Motion Picture (Feb-Jul 1933)

News and Gossip of the Studios WILSON MIZNER is dead. Noted as an author and wit, JMizner wrote screen plays for years and his death is deeply mourned by his numerous film friends, one of whom gave him an epitaph of which any man could be proud: "The gods were in need of a laugh. So they called Bill upstairs." It was ]\Iizner who, when his brother was reported fatally ill, wired, "Stop dying. I'm trying to write a story for Joe E. Brown." Mizner's colorful life (from the Yukon to the Brown Derby) is being dramatized for a William PoweU film. If you don't think Franchot Tone is being built up to Gable proportions, just glance over his recent assignments. While Gable is to do "Black Orange Blossoms" with Jean Harlow, Tone has the male lead in another tempestuous drama, "Lady of the Night." And now he is to play opposite Miriam Hopkins in "Stranger's Return" — in the role once scheduled for Gable! HOLLYWOOD has been getting a laugh from the latest tale about James Cagney. Whether true or not, it's a good story. Jimmy took some pals down to Long Beach to see a regatta (so the yarn goes). And Jimmy — the lad nobody can put anything over on in the movies — was sold some tickets by a speculator at a sweet price. And the tickets were fakes! C. S. Bull Once screen-famous, now stage-famous, Alice Brady has brought her wit to the talkies for "When Ladies Meet" D O you know what Charles FarreU doing while waiting for that "good role" to show up? Along with Guinn Williams, he's breaking in polo poaies and selling them for fancy sums! BARBARA BENNETT, wife of Morton Downey, decided to paj* a visit to her sisters, Joan and Connie, and her father, Richard — ^especially as her singing hubby had engagements on the Coast. Just out of the hospital, she thought California's climate might help her, too. She left her new baby in NewYork with her mother, Adelaide JMorrison (the first ]\Irs. Bennett). The baby developed bronchitis. Barbara took a 'plane home . . . HOLLYWOOD sees one of those "famous short stories" in the fact that soon after Janet Gaynor married LydeU Peck, the former Oakland lawyer became an associate studio executive — and soon after Janet divorced him, his studio oflice was vacated. . . . Marian Nixon and Fox have also parted compan}'. . . . And Lew Ayres and Universal; also, Tala BireU and Universal. . . . And Frances Dee and Paramount. . . . And Wera Engels and RKO. . . . Helen Mack's wire-haired terrier is going places, if he isn't held back. And the same can be said of Helen, who is probably the screen's youngest character actress. Remember her in "Sweepings"? She's now in "Melody Cruise" HOLLYWOOD, which showed excessive curiosity (like a herd of fans) when George Bernard Shaw, the Irish dramatist, dropped into town, is still "burned up" over the "shot" at the movies that he took in New York. He said (talking to America): "The real thing with which you are corrupting the world is the anarchism of Hollywood. There you put a string of heroes in front of people and all of them are anarchists, and the one answer to anything annoying or to any breach of the law or to any expression which he considers unmanly, is to give the other person a sock in the jaw\ I wonder you don't prosecute the people W'ho produce these continual strings of gentlemen who, when they are not kissing the heroine, are socking the jaw of somebody else. It is a criminal ofTense to sock a person in the jaw. When will we see a film issuing from Hollywood in which the hero, instead of socking the gentleman in the jaw, does the civilized thing and calls a policeman?" DIANA WYNYARD, who is beyond a doubt the most notable actress "find" that Holly w^ood has made in the past year, has gone back to England to fulfill a stage contract. (She'U return to California in the Fall.) Sailing from New York, which she had entered as a comparative unknown in January, 193 1, she found herself a celebrity — with interviewers around her, three deep. She confessed that she felt she was lucky, and she revealed how she achieved the illusion of age. She told the New York Times, "1 had lead weights made for my shoes, fitted to the shapes of my soles. That ^Continued on page 88) Hollywood is back on fuU salary again. But it didn't get back on without some fireworks. Employees of one studio threatened a strike, when it looked as if they would get full pay a week later than expected. Conrad Nagel, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, resigned after a dispute over his efforts to straighten out the tangle. 39