Motion Picture Herald (1954)

SMii uaamimm 7 1 H £ he paths that sometimes lead to immortality are as numerous as those that lead to infamy. To keep nature in balance, and depending on personal whims and opinions, there are probably as many immortals as there are infamous characters in our national history. Johnny Appleseed hiked to immortality in song and verse by dropping apple cores all over the virgin west ; Dan Boone gained the pinnacle in our folk lore by slinging a handful of Bull Durham, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, into the eyes of some distant relative of Crazy Horse ; and Davey Crockett has stamped himself indelibly in our memories by tramping through brambles, underbrush and swamp to even the score in scalps with other distant relatives of Crazy Horse’s wife. Conversely, Benedict Arnold became notorious by beating Quisling to the punch by some 175 years. J. Wilkes Booth will live forever in our contempt for his dastardly assassination of our best loved President. And Jesse James still outsells all other villains at both box-office and bookstore. Yes, indeed, the paths to both immortality and infamy are numberless. Immortality is not reached as frequently in an industry as on a national scale, but it has been done. Lindbergh did it in aviation, Babe Ruth in sports, Henry Ford in automobiles, Edison in electro-mechanics, and Jiggs in the funny paper. So far as we can yet be sure, nobody has climbed the ladder of immortal fame in the motion picture business, though it is as old on our national scene as many of the industries noted above. Allowing for the state of the nation moviewise the past few years, maybe what we need more than gimmicks, gags, gals and goons, more than blind checkers, reversible carpets or self-erasing box-office statements, is an industry messiah, -a candi Ch arlie Jones date for immortality, a leader with unborrowed vision to point out to all in the industry the plain, simple, obvious little things that only the blind must fail to see, and explain to those who refuse to see, that we are all in this together. So that when we do see we are all one and together, we can take just a tiny fraction of the time wasted on friction, get back to showmanship and do something about getting one hundred million people a week who do not now attend movies into our theatres. Methinks we gotta have a messiah, though. Courts, pleading, reasoning, threatening and bribing have not worked. We’re just like Crazy Horse’s relatives — so occupied with fighting among ourselves that we haven’t got time to fight the real white-man-enemv. Now who’s going to step up and apply for this open position of messiah ? Will it be the guy who cheats on every box-office report he makes and who brings disrepute onto all his brother exhibitors? No, he won’t get the job. Will it be the blustering executive who rides rough-shod and fills the air with threats? ’Twon’t be him either. Nor will it be the top brass boy who is dividend crazy, nor the pretty boy who is notoriety nuts. It won’t be the lazy man, or the blind man who cannot, or will not, see the obvious. Messiahs come mighty dear these days and it is doubtful if we will discover one before we come to the end of this article. But we’ll try. Being an exhibitor who buys his own film has taught me to think negatively, so let’s continue with a little more looking into the kind of messiah we don’t want. We made a plea a few months back for the application of some “horse sense” in this business, but either we didn’t make contact, or my wife and I are the only ones who read this. That’s one thing the messiah must have — horse sense. That’s not asking too much. There seems to be a lot of brains in this industry, however, that are shy of that precious element. Personally, I’ve leaned further backwards than Pisa does frontwards in trying to see a distributor’s point of view when he insistently demands 50% and up for a picture that might help make up for a lot of clobbering that all exhibs suffer on mid-week dates. I’ve even discovered that there are just as many good eggs on the road and in the exchange offices as there are running theatres. It dawned on me after only a few short years in exhibition that nobody can play this game by having things all his own way or making his own rules. Dealing person to person and man to man, it is not too often that there can’t be some kind of a deal, acceptable to all, if each has the authority to act according to the other fellow’s point of view. But when I lean so far back trying to see how a theatre grossing less than five or six hundred bucks a week (and we are legion) is expected to pay from 50 to 70 per cent for a picture, then the ground slips from under me and I fall flat on my spine. We used to have a janitor over in Elrna who wasn’t exactly a mental wizard. He used to work like a horse, though. Matter of fact, he sort of looked like a horse. It was all very appropriate for we paid him ( Continued on page 27) 16 MOTION PICTURE HERALD, OCTOBER 2, 1954