Motion Picture Herald (May-Jun 1946)

MOTION PICTURE HERALD MARTIN QVIGLEY, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher TERRY RAMSAYE. Editor Vol 163, No. 9 June 1, 1946 SKOURAS SPEAKS OUT A MOOD of special earnestness and disposition for poignantly plain speaking possessed Mr. Spyros Skouras when he arose to address the Allied States Association dinner honoring its president, Mr. Jack Kirsch in Chicago last week. The like of it has not been heard from a rostrunn of this industry for a decade or two. Mr. Skouras was listed on the abundant program as president of Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, but he urged that he was there as an exhibitor of some thirty years' experience, in behalf of the common interest of the motion picture. He achieved an emphasis by direct address to Mr. Kirsch and discussion of his administration as the new president of Allied States, "We hear too often of the things Allied is against . . . against percentage pictures . . . against preferred playing time . . . against local checkers. . . . The arbitrary refusal to cooperate ... is not the answer." "We must hear," said Mr. Skouras, "if this industry is to go forward, an affirmative program which recognizes the economic problems of the producers . . . recognizes the right of established theatre operators . . . recognizes the rights of every free man to enter our business ..." Again there was candour in Mr. Skouras' urging that "the distributor should recognize there are only so many days of preferred playing time . . . that the exhibitor is in business for profit, just as he is." There was sharp meaning, too, in the observation that since the dollar comes in at the box office some exhibitors have "the mistaken belief that it was all theirs . . . and some distributors fell into the same way of thinking." A sharp point was made in observations about "moving our business from film row to the courthouse." The public has been getting too much courthouse news for years. PATTERSON of THE NEWS THE passing of Mr. Joseph Medill Patterson, founder and publisher of The New York Daily News, takes the most spectacularly effective figure of American journalism to arise in a generation. His paper has reached a circulation of two and a quarter millions daily and four and a half millions Sunday, about twice that of any other American paper. Most considerably the policies of this remarkable journalist's performance have been rooted in motion picture experience. No other publisher, and certainly few other patrons, ever saw so many pictures as Mr. Patterson, who rarely passed a working day without an hour at the movies. It was one of his ways of knowing the common people, their likes and loves and laughs and hates. That process began in the years of his newspaper beginnings in Chicago when a little grind house called "The Star", down in Madison Street, ran night and day with the General Film program of Westerns and one-reel melodramas. So it came that the Chicago Tribune was the first paper in the world to give consistent attention, complete with a review column, to the motion picture. It was the Tribune, too, in the days of the early Patterson ardour, which elected to promote its circulation in collaboration of page and screen in serials, beginning with the first one, "The Adventures of Kathlyn", and continuing with such famed titles as "The Million Dollar Mystery" and "The Diamond from the Sky", and ending the fever with the ill-fated and loftily pretentious "Gloria's Romance", the de luxe serial which failed and sent the chapter plays back to the minors. It was incidentally this activity of The Tribune which brought your editor, then a staff writer of that paper, to the motion picture those thirty-and-odd years ago. Mr. Patterson has been for years a reader of Motion Picture Herald and, just by way of keeping its editor subdued, used to remark: "I find the ads interesting." For the record it can be set down that it was the early and aggressive interest of Mr. Patterson and his dynamic city editor, Mr. Walter Howey, which broke the way through censorship controversy to put "The Birth of a Nation" on Chicago's screens. One should set down, too, that The Daily News motion picture page reviews, conspicuously among metropolitan journals, have ever been written precisely for the customers at the box office, with no critical self-consciousness, in plain words for plain people. That department has these years been under the administration of Mr. Patterson's sister-in-law. Miss Kate Cameron. "J. M. P." knew the people. END of THE PARTY THAT gay expedition by Mr. Orson Welles, who went romping down to Rio in cinematographic pursuit of the "good neighbor" policy under the elastic auspices of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, has now fetched up in the law courts, like the aftermath of a Manville honeymoon. RKO had a part in the project, which seemed to be marked by much merry social activity on the creative sojourn in the land of the Latins and some picture negative shipped under the working title of "It's All True". The relevance of the title has never been explained. The relations between Mr. Welles and RKO suffered malnutrition and they parted with him holding the negative and RKO holding his note for $205,000, secured by the film. Now they would take the film in lieu of payment. That might renew the original problem of what to do with it. But it is better bookkeeping to close the transaction. There is morale value. — Terry Ramsaye