Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Hollywood to peddle his audience-research act to producers, Philadelphia-based Pollster Albert E. Sindlinger trotted out some tempting figures to convince the moviemen that they actually have something to sell. Feature films, said Sindlinger, will soon be classified by their expected box-office gross, and will fall into three groups: 1) under $2,000,000, 2) from $5,000,000 to $6,000,000, 3) from $9,000,000 up. Although the total number of movie theaters in the U.S. has dropped from 18,719 to 11,200 in the past two years, Sindlinger insisted that "blockbusters...
Twenty years later, Behrman encountered Howard in Hollywood and inquired after the whereabouts of the Prize-winner, whose name he had forgotten. "Oh, I saw him just last week," said Howard. "I went with Sam Goldwyn to Tijuana, and we had just entered a gambling house, when I heard a voice: 'Hello, Sidney!' It was the fellow who won the Castle Square Prize; he was the croupier...
...Jacobowsky appeared last year, one New York critic commented that Nazism and anti-Semitism were not fit subjects for a humorous approach. "He was dead wrong," Behrman says, pointing out that Franz Werfel had told him the true story from which the play was taken at Max Reinhardt's Hollywood home. "Also present was the composer Arnold Schonberg; they were all refugees who had lost everything to the Nazis, but they all laughed themselves sick. The capacity to laugh is the strongest thing in people...
When one of Behrman's plays is a success, he goes to work for a while on the New Yorker magazine; when it's a failure, he goes out to Hollywood. He says he regrets having spent so much time in Hollywood; he should have written more plays to increase his repertory rather than running out to the West Coast for six months at a time. In connection with his Hollywood experience, he recalls once being asked by producer Sol Wurtzel to do a screenplay for Dante's Inferno. "That requires a lot of research," Behrman replied. "Oh, no," said...
There are humorous moments, too, but unlike Hollywood's contrived chuckles, they grow out of life-as-it-is. Little Apu watches his school-master peddle rice while drilling the quiet students; he is fascinated by a cacophonous brass band that marches through the village; he sits goggle-eyed when a travelling troupe provides "culture" at the local theatre...