Hollywood Studio Magazine (August 1971)

Take it from the top News notes on the Hollywood scene by Zelda Cini A gap in communication Despite the fact that you may already know it, we can’t resist reminding you that this summer’s TV fare seems worse than ever before, difficult as that may be to believe. Bad enough that it should be awful here, but when the British Broadcasting Corp looked at America’s leading kid-show. Sesame Street, and shook its head, you know things are bad everywhere. However, BBC had its reasons. Although the language is ostensibly the same, accent, vocabulary, educational approach and setting are different. Sesame Street had surmounted the language barriers in 40 foreign countries and bombed out in Great Britain. Oh, well, Great Britain lost out in America once — around 1776, if memory serves. But then that wasn’t a very good show! *** Attention Cinema columnists Harrison Carroll, whose death terminated a 43-year newspaper career, mostly as a movie columnist and drama critic, now has an award named for him: The Harrison Carroll Cinema Reporting Prize, for outstanding cinema, television, radio, nespaper and magazine columnists, domestic and international. There will be three awards (all to be made at an annual awards banquet in 1972) - $5,000 for first place; $3,000 for second and $2,000 for third, — at the decision of a board of governors chaired by John Wayne, with John Borgnine as vice-chairman, and such eminent assistants as Stephen Crane, Glenn Ford, Anthony Quinn, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Terry Moore, Ross Hunter, Pat O’Brien, Patrick Curtis, Robert Wagner and others. Prize sponsors, who plan to establish a cinema information library in Hollywood, where Harrison’s work and mementos will be displayed and stored (and where other writers, especially winners of the prize may place their works and memorabilia) are actor Broyden Linden, movie director Gerd Oswald and Troy Cory, singer-actor. For those who have personal reasons for remembering Harrison Carroll well, there was a statement included with the news release which was signed “Harrison Carroll, Philanthropist” and included in it this bit: “ . . . just to be remembered and honored by a few of them (great talented people) after all’s said and done, is an experience that’s worth dedicating a lifetime for.” Anyone care to take the First Amendment? The Fifth, maybe! Backwards ad, backwards From Greater Capitol Heights, Maryland, comes the announcement of the Rosemary Award Association, “a society of remembrance to present belated awards to our beloved Silent Stars”, president Thomas Fulbright, 1211 Roily Avenue, who writes for a Mr. Rubin, editor of a tabloid newspaper called Classic Film Collector. Fulbright wants to honor the performers who attained stardom before the Oscar came into being, and who are still ahve to accept such an award as a token of being remembered. He describes his own “Oscar” as follows: “Locally I can get a beautiful award made up mostly of brass mounted on a lovely piece of wood 12 x 14. Two brass torches with flame and four stars with two plates mounted separately with all the engraving for $27.00.” His own first choices? The first four awards would go to Ella Hall for “The Master Key”; Betty Compson for “The Miracle Man”; Betty Blythe for “Queen of Sheba” and Mary Pickford for “Tess O’The Storm Country.” Rosemary, he points out, is for remembrance. *** Melville Shavelson speaks out Fair or not, and with all due credit to the Newsletter of the Writers Guild of America/west, we quote Mel Shavelson, retiring president of the Guild, because we personally like what he wrote in the June issue concerning the cost of American film-making. “ . . . Hollywood itself runs the very real risk of disappearing before the new technologies can bring a decent return to the creators for the things they create . . . “Most foreign motion pictures and much foreign TV is financed in part by foreign governments, against which the American product must compete. Of course I am in favor of government assistance to Hollywood if it does not mean government interference. I am also in favor of motherhood. I happen to think what we do is at least as important as what Lockheed does. But most important of all, I don’t think Hollywood can sit back and wait for outside help. “ ... It is time for all of us to be realistic about the artificial costs that have accumulated over the years on the part of management, of the agents, of the talent - and that includes us — and of labor, costs that make it more expensive to make motion pictures or TV shows in the LISA than anyplace else in the world ...” That’s Shavelson’s view. As in everything else, it takes thinking people to make value-judgments. How unfortunate that the film industry, perhaps more than any other, has built its own demise on the ego-trips of its brightest names. Everybody wants production costs to be pruned, but like the nasty little boy who provoked a bitter argument, it seems to be a case of “let’s you and him fight”. Who’s to be the first to take the cut? Disney strikes again That small wooden puppet Pinocchio, whose nose grew in ratio to the frequency and magnitude of his lies, is 31 years old this year - Disney’s film version, that is. — and due for re-release, the fourth time around. If that isn’t enough to give one pause, since the movie’s premier release in 1940, JACKIE COOPER RETURNS - He’s never really been away, but Jackie Cooper returns to acting in the M. J. Frankovich film version of Jacqueline Susann’s “The Love Machine.” Principally active as a television VIP for more than a decade, Cooper plays a television VIP in the up-coming Columbia Pictures release which also stars Dyan Cannon, Robert Ryan, David Hemmings, Maureen Arfliur, Sharon Farrell, Shecky Greene, Jodi Wexler and John Phillip Law as Robin Stone. 4