The Trouble with Hollywood

In the midst of a bad week, Hollywood licked its wounds and struck back at a few tormentors. Items:

P:A Gallup survey on movie attendance for the first six months of 1950 indicated that, despite a 19 million population increase, weekly ticket sales had dropped 9% under the prewar average. Since 1946, Hollywood appears to have lost close to 24 million customers.

Touchy moviemen sent an angry protest to RCA President Frank Folsom about a skit by TV Comics Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis on the Colgate Comedy Hour (NBC-TV). The skit, showing a theater owner literally dragging patrons off the sidewalks and a cashier baiting passers-by in a low-cut evening gown, had "done serious damage to the industry." The moviemen asked RCA to "take steps immediately to see that this scene is not repeated on other stations." Martin & Lewis quickly apologized.

P:Hollywood's vigilant COMPO (Council of Motion Picture Organizations) got out a booklet quoting some 56 sociologists and psychiatrists to the effect that movies are not really responsible for juvenile delinquency. Sample dubious boost for the industry, from University of Illinois President George Stoddard: "There is little evidence that the motion picture has much effect upon the behavior of children. When a healthy high-school boy chooses to spend three hours on a sunny Saturday in a world of make-believe, the trouble is not with the motion picture but in the quality of home and neighborhood life."

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