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Harold Brett Wallis, 39, went to Chicago's McKinley High School, got his first job sweeping out the office of an electric company, soon became sales manager for Hughes Electric Heating Co. From sales, he branched into advertising, later into show business. In Los Angeles he was managing the old Garrick Theatre when he met the late Sam Warner, went to work in the latter's publicity department. Increasingly, the Warner Brothers came to rely on Hal Wallis for production as well as exploitation decisions, put him in charge of First National when they bought that studio in 1928. Wallis made Dawn Patrol, Five Star Final, Little Caesar. In 1931 Warners brought their two plants together. Centre of production was the Burbank lot. Darryl Zanuck was put in charge. Wallis arrived one morning to find a workman taking his name off the door to replace it with that of Zanuck. Wallis sat on the stairs and laughed. What made it funny was that he had just finished a picture where a man came to his office to find his name being taken off the door. As an Associate Producer under Zanuck, Wallis supervised One-Way Passage, Gold Diggers of 1933, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. Two and one-half years later Zanuck left to form Twentieth Century Productions. Wallis' name went back on the most important Warner Bros, door, has remained there ever since.
The office behind the door is modest, unostentatious, paneled in dark oak. Wallis spends 12 to 14 hours a day in it. Outside is a lounge resembling a small cocktail bar where daily waits a long succession of writers, supervisors, agents and technicians for decisive two-or three-minute interviews. Wallis checks every budget, red-penciling items he thinks too high. Models of every important set are carried in to be demonstrated to him. The mild, incessant hum of well-routined activity is occasionally broken by stormy story conferences. Producer Wallis may reject other men's ideas but he rarely enforces his own. His success as an executive rests on a shrewd instinct in selecting men. Under him, Warner Bros, have acquired a reputation for daring experiments, a reputation largely due to Wallis' eclectic tastes. In recent months, he has pioneered with fantasy (Green Pastures), costume romance (Anthony Adverse), poetic drama (A Midsummer Night's Dream). Less publicized than any other Hollywood executive. Producer Wallis lives on a ranch in the San Fernando Valley, drives a Cadillac to work, plays a little golf on Sunday. He has been known to turn down his wife, Comedian Louise Fazenda. for pictures he did not think she suited. Spasmodic outbreaks of puckish humor shatter his calm executive mask. He has disrupted story conferences with imitations of Rudy Vallee and Joe E. Brown, can hold his own at banquets with professional gagsters. Tall, affable, dimpled, his personal charm is notable in a business whose executives are conspicuously lacking in that quality.