Hollywood Spectator (1938)

Hollywood Spectator Page Three y%um. the EDITORS EASY CtlfllR FANTASTIC EXTRAVAGANCE . . . CONOMY is good business and good business is economical. It consists of getting the highest quality at the least cost. Motion picture producers are in the manufacturing business, but are getting their conception of the highest quality only at the greatest possible cost. Fantastic extravagance runs riot. A half dozen men control the talent market, yet a girl who would be rated a tremendous success if she were earning five thousand dollars in the com¬ mercial world, is considered a mere beginner if she is drawing ten times that amount in the world of films. There are people who last year were paid over three hundred thousand dollars for acting in pictures. Ex¬ ecutive salaries are grotesque. A Metro-GoldwynMayer stockholder has appealed to the courts to de¬ termine the justice of the payment to a small group of home-office and studio executives in ten years of $32,540,000 in salaries, commissions and bonuses. If competition for services be the determining factor in governing payments to players and executives, it is competition which Hollywood and the film indus¬ try controls. The packing industry is not trying to lure players away from Hollywood nor is the steel industry endeavoring to find executives in the ranks of those serving film companies. The film industry has entirely within its own control the salaries, bonuses and commissions it pays. Should Establish Trademark . . . SOAP company can operate economically because its trademark sells its product. It spends money to advertise the trademark and the trademark draws no salary. A picture company operates expensively because it relies on names of players to sell its prod¬ uct, because a star is its trademark, and that kind of trademark does draw a salary. The film industry sells names, not films. You are not asked to patron¬ ize a picture because it is good, but because its star is Shirley Temple, Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby, Ronald Colman, Sonja Henie or some other player whose popularity has been earned by performance or built by publicity. Each company has its trademark, but it has no market value. Perhaps I should except Samuel Goldwyn. Sam is unique. He is his own trademark. He may have one of the conventional sort; I am not quite sure of it, for the glamour with which he has surrounded his name blinds my eyes to any other distinguishing mark one of his pictures may bear. Gradually Sam’s name is becoming to mean something at the box-office; eventually it will mean enough to fill theatres, and when that time comes, when all of us patronize a picture because Sam made it and not because Dottie Tootwhistle ap¬ pears in it, Sam can tell the ten thousand-a-week Dottie to go chase herself, head his next cast with the few-hundred-a-week Mary Jones, make his pictures much more cheaply, charge us less to see them, and still continue to make himself more outrageously rich than he is already. Art Is Entertaining Factor . . . ND that brings us to the milk in one of the cine¬ matic cocoanuts, for not until pictures are made more cheaply and sold as pictures and not as star containers, will their cost be less and the satisfaction they give be more. And, peculiarly enough, to make pictures cost less and entertain more, Hollywood need not think of either cost or entertainment, but only of the art of the screen. For it is the art of the screen which entertains, not the story it tells, not the people who appear in a picture. Most of the stories could be told over teacups in a brief ten minutes without creating a particularly lively interest. And yet the average screen drama is, in essence, merely gossip about what is happening to people like your neigh¬ bors. One Sunday afternoon George Temple, Shir¬ ley’s father, and I were occupying chairs under one of the Temple trees, discussing some topic of the day. Shirley came hop-skipping across the grounds and asked her father to lend her ten cents, explaining she wanted to buy a toy from one of the group of young guests who were playing with her. With mock seri¬ ousness George discussed with this great screen star the terms of the loan, finally yielding to her gayfully insistent demands, and we picked up our discussion where we had left off. Screen Glamor Made It . . . OT until I saw Shirley's next picture did I think again of the pretty scene on the lawn. In the pic¬ ture she had one very much like it with Henry Steph¬ enson. She carried it so well that in my review of the picture I commented on it. The preview audience applauded it; I joined in the applause, yet on the lawn the same scene was merely that of a child teas HOLLYWOOD SPECTATOR, published weekly at Los Angeles, California, by Hollywood Spectator Co., Welford Beaton, Editor; Howard Hill, Business Manager. Office, 6513 Hollywood Boulevard; telephone GLadstone 5213. Subscription price, five dollars the year two years, eight dollars; foreign, six dollars. Single copies ten cents. Entered as Second Class Matter, September 7. 1937, at the P« '’Office at Los Angeles, California, under the act of Congress of March 3, 1879.