Word: paramount
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...film production. They have won an amazing measure of it. Jimmy Stewart made the breach, and Burt Lancaster, John Wayne, Alan Ladd, Gary Cooper and a score of others have followed. Almost two-thirds of film production at Warner and Columbia is now in the hands of independents. Paramount and Fox are yielding to the trend. Even rich old M-G-M had to make concessions; as many as ten independent pictures may be made on the Metro lot in 1956, and in many cases the mouse has nibbled deep into the Lion's share of the profits...
...There. Fate went to considerable trouble to do just that. When Bill was 20 and a second-year student at Pasadena Junior College, he got a chance at the part of Madame Curie's father in a play at the Pasadena Playbox. On opening night a Paramount talent scout, Milt Lewis, went to see the play. He couldn't see Bill for the whiskers, but he liked Bill's voice, and went backstage to see what the rest of him was like. Says Milt: "It was all there." He invited Bill to Paramount next...
...weeks later Bill had a movie contract ($50 a week) but what about a name? "Beedle!" exclaimed a Paramount executive. "It sounds like an insect." Just then his secretary announced that William Holden, a West Coast newsman, was on the wire. That took care of the name, now all Bill needed was a part. Fate got busy again. Over at Columbia, Director Rouben Mamoulian saw Bill's screen test, grabbed him for the title role of Golden Boy, the Clifford Odets play about a young pug who could hit like Marciano and fiddle like Paganini...
Bill had left Paramount a boy; he came back a man who meant business. By 1946 he had three children (two boys, and a girl born of Ardis' first marriage) as well as a wife to support, and he intended to make a good job of it. At the studio gate he got his first shock: the gatekeeper said he had never heard of William Holden, and refused to let him in. In the executive offices he got another: moviegoers had forgotten all about William Holden, and the big bosses saw no particular reason to remind them...
Several emphasized, however, that if Eisenhower does run, the question of his health will be of paramount importance in the ensuing campaign...