Carl Laemmle Retires

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22402, 24 April 1936, Page 14 (Supplement)

Carl Laemmle Retires

Thirty Years In f RESPONSIBLE FOR 9000 PRODUCTIONS Carl Laemmle, sen., president and founder of Universal Pictures, has sold his controlling interest in that organisation to a financial group in America, and has gone into retirement. Mr. Laemmle has been associated with the motion picture industry for 30 years. He has made 9000 films since 1908, and some of these have been mammoth productions. Universal's production schedule for this year includes four £200,000 pictures.

IN the winter of 1906, a very ambitious immigrant iieased a women's good store on Milwaukee Avenue; Chicago, transformed' it into the White Front Theatre —seating capacity 200 —and with a flourish of mouth-to-mouth advertising presented a one-reel :alm, "From Newsboy to Judge." The admission price was 3d, and patrons could—if they desired— sit through 15 showings a day, and 20 on Sundays and holidays. Recently, exactly 30' years liter, every important star, director, -writer and executive in Hollywood went to the Universal Studios to celebrate with the 69-year-old pioneer, affectionately known in and out of the industry as "Uncle Carl" Laemmle, his great part in raising the motion picture industry to its present position of world-wide entertainment importance. "The best thing that has_ happened to the industry in my time is the recent League of Decency's campaign," Mr. Laemmle told the Melbourne Herald s Hollywood corresondent recently. "In

ipite of the improvements due to sound and better recording, producers were on the point of ruining their market because too much sex was put into films. The decency campaign was a blessing in disguise and forced, producers to make better, cleaner pictures." Temperament, sophisticated film fare, too much talking, the high cost of actors and actresses, and uncertainty about public taste are, in the veteran producer's opinion, responsible for the unsatisfactory financial condition of the motion picture industry to-day. "In my opinion, two of the greatest mistakes made by producers at present are the tendency to make sophisticated pictures that only the mature, adult minds can comprehend, and the inclusion of too much dialogue in the

place of action. For 30 years I have been making pictures that entire families might attend as a group. There is no logical reason for suddenly changing. Box-office figures back up my statement that movies should bo made for the masses. "Motion pictures should have action and not be pictorial arguments of social problems. Pictures themselves tire the universal language. We should welcome Etars from all parts of the world, and not hamper their greatness by binding them with so many words that they are unable to perform satisfactorily. "Perhaps the industry would have benefited to a greater extent it thirddimensional photography had been developed prior to the introduction of sound; if pictures had been perfected as such, before flat shadows on the screen were given voice." Mr. Laemmle declared that the oldtimo stars were less temperamental than those of to-day. They accepted the parts directors, writers and cameramen selected for them without question.

lliey worked harder. ror instance, King Baggott, one of his early stars, made as many as 15 to 20 pictures a year. The smallest number any star made was seven or eight a year. To-day, four or live pictures was considered a very heavy programme for any one star to completo in the same period. "There is no longer any formula for a successful picture. I used to consider myself a good judge in years gone by. I remember sitting through the 15 reel of von Stroheim's first picture in America, 'Blind Husbands,' and feeling at the end of it that I could stake my last dollar on the success it proved to be. But now I can be as easily fooled as the next man. There is absolutely no accounting for the public taste. Furthermore, if .a picture does not go over in Dallas now, it usually fails also in Boston, or Newark, or Portland. It seems as though the whole United States had got together, talked it over and decided it was a bad picture."