Cinema: The New Pictures: Nov. 16, 1931

(3 of 4)

Pathe's "personality group" —Constance Bennett, Ann Harding, Helen Twelvetrees, William Boyd. By last December, RKO'S total current assets were $15,200,615, almost twice what they had been the year before. Nonetheless, by last year, Hollywood producers were definitely less frightened by the potentialities of the new company. RKO had failed to produce a single new star of its own, an obvious symptom of extemporaneous methods in the production staff. The company had had three hits—Cimarron, Rio Rita, Amos & Andy—but these were hardly sufficient to balance the average of mediocre and definitely unsuccessful pictures. RKO had foolishly tried to push the vogue for musical comedies after other producers had dropped it. It had turned out a string of clumsy program pictures which showed a lack of unified efficiency. But if RKO had not justified the apprehensions of Hollywood, the company at least made money in its first two years—$1,669,564 in 1929, $3,385,628 in 1930. Last week, in its third year, the idea of RKO as a menace to other producers had become almost farcical. The company's earnings for the first nine months of 1931 showed a deficit for the last two quarters, a net profit of $622. Recent RKO pictures—for example, The Woman Between (TIME, Nov. 2)—have shown a dearth of producing, writing, directorial and acting talent.

The move which RKO made last week to extricate itself from a humiliating and costly situation, while it may again make RKO an important factor in Hollywood, must have greatly tickled the producers who were most worried two years ago. For RKO's savior-elect, David Selznick, son of Lewis J. Selznick, the jeweler who stampeded the cinema from 1916 to 1919, is definitely a scion of the peculiar hier- archy which always has controlled the cinema industry and, it now begins to seem, always will. Son-in-law of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Louis B. Mayer, David Selznick is doubly a member of Hollywood's highest, smallest, most ridiculed caste. Nonetheless, when he gave up a $2,000-a-week job as assistant to Paramount's Production Manager B. P. Schulberg to venture with independent production (TIME, Aug. 3), it became clear that David Selznick had more radical ideas than the other members of Hollywood's nobility. Dissatisfied with Paramount's methods, he wanted to try making pictures in a way of his own. He set out with Director Lewis Milestone to get backing for an independent company which would not employ factory production methods or stars at exorbitant salaries. When he broached his scheme to them, Hiram Brown and David Sarnoff liked it so much that instead of giving him backing for a small unit of his own, they offered him a job which amounts to reorganizing, according to his own ideas for independent production, the most impressively backed organization in Hollywood. Two months after he arrived in Manhattan with a precarious scheme for earning his livelihood, young David Oliver Selznick returned to Hollywood last week with an importance in the industry more than comparable to that of his father (whose enmities he has thus far avoided), with a contract far more profitable than his connection with Paramount, which will make him one of the five Hollywood executives under 35 who earn more than $200,000 a year.*

As executive vice president of RKO-Radio, David Selznick's first task will be to