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The cinema industry is full of exhibitionists. Consequently, before any picture starts, audiences are compelled to sit through several minutes of a tedious visual roll call which includes practically everyone connected with the enterprise, from the carpenter who made the sets to the musician who rewrote Wagner's overture to Tannhauser, and omits only the banker who put up the money. Because cinemaddicts pay little attention to this list except to deplore it, they entertain vague notions, that moving pictures are either: 1) made haphazard by a collection of overpaid addleheads who speak only a few words of English; or 2) the result of a mass inspiration upon the most miraculously gifted group of creative artists ever simultaneously assembled on the globe. Twenty-five years ago, movies were indeed manufactured helter-skelter by almost anyone who had $5,000 and an urge to see his name or image magnified. Influx of money and brains long since turned Hollywood's film studios into sharply defined units organized along the lines of most other agencies of mass production, except that the nature of their product makes the system more complex.
The Hierarchy of the cinema industry is confusingly simple. At the top are financiers who run the industry from Manhattan or San Francisco. Hollywood is tenanted by hirelings. Top hirelings of the movie industry are a handful of producers, generally one at each studio, who are ultimately responsible for the success or failure of its total output. Under the producers and associates in the scale of authority are directors. Under the directors is everyone else on the lot, from grips to Greta Garbo.
Most generally confused classes in this hierarchy are producers and directors. Actually, producers and directors are not only quite distinct, but they are natural enemies. Producers may be defined as glorified executives who wear immaculate street clothes, sit in luxurious offices, hold conferences around shiny tables and concern themselves primarily with Ideas. Producers' ideas are mostly about money. Top producers in Hollywood currently are Twentieth Century-Fox's small, dynamic Darryl Zanuck, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's aging, pompous Louis B. Mayer, Warner Brothers' Harry Wrarner and Hal Wallis, Jock Whitney's placid David Oliver Selznick, United Artists' socially conscious Walter Wanger and legendary Sam Goldwyn. Producers may be onetime writers, theatre owners, book peddlers or glove salesmen. Their pay runs from $1,000 weekly up.