Hollywood Spectator (1931)

November, 1931 23 article in this issue entitled “Devotion” and Fundamentals. His answer is there. Occasionally a letter reaches the office crammed with meat in the form of concrete examples, names, figures and proof. Such a communication is one signed merely “A Reader.” The apology for his failure to sign a name speaks for itself. “If the writer’s name ever became connected with the example he sets forth here, the political swine in Hollywood would kill him deader than Kelcy’s pup.” Which, say we, is reason enough. The facts contained in the letter we will save, but there is a paragraph or two which amply demonstrate the quality of “A Reader’s” vitriol. Because Wall Street men haven’t yet found out the real low down they must know that grotesque salaries are paid to men who don’t rate one-tenth of what these men are drawing, but what they will sooner or later learn is — that if they have the “guts” to break the hold these parasites have on the business and if they will begin to train young college men to replace these damned parasites, they will discover that they can replace more than half the studio personnel and by the colossal monies that are saved they could even continue the present lavish waste in actual production and still make staggering profits. You know this game inside and out. You’ve forgotten more about what is really necessary than the majority who draw these stupendous salaries. Thus you know that the staggering costs are not for sets, or stories or even stars, but for the salaries paid to nincompoops and their political parasites, uncles, cousins, nephews and relatives. Pictures and picture business will eventually come back to a sane and conservative basis . . . and mainly along the plans you have outlined in the Spectator. It will prove that men outside of the sacred circle of the inner politicians know as much, perhaps more, than this sacred circle or favored ones. They’ll wake up sooner or later and the Spectator will be the paper that will do the job. TTY Failure of Exhibitors’ Conference (Cinematograph Times, London) The meeting to end injustices to American exhibitors ended in smoke. Twenty-one organizations of independent U. S. exhibitors were represented at a national gathering in New York, summoned to lower percentages, abolish score charges, re-establish flat rentals, end forever distributor-dominance of the exhibiting business. For lack of leadership or lack of conviction, the meeting did no more than confirm Hollywood in its comfortable belief that cinema exhibitors are the world's most vacillating, ineffective, disunited body of men, whose tantrums it is hardly necessary to notice. . . . Thereafter the meeting went to pieces. A deal of time was devoted to criticism of Constance Bennett’s salary. Exhibitors went on record as being opposed to crime and sex films, and alibied themselves by claiming that they have to play them because they are included in the Hollywood outputs. They then permitted themselves to be moved to tears by a distributor’s sales head’s speech to the effect that his company has lost between a million and a quarter of a million dollars on each of twenty films during the past three years; the one most frequently quoted was a silent one made over three years ago. Nobody seems to have observed that this company has consistently paid the handsomest dividends, and is now financially the most stable of Hollywood’s Big Four. Percentage Playing Evil (Abram F. Myers, Allied Exhibitor) One feature that has received too little attention is that percentage playing necessarily involves checking. Apart from the annoyance and friction created by the checking of theatres and auditing of their accounts is the economic waste incident to maintaining large and costly organizations for that pur