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(Associated Press)
"NOTHING SACRED ABOUT MY
STIPEND EITHER99
interrietred for America's * Variety3 by Mladic Harris, BEN HECHT expresses himself forcibly on present Hotly wood prod net ion methods, film public and exhibitors, and explains why he is in farour of playiny bacliyammon on the set.
4
Ben Hecht, looking somewhat like a Goldwyn "folly" himself, in a blue moire dressing gown, sat in the living room of his threeroom suite at the Hotel Algonquin, N.Y., and confided that he had just finished his daily dozen for the year by elevating his right thumb to his nose and waving all other four digits exuberantly in the direction of Hollywood! It seems that Mr. Hecht and his latest employer, Samuel Goldwyn, have had a tiff, and now they're farther apart than Cecil Beaton and Conde Nast.
"I left in a childish huff," Hecht explained, "because Sam wouldn't allow me to bring a few of my friends in to the projection room to look at some of the rushes on the Follies. I asked Sam whether it was in a desperate effort to save it from the public, but I'm afraid the significance was lost on him. I didn't really want to write another Follies, anyway. The current one was revealed to me in a dream — and you know how unreliable dreams are— so I packed my luggage, crossed off a couple of zeroes on my next year's income tax, and here I am back in New York, to write a novel for Covici-Friede, my first since A Jew in Love. I'm about a third way through now, but it won't be finished for another year. I'm calling it Book of Miracles — and it has no picture possibilities." (That's one of the major miracles ; it will most likely be sold from the galley proofs!)
As a matter of fact, Hecht has a great admiration for Goldwyn. When the latter called him in to look at the rushes of The Hurricane, after the picture had been in production for several weeks, he asked Hecht his opinion of it.
"I think it stinks," answered Hecht, telling the truth with a sledge hammer.
"So do I," was Goldwyn's comeback. "I want you to rewrite it."
And while Hecht recuperated from the shock of meeting a Hollywood producer who could stand honest criticism, Goldwyn took a terrific loss and started from scratch.
"Goldwyn is a genius — after a picture is finished," Hecht declares. "He smoothes and polishes until it is like a cameo — perfect in every detail. He can tell within 20 per cent of what the gross will be. He has a projection mind. He can look at tests endlessly; five, six, seven days — who counts? He has a good stomach for pictures.
"On the other hand, Selznick, for whom I worked on Nothing Sacred, hasn't Goldwyn's showmanship, but he's a terrific guy on stories. He carries a phantom typewriter with him wherever he goes."
However, what Hecht thinks of the current method of Hollywood production, the current film public and the current crop of exhibitors, wouldn't pass the NBC censor board — minus Mae West in her Garden of Eden. Expurgating it for reading purposes, it goes something like this:
"Catering to the imbecilic type of moron who clutters around first nights and hotel lobbies, pleading for autographs, in the delusion that this public must be served, is just so much pap. Half of these whacky kids never go into a picture house, because if they did they might miss 'Dolly Delovely' at a theatre a few blocks away. The only way to de