JEAN’S SUCCESS

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 886, 1 February 1930, Page 31

JEAN’S SUCCESS

Leviathan leaving New York Harbour, a baseball field with a game in progress, and the entire sweep of the Niagara FallsEach of these pictures, it is stated, presents with perfect definition a greater expanse than is normally perceptible to the naked eye. “New Orleans Frolic,” the fourth Grandeur film to be made by Fox, will shortly be presented. "Budapest,” an all-talking and all-colour picture, starring Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, is in production. CONSTERNATION CAUSED Grandeur film will cause consternation throughout the film world, in so far as it may threaten the very existence of thousands of cinemas in which it is a physical impossibility to accommodate a screen 50 feet wide and 35 feet high. A. PI. Abrahams, one of the shrewdest showmen in Britain, has stated that all his new theatres would be designed to accommodate giant screens. This principle is observed in the building of the new Civic Theatre, Auckland. In America there is opposition to the giant screen. Independent producers, shaken by the talking picture, have declared I that the giant screen will kill film en- | tertainment. But the great American combines, j headed by such men as William Fox ' and Harry Warner, are 'completely i converted to the giant screen. ADVENT INEVITABLE Its coming is therefore Inevitable, but the prospect to all who have money at stake in picture production and exhibition is staggering. Studios w ill have to be built on a \ much vaster scale, and will have to be | re-eq>iipped throughout, entailing an expenditure per floor of, perhaps, ' £IOO,OOO. This will make the giant [ studios at Elstree the most valuable film property in Britain. Cameras costing £1,500 each will have to be scrapped for cameras cost- j mg certainly a great deal more. Picture drama will have to be written not only to combine action with sound, but also to till an enormously greater canvas. One can only guess at the cost of the reconstruction and re-equipment of studios and cinemas entailed by a general adoption of ilie giant screen. In Britain alone it may be as much as £16,C00,000, and in America it may be easily five times as much. The enthusiastic approval by the i public of the giant screen may, there- j fore, bring the English-speaking film world face to face with the necessity of finning the staggering sum of per- j haps £100,000,000.