Hollywood Studio Magazine (October 1972)

TAKE IT FROM THE TOP By Zelda Cini Goldwyn turns 90 Sam Goldwyn, age 90 (August 27, 1972), is a Shell of a man, immobilized by a stroke, physically and mentally victimized by his own longevity. And yet he cannot be toppled from his high place in the history of movie-making. Born Samuel Goldfish in Warsaw, Poland, he had emigrated to London at age 11 and to N.Y. by the time he was 13. From glove salesman to movie maker was an apparently illogical step, except that he married Blanche Lasky, his first wife, whose brother was a vaudevillian named Jesse Lasky. Jesse Lasky had decided to enter a new kind of entertainment business called moving pictures. Goldwyn joined him, along with another farsighted young man named Cecil B. DeMille, in the 1913 filming of a movie entitled “The Squaw Man,” which was mostly produced in a Hollywood lemon grove. The rest is motion picture history, except that Goldwyn himself was never a part of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He was, instead, the dynamic leader of Samuel Goldwyn Studios, which his present longtime wife, Frances Howard, still keeps an eye on. At the risk of sounding fatuous, and in view of today’s film-commentaries on the lives of American Indians, blacks, and other minorities, could it be sheer coincidence that Goldwyn’s first film was “Squaw Man” and his last (in 1959) was “Porgy & Bess”? Was he ahead of his time — or haven’t things changed much? Movie memorabilia museum For five years, the City of L.A. has been looking for a place to house historical relics from the motion picture industry. At last, a deal has been set — for two years, at least, with one-year renewal options - to display the multimillion dollar collection at the existing museum at Universal Studios! Previous locations under evaluation included the Dodge House, since destroyed; Harold Lloyd’s estate, William S. Hart’s residence and Mount Hollywood. Meanwhile, the artifacts languished in the former Lincoln Heights Jail, abandoned as a jail years ago because it was, and is still, a raunchy structure. The collection itself, a potpourri of costumes, still photographs, tapes, recordings, films, etc., was purchased for $22,500 by the L.A. Recreation and Parks Commission from the Hollywood Museum Association on August 31, 1967. It is now valued at somewhere between one and two million dollars, although it is still in the process of being catalogued (at Lincoln Heights Jail) by Walter J. Daugherty, curator of the Recreation and Parks Department’s Hollywood Center for Audio Visual Arts. If you are a Los Angeles City taxpayer, it’s an odds-on Chance you didn’t even know that this “playground” department had (1) a curator, and (2) a Hollywood Center for Audio Visual Arts. You may even have been surprised to learn that Mayor Sam Yorty was once in town long enough - and sufficiently interested in movie memorabilia — to authorize such a purchase. But that was long ago. Some of the collection has been displayed, in the meantime, at such ill-assorted places as the Broadway-Hollywood Department Store, Hollywood National Bank, L.A. County Museum, L.A. Convention Center, art museums in Newport Beach and Laguna — and — the German-American Volkfest in West Berlin. Now, thanks to MCS (which owns Universal), even you can see it in glamorous North Hollywood, as part of the regulär Studio tour, for which admission is charged. Does all of the above compute? Mr. & Mrs. Tarzan Include among the things you may never have known until now, the saga of Joan and James Pierce of Apple Valley (Calif.). Jim was the fourth of 15 movie-screen Tarzans, the last from the silent era . . . and he married his co-star “Jane,” 44 years ago. She was, coincidentally, the real-life Joan Burroughs, daughter of Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan, who cast her as Jane to Jim’s Tarzan in the 1932 radio serial which her father narrated. Pierce was, by the way, the only Tarzan ever to be selected by the author for the role. The silent film, “Tarzan and the Golden Lion,” unfortunately released just as most theaters were Converting to sound, was a box-office disaster. Which may partly account for the fact that, at least so far as Pierce has been able to find out, every print has disappeared. To make the search even more difficult, the movie itself was filmed in 1927 at a studio then owned by Joseph P. Kennedy, father of JFK, Bobby and Ted. Kennedy Sr., at that time, was President and board chairman of a Company called FBO (Film Booking Offices of America), and R-C Pictures (later RCA and then RKO), but legend has it that he was involved in making and distributing movies exclusively for one populär Star, Gloria Swanson. How Tarzan got into that act is another one of those unsolved mysteries of the film industry. In passing The long-awaited release of “1776” as a film musical is set for November 9, 1972, with a hoopla premier in N.Y.’s Radio City Music Hall, in case you’ve been wondering what happened to this Jack Warner - Peter H. Hunt opus. Listen. No need to look Radio’s back and L.A. has it. Just in case you’re as interested in nostalgic