Hollywood Spectator (1936)

Hollywood Spectator Page Three From the ditor’s Easy Chair WHERE ARE MOTION PICTURES HEADING? Metro spends upward of two million dollars in making its Ziegfeld spectacle. It is the most gor¬ geous production ever brought to the screen. Over in England Alex Korda makes Things to Come, the first British picture to cost over one million dollars. For technical wizardry it is said to surpass anything done in a Hollywood studio. Warners have given us A Mid¬ summer Night’s Dream, a great achievement. From the same studio came the screen’s finest biography, Pasteur, and perhaps the best photographed play, Petrified Forest. Metro’s Mutiny on the Bounty, Dave Selznick’s produc¬ tion of Tale of Two Cities, Warners’ Captain Blood, and other big things on the way prompt Red Kann to remark in Motion Picture Daily,, “One of the better manufacturers of celluloid ironically talks about anything costing less (than $1,000,000) as a trailer.” All of which suggests the question : Where is the film industry heading? It has adopted the policy of making pictures out of money instead of out of human emotions. It has trained its audience to look for a million dollars on the screen of every picture house, and the only way it can hold its audience is to keep on spending more money as long as it is making the kind of pictures it is making now. * * * As a matter of fact, though, producers have forgotten their audience and are conducting a battle of millions of dollars among themselves. They are trying to outdo one another, each is trying to top the other fellow’s biggest production. But has the top not been attained already? Can we expect a more elaborate spectacle than Ziegfeldf A greater phantasy than Dream? A more impressive tech¬ nical feat than the Korda picture? A grander sea epic than Bounty? More millions of dollars might accomplish such things, but where are the millions to come from? “One segment of substantial Hollywood opinion,” writes Kann, “thinks it sees the answer in a general hike in admissions.” But today’s pictures are not supporting today’s admission prices. One feature filled film theatres yesterday; two features fail to fill them today. Here are some of the specimen double bills: Show Them No Mercy, Metro¬ politan; Magnificent Obsession (a $1,000,000 produc¬ tion), You May Be Next; Story of Louis Pasteur, Don’t Get Personal; It Had to Happen, Tough Guy; The Lady Consents * Three Live Ghosts; Another Face, Red Salute. And such fare is not enough to draw audiences. Writes Chester B. Bahn, cinema critic of the Syracuse, N. Y., Herald : “The cinema, both as an art and a business, seems to be fast approaching a crossroads. Artistically, it is nearing the day when it must decide whether it shall continue the present ‘mass production’ course, with its attendant evils, or whether it shall abruptly about face and drastically restrict its product to pictures which can stand unsupported by ‘second features,’ give-aways, bank nights and kindred devices. Commercially, it cannot much longer ignore the fact that its competitive practices, es¬ pecially in the field of exhibition, are ruinous, that show¬ manship today is largely a matter of ‘promoting,’ and that instead of selling films, it is merchandising crockery, plat¬ ed ware, screeno and a dozen other box-office stimulii.” And from across the Atlantic come indications that screen commentators over there are wondering about the future of pictures. Herbert Thompson, the discerning editor of Film IV eekly (London), concludes an article on the Korda epic with: “I should admire him still more if he would now descend from the Olympian heights and clinch his film producing genius by making a simple, down-to-earth emotional drama of real human beings, preferably against an everyday English background.” * * * Editor Thompson’s advice to Korda is my advice to Hollywood producers. As they have gone as far as they can from the first principles of screen entertainment, they should return to them, and instead of trying to stupify audiences with the magnitude of their productions they should strive to entertain them with the power of the emotional appeal of more simple pictures. It is not the million dollars spent on it which makes a picture satisfy an audience. It derives its box-office value from its emo¬ tion-producing content, an element wholly unrelated to money. To go back to Critic Bahn. In his faraway listening post he has caught the sound of a Hollywood plaint. “That there is a direct relationship between the double feature evil and the ‘cheap’ production policy observed by the studios, is fairly obvious,” he writes. “That pic¬ tures budgeted at from $100,000 to $200,000 cannot have the same care as those costing five times as much is likewise. And one does not need to be a Daniel or a Solomon to comprehend that a $200,000 picture cannot successfully compete with a million dollar ‘epic’ or even one costing half as much.” The $100,000 picture fails to entertain its audience sufficiently to need no mate on the program with it, not because it “cannot have the same care as those costing five times as much,” but because it does not have the same care. Double features, bank nights, general merchandiz¬ ing, stage shows, were made necessary by the fact that studio attention gradually drew away from the many cheaper pictures and centered itself on the few whose HOLLYWOOD SPECTATOR, published every second Saturday in Hollywood, California, by Hollywood Spectator, Inc., Welford Beaton, president; Howard Hill, secretary-treasurer. Office, 6513 Hollywood Boulevard; telephone GLadstone 5213. Subscription price, five dollars the year; foreign, six dollars. Single copies 20 cents. Advertising rates on application.