Cinema: Newsreel, Feb. 14, 1955

¶ In the four-contestant race to film Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, Broadway Producer Mike Todd (TIME. Dec. 13) and Italian Producer Dino de Laurentis are well ahead of M-G-M and David O. (Gone With the Wind) Selznick. De Laurentis already has a crew in Finland ready to shoot snowy backgrounds for Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, although his six writers have not yet done the script for Director King (Duel in the Sun) Vidor. Unintimidated. Todd hired Fred (From Here to Eternity) Zinnemann to direct and Playwright Robert Sherwood to write his version, announced that he had budgeted the movie at $7.500.000.

¶ Drive-in theaters, once strictly a summer phenomenon, are doing year-round business in 14 U.S. cities, defying snow and freezing temperatures. The drive-ins keep their customers cozy by providing, for an extra 25¢, a portable electric fan-forced heater for the floor of the car.

¶ Charlie Chaplin is hard at work on the script and music of a new movie that he plans to begin shooting within a year. Title: The Good King. Plot: a monarch is forced to abdicate and live like an average man. Having abdicated his monarchical position in Hollywood two years ago, Chaplin is now living in self-imposed exile in Switzerland with wife Oona and their five children. His is the simple life of an average man—in a $200,000 villa (13 rooms) on the shores of Lake Geneva.