Script for Success

Telling Hollywood's fortune is a tricky job that depends on the angle at which one leans over the crystal ball—and everyone in Hollywood has an angle. "Conditions in the movie industry," says redoubtable Independent Producer Sam Goldwyn, "are worse than I have ever known them in the 47 years I have been connected with motion pictures." Says Paramount Pictures Chairman Adolph Zukor: "The future of motion pictures has never been brighter." Last week Hollywood could split the difference, find plenty of signs that the movie industry, for all its problems, is healthier than it has been in many a postwar year.

The figures most attractive to moviedom's magnates are the seductive black ones in their accounting books. Last week Loew's (MGM) reported earnings of $1.08 per share for the 28 weeks ended March 12, a gain of almost 1,000% over a year earlier. United Artists Corp. announced that it boosted revenues 20% and earnings 30% for 1958 to set new records. In 1959, higher earnings have been reported by Warner Bros., National Theatres, Inc., 20th Century-Fox and Columbia.

Wall Street has shown its faith in moviedom's future by sending stocks of producing companies steadily upward. United Artists has jumped from 15¼ to 32¼ in 15 months, Paramount from 30⅝ to 50, 20th Century-Fox from 21¾ to 43½, Warner Bros, from 16⅞ to 40. Though Standard & Poor's recently prepared an analysis warning that movie stocks are "quite speculative," it gave bullish reviews to seven of the ten companies it examined. Says a leading Wall Street movie industry analyst: "There's a great deal of skepticism —but the Street is intrigued."

The Price of Alaska. Why is Wall Street intrigued? Hollywood has adjusted to the threat of TV far better than anyone expected. Box-office receipts have dropped some 20% since the high of 1946, but moviemen expect attendance to level off at its present 40 million a week. Though no one knows exactly how many pictures Hollywood will produce this year, the total will probably be about 250, far below the 600 of Hollywood's heyday, but hardly the output of a dying industry. Twentieth Century-Fox says that it is "enjoying the greatest production spurt in 13 years," in 1959 will spend $64 million on 32 new pictures, highest ever in a single year.

"The only reason for the cutback in movies at all," says Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's boss, Sol C. Siegel, "is that we will not make pictures for the sake of making pictures any more." TV has killed the routine movie for most people (who can watch all the routine movies they want to on TV), forced Hollywood to concentrate on blockbusters—the big-screen, big-star, big-color extravaganzas that often cost upwards of $3,000,000. The blockbusters have no trouble luring people away from TV, are the favorites of the drive-in theaters, which have grown from 820 to more than 4,500 in the last ten years. The Ten Commandments, which cost $13.5 million, will have brought in more than $45 million by year's end. In the works: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Ben-Hur (cost: $14 million), Hecht-Hill-Lancaster's The Way West ($8,000,000), and 20th Century-Fox's The Alaskans, whose cost ($7,200,000) is about what the U.S. paid for Alaska in 1867.