Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Many Hollywood stars are stagestruck. To fill their yearning for the feel of an old-fashioned stage, some cinemactors take an occasional fling at Broadway. Others settle for Eastern summer stock or the hopeful little theaters that spring up in & around Los Angeles. In the past two years so many have trod the boards of a high-school auditorium in La Jolla, Calif., 100 miles south of Hollywood, that it has become the nation's most star-studded summer theater...
...Jolla (rhymes with Ahoy ya) Playhouse hit a jackpot with a midseason production of Moss Hart's Light Up the Sky. The cast read like that of a grade A cinema-Gregory Peck, Jean Parker, Benay Venuta, Florence Bates-and the first-night audience looked like a Hollywood première. But behind the elaborate façade was the solid work of such self-improving actors as Gregory Peck and Mel (Lost Boundaries) Ferrer, who have carried the load of running the Playhouse ever since David O. Selznick put up $15,000 to help get it started...
Honest Opinion. The idea, as Peck puts it, was to give the screen actors a chance to "sharpen up." Says he: "Hollywood is a vacuum in which criticism doesn't exist . . . The only way you can get a really honest opinion of your work is to get in front of an audience that pays to see you. Then you know in a minute if you're bad." Among the players who have kept the audiences paying for Broadway revivals: Eve Arden, Barry Sullivan, Ruth Hussey, Guy Madison, Diana Lynn, Sylvia Sidney, Reginald Denny, Jane Cowl Ann Harding, Laraine...
...Jolla pays its top stars an Equity minimum wage (lesser names get their regular price), sticks to a modest budget and limits itself to one set per production. But sometimes Hollywood will out. When Jennifer Jones starred last season in Serena Blandish, Angel Selznick insisted on surrounding his favorite actress (later to become his wife) with a cast that included Cinemactor Louis Jourdan and such polished stage veterans as Constance Collier, Mildred Natwick and Reginald Owen. He also insisted on gowns by Jacques Fath and five sets. The show drew capacity crowds throughout its run-and lost several thousand dollars...
Bigger & Better. Heartened by La Jolla's success, stagestruck Hollywood has a much bigger project under way. Peck, with the newly formed Actors' Company,' plans to build a $2,000,000 showplace housing a year-round theater in Beverly Hills. Former RKO Chief Peter Rathvon heads the company; its other officers are Peck, Ferrer, Rosalind Russell and Producer Jerry Wald. The project calls for the production of six plays a year for a run of at least six weeks each, with every member of a star-cluttered board of directors already agreed to appear every season...