Motion Picture Classic (Jul-Dec 1930)

Facts And Figures {Continued from page 14) WHILE sound pictures have eliminated hundreds of good folk from the studio payrolls, they have given other specialists their chance. For instance, there is little Charlie Gamares. Charlie used to put in most of his time painting portraits, but now he's a gorilla specialist. He makes gorilla costumes and paints the faces. Then he puts on a suit and "gorills" in a most convincing manner. Once Charlie was satisfied with a very modest daily fee. Lately he has demanded $500 a day. And there is Count Cutelli, who will guarantee to imitate any noise you can name. He doubles for frogs, animals (any kind), seawaves, motorboats, hurricanes, steam whistles, airplanes, babies and most kinds of machinery. And about seventy-two other noisemakers are listed in the studios, ready to imitate anything from a slowly creaking door to a loud noisy elephant trumpet. I'M not sure whether the efficiency principle will do the picture business any good or not. The half-dozen companies putting forth newsreels use up about 10,000,000 feet of film each year. But — and maybe we should be thankful for this — only 500,000 feet ever reach the theaters. Think of the thousands of naked babies, Japanese fishing scenes, and bathing girls we have been spared. And the average director uses up about 50,000 feet of negative film to get the 7,000 feet you finally see on the screen. Before the talking pictures came along, he used to shoot several times that amount. In "Ben Hur, " Fred Niblo shot 750,000 feet of film to get the 12,000 feet that made the eventual picture. Imagine the feelings of the financial and engineering sharps who broke into pictures within the last two years! No wonder the sanitariums were overpopulated for months! TIME was when you could scare a theaterowner into convulsions by telling him that this or that was not interesting the children. But lately he doesn't scare so easily, because he has discovered that about 5% of his patronage comes from persons under 16 years of age. Columbia University in New York analyzed a theater audience for a week. In that time, 150,000 people passed through its doors. Of the total number, there were 8,250 under 21 years F S A Los Angeles doesn't have any honest-to-goodness free lunches, but the hordes of always-hopeful unemployed — like this one outside Warner Brothers Studio — call themselves the "breadlines" of age: only a small number being children. And another odd circumstance was discovered. Children under 12 years remembered very little of the details of any picture, but they disliked the wrongdoers very positively. But how they liked heroes! Lindbergh, Tom Mix and Doug Fairbanks outclassed all the villains and bedimmed all the crime. ANYONE who doesn't think that talking pictures have changed the character of theater audiences might do worse than consider how greatly studio fan mail has changed. Not the mail addressed to the plaj-ers, bat that coming to the studio itself, and generally dealing with criticism, suggestion, advice, encouragement. Two years ago, the average big I "lot" had from! 500 to 750 letters a day. Now, such) concerns as Paramount. Fox, M-G-MandRKOj get as many asj 1,500 each, the I greater number^ being quite sane in their comments. The studio folk believe the intelligence of the picture public is on a higher level since the talkies came. Rude persons like H. L. Mencken insist that it had to go up since it could not by any possibility fall lower. THE financial firm of Halsey-Stuart and Company have made a survey of the picture business and find that the investment in theaters and exhibition equipment runs to $1,250,000,000. That means that more than 300,000,000 people have to slip their admission fees over the glass shelf every year just to pay the interest on the investment. Put it another way: every twentieth one df you pays the interest; every seventeenth person pays for the profit ; and the rest just pay to keep the machine going. A PRODUCER showed me his cost-sheet for a new feature picture not long ago. It was a seven-reeler, and the total figure ran to just $478,099.5 1 . He mentioned that it had been 37 days in the making. My mind went back to the earlier days of the picture business, when I dropped in at the old Solax studio in Flushing, L. I., and found the entire staff — of seven people — in a heavy conference. They were half-way through production of a onereeler, and the cost to date had been $850. They had found that they couldn't tell the story in one reel. It would have to be two, and that meant more than $500 {Continued on page 106) 16