REAL ESTATE: 20th Century City

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To the troubled movie business, 20th Century-Fox last week had good news to report. Ten-month earnings in 1957 rose to $2.44 a share v. .$1.83 for the same period of 1956.

President Spyros Skouras also an nounced a plan that he hopes will make a big chunk of money for Fox in the future.Fox plans to convert a large part of its wide-open, 284-acre West Los Angeles production lot into a "Century City" with more than a score of skyscrapers and apartment towers. The project would eventually cost $300 million, bring a net income of as much as $36 million a year.

Cowboys & Oil. Fox intends either to build up the whole area through its Fox Realty Corp. or to develop 25% of it and sell off the rest to another developer for a capital gain. The moviemaker, which has still to raise the cash for the project, has started to dicker with at least five "interested" insurance companies, and one is considering putting up $50 million. Fox's lot—half of which it bought from oldtime Film Cowboys Tom Mix and Buck Jones, who used it to stable their horses—is the largest piece of underdeveloped real estate in a city that is rapidly running out of space. Quietly for the past year, Fox has been drawing up plans to exploit the plot. Architect Welton Becket's models call for Fox to shrink its moviemaking operations into 79 acres on the southwest part of the property, build a $15 million structure to house all its offices and indoor stages. (For outdoor shooting, Fox has a 2,300-acre ranch, 25 miles away in the Malibu district.) Fox will continue to let Universal Consolidated Oil Co., which is pumping crude from underground stations that cannot be seen at street level, and which has paid more than $500,000 in royalties to Fox since the lot's first deep well was brought in late in 1955, drill for oil.

Reaching for the Skies. Within a year, on the east side of the property, Fox expects to break ground for the first of 18 apartment towers of 20 stories each, another 20 apartments of six or seven stories each and 21 garden apartments. The complex is to have 40 swimming pools, twelve tennis courts and almost three parking spaces per apartment. Rentals: $75 to $110 per room a month, with some large apartments (five bedrooms, two servants' rooms) running to $1,700 a month.

On the north side of the property, along bustling Santa Monica Boulevard, will rise seven air-conditioned office buildings (including one of 30 stories—far taller than anything now standing in Los Angeles—and three of 22 stories). Near them will spring up an 1 8-story, 1,000-room hotel, a six-story motion-picture arts center with adjoining 4,000-seat auditorium, a series of shops and department stores. Cutting a swath through the whole development will be a 175-ft.-wide concourse almost a mile long, with a centerway of statuary, fountains and subtropical plants.