The New Hollywood

Fur-covered toilet seats ($200 for ermine), imported opium bowls of hammered brass ($250), hairbrushes that cost more than $200, and a child's battery-operated Mercedes-Benz for only $400 were all on sale last week along swank Rodeo Drive in California's Beverly Hills. But the most symbolic luxury item that is putting the bloom on the Hollywood boom is the mink-covered TV set ($950). TV has become the star of a new Hollywood, and the movies merely a supporting player. Items: P:A single Hollywood TV show, NBC's daily Matinee Theater, hires 2,400 actors a year for speaking parts--50% more than the players used by Warner and Paramount combined in all their 1956 movies. The show uses as many scripts--250 a year--as all the studios put together. P:A single TV film producer, Desi Arnaz' and Lucille Ball's Desilu, which turns out I Love Lucy and 14 other shows, spends $21 million a year, employs up to 1,000 at peak periods, and produces more film footage than the combined output of the five major movie studios. P:The two biggest talent agencies in U.S. show business, William Morris and the Music Corp. of America, now get $9 in fees from TV deals to every $1 they earn from the movies.

P:In the ranks of the movies' own guilds, fully half of the actors (plus Mickey Mouse, Rin-Tin-Tin and Lassie), cameramen and cutters earn their living in TV.

TV's swarming demand for studio space has revived and even expanded old movie lots that had been virtually silent almost since the silent movie days. In the Kling Studios where Charlie Chaplin made The Gold Rush, and on lots that twinkled with the names of Theda Bara, Mary Pickford, Harold Lloyd and Janet Gaynor, TV now grinds out commercials and films--Burns & Allen, Ozzie & Harriet,

The Life of Riley, etc. In the once wide-open Hollywood acres used for the location shooting of Rudolph Valentino in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse now stands CBS's Television City, so vast a factory for live TV production that the director of the Red Skelton Show shuttles between his set and the control room by bicycle. NBC's sprawling new $13 million color studios in Burbank, hard by the Warner lot, are even bigger.

The big movie studios hoped at first that TV would somehow blow over. Instead, it practically blew RKO right out of moviemaking, threatened to knock over 20th Century-Fox, which rescued itself largely by selling its old pictures to TV.

The impact of the little home screen that Hollywood once scorned made the studios jettison more than half their production schedules, as well as stars, writers, directors--even relatives. It also softened them up for the production deals that give top creative talent between 50% and 75% of a movie's profits. The ill wind has so far blown a windfall of $150 million to the studios for letting their pre-1948 movies go on the air. Except for Paramount, every major studio is also making TV films in earnest. Movie bigwigs curled their lips when such onetime movie performers as Betty Furness, William Lundigan, Lee Bowman and Ronald Reagan emerged as full-time TV commercial pluggers, but now virtually all the studios are in the business of filming commercials themselves. To help make ends meet, once-mighty M-G-M even rents out its sets and props to TV producers.

No More Skunk Fur. Hollywood's old tribal customs and pecking orders are changing, too. The Brown Derby now buzzes with talk of TV, and Gus, its maitre d'hotel, gives his best tables to the TV stars. Tourists who once paid to ogle the movie stars' homes now want to see the live TV shows and ogle the homes of Jack Webb, Lawrence Welk and Liberace.

Such film gossipists as Hedda Hopper find themselves devoting increasing space to TV personalities. When the famed old Cocoanut Grove reopened a fortnight ago, the society columns listed as guests George Gobel, Hugh (Wyatt Earp) O'Brian, Art Linkletter, even Milton Berle. Hollywood's own Bastille Day, the annual Oscar awards, is geared completely as a sponsored TV show; except for those in the running for an Oscar, few movie people bother to attend.

The cinemoguls once frothed when Lana Turner let slip to an interviewer that she had five TV sets, and Beverly Hills Furrier Al Teitlebaum had a customer who, aspiring to dramatize his contempt, ordered a TV set covered in skunk fur. Now TV sets glitter within Romanoff's and during lunchtime in the executive dining rooms of major studios, where the executives claim they use TV for casting ideas. Jack Benny has seven sets. TV exerts such a spell on movie stars--especially when it happens to be showing their old films--that it has rendered the movie colony housebound. Says Columnist Sidney Skolsky: "The nightclub business is dead, and there is just no place left in town, day or night, where you can count on finding a gathering of well-known movie people." As for fur-bearing TV sets, Teitlebaum has since filled orders to cover them in mink ("Of course, I left the screen showing").

The Old Guard. The rise of the TV era in Hollywood has placed the movie people, themselves long cast as parvenus, in the odd role of the social old guard. Social Arbiter Mike Romanoff, the town's leading restaurateur, sniffs at the "dirty shirt" school that he finds prevalent among TV performers as well as newcomers to films. Says he: "The TV actors can afford to eat here, but they haven't progressed beyond the drugstore counter. They think differently, behave differently, live differently. The dirty shirt is a form of snobbery, you know. We're snobs, but not that kind. We are snobs for good manners. I'm a snob without prejudice."

Television parties outnumber movie parties four to one, but oldtimers find them lacking in the oldtime glamour. Says one veteran: "Too many men in empty grey flannel suits and expressions." Says Gossipist Jimmy Starr: "At parties the TV people are on one side of the room, and the movie people are on the other side. TV and movies haven't jumped the social gap yet."

What the TV crowd lacks in glamour--an item for which the movies themselves have desperately fallen back on such a grotesque as Jayne Mansfield--it makes up in the kind of youth and vitality that once drove the movie studios. Where the oldtime film director sported puttees and riding crop, the TV director wears blue jeans and sneakers--and gets often impressive results under tight schedules and other pressures that frankly frighten veteran moviemakers. The best new creative talent that the movies can find comes from TV: such directors as Delbert (Marty) Mann, 37, John (The Young Strangers') Frankenheimer, 28, Robert (Fear Strikes Out) Mulligan, 30, such writers as Rod (Patterns) Serling, 32, Reginald (Twelve Angry Men) Rose, 36, and Paddy (The Bachelor Party) Chayefsky, 34.

By contrast, the old Hollywood of the movie studios seems staled by age, caution and fear. Its moguls had a chance to move into TV in its infancy; now TV has grown too big for them to dominate. Some of the studios, struggling under heavy overhead costs, have thought of combining their activities, or selling off some of their plant. But ironically, the thing that keeps up their hopes for the future is also TV--the chance that the Government will approve pay-as-you-see TV. Says the Hollywood Reporter hopefully: "When this [happens], no studio will have half enough space for the number of pictures that will be produced to cash in on home exhibition."

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