Boles (in 1931’s Frankenstein) and director Edwin Carewe throw a ball to one another. Carewe’s children on the beach (4:37-6:55). Title: 1922 – U.S. Treasury Building Blazes. February 8, 1922, roof of the treasury building in Washington, D.C. catches fire. Ladders, firemen, people try and put it out. Smoke billows. Firemen confine the blaze to the roof. Title: 1923 – Library on Wheels. Evanston, IL, a man drives books around in a car in 1923 to help the poor read books. Poor people line up to see some books. Title: 1925 – Aviation. Grandma Bennett, 100 year old resident of Portland, ME, has her aviator goggles on. She’s ready to fly. She flies in a sea plane that lands on the water. She is helped out (6:56-9:16). Title: 1928 – Fashions of the Day. A woman poses in her dress. She wears a fur wrap. She walks in a dress. Title: 1932 – Sports (the sound for the remainder doesn’t match what’s on screen from 10:09 until 11:45). Men roll balls on a grassy field as people watch. People continue to roll and try and outdistance the others. Crowd of people watch horse racing. It’s the Belmont Stakes of 1925. Full horse race. Sting wins a tight race towards the end. The jockey poses with the horse (9:17-12:39).
William Harrison Hays Sr. was a United States politician, chairman of the Republican National Committee (1918–21), U.S. Postmaster General (1921–22), and, from 1922–1945, the first chairman of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA). He became the namesake of the 1930 Motion Picture Production Code, informally (and inaccurately) referred to as the Hays Code, which spelled out a set of industry moral guidelines for the self-censorship of content in Hollywood cinema.
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