The Hexagon

HOLLYWOOD

"Through cooperation we get a multimillion-dollar vehicle for worldwide propagation of a favorable military entity."

Who could plow words together like that but a Pentagon flack? What in the wild blue yonder is he talking about?

He is talking about the importance of Hollywood as a branch of the armed services. Pictures about the military can touch off avalanches of enlistment. They polish the image, lift morale. A common soldier sees a movie and decides he's Tab Hunter.

But more or less since Director Darryl Zanuck drew widespread attention to his own invasion of Normandy, The Longest Day, by using troops from crisis-ridden Berlin (TIME, Sept. 8), the Pentagon has been a house divided. Its low-ranking flacks and Hollywood liaison men are for giving Hollywood what it wants at all times--tanks, planes, ammunition, West Point, Annapolis, nuclear warheads, classified information, bases overseas. But the Pentagon's Audio-Visual Division of the Directorate for News Services of the Public Affairs Division disagrees. It is now concerned about criticism from Congress, the source from which all that hardware flows. Word went out: billions for defense, not one extra cent for Hollywood.

As filming proceeded last week in the Florida Keys on Warner Brothers' PT 109, Navy landing craft maneuvered around Munson Key and 20--mm. U.S.N. ammunition pah-pah-pahed in the air. But Warner Brothers was paying for all the ammo and all the fuel for the ships. Moreover, where they once might have dragged old PT boats out of mothballs, the Navy refused. No PTs are on active service, so Warner Brothers had to build its own.

Poor combat-fatigued 20th Century-Fox may lose The Battle of Leyte Gulf. The studio needs an obsolete cruiser, an obsolete flattop and two obsolete submarines with deck guns. The Pentagon has refused to help with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Follow the Boys, even though M-G-M agreed to take out a scene that shows an admiral getting seasick. The Pentagon is, by and large, against comedies.

When cooperation is given any more, strings of steel are attached. B-52s and KC-135s will be filmed for Universal-International's A Gathering of Eagles, but the planes' crews must be "in training" at the time. And Columbia's Flight from Ashiya (about the Air Rescue Service) has been bowdlerized at Pentagon insistence. In the original script, a paramedic says to an uncomprehending Arab girl: "I bet you'd be great in the sack."

"Seduction is absolutely against our policy," said the Air Force. Cut.

Meanwhile, 20th Century-Fox's Field Marshal Zanuck was busy on the home front. Irritated by the rising sway of the stockbrokers who purged Fox President Spyros Skouras, Zanuck set himself up as a one-man Pentagon and declared war. Calling for a special meeting of the Fox board within 30 days, he said he would like to double the size of the board and hence dilute the brokers' power. If he was given enough power, he hinted, he might consent to take over as president. Zanuck was the studio's production boss until 1956, left to form his own independent company, but has kept a Fox vice-presidency all the while, still owns 110,000 shares of Fox stock, more than the combined personal holdings of all the present board members, A creative man who knows how to make movies (The Grapes of Wrath, Gentleman's Agreement), he says: "I don't mind being second-guessed by pros, but I don't want to be second-guessed by amateurs."

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