Motion Picture Classic (Jul-Dec 1930)

Facts an d Figures Intimate Items About Pictures, Past, Present And Future By CAMPBELL MacCULLOCH BECAUSE he has been in the picture business some fifteen or twenty years, the presumption is that Ivan Abramson has come to beheve some of the wildly exaggerated bunkum the publicity departments turn out. At least that seems the charitable view, or how else account for Ivan's suit to compel Will Hays into court to explain how he uses th^" hundred million dollars annually the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America are said by Ivan to collect and spend ? Just for the sake of the record, the M. P. P. & D. of A. is much more modest than Ivan seems to believe. It collects and uses about one percent of the excited Abramson figure, which isn't so much when you consider the industry's two-billion-dollar income. THERE must be something out of synchronism with the news reports about the growing unpopularity of American talking pictures among foreigners. We're sending more audible film overseas than ever before. For instance, in the first six months of 1930 we exported 144,932,674 feet of film, which was valued a t $4,127,172. Compare that with the same period in 1929 when we exported 121,810,453 feet and collected 13,331,022 for it. If you're interested, you'll find that this year we got a higher price per foot by .02 cents than we had last year. Those calamity-howlers who have been telling us that Great Britain had organized against our pictures have been listening in on the wrong station, because John Bull took more than double as much talking film from us in the first half of 1930 as he did in 1929. If you must have the figures, they are 23,677,004 feet these first six months and 11,195,243 the previous period. I got those figures from the Department of Commerce, and they're official. ND while we're talking about exports, don't let anyone tell you that talk is cheap. The manufacturers of talking-picture equipment sold ^4,585,000 worth of their apparatus between January i and June 30 of this year, just for export alone. Most of it went to England, though both France and Canada figured well. While we're on the subject of such apparatus, last year I counted 173 firms making it, but the mortality must have been terrible since, because less than half that number reported for business this September. From the sounds some of that equipment made, the only wonder is that there were not more financial funerals, and corporate executions. And why the ear-'phone business is so slow. I International Newsreel Three film faces East: Claire Dodd, Christine Maple and Virginia Bruce, beginners all, were picked by Florenz Ziegfeld as the Hollywood girls he would like to glorify. It will cost Talkie Town plenty to get them back gram for 1930-31. N CLASSIC recently an article on the ownership of the movies set forth a financial line-up which indicated that the big banking and investment houses, together with several great electrical companies, were gradually acquiring a foothold in pictures. Current Wall Street gossip lines up Hayden, Stone and Co., The Western Electric Co., Goldman, Sachs and Co. and the Du Pont interests as a composite group to furnish between $15,000,000 and $20,000,000 for the completion of just one company's proThere is a well-known Arabian proverb that recites the experience of a desert-dweller who permitted his camel to put merely his head in the tent, and — you probably recall it as well as I do, so finish the application for yourself. A FEW days since, I came across a statement of the gross receipts of the Roxy Theater in New York City for one week. The figure was $176,812. And there are between 5,500 and 6,000 seats in the establishment. That {Continued on page gj) 14