Prospectus

Main idea of a cinema sales convention is to put the coming season's production program over with a bang. At one of this year's conventions the spirit of Hollywood enterprise was neatly summed up by firing tommy guns loaded with blanks. At other conventions, this year's plans for some 500 feature pictures, to cost some $150,000,000, were introduced with less noise, no less ballyhoo. By last week salesmen were visiting the nation's 16,558 exhibitors, talking up next season's shows. Under the block-booking blind-selling system of distribution to which the sprawling cinema industry is geared, they were all out to sell, in prescribed assortments, films not yet produced.

But U. S. exhibitors met them with more determined sales resistance than ever before. In the season just closing, exhibitors had heard far too often the ugly noises made by disapproving audiences; their pocketbooks were feeling pinched. Some exhibitors thought the trouble lay with stars who seemed to be "boxoffice poison" (TIME, May 16). Most of them knew the real trouble: inferior pictures. Meanwhile the Government has cast a quizzical eye over Hollywood's trade practices. While film circles last week rumored that the $2,000,000,000 cinema industry was slated for official arraignment, a Hollywood lobby in Washington fought to prevent the Neely bill, already passed by the Senate (prohibiting compulsory block booking and blind selling*), from reaching the floor of the House.

But at most conventions this year, platforms were cannily paved with good intentions. Most producers forswore "B" pictures, made high & mighty promises of action, thrills, allure, import, quality.

Of the minimum expenditure of $150,000,000 for 1938-39, the payroll will be more than $85,000,000, to be shared by the many studio executives in Hollywood's nepotistic structure, and those of the 28,000 cinemartisans who have managed to survive recent retrenchment. The remainder will largely go for the papier-mache, froufrou, sundries that give Hollywood its supercolossal gloss.

Biggest share of the Hollywood budget will probably be spent by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, opulent producing subsidiary of Loew's Inc. Accustomed to spending as much as $3,000,000 on a picture (Conquest, Marie Antoinette), M-G-M does so to give proper setting to Hollywood's greatest star roster, to produce most of Hollywood's best jobs, many of its stuffiest. Over last fiscal year, Loew's Inc. topped the cinemindustry with a net income of $14,426,062. In the coming season, MGM's schedule calls for 52 films, to include Northwest Passage, with Robert Taylor; The Women, with Norma Shearer; The Citadel, in production in England to satisfy the new British quota law (TIME, April 11); Kim, with Freddie Bartholomew; and Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Most successful purveyor of mass entertainment is Twentieth Century-Fox, whose net profit last year was $8,617,114. This year a program of 58 features will find the Dionne girls hygienically spotted in a musical to be called Five of a Kind. Other notable projects: Drums Along the Mohawk, the Ritz Brothers as The Three Musketeers, three Shirley Temple, four Jane Withers films, specially designed pictures for Eddie Cantor and Sonja Henie.

Most self-conscious about problems like race prejudice and the fight for social justice are Warner Bros. But most of the $5,876,183 profit their company netted during its last fiscal year came from Dick Powell musicals, crime stories opportunely snatched from newspaper headlines, feathery comedies. With recent earnings over a million dollars less than those of the first six months of the last fiscal year, Warners have decided on a return to the brisk action film of the G-Man and public-enemy cycle that pulled them out of their last slump. For such a return, James Cagney, now back on their payroll, seems to be just the ticket. The Warners also plan Hell's Kitchen, with the Dead End boys; Juarez, with Paul Muni; for prized Actress Bette Davis, four stormy stories. Total planned: 52 features.

Less steady in its aim than most studios is Paramount, which ranges from experimental cinemopera like Rouben Mamoulian's High, Wide and Handsome to loose-jointed sophomoric trifles like College Swing, Turn Off the Moon. Paramount's net income for last year was $6,045,103. This year's budget, covering 58 planned features, allows for but one million-dollar film, Men with Wings. Paramount's most important trend will be toward romantic U. S. history, with Union Pacific and The Texans. Other specials: If I Were King, with Ronald Colman; Knights of the Round Table; The Grade Allen Murder Case.

RKO has the recently acquired right to distribute Walt Disney's animated cartoons. Otherwise it is most noted for Ginger Rogers-Fred Astaire musicals, serious and thankless ventures like Winterset, The Informer. Now in the throes of reorganization, RKO has held no conventions, has announced only that it will make 54 features next season. For 1937, the corporation's net income totaled $1,821,166, a drop of over $600,000 from the previous year. On picture production it lost $236,909, made most of its profit from its theatre chain.

Without apple-cheeked young Singer Deanna Durbin, Universal Pictures might have been far deeper in the red than its net loss (as of October 30) of $1,084,999 indicates. Next season Deanna will make three films of her studio's scheduled 40. Figuresome, French Danielle Darrieux (Mayerling) will appear in two.

Columbia Pictures runs a gamut of its own, from the frankest sort of penny-thriller melodrama to the maturest. best-ordered and funniest comedy in cinema. For Columbia's good standing with the carriage trade, the men chiefly responsible are the team of Director Frank Capra and Writer Robert Riskin (It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, Lost Horizon). Last fiscal year (June 26) unpretentious Columbia cleared a profit of $1,317,771. Of next season's schedule of 40 films, high spot will probably be Director Capra's production of the 1936 Pulitzer Prize play, You Can't Take It With You.

Unreported at week's end was the production schedule of United Artists Corporation, owned by retired Stars Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin and Producers Samuel Goldwyn and Alexander Korda. A private corporation, United Artists keeps its business largely to itself, occasionally gloats in the trade press over large but unrevealed profits. Month ago the five owners met, split a modest melon of $250,000.

*Exempted by sentimental Senators: distribution of Mickey Mouse, Silly Symphonies.

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