Three months ago, as chairman of the Motion Picture Research Council, President Emeritus Abbott Lawrence Lowell of Harvard signed a petition to President Roosevelt asking that the cinema code include restrictions on block booking. President Roosevelt signed the code without such restrictions and appointed Dr. Lowell. Eddie Cantor and Marie Dressier as Government representatives to the Code Authority. Last week Dr. Lowell refused the appointment. His reasons, explained in letters to General Johnson, showed a remarkably sound knowledge of the cinema industry.
Dr. Lowell's first letter complained that the code, instead of checking block booking, gave it "a certain legal sanction." When General Johnson reminded him that the code does permit exhibitors to cancel up to 10% of the blocks of films which they are forced to buy from major producers if they want any films at all, Dr. Lowell wrote back:
"The right of exhibitors to cancel 10% of the product ... is futile because it is perfectly easy for the producers to put in 10% of films which the exhibitors are certain to reject before reaching the objectionable ones. ... I am very much struck by your explanation of why the representatives of the Government on the Code Authority are not given a vote. You say 'What is the use of a vote against a certain majority?' This assumes that a member of the Code Authority whose only interest in the matter is clean films will find himself necessarily in opposition to the producers. I fear this is only too true. . . ."
The New Pictures
In Going Hollywood (Metro-GoldWyn-Mayer) Marion Davies stands proxy for all U. S. radio enthusiasts who grow sickly sentimental over crooners. In a girls' school she listens to the songs of one Bill Williams (Bing Crosby) which so stir her that she pursues him to Hollywood. There she finds that radio crooners are less romantic in real life than they seem on the air. Bill Williams is acting in a cinema, backed by a solemn Ernest-P. Baker (Stuart Erwin). directed by a sardonic Mr. Conroy (Ned Sparks). In the cast is Williams' temperamental mistress Lili Yvonne (Fifi D'Orsay), whom he describes in Going Hollywood's most sombre song as his Temptation.
In a story designed for audiences who share the admiration for Bing Crosby which Miss Davies affects in this picture, it would be unthinkable for Williams' temptation to get the best of him. Miss Davies supplants Lili Yvonne as the lead in the Williams picture. When Temptress Yvonne whisks Crooner Williams away to a Mexican border saloon. Miss Davies pursues and persuades him to return. He is reeling slightly but still able to deliver one more tune, called "Our Big Love Scene."
An informal, rambling musicomedy written by Donald Ogden Stewart, Going Hollywood is an effort to use radio as a decoy for cinema audiences, which succeeds much better than previous attempts built around less genuinely valuable performers than Bing Crosby.