SHORTAGE OF STARS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26996, 3 February 1949, Page 2

SHORTAGE OF STARS

Crisis follows crisis in the British film industry. The latest worry to loom up is a shortage of stars. Production plans are piling up at an impressive rate, but tlie number of names with box-office appeal is not growing in proportion, and producers are finding it a desperate job to spin out the supply. The Rank studios are hardest hit, for the simple reason that they make the bulk of Britain’s pictures. In the presentquota year they plan to make 60, compared with 45 in the past one. But where they are going to find all the stars to “ sell ” the films is another matter.

The near stars—feature and small-part players—raise no problem. Their abundance, in fact, is the wonder and envy of Hollywood. It is the people who can pack a cinema that are so scarce. You can count them on just about two hands. Among the men are John Mills, Laurence Olivier, Michael Wilding, Stewart Granger, Robert Donat and Jack Warner: amorg the women, Margaret Lockwood, Anna Nearle, Ann Todd, Patricia Roc. and Jean Simmons. These stars are working harder to-day than they have ever worked before. Where they used to make two pictures a year, they now make three, and in many cases four and five. Producers are registering films a year ahead to stake their claim on one or other of the precious few who can be' counted on to pull the public in. Sometimes all they have in mind is a title. The script, director and oth r details can wait. It is the star that matters. Margaret Lockwood’s filming dates look like the belle of the ball’s dance card. -She is booked up for the next two years. As the big names become booked up so the demand increases for the stars-to-be and the people who stay just on the fringe of stardom. Consider, for example. 19-year-old Susan Shaw. This little girl from the Sydney Box Company of Youth (now part of the Rank Charm School) will be seen in eight new Box pictures between now and the middle of next. year. She is alreadv booked for one beginning next June. David Tomlinson has six on his list and Kathleen Harrison five. " lif you don’t plan far ahead like this you find yourself right out of the running these days,” says Sydney Box. chief of Gainsborough Pictures, with a £3.000.000 annual budget of films which he must stud with stars. The production boost is creating a tremendous new op-no-tunity for the budding Lockwood or Mills.

It is generally realised by those who take films seriously that the films do not usually take themselves seriously enough. The makers pull off the odd masterpiece while producing a commoditv for ready sale, just as if they were in the soap business. One would not suggest for a moment that all films should be serious, but merely that they should be made with the least possible concession to sloppy sentiment. For comedies can be serious, too, in the sense that that can be genuine comics, with or without social sting, but with the darts directed at the funny-bone end not at the purse-string. The common denominator should always be sense or nonsense, and sensibility. * * « Daryl Zannuck is planning a picture exposing, the colour problem frankly as his “ Gentlemen’s Agreement” bared anti-Semitism. , * * ’ 1 On a high plateau in the Colorado desert country 125 miles south-east of Hollywood there has lately emerged out of the sand and sage a unique village, Pioneertown, built to serve primarily as a movie set and now being developed as a permanent film-making site. Designed especially to meet the needs of Western and other outdoor pictures, it is about, to become headquarters of Philip N. Krasne’s Inter-American Productions, currently making a new series of eight Cisco Kid features for United Artists release. Krasne, who expects Pioneertown to provide a happy solution to his problem of turning out. low-cost pictures in high-cost times, has taken a 25vear lease on the town and has acquired filming rights to some 30,000 surrounding acres of desert and mountains.

Despite the tact that the Soviets are not considered prime movie fodder at the moment, interest in the area beyond that curtain has not waned, as Edward A Golden can attest. That independent producer has acquired the screen rights to “As We See Russia.” the recentlypublished book composed of views of the Soviets, some not softly spoken, by 26 foreignikcorrespondents. Mr Golden, incidentally, has no director or cast lined up yet. The picture, he said, " will be made in Hollywood.”

There Is a sharp division of opinion between Rex Harrison, the British screen star, and Clyde Cook,' film actor and eccentric dancer, about the impact of television on Hollywood players, Mr Cook said that television would not develop to the point that it will threaten the film industry for four or five years, whereas Mr Harrison said bluntly that it " was all up with Hollywood.” Even Mr Cook’s statement is guarded, as he gives a time limit, which almost infers that television is going to make a big splash in the entertainment world, but not for some years yet. and he admitted that ” the new creation is popular with actors because they feel they are getting closer than ever to their audiences.” In the meantime, the actors are getting btg money for television performances—the better they are known, the bigger the money. • • • Aquila Production’s film, “ Poet’s Pub,” based on the satirical novel by Eric Linklater, will star Derek Bond and James Robertson Justice. • * > After the screening of a very bad film, the publicity department of one of themajor studios met to discuss possible “ tie-ups ” for the show. “ I suggest,” said one of the publicity men, ” that we make a tie-up with the Red Cross to feed the children of the manager during the week he plays the picture!” * * • Tire latest brother team in the movie business is the Riskins, Everett and Robert, who have entered the independent producing field with Equitable Pictures. Although there are those in Hollywood who feel that the risks involved in independent enterprise outnumber the advantages, Everett Riskin is ” sanguine about the whole business,” believing that there always will be room for the fellow who ” knows how to make pictures.” Mr Riskin, it ought to be noted, spent seven years at Metro as a producer, and his brother not only collaborated with Frank Capra on his most successful pictures, but also produced independently on his own account.