Producers' Tsar

Job of cinema producers is to produce cinemas. How to do so and at the same time deal with Hollywood's screen writers, actors and technicians, whose organizational activities in the course of the last month have reached a record peak, has lately been cinema producers' most pressing problem. Last week in Hollywood they found a solution: to represent them as labor arbitrator, the eight major companies included in the Producers Association (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount, Warner Bros., Twentieth Century-Fox, RKO, United Artists, Universal and Columbia) elected Benjamin Bertram Kahane, for the last year right-hand man to Columbia's President Harry Kohn. Bald, hook-nosed Ben Kahane, 45, is a onetime Chicago lawyer who became general counsel for the old Orpheum Circuit, and got into cinema when the Radio-Keith-Orpheum Corporation was formed in 1928, worked up to become president of RKO Studios in Hollywood until a year ago. Promptly dubbed "producers' tsar" by Hollywood's trade press, his $75,000-a-year job of being a clearing house for the whole industry's complex and continual labor troubles will last for three years.

Tsar Kahane's appointment coincided auspiciously last week with the conclusion of Hollywood's most troublesome recent labor difficulties when, after six weeks of picketing and bickering, the strike of painters and scenic artists (TIME, June 14) approached settlement. Pending final wage adjustments, the strikers last week returned to work.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.