Cinema: Premiere

Next to the annual Academy Awards presentation, Hollywood’s highest social rite is the full-blown premiére (pronounced pre-meer). Last week, close to the deadline for the annual Oscar sweepstakes, 20th Century-Fox shot the works on the premiere of its own contender, Darryl F. Zanuck’s war film, Twelve O’Clock High. The result was the very model of the full, colossal treatment.

For weeks, 23 studio employees had labored over a six-page blueprint of arrangements budgeted at $30.000. They sent out 2,000 seven-inch gilded tickets to Who’s Who in Hollywood, taking pains to give choice locations to the elite and to keep known enemies and recently divorced couples seated apart. From the cooperative Air Force they got an imposing turnout of brass, a 67-piece band and a flight of bombers. From the Los Angeles police they got 100 cops to keep a crowd of 6,000 openmouthed fans in check. From Fox’s own studio wardrobe, they supplied attending starlets with full finery, including ten gowns, eight fur coats and two mink stoles.

As the big event began, the usual klieg lights were dimmed by ten antiaircraft searchlights that threw 15-mile beams up over Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Snappily uniformed attendants parked the arriving Cadillacs (many rented for the evening at $25). From the red-carpeted curb, past an awed crowd of sandwich-munching fans in bleachers around the entrance, stepped scores of stars into the arms of 14 pressagents, who whisked them to a platform for an amplified introduction. The standard response: “I hear this is one of the greatest pictures . . .” Inside were 32 special usherettes and four extra theater managers from other Fox cinemansions.

Afterward came the studio’s biggest protocol headache: a party at Mike Romanoff’s restaurant, which can hold only 250—of the very best people, of course. When it was time for comments about the film, everyone seemed to have enjoyed it. There was no need to fall back on the standard gambit of those who are forced to comment on a bad new movie: “What a picture! What a performance!” Fox figured that, all in all, it was well worth the $30,000.