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Star (Christchurch), Issue 19070, 15 May 1930, Page 6

A REMARKABLE CONFESSION was **■ made by Mr Sidney R. Kent, the general manager of Paramount, to a London newspaper representative. It was found, he said, that so far as Hollywood was concerned, the “story material of the world has been used up.” They had been through, he said, all the narrative _ and dramatic literature that was ever written, and there was nothing left. For modern, purposes no new stories were being told, or, at any rate, not enough of them. The talk-film, however, opened up a new vista. On the face of it one felt inclined, says a commentator, to answer in the words of the comedian, who advances to the footlights with a hen in one hand and an ostrich egg in the other, and say simply: “1 don’t believe it!” When one remembers that filmable civilisation has gone on for something like four thousand years from Egypt to Assyria, from Persia to Greece, from Greece to Rome, from Rome to th® mediaeval world and the splendours o 4 the Renaissance; that even from the tiraß on. East and West have teemed witll treasures of fact and fancy, can it be that those studio-libraries of Hollywood have exhausted every possibility that could be “checked up” and standardised as “sure fire”? (Anglo-American N.S. Copyright.)