Prima Donna's President

Through United Artists Corp., a group of cinema prima donnas market their own pictures. Last United Artists' president able to keep the peace inside that concern was another prima donna, Joseph Schenck. Last year he quit to take his own Twentieth Century Pictures and Producer Darryl Zanuck to Fox. Sales Manager Al Lichtman was moved up to president, speedily quarreled with Producer Sam Goldwyn over the marketing of Barbary Coast, resigned. Prima Donna Mary Pickford took over as provisional president. Last week United Artists owners--Miss Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Goldwyn, Charles Chaplin and British Producer Alexander Korda's delegate, Murray Silverstone--sat down in Hollywood to pick a boss. Favored candidates were Pickford and Silverstone. Instead the owners elected Dr. Attilio Henry Giannini.

Overshadowed by his older brother, Amadeo Peter Giannini, head of Transamerica Corp., Attilio Giannini had quietly grown into a unique relationship with the cinema industry. Cut out to be a doctor, he took his M.D. at the University of California, doctored 6,000 Negro troops stationed at San Francisco's Presidio during the Spanish-American War, worked day & night through the terror of San Francisco's 1906 earthquake, nearly died of typhus. Meanwhile Brother Amadeo's bank, having been demolished in the earthquake, moved into Attilio's house. When he recovered from typhus, Attilio became manager and vice president of Bank of Italy's first branch in San Jose, Calif., later ran his brother's first Market Street branch in San Francisco. At once his partiality for the entertainment business showed in small loans to struggling nickelodeon houses.

Switching to Manhattan to found East River National Bank, the doctor was obliged to gamble for new business, began financing money-hungry cinema companies. His sure-fire test of the box-office value of a new film was to show it privately to a group of schoolgirls aged 15 to 20. What they liked he lent money on. Berated once by a bank examiner for having risked $500,000 on Charlie Chaplin's The Kid, he replied: "I think it a better investment than a Liberty Bond." The Kid paid back its loan in five months, and Liberty Bonds dropped to 80. In 1931 Bank of America National Association, into which the East River Bank had grown, was absorbed by Manhattan's National City Bank. Attilio went back to Brother Amadeo's potent Bank of America N.T. & S.A. as director and executive committee chairman and moved into the position of financial godfather to the cinema industry. Cinemagnates went to him first for loans and advice, called him "Doc," credited him with having settled more cinema wrangles than all the law courts of California. Last week Dr. Giannini declared: "I've just started getting paid for what I've been doing for years."

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