NOT UNDERSTOOD.

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 661, 14 January 1933, Page 24 (Supplement)

NOT UNDERSTOOD.

Hollywood as a Director Sees It. Hollywood is misunderstood, according to Ernst Lubitsch, the greatest and the highest-paid talkie director in the world. The film colony isn’t really a place full of stupid people, he says. It is the most difficult thing in the world to make an entertainment which at one and the same time will not seem too childish for one class of picturegoer or' two highbrow for another. That is, he declares, Hollywood’s problem. Lubitsch is now spending a holiday in England. His last visit to that country occurred twenty-one years ago, when he earned 25/- a week as the comic thief in “ Sumurun.” Now he spends as much daily in cigars as he used to earn in a week when he was a humble comedian. “We cannot make really intellectual pictures,” he told a London correspondent, “ because pictures cost so much and there aren’t enough intellectually inclined people in the world to make them pay. We must progress, of course, slowly, and hope that the public will keep up with us. “ Hollywood makes too many pictures a year. Six hundred pictures! How can they all be good? There aren’t enough writers, players and directors in the whole world to make 600 good films a year. . “ Hollywood is taking the question of England’s film attitude very seriously. It uses English players a great deal, and takes the greatest pains to avoid anything that would give offence there or be ridiculed. “ When I made ‘ Smiling Lieutenant ’ I shot a second time all the scenes in which the word lieutenant was used. In America they pronounce it ‘ lootenant.’ ”

Silly Symphonies. The ingenious animated and sound synchronised cartoons produced by Walt Disney, the creator of Mickey Mouse, are to be photographed in natural colour in future. “ Flowers and Trees ”, the first of a new series being produced for world-wide distribution by United Artists, was made in natural colour, and has scored a hit in the United States.