Boxoffice-August.21.1954

!
For
! HOLLYWOOD—With
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[
Directors,
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1 be
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years
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iSDG to Film TV Series
Benevolent Fund
revenue derived
therefrom to be turned over to its educational
and benevolent foundation, the Screen Directors
Guild—through its subsidiary. Screen
Inc.—is blueprinting a series of one
or two-hour television programs, which will
offered for TV sponsorship. The venture
will be similar in format to the Playhouse
radio series which the SDG produced some
1
ago. The entire membership of the
guild will be asked to assist, with a different
megaphonist. contributing his services for
each show.
Artists Distributors, headed by Arthur
Lyons, will handle national video release of
the Veloz and Yolanda show, a batch of 39
quarter-hour
subjects.
Effective Monday (16), United Television
|Programs launched operations at three new
offices in Minneapolis, Detroit and Balti-
Imore, bringing to 12 the number of branches
now open.
Video rights to mystery stories penned by
raig Rice have been obtained by McCadden
oductions, the Burns & Allen enterprise,
jind a series of 39 half-hour subjects will get
jjnder way this fall with Tony London prolucing
and Sam Neuman as associate proiucer.
Rambling around video row: Sol Lesser,
is 'eteran theatrical film producer, moving
nto the TV field. In association with Tony
reader, he is preparing a video series ba.sed
111 the adventures of Robin Hood.
Terming the mushrooming television inustry
largely responsible. Motion Picture
lound Editors Local 776 reports employment
mong its members at an alltime high, with
than 10 per cent of its 1,000 workers
urrently
jobless.
Walt Disney turned the cameras on four
lore in his Disneyland video series for ABC-
V, "What Is Disneyland?" "Adventureland
," "Operation Underwater" and "The
luto Story."
A new telefilm series "Man Behind the
idge," went into work at American National
udios with Pi-ockter TV Enterprises producg
and Charles Bickford as narrator. Leigh
ison directs.
[ayworth Suit Dismissal
lea Denied Columbia
NEW YORK—Judge Edward Weinfeld of
New York federal district court has deed
a motion by Columbia and Columbia
ternational for dismissal of an action
ought by Rita Hayworth for an accounting
four films she made for Beckworth Corp.
Columbia release. She is a stockholder
Beckworth.
rhe judge ordered the taking of deposins
of officials of the defendant companies,
Tting September 3 in New York. Some will
taken in California. Among the officials
11 be B. B. Kahane, president of Beckworth
d a Columbia vice-president, and Harry
hn,
Columbia president.
THERE
can be little doubt that producer
Harriet Parsons was made a victim of
the give-a-dog-a-bad-name approach
when the film mentors of Chicago's police department
hung an "adults only" classification
on "Susan Slept Here," her most recent filmmaking
effort, currently being distributed
under the censorship-tattered banner of RKO
Radio.
Because of the bitter legal battle over
efforts to exhibit that company's banned
"The French Line" in the Windy City, it is
obvious that the movie-appraising gendarmes
of that highly moral metropolis have their
vengeful blue pencils poised for any celluloid
bearing the Howard Hughes trademark.
While entirely logical, admirable and forthright
was Miss Parsons' blast in refutation
of the censorship, she'll have to reconcile
herself to the fact that one can't fight city
hall. At the same time, she should find consolation
in the knowledge that the patently
unfair action by Chicago's law minions will be
generally recognized for what it is, and will
have no influence on her excellent picture
when it is adjudged in other communities.
Rosy indeed was the analysis of Allied
Artists' fiscal and productional position, current
and future, which appeared in a recent
issue of Walker's Weekly Newsletter, an investors'
information service published on the
west coast. Understandably, the covering: letter
by AA president Steve Broidy, who sent
a copy of the bulletin to all of his stockholders,
was comparably optimistic.
But for all of their aura of bright promise,
the twin documents savored slightly of rainbarrel-shouting.
It appears a reasonable assumption
that AA stockholders are firmly
sold on AA stock. Otherwise they wouldn't
be stockholders.
In order for the Broidy company—and its
shareholders—to reap full benefits from the
apparent propitious circumstances, it might
be advisable to call them more intensively to
the attention of the theatremen who rent AA
films and the public that is expected to patronize
them.
Gals in stir- are going to get plenty of
screen attention during the next several
months.
An English import on the subject. "The
Weak and the Wicked," is being distributed
by Allied Artists: over at Columbia, producer
Bryan Poy is making "Women's Prison": and
independent film fabricators William Caliban
and Ace Herman are blueprinting "Girls'
Reformatory."
Take your time, you trend followers—there
are plenty of titles left, such as "Juvenile
Jug," "Pi-ostitutes' Pokey," "Blondes' Brig,"
"Hei-sters' Hoosegow," "Janes' Jailhouse," etc.
Teet Carle's Paramount praisers freight the
mails with word that Cecil B. DeMille, now
preparing to film "The Ten Commandments"
in Egypt in the VistaVision process, has discovered
that "the ancients in the time of
Moses were conscious of the panoramic
dimensions of VistaVision, too." This startling
advice is based on the alleged revelation
that muralists who worked on the walls of
King Tut's tomb painted in aspect ratios
approximately 1.85 to 1—and in color, yet.
Next Teet would have us believe that the
ancient artists were sold on VistaVision by a
few thousand words from Y. Frank Freeman.
From RKO Radio ravers a press-.stopping,
verbose handout claiming that a record "for
the most falling horses filmed in any movie"
was set by the studio's current costume epic,
"The Conqueror." There were 119 such falls,
according to the alleged statistics, and—in
addition— 156 "grabs," which is the stuntmen's
vernacular for riders being pulled off
horses.
Trying to grab space with such trivia is a
horse on Praise Pundit Perry Lieber.
A communique from Allied Artists' blurbing
bailiwick informs that "after two days at sea
on the SS Cynthia, a freighter, the 'Dynamite
Anchorage' company, headed by Dane Clark,
Carole Mathews and Wayne Morris . . . moved
into the Todd Ship Co.'s dry docks at San
Pedro, Calif., to shoot aboard the SS Salinas,
an oil tanker."
Seems like a waste of money when the SS
Sandy Abrahams was anchored right at the
studio.
A handout from Bill Hendricks' Burbank
blurbery refers to a character in the forthcoming
remake of "Moby Dick" as a
"weirdly tattooed figure who collects human
heads."
Which avocation is not entirely a stranger
in the Brudern Warners' publicity department.
Further evidence that the new look in
motion pictures has been embraced by most
everyone at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—with the
noteworthy exception of Howard Strickling's
publicity department—was introduced when
the studio's loudly-touted "Brigadoon" was
unfurled, ostensibly for the convenience and
edification of Hollywood film appraisers.
The impressive, "cordial" invitations—and
a right sharp and costly printing job they
were—clearly stated that the event was a
"special press preview" and that the time was
"eight-thirty" o'clock. Yet when the cordially
invited reviewers arrived—as early as eighttwenty
o'clock—occupied was every desirable
seat in the cavernous Academy Awards Theatre.
And who occupied most of them? The
same assortment of agents, stooges, relatives,
actors and sundry other sycophants that for
too many years were part and parcel of the
archaic, bow-taking, "looks-like-ya-got-ahit-on-your-hands"
Cinemania debut.
Fortunately "Brigadoon" was sufficiently
meritorious to transcend such maltreatment
of the cordially invited newsmen; otherwise
producer Arthur Freed and director Vincente
Minnelli could voice a justifiable, resounding
beef against Strickling's rover boys and
their old look in press relationships.
EXOFHCE :: August 21, 1954