Motion Picture Classic (Jul-Dec 1930)

Facts and Figures (Continued from page i6) that wouldn't pay the cost of the Klan riders for four days. It has been shown aJmost continuously for sixteen years, being seen by over 55,000,000 people, and taking in $21,500,000. Now it is being fitted out with sound effects and talking prologue to start forth again. Griffith sat in a projection-room the other day, watching it, and wondered: "What will I have to do in 1946 to bring it up to date?" SERIOUSLY, you must accord Cecil B. de Mille the merit of complete consistency. He has been producing spectacles so long that it pervades everything he does. There's his office bungalow on the M-G-M lot, said to have cast $22,000 to build and $30,000 to furnish. Four secretaries, a librarian, a publicity director and a couple of clerks. When C. B. goes to work, it is a parade. He moves first in golf trousers, carrying a walking stick beneath his arm. The head secretary next with a brief-case, followed by a sub-secretary. BY the way, the censors' most humorous blow has been delivered. They are censoring Mickey Mouse and Minnie in three States. It seems that Minnie has been flaunting her lace-edged lingerie too much lui that Mickey has been guilty of vulirities. Both in a manner that cannot but e highly menacing to the law and order : the country at large. IT'S odd how things turn upside down. When Carl Laemmle left his Wisconsin clothing store to open a picture theater and followed this with others, he ran into the producing trust. To be sure he could get pictures to show, he began production on his own account. But the big producers of today work the other way; to be sure of a market for their product they buy up and operate the theaters. Now it is said that more than 8,000 of the best houses of the country are in the hands of the big producers. IN 1<)29, the studios turned out over a billion feet of film, which was sold to audiences in the United States and Canada for $1,560,000,000. That is, at just a little more than SI. 50 a foot. So it is interesting to note that the average cost of "release prints" — which are what you see in the theater— is a fraction more than a cent a foot. Don't subtract the latter from the former, though, expecting the difference to be profit. It isn't. There is overhead, interest on investment, production cost, distribution cost and advertising to come out of that. But even so, the studios are not yet starving. AND lest you also have inflated /V ideas about the big salaries of the movie business, absorb these facts and figures: There are 17,500 extras on the books of the Central Casting Bureau. The studios used just 252,000 of them last year, or 840 a day — which means that 16,660 were out of work each day. For the extras they used, the studios paid out $2,229,076, which, if split up among them all, works out to about 43 cents a day. How would you like to try to live on that in Hollywood? 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