Motion Picture Herald (Jan-Feb 1939)

MOTION PICTURE HERALD MARTIN QUIGLEY, Editor-in-Chief and Vublhhtr Vol. 134, No. 2 OP January 14, 1939 THE BLIND BUY FROM Hollywood-the-producer come continued complaints that the "Greatest Year" campaign attained conspicuously not-so-much at the box office. Possibly in time it will become apparent to the "creative community" that in the motion picture business there really is no ultimately satisfactory substitute for motion pictures. Everything else has been tried. Every now and then somebody makes a picture and it does business. That simple method could be used more often. Hollywood fell somewhat short of making it the "Greatest Year", in the large. That was not, certainly, by design, but rather for the lack of design. An examination of the crystallized summarization of what the motion picture industry, including Hollywood, was thinking, talking and doing the most about in 1938, as presented in the "headlines of the year" in the December 31 issue of Motion Picture Herald, will find pictures made very few headlines as compared with issues about the distribution, selling and exhibition of pictures. There was a venerable and honored tradition of what was once the show business epitomized in "the show must go on". When the show does not go on, the box office and the public become most aware. The "Greatest Year" campaign was "blind buying". AAA CHOICE ON THE LEFT ANNUAL selection of lists of "the best" has become a national epidemic. For the sake of the record it is to be set down that the Daily Worker of New York, which has critics and departments devoted to the arts, has presented its choices in two categories: 1 — "The most significant picture of the year was the Soviet production, 'Professor Mamlock' ... A close second was 'Blockade', the Wanger-Lawson-Dieterle film on Spain . . . " — this by Mr. David Piatt. 2 — "This week we are satisfying a primitive urge by listing the worst. At the very top, almost unchallenged, stands 'Marie Antoinette' . . . two million dollars worth of scalloped icing . . . " — by-lined by Mr. Peter Kinney. Mr. Kinney seems to have been displeased because the icing was applied to Marie Antoinette instead of the sans culottes. That, one may assume, is an expression of taste — an opinion in art. America and its motion picture industry must be eternally indebted to the constructive and unbiased Judgments of the impartial press. AAA SPEAKING of names, California's flower seed industry has been having a time for the last three years building up a stock of an elaborately nurtured and allegedly new red ipomoea — morning glory to you — and at last with it ready for release, have named it Scarlett O'Hara. Now comes the discovery that the damthing grows wild down South, a weed in fact. "FIRST STAR" FADES WHEN Florence Lawrence closed her career by her own design last week, she became a national story because of Hollywood, tragedy and her three divorces. In another sense her passing was the more tragic, too, because of the yet unnoted fact that it was Florence Lawrence whose fame and public following established the star system for the motion picture. Miss Lawrence and Mr. Harry Salter left the stage for the motion picture in the early years of Vitagraph out in Flatbush and moved to the American Biograph Company in the golden age of that concern as Mr. D. W. Griffith started his rise in 1909. Miss Lawrence, kept anonymous by the policy of the company, became world famed as The Biograph Girl. Therein Mr. Carl Laemmle and his diligent confrere, Mr. Robert Cochrane, found opportunity. One day Miss Lawrence vanished and from way out in St. Louis came a story intimating she had been mysteriously slain. Presently she was found alive, on page one and on a contract with the Independent Motion Picture Company which was to be the famous "Imp" which became Universal Pictures Corporation. The project proved so successful that it established a policy. The next raid on Biograph took Miss Mary Pickford for "Imp". The star era had dawned. AAA YOU remember what somebody said about a certain piccolo player. V/ ell , it seems that when the Paramount theatre in Broadway opened of a Wednesday with that costly "Zaza" the bill also included Mr. Benny Goodman and his orchestra. According to the public prints, the jitterbugs dominant in the audience hooted and shouted through the picture for Benny, to the utter destruction of the picture showing. The Paramount has known about the jitterbugs and Benny for quite awhile. The reaction had nothing much to do with the picture, and certainly did nothing for it. Apparently production and exhibition do not, in some spots, precisely coordinate. AAA A SUMMARY of electrical developments for the year just ended, by Mr. Guy Bartlett of the General Electric Company, brings to attention the interestingly new device of operating electrical generators in an atmosphere of hydrogen, reducing air-friction by nine-tenths — which will mean cheaper current. Also the year has seen the coming of important improvements in light sources, including the new fluorescent lamps, capable of giving any tint in the visible spectrum, and presently to be applied to showmanship at the New York World's Fair. So far "The Great White Way" is mostly red and green. Presently it will be a rainbow. AAA JOURNALISM NOTE— Maybe it's all right, but we got quite a start the other morning on observing that the building that is our new neighbor in Rockefeller Center is shared so very adjacently by the Associated Press and the National Cash Register. — Terry Ramsaye