Shorts

>In Washington, Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold filed a brief explaining why the eight major motion picture companies, named last July in the Government's suit charging violation of the anti-trust law, were not entitled to a bill of particulars.

In Chicago, James Roosevelt again denied that his new vice-presidency of Samuel Goldwyn, Inc. had anything to do with the Government suit. In Hollywood, President Harry M. Warner of Warner Bros., who as a patriotic gesture are already producing a series of Technicolor historical shorts, gave orders that hereafter the national anthem must be played at least once daily in each of Warner Bros.' 450 U. S. theatres.

>In Hollywood, Shirley Temple got her first Christmas presents: an English Bible and four sling shots. Her mother discussed the whole situation: "The problem is the same every year. We get packages from every place in the world. . . . We let Shirley enjoy every present she gets. When she tires of something . . . we store it in the attic. Just before Christmas, we take them to a children's hospital. . . ."

>Deal of the week : formation of Imperator-Radio Pictures, Ltd., by RKO Radio Pictures in the U. S. and British Film Producer Herbert Wilcox (Sixty Glorious Years, Victoria the Great). Objects: to enable Producer Wilcox to get his pictures distributed in the U. S., enable RKO Radio to borrow his actors and actresses and meet British quota requirements.

>First of the year's-end lists of best pictures of the year was released by the Committee on Exceptional Photoplays of the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures. Best English-speaking picture: The Citadel. Best foreign-language picture: Grand Illusion.

>In Beverly Hills, Carl ("Uncle Carl") Laemmle Sr., 71, onetime Chicago nickelodeon proprietor and retired head of Universal Pictures Corp., set about trying to interest U. S. can manufacturers in his patent on self-heating hot dogs on a royalty basis. Demonstrated to the press at a buffet preview last fortnight, the hot dogs are packed in cans invented by a German-Jewish refugee named Leo Katz, whom Mr. Laemmle picked up in Zurich last year. At one end of each can is a compartment containing chemicals. When the compartment is punctured, contact with air makes the chemicals hot enough to warm the hot dogs, which are then plucked from the other end.

>In Hollywood, Aviator Douglas Corrigan, informed he was needed on the set after dinner for shots on his picture The Flying Irishman, demanded and got 25-c- supper money. In the past three months, Aviator Corrigan has netted some $75,000 for acting and for writing an autobiography. Most parsimonious celebrity in Hollywood, he lives in a cheap hotel room, rides to work on a bus, lunches on a nickel ice-cream bar, spends his weekends relining the brakes on his ten-year-old car.

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