BRITAIN’S HOLLYWOOD

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3821, 14 October 1936, Page 6

BRITAIN’S HOLLYWOOD

What is the difference between our film industry here in Britain and America’s? asks Reginald Pound in “Britannia.” A British film executive, supervising ar scene in production, has been known to insist cn a visiting card announcing the hero being received on a silver salver. Another vouched-for British studio scream went up when a reigning British film nabob remarked that • these verbal agreements are not worth the paper they are written on. But when anyone wants me to illustrate the affinity between th? Hollywood mentality and that of our own centres of film, manufacture, I like to do so by giving the classic example of the British studio manager and his temporarily exiled Majesty King George of Greece. The King, having little to do and only

four hundred a year to do it on, decided to pass the monotony of one of his days here by watching a British film being made. The studio manage-, noting the King’s straying interest in the course of a dissertation on the recording system in use, wound up abruptly with, ‘ But there, I suppose this is all Greek to you, ain’t it?”

In other words, except for the alleged wild parties and occasional kidnappings and, of course, the exotic vegetation, the human differences, at least, between Hollywood and the British film industry are not so wide as a great many people evidently think. You find here., as in Hollywood (or “out on the coast.” as they say in America), the same rapturous abandon in regard to the more sober economic facts of existence. You find money being used apparently for almost everything but making the best possible pictures. You find actors and actresses “standing by” for weeks on huge salaries.