Quickie King

A quickie is a movie financed on a shoestring and shot almost as fast as the cameras can turn. No one in Hollywood grinds out quickies at a greater pace or profit than 41-year-old Robert Lippert, who, in his 6 years as a producer, has made 60 pictures at a total cost of $3,800,000. Gross: about $10 million.

Last week speed-loving Producer Lippert surpassed himself. He wrapped up three complete features in a mere twelve days of shooting, and also worked a couple of new angles. The pictures take advantage of a cheap, plentiful source of story material: the radio serial. Stemming from Johnny Madero, a defunct network radio program about a private eye, each film uses a "bridge" to link the action of two complete half-hour shows. When TV begins snapping up Hollywood films in earnest, Lippert will simply burn his "bridges" and sell half-hour shorts. Meanwhile, his own distributing company will sell the movies to theaters--including 62 owned or operated by Lippert himself.

Arabs to Indians. Like the early Hollywood pioneers, the pencil-mustached producer entered moviemaking from theater operation. He says he owned his first theater at the age of 14, got the down payment ($800) by starting a newspaper at Alameda (Calif.) High School and selling ads. During the war he turned garages and stores into movie houses to cash in on the heavy business around shipyards. His booming theaters began using up so many pictures that he went into distribution, then into production, to meet the demand.

Producer Lippert keeps his casts and crews hopping like ushers. Once he filmed six westerns simultaneously in 28 days, using the same cast and sets, photographing the same saloon from different angles for each picture, letting the same posse race through six different patches of countryside for the chase scenes. Early in his producing days, he told an interviewer: "I see about ten movies every weekend. Well, I see a movie I like, and we just change legionnaires to frontiersmen and the Arabs to Indians, and we start shooting."

On & Off Trends. Lippert boasts that his "very fluid operation" allows him to "let go of a trend" much quicker than his high-budgeted competitors. He can also latch on to a trend more quickly. In ten days and for $91,000, he was fluid enough to put out a picture on space ships (Rocketship X M) in time to sop up the publicity being lavished on the then forthcoming Destination Moon. He beat every other studio to the Korean war with The Steel Helmet (now doing well enough to promise a $2,000,000 gross). Lippert prefers not to say what Helmet cost, while he is still selling it to exhibitors who dislike paying big rentals for quickies.

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