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How did Starr change her mind? “Look,” he says, “I don’t care how big a star is—every one of ’em is a ham at heart. Give ’em the right script and the right treatment and they can’t say no. All I did was show Teresa a script I knew she’d go for.” Money? What’s Tliat? How about money? Stars are sup¬ posedly temperamental about money. “The money,” Starr says, “is sec¬ ondary. They work for us only three days, four at the most, and it’s pretty good pay for three or four days’ work. Why, we’ve had ’em come back for a second film for less money than we paid ’em on the first.” What makes them come back? “Ego,” says Starr, grinning. “We’re not amateurs at this business. We do a good job. The star sees the results on the air within a few weeks. More important, all his friends see it, all on the same Thursday night. Friday morning he’s getting phone calls. Everybody’s excited. ‘Saw you on TV last night. You were great.’ Friday afternoon he’s got us on the phone, wondering if there isn’t another good script lying around.” But the working conditions? Three days makes for a pretty hectic shoot¬ ing schedule. Eager Beavers All “They love it,” Starr replies. “We’re all ready for ’em by the time they report. The star has a good script. I’ve gone over it with him, let him in on some of our problems, made him feel he’s really on the inside of the operation. If there’s a month’s inter¬ val between the time he gets the script and the time we shoot, I get him on the phone at least once a week, keep boosting his enthusiasm. When we’re ready to go, he’s a real eager beaver. “Furthermore, that tight shooting schedule doesn’t give him any time to cool off. He stays in character. And there’s no time at all for any company politics to get started. You work two months on a feature picture and all sorts of personality clashes have time to build up. We simply don’t have time for that sort of thing.” But how about the prestige? “Well, how about it?” Starr asks. “Where was Milton Berle’s prestige before he went into TV? Or Lucille Ball’s or Gale Storm’s? TV has made Two for TV: William Lundigan and Wanda Hendrix rehearse for telefilm. these people. When Merle Oberon came back to Hollywood after two years in Europe, she knew the public had forgotten all about her. Rather than wait another six months to get a feature picture made and released, she made a couple of TV films, in¬ cluding one for us. Now she wants to do more. She’s losing prestige?” Starr can recall only one case of temperament in his 30-odd films for Ford Theater. “Guy got into a lather about the short shooting schedule and swore he’d never do TV film work again. Morning after his show went on the air he called to know if we had another script for him. Real tem¬ peramental, that boy.” 21