Hollywood: Period of Adjustment

The lights went down at the 20th Century-Fox stockholders' meeting last week as Spyros Skouras—beneficent impresario of a troubled corporation—happily announced a preview showing of scenes from new Fox films. The ploy failed. Twenty minutes of movies helped no one to forget that Fox lost $22.5 million on last year's operations, and next year's hopes rest entirely with the $30 million production of Cleopatra. The fact that Liz Taylor's take from Cleopatra will exceed $1,300,000 brought a bitter joke; a furious stockholder nominated her for the board of directors.

Liz's peccadilloes throw a lurid light on Hollywood's supercolossal, cast-of-thousands inefficiency....