Cinema: Help Wanted

Flipping through the blurbs and blarney of Its trade press one day last week, Hollywood stopped to goggle at a full-page ad. Blazoned as an open letter “to the top executives of the motion picture industry,” the ad said:

“As most of you know, I have devoted a third of a century to our industry . . . Yet at this time, when the industry demands and requires a fixed habit of production economy, seems I can’t get a job . . . Must we always wait until a productive pioneer is found dead in some ‘obscure Hollywood hotel room’ before you reflect upon an ‘indifferent and forgetful’ industry?”

The letter was signed by B. P. Schulberg who, at 57, had reaped the rewards of a full Hollywood producing career: money, enemies and some impressive credentials. He was the man who discovered Clara Bow, dubbed Mary Pickford “America’s Sweetheart,” helped to form United Artists, produced Wings, which won the first Academy Award. As Paramount’s production boss from 1925 to 1932, he had drawn $9,500 a week.

During the last 15 years, while he “gambled my money away” on dice and the stock market, Schulberg has watched his jobs shrink in importance. Finally, he began haunting cinemoguls’ anterooms looking for a job. Says he: “I got the cold shoulder.” His open letter offered some explanation: “Some of my friends who are not top executives tell me that doors are closed because I have in my time talked back to some of the big boys.”

The doors stayed closed. Many an old-timer resented Schulberg’s public airing of a private grievance; some speculated skeptically on how quickly he would have shut the door on such an appeal when he was on the inside. But at week’s end, Showman Schulberg reported a nibble. Some eastern bankers, he said, had approached him with an idea of forming a whole new company. But “I can’t give out any more details until it jells.”