Hollywood Spectator (1931)

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6 Hollywood Spectator Alan Hancock’s General Manager Bachelder pulled her ears gently and spoke into them endearing things that real affection prompted. But even when her great and glorious eyes looked into mine I could not cease marveling at the fact that the dear lady presented to the world fourteen tons of milk during 1930. T ▼ V Executives A WOMAN chides me. She writes from a New England town that (1) she reads the Spectator, (2) she sees three or four pictures a month, (3) almost invariably she enjoys all of them, and (4) if she could believe what she finds in the Spectator, Hollywood doesn’t know how to make a picture anyone could enjoy. She wants to know what is the matter with which of us. Nothing at all, dear lady, nothing at all. No doubt if you had told me the names of Edited by WELFORD BEATON THE 10 Cents FILM SPECTATOR Published In Hollywo turdav Vol. 7 Hollywood, Califori|CJanuary 12. 1929^ No. 3 _ _ . 111U1I „ u 0 , 1 ^ —■ | Talkies will not con ; tinue to be successful i Public does not want to hear voices : Joe Jackson shows how to save money Reviews by the Editor CASE OF LENA SMITH SHOPWORN ANGEL MARQUIS PREFERRED WOLF OF WALL STREET ! By the Junior Critic IN OLD ARIZONA MARQUIS PREFERRED SHOPWORN ANGEL WOLF OF WALL STREET HIS CAPTIVE WOMAN the pictures you enjoyed, you would find that I enjoyed them also. I do not abuse pictures as much as I do those who make them. Let me see if 1 can make my position clear. When I criticise the industry as a whole I view its product as a whole. I thoroughly enjoy perhaps half the pictures I see, yet the industry’s financial condition is desperate, which shows that I would be a poor judge of the screen’s commercial welfare if my judgment were controlled by my personal tastes in screen entertainment. The public does not like as many pictures as I do. If it did, there would be no box-office slump. ▼ ▼ My CONSTANT criticism of the film industry as a whole is based on the folly it has shown in putting itself in its present alarming position. All the existing financial distress could have been avoided and pictures could have sailed serenely through an untroubled sea even while the general business depression persisted. The industry had assumed enormous proportions by producing a certain line of goods — silent pictures. The sound camera came along and the industry began to produce an entirely different line of goods — talking pictures. There could be no quarrel with this if the level of the industry’s financial condition had been maintained after the change of product. But what do we find? Warner Brothers and Fox facing bankruptcy ; Paramount so desperate for money that it is forcing its employees to lend it money. Such distress is general throughout the industry. The situation becomes more alarming when we realize that there is no relief in sight. The incompetent executives who brought the business to its knees continue in control of it. The pictures that almost wiped out the business last year, are being duplicated this year in all the Hollywood studios; the producing organizations will present again to the public the sort of entertainment it already has spurned. ▼ ▼ How COULD the industry know that the public would not continue to patronize pictures that told their stories in dialogue? you may ask. A fair question, but easily answered. If the executives, who are being paid the hugely grotesque salaries that make the film industry so ridiculous, knew anything whatever about the fundamentals of their business they would have known just what was going to happen. An executive’s value to a business lies in his ability to look ahead. Our present executives lack this ability. If they had no other way of foretelling what was going to happen, they could have discovered it by reading the Spectator of January 12, 1929. In it I predicted precisely what has happened. V V V Salary Cuts THE HEAD of one of the studios told me that salaries simply had to come down. He made a virtue of the fact that he uncomplainingly would stand a cut along with the rest of the studio personnel. An actor on this lot received a salary of five hundred dollars a week for a year; worked for three weeks in one picture from which all his scenes were cut after the first preview. An effort was made by this studio to raise to stardom two stage actors who proved to be such dead ones that their contracts finally were bought up. Cost to the studio — pure waste — $260,000. ▼ ▼ Four HIGH-PRICED writers worked for months on a story before the studio discovered that it didn’t own it. Waste probably $50,000. A picture, a pet production of the studio head himself, turned out to be so bad that it will not be released. Waste over $400,000. I could continue to add things that I know of my own knowledge that would bring the waste for one year above one million dollars. The studio head is willing to contribute a