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384 Round the Studios
a lime-grove in which was a barn. That barn was HollvAvood's first film studio.
To-day Paramount has a 26-acre studio-town, in which 1,600 people work. There are fifteen sound-proof stages and twenty-five other structures with more than 100 distinct departments. At Calabassas, outside Hollywood, is the Paramount 2,700-acre ranch for exterior locations.
In the laboratory 78,000,000 feet of release-prints were prepared in one year, the finished celluloid witness to the work of 46 contracted players, 36 directors, 40 writers, and 55 camera-men.
Paramount is Holljrwood epitomized. It has developed into a huge, organization, and produces 65 feature-films and countless shorts in a year.
Yet, even more important was its unpretentious beginning, for had there been no Paramount, there would have been no Hollywood film-land.
Radio Pictures Studios
Radio Pictures, Inc., 780, Gower Street, Hollywood, California.
IMMEDIATELY adjoining the Paramount Studios and not far from the United Artists, Columbia, and Metropolitan production-centres, lies the Gower Street studio of Radio Pictures. It is a studio on a grand scale. Ten huge stages offer space for the production of six full-sized pictures. For location work, four sound-trucks are in constant readiness to cope with the recording operations.
The Radio studio is another city-in-miniature. It has its own policeforce of twenty constables. It has, of course, its own fire-brigade, with water-tower and sprinkler-system all complete. There is a studio telephone exchange, with thirty-three trunk lines, and operators dealing with three hundred personal calls per day.
Radio prides itseK on its restaurant, which seats two hundred and twenty-five people and serves about five hundred meals a day. The studio even has its own hospital, equipped for all emergencies, where there are three beds and a trained nurse on duty from 7 a.m. until i a.m.
Another feature of the Radio organization is its story department, which is modelled on entirely new lines. Early in 1932 a " story cabinet " of four members was formed, under the supervision of David O. Selznick, the vice-president in charge of production.
Each member of the " cabinet " has his or her special duty. There fs Adela Rogers St. Johns Hylands, a celebrated American novelist, who supervises stories for women ; H. N. Swanson, editorial director of a famous American college magazine, serves on the cabinet in selecting stories with an appeal to youth ; Kenneth MacGowan, a well-known stage-producer, sits in judgment on stage plays, selecting those suitable for screen adaptation ; and James Seymour, formerly story-editor at the Pathe studio, is responsible for the choice of original plots contrived specially for the screen.
As a sidelight on the scarcity of real talent in film-writing, it should be explained that one of the first things the " cabinet " did in its search for stories was to seek young Americans as apprentice writers in the studio. Of seven hundred applicants in the first few weeks, two were chosen !