Billion & a Half

Developments in the cinema industry last week:

Famous Players-Lasky. President Adolph Zukor last week announced that the company's 1926 net profits were $5,600,815. The Paramount Theatre, Manhattan, has been taking in an average of $75,000 weekly; is earning money at the rate of $1,000,000 a year. Less gorgeous are more than 550 other "Publix" theatres owned and controlled by the corporation, and earning profits. This year Beau Geste, Old Ironsides, Wedding March, Wings, Rough Riders and The Greatest Show on Earth, all Famous Players-Lasky productions, will tour the country as though they were plays on the legitimate stage, expecting to succeed as did The Covered Wagon, which as a "road show" earned $1,000,000 net. Because the Paramount trademark is so widely known, the corporation name may be modified to: Paramount Famous Lasky Corp.

Loew's Inc. earned $6,388,200 in the 1926 fiscal year that ended last August. It controls about 150 first class cinema houses; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer produces pictures for this company. Nicholas M. Schenck and Louis B. Mayer run the business because Marcus Loew, official head, has not been well.

Universal Pictures Corp... Carl Laemmle, president, said last week that he will spend in the following months $15,500,000 on filming 11 Broadway plays, 11 popular novels, 22 "thrill dramas," International News pictures, scores of short subjects.

First National. Stanley Co., which controls several hundred theatres, has just bought control of First National for $100,000,000.

In London. British Incorporated Pictures Ltd. (capital: $4,850,000) claimed last week to have five-year options on film rights of John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, Eden Phillpotts, Sir Hall Caine, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and other famed British authors.

Kodak-Pathe. Cabled Charles Pathe, president, Pathe-Cinema (red rooster trademark), to George Eastman (kodaks) at Rochester, N. Y.: "It is with great pride and great joy that I have just signed the agreement which associates my name with yours." He referred to last week's purchase of Pathe-Cinema control by Kodak Ltd., Mr. Eastman's English firm. The new company Kodak-Pathe, will be sole distributor of Kodak and Pathe in Western Europe. There are separate Eastman kodak companies in England, Canada, Hungary and Australia.

George Eastman whose perfection, in 1884, of the first practical roll film made the $1,500,000,000 motion picture industry possible, still lives at Rochester, N. Y., busy industrial city at the falls of the Genesee River. At 72, he has given away more than $58,000,000 --to the University of Rochester including its medical school and its Eastman School of Music; to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes. He has also financed scientific expeditions (Time, March 22, 1926), research in electrolytic deposition of colloidal rubber (TIME, Nov. 8). At present his research staff is working with U. S. surgeons on the tinted, chromatic motion photography of difficult surgical operations.

"Fatty" (Roscoe Conkling) Arbuckle, onetime cinema comedian, signed two contracts last week-- to appear in vaudeville on the Pantages Circuit;* and to act in a series of films made in Germany. He expects to earn $2,500,000 in five years. Since the orgiastic, accidental death of one Virginia Rappe in 1921 no U. S. producer has dared risk the national opprobrium against "Fatty" Arbuckle. Last week he looked both doleful and healthy.

*Vaudeville theatres are organized into "circuits" or "time"--Keith, Orpheum, Pantages, etc. Pantages' "Time" controls vaudeville bookings for theatres in the West.