It's Not Art But ...

A timeworn wheeze among U.S. movie producers is that a Pine-Thomas picture run backwards would entertain an audience as much as the same film shown in due order. It is the standard opening for the observation that however the film is run it will be a money maker.

Since they formed a producing team in 1940, lank, solemn, ex-pressagent William Hoy Pine, 49, and sleek, peppery, ex-pressagent William Carroll Thomas, 41, have whipped up 30 musicals and melodramas for the nation's double bills. None has come close to an Oscar, but all have been good business.

The first three were made with their own money. They were so fabulously successful that Paramount promptly bought into the gold mine. It agreed to finance all Pine-Thomas productions, pay them 25% of all profits over 170% of the cost of the film.

This gave Pine & Thomas, who call themselves the "Dollar Bills," what few other class-B moviemakers have: a big bank roll and a spigot for their potboilers in Paramount's 11,000 outlets. Result: By last week the Dollar Bills were 1) producing pictures at an average cost of $125,000; grossing an average $600,000 on each, 2) top class-B producers in Hollywood, 3) among the highest paid moviemakers in the business. This year they will collect about $700,000 (before taxes) for their work.

Profits, Not Art. In their early years in Hollywood, Thomas as a producer-writer and Pine as an associate producer (he was once Cecil B. de Mille's assistant) learned that poor planning skyrockets overhead and production costs. Often everybody on the set is idle while the director works out a new plot twist. So Pine & Thomas reduced their plots to two inartistic formulas.

No. 1 is a melodrama about a dangerous occupation such as minesweeping, test piloting, logging. It begins with a fight, has the hero's pal killed in the second reel to prove the job is really dangerous, ends with a chase and the happy mating of the hero. No. 2 is a musical. It opens with boy meeting girl, ends with boy getting girl and playing a cantata in Carnegie Hall.

Overhead is cut to the bone by renting stage space, keeping only a skeleton staff of eleven people between pictures, paying actors by the hour. But they are paid well and they do the scenes right the first time. Gagged Pine: "We pay the highest salaries in Hollywood--for 20 minutes." Result: Overhead, which amounts to 40% of a film's total cost at M.G.M., is kept at 4% by Pine & Thomas.

Match into Holocaust. Production costs are pared by filming time-eating outdoor shots with low-paid doubles and stunt men. With transparencies and miniatures, the film is finished in the studio, using a minimum of a well-paid actor's time. The Bills wangle Army & Navy tie-ins : in one picture they used 250 Army planes, in another, a group of Navy divers. Cracked one Hollywoodite : "They strike a match and make it look like a five-alarm fire."

This week, the men who made Power Dive, Wrecking Crew, etc. will begin work on their 28th picture for Paramount, a bodily-harm thriller called Hot Cargo. If their formula holds, it will be shot in the usual time of twelve twelve-hour days, should earn some $378,000 for Paramount, $97,000 for Pine & Thomas. Hollywood's artists will pooh-pooh it. But the customers will not.

"Don't forget," says Thomas, happily, "we get more up on that screen for 40-c- than anybody else in the business."

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