Motion Picture Herald (Mar-Apr 1947)

Win mmiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiu minimi minium i l i i iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii mi i in i i iiimiimiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiihihiii imiiiiiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimiiimiiimmiiiimiii iiimiiiiiiiiiiiiimiimiiii iiiimi mini iiiiinii imiiiiii Sees Westerns Perennial Fare PREVIEWS OF TRADE SHOWS KILLING, from the picture. "Born to Kill". Lawrence Tierney. star along with Claire Trevor, kills his best friend, portrayed by Elisha Cook, Jr. The RKO Radio picture will be shown to the trade April 14. Herman Sch/om produced it; Robert Wise directed. LOU COSTELLO AND BUD ABBOTT at the right put on a sales talk to Charles Trowbridge in Universal-International's "Buck Privates Come Home", now available to the trade. Robert Arthur produced; Charles T. Barton directed. by WILLIAM R. WEAVER Hollywood Editor Not only will there always be Westerns, a prediction nobody ventures to dispute, but there will always be big Westerns — "A'' Westerns, to use the Hollywood term of differentiation— and as time goes on more and more of them will be turned out by independent producers. The writer quoted above is Niven Busch, who isn't so old, but who started paying close attention to the art-industry at close range at the age of 10. Showmen will identify him, if they read their billing as attentively as they should, as the man who wrote "Duel in the Sun," the novel, and both wrote and co-produced "Pursued," the picture. Close to Business as Boy He got close to the roots of show business as a boy who spent his play time at the Fort Lee, New Jersey, studio of the late Lewis J. Selznick, whose then expansive holdings included the World Film Corporation, with Master Niven's father, Briton Busch, in charge of distribution. That was 1913. Master Niven's ambition, at 10, was to work up to the post of office boy at the Fort Lee plant, a job held down by an only slightly bigger fellow named David O. Selznick, who doubtless at that point coveted similarly the clerical responsibilities shouldered by his big brother, Myron. All the boys went on up in the business from there, Myron to fabulous heights in the talent agency field, David to producership of such showmanly items as "Gone with the Wind," and Niven to the front rank of American writing men. Fort Lee, as Editor Terry Ramsaye of this publication has recorded in detail in his "A Million and One Nights," was quite a place. They did make Westerns at Fort Lee, but it was by no direct line from that circumstance that Briton Busch's boy Niven came to the writing of such impressively screenworthy Western stories as "Duel in the Sun" and "Pursued." Nor were the Busch and Selznick careers steadily connected, although Niven and David did work for a time, nor exactly tegether but alongside, on a little magazine called Time, which a friend of theirs named Henry Luce was putting together with more pains than prospects in a loft on New York's 34th Street. To Coast in 1933 And it was indeed Myron who, in 1933, brought Niven to Hollywood and started him off as a writer of scripts, so many scripts that he can't remember the names of all of them. But he didn't set out to have David produce "Duel in the Sun," planning to do that himself, in a deal with RKO Radio, and letting the property go to David, when the latter, reading the thing as a preliminary to lending that studio the services of Jennifer Jones, decided to bid it in for his own uses, and did so. Author Busch says he'd have used it differently. The Busch dedication of his talent to the Western type of subject grew out of his disappointment with the exhibition result of Samuel Goldwyn's "The Westerner," for which he had written the script without having found out at first hand what the West was really like. It didn't play the way he felt it should have played, so he went down to the Panhandle for six months, living with its people and roaming its vastness, to find out why. What he found out prompted him to take a year off to write "Duel," which is followed now by "Pursued," and to be followed by another work in kind which he considers a bigger, broader and better treatment of the West that was and, he is convinced, in literature always will be. Westerns, he says, can be substantial stories about maturely motivated characters whose problems may be dealt with peculiarly well against the richly dramatic background of the West. And the reason why more and more of the big Westerns will be coming from independent producers, he observes, is because an independent producer, venturing his own money in quest of profit, prefers to venture it in a property he's dead sure will attract at minimum a definitely predeterminable number of customers. The Western, he says, is the only type of picture that commands, be it good, bad or indifferent, a virtually irreducible rain-or-shine attendance. Army Film Released More than 800 prints of ''Your Army Today,'' the War Department Army Week film, are in circulation, according to Army officials in Washington. About 60 per' cent of the prints are 16mm. with the balance 35mm. iimimmiminiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiu^ MOTION PICTURE HERALD, APRIL 12, 1947 31