Boxoffice-December.20.1952

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Columbia and 20th-Fox Buy
Two Story Properties Each
Once listed as a title for a Wald-Krasna
production at RKO Radio before the W-K
unit was dissolved and Jerry Wald packed up
and moved over to Columbia as a vice-president
and executive producer, "The Long Grey
Line" has been dusted off as the tag for a new
Columbia acquisitions, "Bringing Up the
Brass," an autobiography by Marty Maher,
athletic instructor at West Point. The yarn,
for which President-Elect Dwight D. Eisenhower
wrote the foreword, will be produced in
Technicolor by Robert Arthur in the early
summer of 1953, and a script writer will be
dispatched to the military institute in the
near future to gather material for the screenplay.
Also purchased, for distribution through
Columbia, was "Sunset Rim," a western novel
by Curtis Bishop, picked up by the Scott-
Brown unit. It will star Randolph Scott and
will be produced by Harry Joe Brown, who
booked John Meredyth Lucas to develop the
script . . . Twentieth Century-Fox, matching
Columbia's pace, also bought two properties.
"Be Prepared," the story of a children-hating
man forced to take over as Scoutmaster of a
Boy Scout troop, sounds—although no catting
has officially been set—as if it were made to
order for Clifton Webb; a best-.seller by Rice
E. Cochrane, it has been assigned to Producer
Leonard Gold.stein. Also acquired by
the Westwood studio was "The Girl With
Black Glasses," an original by Walter Reisch
with a Metropolitan Opera background. It
goes on Charles Brackett's production slate
... To MGM went the film rights to "The
Tea House of the August Moon," a novel by
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