Hollyday

That Hollywood was not obliterated by the earthquake was almost the only thing that cinema producers had to be thankful for last week. By last fortnight, overexpansion and Depression had brought the $2,000,000,000 cinema industry, which supplies entertainment to 75,000,000 people a week in 20,000 U. S. theatres, so close to ruin that producers had begun to feel sure nothing more could happen to them. They had failed to anticipate something which was almost as disastrous to the entertainment business, dependent solely upon ready cash, as the earthquake might have been. The national bank holiday caused cinema box-office receipts to fall about 45%. The effect was at once felt in Hollywood. Studios, most of which pay their running expenses with money from the financial capital of the industry in Manhattan, had no way to meet their payrolls.

In the Hollywood offices of the Hays organization last week, six of Hollywood's major producers--Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Vice President Louis B. Mayer, Fox Production Chief Winfield Sheehan, Warner Brothers' Jack Warner, Columbia's Harris Cohn, President Benjamin B. Kahane of RKO, Comedy-Producer Hal Roach--met to decide what to do. Their 10,000 underlings, whose total weekly pay amounts to $1,500,000, blenched at the rumor that all studios would close for at least four weeks. Next day the producers met again. They decided they could keep studios open temporarily at least if employes at $50 a week or more took a 50% paycut for eight weeks, with a 25% cut for employes under $50. What followed was a week of controversy, conducted in the wildest Hollywood fashion, so frantic that even the earthquake passed almost unnoticed. The week ended with every studio in Hollywood closed for the first time in history, while arguments continued between producers and their employes.

Cinema employes in Hollywood are divided roughly into two groups--high-salaried stars, writers and directors, with individual contracts; lower salaried union workers--film cutters, projectionists, sound technicians, "grips" (property movers), laboratory workers. On the assumption that the unions would accept the cut, the high-salaried employes held meetings of their own and agreed to share their employers' woes, only demanding an audit of studio books first. Cinemactress Marie Dressier wired her acceptance. Writer Laurence Stallings said he was "proud to be the first" to take the cut. Cinemactors Jack Oakie and Stuart Erwin were still arguing when earthquake shook the walls. Both grabbed pens and signed their new contracts. Not until the high-salaried employes had generally agreed to take the cut did they learn that Hollywood's 24 unions--who suspected that producers were taking advantage of the emergency to further a campaign which has cut producing costs 35% in the last two years--had refused.

Producers, union heads and an emergency committee of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences met at the Roosevelt Hotel. At Hollywood's United Airport, three planes piloted by members of the stunt flyers' union were waiting, in case union demands were not met, to fly over the studios with black trailers as a signal for union labor to quit. The hotel meeting became so excited that when it adjourned with nothing decided, no one remembered to notify the pilots. While the meeting continued later, in Producer Ben Schulberg's bungalow at Paramount, a smart stenographer found a forgotten but unexpired five-year contract between producers and unions which fitted the situation perfectly. It called for three weeks of arbitration with union workers receiving full pay.

Whether or not high-salaried workers would work for half pay during the period of arbitration was what they were to decide when the studios closed last week. If they agreed to do it, producers had three more weeks in which to find a way to keep Hollywood's huge, eccentric, unpredictable cinema industry from shutting down completely.

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