Hollywood Spectator (1931)

Unit Production BANKRUPTCY VERY nearly has been the price that the motion picture industry was called upon to pay for its demonstration of the great truth that screen entertainment can not be turned out by factory methods. Since the world began there never has lived in it a man who could handle intelligently as a producer as many as eight pictures in one year, yet we have some producers who make a bluff at handling nearly eighty. As an art the screen was powerful enough to succeed financially in spite of the terrific manhandling it received from those who acquired control of it; it was able to pay enormous salaries to those who did not earn them, and to squander money outrageously on extravagances due to executive stupidity. But the good old gold-spattered days are over. Pictures are getting down to cases. They are going to continue to make a lot of people wealthy, but they will be people with picture brains. Anyone with an executive mind, common sense and ordinary business training, can run a studio. He never will be a man who can make a motion picture, for the brains that equip him to produce artistic creations would not function also in a business way. We rapidly are approaching the time when the chief occupation of the film executive will be to see that the creative artist is not worried about anything. Only Hollywood knows what a complete revolution that will be. At the present time film executives with malignant persistency worry those upon whose brains they must depend for salable product. The RECOGNITION of the value of individual effort will lead to unit production, wherein lies the industry’s only hope of a return of prosperity. Both artistically and economically it is the only way out for Hollywood. It will permit creative brains to function and it will rid pictures of the terrific overhead that consists principally of the most wildly absurd salaries that any industry ever has been crazy enough to pay. Its coming will be opposed by those who now run the big studios, but such opposition makes it no less inevitable. The only thing that will put an end to the box-office depression is the response of the public to the quality of the pictures; the public has registered that it does not like the present product, and there will be no other response until the product is changed. All the big releasing organizations already are looking for pictures, no matter where or by whom made. Paramount, under the terrific strain of scores of picture houses in the red, will release anything that indicates box-office strength, and it is the same way with the others. All this is hastening the day of universal unit production. For the first time in the history of the film industry it is thinking wholly in terms of pictures. In previous years the public would accept almost anything; New York executives devoted their attention to jockeying one another out of chains of theatres, and proceeded on the assumption that anyone could make their pictures. But now they are thinking differently. They understand that there is nothing else of quite such importance as the product. ▼ ▼ For PERHAPS the first time in any industry, the follies of film producers are going to react favorably to themselves. By making it practically impossible for good directors to make pictures, they are bringing on a rebellion that will react to their own benefit. The best directors, smarting under incompetent supervision, limited as to expense and shooting schedules and * _ * WELFORD BEATON, EDITOR VOL. 12, NO. 6 ROBERT E. SHERWOOD, ASSOCIATE HOLLYWOOD SPECTATOR, published every other Saturday by The Film Spectator, Inc. Welford Beaton, president; Howard Hill, secretary and manager; at Los Angeles (Hollywood Station) in California. Address 6362 Hollywood Blvd. Telephone GL 5506. Entered as second class matter July 1, 1931, at the post office at Los Angeles, California, under the act of March 3, 1879. Subscription price, $3.50 per year ; foreign, $4.50 ; single copy, 15 cents.