Stairway to Hollywood?

The drama department at Catholic University in Washington,D.C. is the best collegiate play factory since George Pierce Baker's late, great 47 Workshop at Harvard. It also has a broader backstairs to Broadway. In the last nine years, seven C.U.-produced plays (including Lute Song and Sing Out, Sweet Land) have opened in New York. Last week C.U. added a stairway to Hollywood.

The university's first annual playwrighting festival, C.U. announced, will be sponsored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and Broadway's American National Theater & Academy. The stage group will send lecturers, the cinema organization will lend a big movie star (none picked so far) to each of the seven festival productions. To get the project rolling, the Motion Picture Academy assigned one of Hollywood's best known front-office hands, Anita ("The Face") Colby, to work with C.U.'s Father Gilbert Vincent Hartke (TiME, March 4, 1946).

Last week the festival opened without a star (Father Hartke had wanted Jimmy Stewart, who couldn't make it), but with much of the ceremony given a Hollywood premiere. The play itself, John McGiver's All Gaul Is Divided, was a comedy about G.I. black market operations in France, and perhaps not worth so much fuss. But stage & screen bigwigs by the dozens and critics by the score came to look things over. Paramount and Pathe newsreelmen took shots. This week NBC will telecast the play, plans to do the same for all seven plays.

Hollywood benignly agreed that Playwright McGiver was ready for some graduate work. Cinemogul David O. Selznick sent him the script of the forthcoming Portrait of Jenny, asked if McGiver would please, for good Hollywood money, just touch up the Irish dialogue.

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