Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1927)

N< ) domestic tragedies should be shown. No pictures showing revolvers, sashweights, nor newforms of murder. If the battle has been unusually bitter the husband is apt to be very susceptible to suggestion. No Sennett bathing girl pictures. They might have a tendency to make him glad he had a fight, especially if the other sick' of the argument is aging under the matrimonial strain. AT intervals conciliatory worded, illustrated slides should be thrown on the screen. For instance: "Maybe it's the bum gin you have been drinking." "How long since you sent her flowers?" "Perhaps you, too, had a mother." "Crime does not pay." "How would you like to wash dishes?" "Father, dear father, come home with me now, The clock in the steeple strikes one." "Throw your mother-in-law out." "Maybe he was her cousin." Then instead of going home burning with rage the husband would return and awaken the broken-hearted little wife to tell her a few gags from the picture. That would end everything, — one way or another. WITH seasonable precision the melancholy days arrived in Hollywood. Where actors walked up the boulevard with jaunty tread and buoyant smile, they now go furtively along, glancing over the shoulder, fearful of the future. The little sunlit haciendas in Beverly Hills are overclouded with the dread of cheerfully acquired mortgages. The water in the tiled swimming pools has become too chilly for comfort. The cheery songs of a happy world are no longer heard, and the "Hollywood Blues" is a best seller at the music counters. WHAT next?" is the popular greeting, not "Cheerio." "When does your contract expire?" has replaced "How's the boy?" Temperament has disappeared like sunshine under a thunder cloud. The golden days are over. FOLLOWIXG the failure of the producers to effect a horizontal ten per cent reduction in the salaries of actors and actresses, directors and writers, and all employees of studios getting over fifty dollars a week, and the subsequent fiasco of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences arbitration, it was generally known that another method of salary curtailment would be sought and found. It has. Hence the despondency. As the contracts for high salaries, made in the days when competition for these workers was keen, have expired, they are, in most cases, not being renewed. Options on their services, at increased figures, are not being taken up. 2S ALL this is in line with the effort of the producers, not only to lower the cost of pictures, but to overcome the star problem, and to gradually lessen the dominance of the name of the player or director over the picture itself. No wonder some of the best known screen actors and actresses are going about 1 Ioll\ wood mumbling about a conspiracy against them. Fortunately for them only one group of production managers are working together, but when one of them finds himself out in the cold at his old studio he finds himself equally unwanted at several others. WE are listening (hypothetically, of course), to the telephone conversation of one studio managersupervisor. "Miss Switchboard, get me Mr. One, Mr. Two, and Mr. Three on the phone." A pause. "Hello, One. So and So's contract is up and he won't renew for fifteen hundred a week .... Our option is two thousand, but we won't take it up at that figure .... Too much dough . . . . O. K. kid. Oh, yes, Watchamaycallhim sent his agent around, but we wouldn't talk business and I guess he will come to his senses .... I don't like him anyway .... His wife gave mine the Ritz at the Ambassador .... By the way, Two said Whoziss is going to be around .... Give him the razz .... A thousand smackers is plenty for that bozo .... So long .... See you at the Montmartre Wednesday." Simple, isn't it? ALL is not lost, however. Jack Gilbert is not worried. Neither is Clara Bow, nor Richard Dix, nor Tom Mix, nor a score of others whom the public will continue to demand to see. The hope of the acting profession is the public, whose professional name is Mr. Box Office. And there isn't a supervisor whose name means one nickel to that gentleman. THE studio managers and supervisors of Hollywood cling to the theory that they are showmen and the actor is merely a mummer. They're dead wrong. Excepting three studios I can pick better showmen and better executives among the actors. Douglas Fairbanks, for instance. I am not alone in the belief Douglas Fairbanks is the finest and fairest showman and producer in the business, bar none. Conrad Nagel is another. So is Thomas Meighan. Harold Lloyd has proved it. And don't let anyone tell you that little Mary Pickford, despite the difficult problem of her own pictures, isn't one of the grandest little showmen of them all. JUST put this down as a fact. No conspiracy or no agreement among producers to eliminate a big bo: office personality can exist. , One of the producei would always find a way out of the agreement. The; always have. If a conference of producers agreed to lock out Clara Bow, Jack Gilbert or Charlie Chaplin, an automobile race to their homes would start the second the meeting was over.