It's in the Bag! (United Artists) (1945)

F red Allen, sour-faced radio comic, hates movie¬ making and in these pictures arid captions under them he tells why. The horrors of Holl^i^ood are fresh in Allen’s mind for he has just completi^a new pic¬ ture, Ifs in the Bag. There were many times during his ordeal by “klieg light,” says Allen, “that, if it weren’t so permanent, I would have wished I were dead.” A master of the ad lib, Allen may really resent the ponderous, slow-moving Hollywood technique because it leaves so little room for an actor’s originality. “Main thing an actor must learn,” he says, “is to stay within camera range. This is done for him by lighting the actor and marking his places. An ideal actor should have rigor mortis and a neon head. With rigor mortis he can’t move. With a neon head he can light himself.” However, his coactors in It's in the Bag and Jack Skirball and Walter Batchelor, who produced it, do not take Allen’s anti-Hollywood strictures too much to heart. They willingly cooperated in making the pic¬ tures on these pages, realizing Allen always gets his me t effective humor by biting whatever hand feeds him. Allen has also said some very harsh things about radio. He considers the average radio gag writer “an emaciated nonentity with a good memory and a pen¬ cil,’’ the average radio vice president “a form of execu¬ tive fungus that attaches itself to a desk.” His manager, Walter Batchelor, however, thinks Allen heaps scorn on radio just a bit less than he does on Hollywood. “The only good thing Allen will admit about Holly¬ wood,” says Batchelor, “is that he sleeps better there.” Hair. “The hair stylist’s sideline is selling tou-pees. If the stylist can pull out enough of the actor’s hair she hopes that she can sell him a scalp div¬ ot. Most of Hollywood’s glamor boys are bald—victims of the hair stylist.” “A harbinger of the bedlam that is to fill the actor's entire day is the dialog director. As the make-up genius and stylist torture the actor, the dialog director arrives to advise him that most of the lines he has learned at'breakfast have now been deleted. When old lines are discarded the dialog director is the man who salvages the punctuation.” “HOLLYWOOD ACTORS SHOULD LIVE THEIR PARTS MORE" Pests. “ Tourists clutter up every studio. Press agent insists the actor meet some giggling dame who won Glutton’s Derby at Belleville, III. She ate 200 pounds of liverwurst in three days, was crowned Miss Cold Cuts of 1911.” Conference. “On the set the Hollywood actor’s day starts out with a great, big, earnest script conference. The author and the director explain what they believe to be the first scene to the actor. The actor is all eyes. He is concentrating on it with all his might. Apparently the first scene in the drama concerns the Prodigal Son. The Fatted Calf awaits the cue.” The double. “ The only comfort an actor has while making a picture is that his double takes more abuse than he. The double is stabbed, beaten up, subjected to mayhem. There’s only one danger. If the double is Icilled the Screen Actors Guild may bury the actor.” Character portrayal. “ Jail sequences are source of worry to actor. If he plays part too realistically he may find too late that the picture is released and he is still doing time. One actor was pardoned by the governor in script but the atidience never forgave him.” More pests, “Salesmen stalk the actor on the set, trying to sell him anything from an av¬ ocado bush to a half interest in an abandoned svnmming.pool. IChen this particular ac¬ tor gets up out of the chair he is in he is going to beat this in.surance man’s brains out.” Printed in U. S. A.