Motion Picture Classic (Jul-Dec 1930)

Facts an d Figures Intimate Items About Pictures, Past, Present And Future By CAMPBELL MacCULLOCH A CHINESE merchant recently alighted from a steamer in Los Angeles harbor and announced that he had come here as the representative of a group of tradesmen in Shanghai to contract for American merchandise. "I shall make contracts for over a million dollars," he said. "We come to you for these goods because we have seen them in your moving pictures. Not only have we seen them as to their appearance, but we have seen them work. Among other things, I will buy electric refrigerators. They have commended themselves to us." That is one of the accounts Hollywood has bestowed upon these United States. And a million dollars in foreign trade is no trifle, especially when it comes from one buyer. Yet you hear supposedly reasonable folk sneering at Hollywood's pretensions to usefulness. AND just to clinch ±\_ the matter, it is less than a month since the Chilean Government awarded the Foundation Company of America a $4,500,000 contract for the construction throughout Chile of 250 schools and 20 hospitals. Jorge Delano, a Chilean picture director recently arrived in Hollyvs^ood, says that the contract was directly the result of American films made in Hollywood. Walter G. Matthewson, chief of the Division of Labor Statistics in the California Department of Industrial Relations, with a brutal smash at the swollen-stipend fantasy. "Between May, 1929, and May, 1930," says Mr. Matthewson, "the average weekly earnings of motion picture folk was $54.49. This represented an increase of thirty-seven per cent, over earnings for the previous year." Now what, I ask you, are we to do with an iconoclast like that? Has the man no sympathy, no mercy? $54.49! He wouldn't even make it $54.50. LSO, we have been so stuffed with tales about the motion picture magnate, his millions and his power, that we ^ave come to believe that Brother Zukor owns Paramount; and Brother Mayer, M-G-M; and Uncle Carl, Universal, and so on. But, suppose you learn that the Paramount-Publix outfit is owned by no less than 16,486 common people like you and me! Rather makes you wonder how many people Brother Adolph has to consult before he can order Clara Bow to stop talking about her love affairs. o NCE, quite a dis WHY DIRECTORS ARE BALD Director, tearing out hair by the handful, as the cameras catch not only the big jungle scene, but something else: "Who in Hellywood let those cats out of the bag?" I HEARD a Ch icago business man — who, by the way, must at sometime have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle — pooh-pooh the whole influence of films on foreign trade. The Asiatics and sub-Europeans, he insisted, were too simple to know what most of the things in American pictures were intended for. Perhaps so. But you can't shove bathtubs and motor-cars and handsome clothes under a simple man's nose week after week without making him want them. THOSE $10,000-a-week movie salary yarns — usually the last resort of a desperate publicity department— are really getting just a little too much to swallow. And now comes movie history, I went with an advertising friend to call on Carl Laemmle in his New York offices. I went along to lend moral support to my friend, who had the absurd idea that it was time for picture companies to advertise their wares. His idea was that Universal should spend as much as $10,000 the first year to advertise its pictures. As I recall it now, we left quickly, followed by Uncle Carl's voice shouting to know if we thought he was crazy. Advertise? Advertise? I'm reminded of the experience, because in 1929-30 the movies spent over $100,000,000 buying advertising space. And Uncle Carl's company went — believe me— quite a long distance beyond that first suggested ten thousand that roused his ire. {Continued on page 16) 14