Word: hollywoodize
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Task Force has a double box-office virtue: its release is timed 1) to cash in on U.S. naval aviation's well-publicized wrangling with the Air Force and 2) to get an early start in a new Hollywood cycle of World War II films. (Coming up in the near future: Battleground, Sands of Iwo Jima, Twelve O'Clock High, Three Came Home...
...producer of the Warner lot. Last week, while the average producer managed to look busy on his year's quota of one or two pictures, Mass-Producer Jerry Wald had five more films finished, and three about ready to start shooting. It was not an unusual week for Hollywood's busiest moviemaker. Last year he turned out nine pictures, including the laureled Johnny Belinda, and got enough quality into the quantity to win himself the prized Irving Thalberg statuette for high-grade production...
Smooth Blend. Just how 37-year-old Wald does it rankles his detractors, who cultivate the legend that he is one of the Hollywood comers who sat for the composite portrait of the fast-rising heel in Budd Schulberg's novel, What Makes Sammy Run?. Like Sammy, he broke into the movies as a hack scripter. Like Sammy, Jerry has stoked his career with a singleminded ambition, a glib tongue, monumental speed and endurance, a flair for opportunism and an enormous talent for picking other men's brains and putting the pickings to work. Whether a credit...
...hour day of directing his writers, writing his directors, casting his actors, cutting and editing film, reviewing musical scores, sets and costumes, compromising the clashes between the commercial mind and the artistic temperament. Most of his spare time, with his wife and two children, is uncluttered by Hollywood's social excesses or such private indulgences as drinking and smoking. He spends it in a tireless hunt for story material in 70-odd publications a month, plus novels, plays and synopses...
...pains, Wald gets only $2,700 a week, about half of what he is worth to a top Hollywood studio at the going rate for production geniuses. Even on a living scale modest for Hollywood bigwigs (a ten-room house without swimming pool or tennis court), he moans that he can save little of it after agents' fees and taxes. Though tied to his handsomely austere wage by an optionless long-term contract that runs through 1951, Wald gets some comfort from recognition. He flirts occasionally with another studio to learn how much he is really worth, and does...