Word: mgm
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Harvard Club lunch in Los Angeles MGM's Dore Schary decided to look on the bright side of the movie-TV battle: "Television actually is having a salutary effect on films. It is eliminating our potboilers, dreadful melodramas and other junk. In fact, television is inheriting most of Hollywood's mediocrities...
...Ivanhoe (MGM) makes a rousing medieval horse opera out of Sir Walter Scott's most popular novel.* Set in the chivalric days of Norman-Saxon rivalry in 12th century England, the story is a blend of historical fact and romantic fiction about the Saxon Knight Wilfred of Ivanhoe, who helped King Richard the Lionhearted reclaim the throne usurped by his villainous brother Prince John and the Norman traitors while Richard was away at the Crusades. In the course of his adventures, Ivanhoe also champions the black-eyed Jewess Rebecca, falsely accused by the Norman conspirators of sorcery, and wins...
Fearless Pagan (MGM) is a circus lion that tangles with the U.S. Army. When Pagan's owner (Carleton Carpenter) is inducted, he cannot bear to part with his playful pet, and secretly puts him up in a cage on the Army post. This leads to complications involving a hard-boiled sergeant (Keenan Wynn), an apoplectic colonel (Wilton Graff) and a visiting movie star (Janet Leigh). All ends happily, with Janet and Carleton finding love, and Fagan finding a home in Hollywood. The fadeout shows Fagan, majestically poised on a diving board, leaping into a movietown swimming pool...
Schenck had slipped into Hollywood five weeks before, set up a round of interviews with MGM's key personnel, from Production Boss Dore Schary to Bathing Beauty Esther Williams. His conclusion: in the face of a box-office slump and skyrocketing overhead, the time had come for a rigid economy campaign...
Other studios are almost certain to follow MGM's lead. Paramount, probably in the best shape of any major studio, is not planning to renew the contract of Producer-Director George (A Place in the Sun) Stevens, whose perfectionist methods were too costly, and has dropped its top box-office draw, Alan Ladd, whose price is too high. Explained one studio spokesman: "What you've got to do today is make pictures look like four million dollars-but cost under a million...