Business: Super, Super

Mild, moon-faced William Goetz, president and production stay of Hollywood’s young & healthy International Pictures Corp., was rich with property. Time was when Goetz had had to rent lot space, pick up stars, writers and directors on the run, and share his profits with the industry’s entrenched distributors. Now fast-failing Universal Pictures, the sixth largest company in town, had dropped 230 acres of lot space and 31 key domestic distribution offices into International’s lap. Included in Universal’s assets was the first crack at the more than 1,000 theaters owned by British Film Magnate J. Arthur Rank. Mr. Goetz could hardly contain himself.

International’s good fortune began when the Government ordered the industry to give up the monopolistic practice of block booking (TIME, June 24). Shorn of the chance to peddle its potboiling B pictures, Universal was left with only two A-makers, Deanna Durbin and Abbott & Costello, to service its outlets.

The only answer was to merge with an up & coming producer of A pictures. Results: 1) a new corporation, Universal-International, formed last week with Goetz as president and Hollywood lawyer Leo Spitz as board chairman (U-I will be to Universal what M-G-M is to Loew’s); 2) the degeneration of once formidable Universal into a distributing company; 3) a hike of six points in Universal stock.

Under the new setup, U-I will become the first major company formed to produce A pictures exclusively. Many Universal production heads will roll. Such Universal executives as J. Cheever Cowdin and Nate Blumberg will retain their rank in what remains of their old company. Their job will be to distribute each year 25 U-I pictures, twelve hard-to-sell Rank pictures, and five of Charlie Einfeld’s Enterprise Pictures Inc., U-I’s foundling affiliate.

They will have to work at least as hard as their new boss. But with a $60 million budget and all that property to play with, Bill Goetz will be hard for even his father-in-law, MGM’s mighty Louis B. Mayer, to match.