Cinema: The Plug Lobby

Simply by wearing a cap in his pictures, the silent screen’s Wallace Reid started men rushing to buy caps of their own. Clark Gable almost wrecked the sale of men’s undershirts by appearing without one in 1934’s It Happened One Night. Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne toasted each other with pink champagne in 1939’s Love Affair, and the day after the Manhattan opening, romantic moviegoers snapped up Macy’s whole stock of the stuff.

Last week, as they have for years, high-powered Hollywood lobbyists were subtly slipping their wares into the screen’s magic showcase. With tireless insistency they pushed plugs for automobiles, refrigerators, railroads, soft drinks, rifles, liquor, diamonds, Venetian blinds, cigars.

Tea for the Millions. Smooth, fast-talking Lobbyist Bill Treadwell, who works for Britain’s Tea Bureau, claims he has boosted U.S. tea consumption 17 million lbs. a year, largely by getting tea scenes into 83 movies in two years. His greatest coup: persuading Warner to change the name of its musical, No! No! Nanette! to Tea for Two. (In return, Treadwell used some of the Tea Bureau’s $2,000,000-a-year promotion fund to squire a couple of starlets on a 14-city tour as “Miss Iced Tea for Two” and “Miss Hot Tea for Two.”)

Newest member of the plug lobby is the U.N.’s Mogens Skot-Hansen, a hustling Danish moviemaker, who persuaded a producer to make Dorothy McGuire a U.N. translator in Mister 880 (“She is a nice good girl and gives us a good name”). Thanks to his efforts, Bing Crosby, playing a journalist in the forthcoming Here Comes the Groom, will be shown at work on a story about U.N. relief work; Joseph Cotten, cast as a doctor in Peking Express, will be working for the U.N.’s World Health Organization; in The Day the Earth Stood Still, a visitor from another planet (a sort of interplanetary Skot-Hansen) will instruct the earth in how to join a U.N. of the universe.

The U.N. at Home. Skot-Hansen’s proudest feat is a projected M-G-M production of The Big Glass House, a story of the U.N.’s new Manhattan headquarters in the Grand Hotel manner. He has no advertising budget with which to plug movies that plug the U.N., but he can lend studios Korean war film, give producers publicity in U.N. publications and good story material (“I have 30 story treatments dealing with the U.N. which would make fresh, wonderful pictures”).

Despite an ailing box office, cinemoguls may feel a compensating sense of power in the thought that Hollywood can succeed, via Dorothy McGuire and Joseph Cotten, in making the U.N. more palatable to the U.S., or putting more teabags into the world’s cups. They would feel even better if some way could be found to make the movies plug the movies.