Hollywood Slump

The nation's box-office receipts in cinema are currently estimated as 15% less than they were a year ago. For this decrease the cinemindustry blames the U. S. business recession. But other explanations have been suggested: 1) the topheavy ratio of bad motion pictures to good ones, perhaps due to the demands of the double-feature market; 2) the obviously bad business move of building up cinema personalities and then letting the radio make them too familiar; 3) the lure of bingo and other catchpenny diversions of the nation's entertainment dollar.

But no matter who or what was to blame, the man who was last week taking the rap was the Hollywood craftsman. At unwieldy Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which has been at sixes & sevens since the death year-and-a-half ago of its one indisputable producer-genius, Irving G. Thalberg, more than 1,000 of the 3,000 studio employes had been dropped from the payroll. At RKO Radio the pruning halted at 250. In the United Artists group, only Producer Walter Wanger was working at top speed. Samuel Goldwyn was temporarily inactive, his corps of laborers laid off; Selznick International, geared to leisurely production, had a skeleton staff, the publicity department alone working at full blast. Other studios, already entrenched against the slump, functioned at what now passes for normal speed.

Hollywood labor, to which the present slump was merely the sharpest pinch of a long campaign of studio skimping & saving, fortnight ago engineered a general four-day work week agreement with the studios. And last week, the Screen Actors Guild was facing the problem of 4,000 members of the Guild's junior branch, chiefly extras and occasional players, for whom work has been so scanty that they have been unable to pay union dues. Since no actor in Hollywood can get a job without a Guild card, Guild officials were considering issuing temporary working cards to delinquents, permitting them to pay up as they earn.

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