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"Yeah? This is Holden. Yeah, Marty. Hold it a sec." The muscular man with the hard eyes palms the phone. "I'll take those letters now, Miss Moller." The voice is hard, too, even sexy in a nasal way. Holden flips a Parliament into the corner of his mouth. "Marty? Shoot." Miss Moller brings the letters. Holden stands up suddenly and paces the floor, still listening. His brogues gleam richly on the broadloom, his tie is tensed into a merciless Yale knot. "Yeah, boy. Versteh. Versteh." He sits down, props the phone with his left shoulder, reads the letters with fierce concentration, signs them. Miss Moller leaves the room. "You do that, Marty. Yeah. Get back to me Monday. No, I'm tied up. Make it noon. No—" He squints at the ceiling. "Say 12:30. Oh, Lucey's. See ya, boy." He hangs up, bounds from his chair, grabs a sharp Tyrolean felt. "I'll be over in dubbing," he flings over his shoulder as he hurries out.
The man in a hurry is William Holden, and he has no doubt where he is going. He is going to make a million dollars. He is going to make his first independent picture, a movie called Toward the Unknown, about a jet flyer, and the reason he is racing his engine is that half the population of Hollywood is hell-bent in the same exciting direction. The movie colony is now off, like a merrily misguided missile, on another of its whilom whooshes toward the unknown. Spang in the middle of a firm prosperity, the production pattern of three decades is dissolving. The mighty major studios, which have dominated U.S. moviemaking since L. B. Mayer founded the M-G-Mpire, have been brought to humbling terms by a spectacular revolt of the stars. Hollywood, which thought it had seen everything, is seeing something new beneath the California sun: the cinemogul with a profile.
Loosed from their contractual shackles during the great television scare, and thirsty for the taste of tax relief, a host of famous actors have saddled up their "horseback corporations" and gone storming after creative control of U.S. 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.
The new lords of the celluloid jungle are a rugged breed. They have to be. When the actor is a businessman, what he says in conference can matter more than how he says his lines. He must learn how to pick a story as well as play it, fire an actress on the set as well as set her on fire.
And while he is at it, he should learn to direct the director. His days are spent in a nerve-shattering series of quick dissolves from the lawyer to the tax man to the agent to the press, and no matter what he looks like on the screen, his very best scenes had better be played at the bank. "The matinee idol of the Eisenhower era," cracked a Hollywood reporter, "is a man in a grey flannel suit."