MOVIES: Exit King Log

Big & little frogs of Hollywood have long been dissatisfied with the rule of their King Log, Will H. Hays. He was called “The Speechless Spokesman” be cause, as the industry’s Washington representative, he often seemed to be in effectual. His Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc. (The Hays Office) also disliked him because he administered the motion picture code with prim inflexibility. So last week Czar Hays finally abdicated.

In return he got a five-year contract as “adviser,” at $100,000 a year. Cracked a producer: “It looked like it might be difficult, but all we had to do was give him half a million in severance pay.”

The search for a successor had been started back in 1941. At that time a Senatorial investigation had put Hollywood on the worst spot in its history, yet Hays came up with no aggressive ideas to beat off the attack. The industry, realizing that the chips were down, hired the late, great Wendell Lewis Willkie as defense counsel. Willkie was eminently successful. Hays, realizing that he was on the skids, tried to save the job he had held since the office was founded in 1922. But last June his authority fell completely when Warner Bros. Pictures Inc. became the first major studio to pull out of the Hays Office.

When he abdicated, Hays’ successor to the reported $200,000-a-year job had long since been chosen. He was the darling of U.S. free enterprise: handsome, grinny Eric Allen Johnston, 48. He will go to work immediately, but will keep his job as President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce until May 1, 1946.

Hollywood neither wanted nor expected him to be King Heron; it was just that all the frogs in the swamp were good & tired of King Log.