Blue Skies

Hollywood, which had neurotically exaggerated its economic doldrums (TIME, Dec. 27), was startled last week to find its new-found optimism dramatized at last. For the first time in eleven years, M-G-M summoned 81 of its far-flung sales executives to hear the good news straight from the front office: the company, which released 24 pictures last year, was going to turn out an imposing total of 67 in the next 12 to 15 months.

The big plan was the work of aggressive, able Dore Schary, 43, MGM's new vice president in charge of production. Of the projected 67 films, a dozen are already in the can and six are now shooting. The program will "challenge the gloomy prophets of defeat," said Schary, who is being privately hailed by his studio head, Louis B. Mayer, as the long-sought successor to the late Irving Thalberg. There are still "tough problems to be solved," Schary told the visiting salesmen, as they gathered for luncheon under thousands of square feet of improbably blue sky (left over from an old Esther Williams picture). But "no company fearing disaster could plan what we have planned."

What surprised oldtimers as much as the ambitious total was the content of the projected films. The studio which, before Schary, had rarely put into its pictures anything more controversial than Lassie and Ma Hardy's apple pies, was now courting social themes: Intruder in the Dust (about the Negro problem); Border Incident (about Mexican laborers who enter the U.S. illegally); an antitotalitarian story; a script about an American Indian (Robert Taylor) trying to adapt himself to modern society.

Conventional M-G-M also grabbed some of the most unconventional talent in the business: there would be a Preston Sturges original for Clark Gable, a comedy by Garson Kanin, and Quo Vadis?, a mammoth epic to be shot in Italy by John Huston. But there were also plenty of safe, sumptuous projects along the more familiar M-G-Model, e.g., Annie Get Your Gun, the Broadway musical, a sequel to Mrs. Miniver, and what was described as an "adult" love story for Lana Turner.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.