Word: m-g-m
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Stern's annual income of around $150,-ooo comes largely from his Colgate stipend of $2,500 weekly and his salary as sports director of NBC. It is pieced out by his M-G-M newsreel work, magazine articles and sports shorts for Columbia Pictures. But he feels that the era of great announcers is at an end. "We used to be the public's eyes; now television is," said Stern. "The TV audience just wants a few words from us ... I'm going to try hard to fit into...
...doctors could not be sure just what had caused Gregory Peck's eye infection, but M-G-M found its effects painfully clear: the moviemaking machinery had grown so complicated that an actor's inflamed eye was enough to inflict a year's postponement (and thus tie up $1,000,000 already spent) on "the biggest picture of all time...
...months M-G-M had throbbed with preparations for a super-epic Quo Vadis, based on the famed Sienkiewiecz novel about Roman persecution of the early Christians. Filming was to start July 1 in Rome on a $4, 000,000-to-$5,000,000 budget, a whopper for an economy-minded industry. Already shipped from Hollywood were 125 of 150 scheduled tons of equipment, including giant generators to feed the Technicolor arc lamps. Planes had flown eight tons of armor, enough to gird a Roman army of 2,500. On Manhattan's Times Square, a huge sign...
...week the studio bowed to the fateful intricacy of its own schedule, and put the Roman invasion off to May 1, 1950. When Peck bounced out of the hospital, having lost only two days of shooting on the Fox lot (at the cost of a mere $40,000), M-G-M was already a prisoner of its decision...
...Some M-G-M officials secretly thought it was just as well. Quo Vadis still had no final shooting script, some casting and production details were unsettled; with luck, most of the $1,000,000 investment could be salvaged in the end. Besides, M-G-M still had an even jumpier headache: Judy Garland had flounced off the Annie Get Your Gun lot, and the company had decided to scrap much of some $1,000,000 worth of film and wait until late summer to start the picture all over again with Betty Hutton...