Cinema: Shorts: Jan. 30, 1939

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¶In Hollywood, Motion Picture Research Project, headed by Dr. Leo Calvin Rosten and financed by a Carnegie Corp. grant, took offices on Hollywood Boulevard, to conduct a year-long survey of movies, moviemakers and movie society, findings to be published in book form by Harcourt, Brace some time in 1940.

Known to readers of the New Yorker for stories above his pen name of Leonard Q. Ross, Dr. Rosten is no stranger either to eccentric research or to Hollywood. In 1937 he published The Washington Correspondents, based on a similar survey subsidized by Social Science Research Council. In 1937 he worked as a screen writer for Major Pictures Corp., to acquire "the neurosis of the profession."

¶In Washington, North Carolina's ladies' man, Senator Robert Rice Reynolds said of the selection of British Vivien Leigh to play Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind: "I vigorously protest against... the selection of a foreigner for this . . . part."

¶Castings: W. C. Fields as Pickwick in a trilogy based on The Pickwick Papers, to be started by Producer Lester Cowan in London next summer; Paul Muni as Rev. Martin Niemoller, famed German Lutheran preacher, in a Warner Bros, picture to be called The Bishop Who Walked With God.