Shangri-La in Burbank

In James Hilton's 1933 novel Lost Horizon, Shangri-La was a valley of delicate beauty and perfect serenity set against a backdrop of soaring Tibetan mountains. To Movie Producer Ross Hunter, Shangri-La is Burbank, Calif. The mountain range is only 600 ft. long (not bad by studio standards) and made of plaster; in Hollywood, serenity is a realm that lies only beyond the fourth martini or the third joint. Otherwise, Hunter's Shangri-La--the set for a new musical version of Hilton's novel--has it all over the novel, as well as Frank Capra's 1937 black-and-white Ronald Colman tearjerker.

The four-acre set cost $500,000 --more than some entire movies in today's budget-squeezed Hollywood. Next to the plaster mountains are two 40-ft. waterfalls, four glistening pools, and an 80-ft.-high Greco-Roman-Byzantine-Gothic-Sung-Khmer Lamasery that owes more to Hilton the hotelier than Hilton the novelist. "It's like having a dream you can walk into any time you want to," gushes one of the Columbia Pictures secretaries who spend their lunch hours or coffee breaks on the set trying to catch glimpses of a cast that includes Charles Boyer, John Gielgud, Peter Finch, Sally Kellerman and Liv Ullman, Ingmar Bergman's most famous female star.

Plaster dreams for people to walk into are Hunter's stock in trade, and a very profitable trade it is, too. In the past 20 years, his 45 movies have grossed countless millions; one of them alone, the 1969 Airport, has grossed $45 million, according to Variety, making it the fourth-ranking moneymaker in Hollywood history. Though he is only 51, Hunter is the apostle of the old big-budget Hollywood, and he would be properly mortified if anyone saw any social relevance in such Hunter-produced films as The Magnificent Obsession, Pillow Talk and the various Tammies (Tammy Tell Me True, etc.). "What I offer people is escape," he says. "I have never in my life made a picture to please me. Can you imagine that I'd make a film like Tammy for me?"

Well, yes. An affinity for schlock like Hunter's must be sincere. Except for a few million dollars and an opulent house in Trousdale, overlooking Beverly Hills, he has changed little from the movie-struck kid who ushered at Lowe's Park Theater in Cleveland 30 years ago.

Golden Hair. The son of a real estate man, Hunter grew up to become briefly a high school English teacher. His girl students were so dazzled by his golden-haired good looks that they sent his picture to a Hollywood movie agent. Improbable as it sounds, a contract resulted, and Hunter starred in 26 B-grade flicks, each one, he recalls, "as forgettable as the next, mostly because I was a horrible actor."

Emboldened by the 1,000 fan letters he received a week, which he kept in, under and around his bed, he asked to be upgraded to bigger budgets. Columbia assigned him to an undersea feature, first insisting that he be given a precautionary penicillin shot. The result was an almost fatal case of penicillin poisoning. After a year he recovered, to find that his contract was up and neither Columbia nor any other studio wanted his meager acting talents. His friend Ann Sheridan counseled him: "You're an organizer. Learn your trade." She got him a job as a dialogue director at Universal, and Hunter did the rest, mainly through demonic work and an intuitive grasp of the dictum, attributed to H.L. Mencken, that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

Hunter is a bachelor who seems unlikely to marry (although he has been dating Nancy Sinatra, Frank's former wife, for six years). More than most producers, he makes the movie set his home and tries to create a family atmosphere among his cast and crew. He shows up almost every day for shooting, lavishing kisses, hugs, flowers and praise on almost everybody in sight. To ensure Dean Martin's wandering interest during the shooting of Airport, he installed a putting green on the set. To prevent another star, a lusty, hard-drinking ' grande dame, from straying during the shooting of another film, he supplied her with a steady stream of Scotch and, if he is to be believed, a steady stream of handsome young men.

Once his pictures are released, Hunter often goes to neighborhood theaters where they are playing and buttonholes people at intermission to see what they think of them. Sometimes he sells tickets at the box office so that he can find out why people came to the movie in the first place. Whenever he has the time, he sits in the audience to gauge reactions, often crying during the more maudlin scenes. "One way I know I'm in trouble," he says, "is if the audience is laughing when I'm crying." From the looks of things, Lost Horizon should make them both laugh.

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