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JOHN HOUSEMAN has been writer, director, and producer in theater, TV, radio, and motion pictures. The films he has produced include The Blue Dahlia, They Live by Night, A Letter from an Unknown Woman, The Bad and the Beautiful, and Julius Caesar. The plays he has directed on Broadway include Four Saints in Three Acts, Valley Forge, The Devil and Daniel Webster, Hamlet, Lute Song, and, most recently, King Lear. He was cofounder with Orson Welles of the Mercury Theater, and has taught drama at Vassar and Barnard colleges. Mr. Houseman is currently producing Executive Suite.

JOHN HOUSEMAN, who shared with Orson Welles in the creation of the Mercury Theater, has directed plays on Broadway, and produced and directed television and radio programs. On leave of absence from his post as a producer at MGM, he is to be associated this summer in the management of the Shakespearean Theater at Stratford, Conn. Mr. Houseman prepared this paper for the International Design Conference in Aspen, Colo., last summer.

Then we witness the fascinating and shocking spectacle of a nation's most pressing fears and secret desires publicly exhibited in whatever art form happens, at the moment, to be the most immediately accessible to the largest mass of its people. Today this art form is the Hollywood-made motion picture. I have argued elsewhere against the notion that Hollywood enjoys any real free-will in the choice of its subjects. The best it can do, in the general run of its product, is to reflect as honestly and competently as it can the interests and anxieties of its hundred million customers. That this reflection is at the

JOHN HOUSEMAN, co-founder with Orson Welles of the Mercury Theater, divides his time between producing motion pictures in Hollywood and directing plays on Broadway. Producer of The Blue Dalia, he recently completed Your Red Wagon for RKO, and is now producing Letters From an Unknown Woman at Universal-International. He is also president of Pelican Productions, and a director of the Coronet Theater.