Planning Season

No book of Nobel Prize Winner Sinclair Lewis has been effective when filmed. Reason: he is documentary rather than dramatic. Now Samuel Goldwyn has bought screen rights to Arrowsmith, will adapt it for Ronald Colman. Said Lewis: "Arrowsmith is my favorite. ... I know a notable work will be made out of it." . . .

Paramount has dropped three ingenues of experience, all still young and pretty: Jean Arthur, Fay Wray, Mary Brian. Reason: three new ingenue possibilities can be hired for the salary of any one of the three leaving. . . .

Bobby Jones's first picture, The Putter, was released by Warner last week. With Golfing Actors Richard Barthelmess and Frank Craven, Jones explains how to putt. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer will make other sport shorts, including one of track games featuring Frank Wykoff, famed sprinter. To Helen Wills Moody has been offered, it is rumored, a $150,000 contract. . . .

Extra policemen will guard all Hollywood production lots. Reporters, bootleggers, peddlers, and insurance solicitors can get in no more. . .

Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, wheel-horses of Manhattan's Theatre Guild, Helen Hayes, pudgy emotional actress, Bert Lahr, loud-voiced comic, and Jimmy Durante, long-nosed, button-eyed master of ceremonies who makes up his own gags, will work for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Lunt & Fontanne's first picture will probably be Private Lives.

Mae. Marsh, Thomas Meighan and

James Kirkwood will try comebacks. . . .

Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell will make a musicomedy containing the first music George ("Rhapsody in Blue") Gershwin has written for the cinema. . . . With 16 blonde, 5 redheaded actresses under contract, Fox has only three brunettes, none of them important: Maureen O'Sullivan, Fifi Dorsay and Sally Eilers. Newsworthy were these precipitations of the conference season that has been raging for the past three weeks in the film industry. Salesmen were exhorted; company officials read numberless addresses carefully prepared by their secretaries; hundreds of millions of dollars worth of directors, writers, actors, technicians were re-engaged; resounding phrases were thumped like drums -- "banner year . . . ," "greatest ever. . . ." Out of all of which the principal producers promised the following number of full-length films for 1931-32: Fox 48 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 48 Paramount 70 Warner Bros. 35 First National 35 RKO Radio 36 RKO Pathe 21 Columbia 26 Producers do not consider that television will come into contact with films for a long time yet. Paramount believes more pictures should have children in them and more attention should be paid to woman's share in the War.

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