EDGAR WALLACE AND FILMS

Greymouth Evening Star, 28 October 1931, Page 10

EDGAR WALLACE AND FILMS

“HOLDING OUT FOR STOO A WEEK.”

Mr. Edgar Wallace, the famous nonstop novelist and dramatist, has received an offer from the Metro-Gold-wyn Film Corporation to go to Hollyhood, with a view to writing stories for the talkies and generally advising their scenario department, writes G. A. Atkinson, "Daily- Telegraph” film critic. He has decided to .accept the offer, subject to agreement over the fee, which despite published statements to (ho contrary, is not 'likely to exceed £7OO a week, equal to £36,000 a year. Mr. Wallace told me. that the. MetroGoldwyn Company’s original offer was £5OO a week. “It is no use goihg to Hollywood without a flourish of trumpets,” he said, “and unless I went in tJLie potentate class they would not believe me. For that reason I am holding out for £7OO a week, as I shall be compelled to live on the grand scale.” Mr. Wallace’s infinite resource in story construction has been already amply demonstrated in the cinema industry. He is the chairman of the British Lion Film Corporation, and the film versions of his works have been as popular as the novel and stage versions.

■He told me that he had been negotiating with the British Board of Film Censors over a film version of his play, "On the Spot,” and that there was a strong, likelihood of it appearing on the screen as a “drama of mother-love.”

“On the Spot” is, as a matter of fact, a gangster play. It was recently proposed to produce it in Hollywood, under Anglo-American auspices, with the co-operation of Mr. D. W. Griffith, but Mr. Will Hays, the “Czar” of the American film world, banned the proposal on the extraordinary ground that the American public are tired of gangster films. This decision is regarded as a compliment to the Chicagoan realism of “On the Spot.” Mr. Wallace’s fee of £7OO a week will be the highest that has ever been paid to an author. Mr. Lonsdale is understood to receive a fee equal to £24,000 a year, and Mr. P. G. Wodehouse received £20,000 for doing practically nothing, a state of things now described in Hollywood as “getting a Wodehouse.”