The Boy with Fair Hair

In RKO’s crowded Hollywood studio last week, the cameras started shooting a picture called The Boy with the Green Hair. When a spectator asked about the plot, an RKO pressagent replied: “It’s terrific. This boy wakes up, see, and he’s got green hair. Then everyone who sees him knows there ought to be more, tolerance.” But how could a movie possibly be made on that faintly mad kind of a plot? “Well,” said the underling, “maybe nobody else could make one out of it. But Dore Schary will pull it off.”

In the six months since he became boss of RKO production, Dore Schary (rhymes, in Hollywood, with hoary sherry) had run off many a movie from such a slim start and with a slimmer budget. (The Boy will cost $500,000.) From the process Schary had emerged as the fair-haired hopeful of the film industry. Threatened with the loss of its lucrative British market (TIME, Sept. 22), Hollywood was feverishly seeking ways to make A pictures on B budgets, and to Schary that was an old experience.

A writer of B pictures for years, 42-year-old Dore Schary never got into the habit of throwing money around. At RKO, he has cut down the costly time of shooting a full-length picture to as little as 19 days (the industry average is 45 to 70 days); he has been known to leave as little as 200 feet on the cutting-room floor in editing a film. This has been done by cutting scripts to the last adjective, working out every twist of plot before shooting starts. (Many a director still makes up the plot as he goes along.) Schary also cuts corners on scenery by writing in night scenes, because “you can’t see as far at night and you don’t have to build as much.” And he does not like snow. “Snow runs into big money,” says he. “You won’t find snow in my pictures unless there’s a good reason for it.” Schary believes that any good plot can be told in a telegram, likes unusual ones. Says he: “I am not interested in the blue serge of the picture business [tried, true, and worn thin]. The material is the star.”

Tricky Mix. Schary’s tactics have paid off. Until he went to RKO, the chain’s uneven movie production was just an appendix to its operation of some 125 theatres. RKS’s setup was to make a few pictures, hire others from independent producers. It was on such a lease arrangement that RKO took over Schary in 1946 from David O. Selznick. The first four pictures he made for RKO (Spiral Staircase, Till the End of Time, The Farmer’s Daughter and The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer) helped lift RKO’s 1946 net income to $12 million, more than double the previous year.

Schary likes to mix imagination with his economy, deftly stirs in social questions. Crossfire, a blunt and effective arraignment of antiSemitism, was made for $600,000, is expected to gross $2,500,000.

Rich Cake. Before he turned up in Hollywood in 1932, Schary, son of a Newark German-Jewish caterer, was a jack-of-trades. He had quit high school at 14 to work as a printer’s devil (he later graduated), was a feature writer for the Newark Call, did publicity, tried to write plays, and became a bit-part actor. He did not think his given name, Isidore, had any marquee glamor, so he lopped it in two. This operation caused him some embarrassment. Producer Walter Wanger read one of Schary’s unproduced plays, assumed that the writer was a girl, and decided to hire her because “she seems to have a lot of vitality.” Wanger was chagrined to discover “she” was a he, but he hired Schary anyway as a $100-a-week B-picture writer. In the next six years Schary ground out 35 scripts in a dozen studios. Then he wrote Boys’ Town and became MGM’s chief of B-picture production in 1940.

Not all his ideas are good. Schary quit Metro in an argument over his own weird idea of making a horse opera in which Roosevelt, Mussolini, Hitler and Chamberlain would be portrayed as feuding ranchers.

For all his fast rise, Schary still has to prove to Hollywood that the touch he has displayed on single pictures can be spread over RKO’s entire production schedule. But so far, in the first six months of 1947, Schary had enabled RKO to hold its own with a net of about $6,000,000. With the box office now slumping, Schary has his fingers crossed for the future.