Industry & Art

What's wrong with the movies? Last week two Hollywood experts gave contradictory opinions:

The Hollywood Reporter's W. R. Wilkerson, who often picks up views lying around in the industry's top (or second) drawer, announced: "During the past five or six years our production efforts have been just too damned arty. We've been shooting over the heads of our ticket buyers and . . . audiences have not been happy . . . because, seemingly, our producers forgot all about their tastes . . .

"What's happened to Hollywood? . . . What inspired the effort to go intelligentsia instead of making the type pictures that made this great business what it is, or was? . . . This Academy Award thing . . . has done a lot to twist the type of our shows from entertainments to artistic successes . . .

"Audiences are yearning for some good, bellylaugh comedies and pleading for those great love stories of yesterday and the homespun yarns that sent them home happy . . . Let's get back to movie production!"

Producer Sam Goldwyn had his say in the Screenwriter: "What bothers me deeply is why the practitioners of the art have failed, on the whole, to become truly creative artists but rather have been content, in the main, to remain little more than glassblowers, huffing and puffing and blowing up slender ideas--their own or others' --into some sort of shape for the screen. What has happened to fresh; honest, vital, original writing for the screen? . . .

"Hollywood writers have sacrificed their potential as truly creative artists for the gold in them thar hills. . . ."

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