Photoplay (Jan - Jun 1939)

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CLOSE UPS AND LONG SHOTS li Li . IVi't, f" BY RUTH WATER6URY HAPPY NEW YEAR, Photoplay readers ... I write you that with the great surety that for all of us who love Hollywood and its people and its product a happy New Year will come true ... I know the things that Photoplay itself has in store for you and even if I had been given no glimpse into the new films to come, as I have, I could yet tell you that great pleasure lies ahead for you on the basis of the year that has passed. . . . For in a world beset by worries, darkened by the threat of war and bruised of heart through the oppression of innocent peoples, Hollywood itself has remained the one spot where the dream of happiness has gone on . . . not that that town has been without its troubles . . . the loss of the European market has meant that the margin of safety that lay before between possible failure and fair success has been quite wiped OUt . . . labor difficulties have 8J making production more expensive and more precarious . . yet, week after week, the great pictures have come out . . . "That Certain Age" . . . "The Cowboy and the Lady" . . . "Submarine Patrol" . . . "The Sisters" . . . "Four DaughM n With Wings" . . . "The Citadel" . . . products of no one company or do one star . . . but of all the companies and of all the stars combined . . . the successful efforts of a great industry to provide laughter and romance and the surcease of tender tears. . . . You go one night and you see the discovery of a Nancy Kelly; you go another night and watch, as though he were your own son or brother, tl . sincere growth of young Jackie Cooper . . . you worry and hope that Mickey Rooney won't get too cocky . . . you sigh with delighted relief when little Miss Temple comes round again and is still just as much of a darling as ever . . . you speculate as to whether Ruth Waterbury Mr. Boyer can possibly be as sultry at home as he is on the screen ... or Mr. Gable as debonair ... or Mr. Taylor as handsome . . . such glittering people of all ages and moods to be a dream family for all of us . . . if they have their troubles, they are mostly hid from us, for which our thanks . . . for it is more fun to think that all this glamour and glory happen quite by chance . . . though nothing could be less true. . . . I HERE was a time, though, when it was true . . . when big, successful pictures just happened . . . when things were left to inspiration and to chance . . . and there are those people still about Hollywood who sigh and say that the "color" is gone ... I think that is so silly . . . today's color is different, but a more vivid, brighter, truer color for all that. . . . I thought cii this ,1 tew weeks back when it was announced that Adolph Zukor, the guiding head of Paramount pictures, was leaving his production post in Hollywood to go to Europe . . . I thought of Zukor. really a figure of Hollyv. nod's past, in contrast to a man like Hal Wallis, a typical personage of today's Hollywood. . . . It was nearly thirty years ago that Zukor got his first and greatest inspiration . . . that of signing the then greatest actress in the world, Sarah Bernhardt, to do a movie called "Queen Eliza . . . the spectacular triumphs of Producer Hal Wallis (above, with two of the famous Lanes) beth" . . . that picture and that idea were the whole basis of the company that was to be called Famous Players and later Paramount . . . and that method, the sheer inspiration of an idea that came out of the nowhere into the here, i; typical of the way that pictures have been made until very recently . . . Zukor was a fur salesman originally; Sam Goldwyn, one of the pioneers, was a drummer in gloves . . . men who came from the outside world into the business of showmanship . . . today the great figures of the industry, David O. Selznick, Darryl Zanuck and Hal Wallis, are men who have never known any other business than movies . . . and of these three it may yet be revealed that Wallis will be the greatest . . . for Selznick and Zanuck both have temperament and to spare . . . but Wallis works with a head as cold as ice . . . yet one thing he has always possessed to a passionate degree and that is his love of movies. . . . He first started working in Chicago and he never had to think twice about what he wanted to do ... he wanted to be a movie producer . . . but how that could be brought about he couldn't perceive ... he knew one thing, though . . . movies had to go into theaters, so perhaps he could do tricks backwards ... if he went into a theater he might get into movies ... so he got himself a job in a Chicago movie house ... he started as an assistant there but presently he was the manager, and as manager he learned everything he could about what people wanted in movies, and how and when, and as soon as he felt he had mastered as much as he could, he betook himself to Los Angeles. . . . To THE world at large Wallis is as yet little known, for until very recently he was almost completely hidden behind his bosses, the Warner (Continued on page 84) 10 PH OTOPLAY