Whitney Colors

(See front cover)

Of all the strange organizations functioning in the amusement industry, Pioneer Pictures, Inc. is one of the strangest. Organized two years ago, it is run by John Hay ("Jock") Whitney, 30, and his Cousin Cornelius Vanderbilt ("Sonny") Whitney, 35, whom Jock interested in cinema as Sonny had interested him in aviation. Board members are almost exclusively Whitneys. Last week the Whitneys had made ready for the U. S. public, at a cost of $1,000,000, the first full-length color picture since 1931--8,000 ft. and 1 1/2 hours of 19th Century romance which may or may not revolutionize the cinema industry.

Having completed last year an experimental two-reeler, La Cucaracha (which grossed $350,000), the Whitneys held a story conference to choose a feature subject. The vogue for clean pictures, the necessity for glamorous costumes and the current popularity of Victorian classics made a dramatic version of William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair appear to be ideal. For a director the Whitneys chose Lowell Sherman. For a star they chose Miriam Hopkins. Becky Sharp went into production almost a year ago. By last week, it had survived a series of unprecedented mishaps.

First calamity was the death of Director Lowell Sherman from pneumonia, when he had shot about one-third of the picture. Second was an attack of pneumonia for Miriam Hopkins, in the middle of a ballroom scene erected on a rented Pathe lot. Director Rouben Mamoulian, hired to replace Sherman, scrapped all the scenes made by his predecessor. A sequence carefully pieced together from 6,000 ft. of negative was burned in a projection machine and had to be recut, which took a week. During these tribulations, Jock Whitney flew to the coast nine times. Final difficulties with Becky Sharp were concerned, not as anticipated with color, but with sound--re-recording the sound track by a new RCA process. Last week, its release date was postponed to June 6.

The Whitney fortune expresses itself in directions which are urbane, sporting, adventurous, without being reckless, and which betray efficient and complex sophistication. The interest which most Whitneys have in common is horse-racing. Theirs is the most important name on the U. S. turf but their stables are at once so well-managed and so large that a sport which is economically ruinous for people who attempt it less elaborately costs them almost nothing. Without being either dilettantes or intellectuals, Whitneys are rarely averse to making money or spending it on enterprises connected with the arts. Without being extravagant or foolhardy, they like to gamble with experiments.

That some of the Whitney fortune would find its way into cinema has been inevitable ever since Jock Whitney started backing unsuccessful Broadway shows, like his friend Peter Arno's Here Goes the

Bride in 1931. Jock Whitney's literary cronies are Donald Ogden Stewart and Robert Benchley, who spend most of their time in Hollywood. In Hollywood, Jock Whitney met RKO's production chief, Merian Caldwell Cooper, who talked enthusiastically about Technicolor as the next great revolution in the cinema industry. Color was the incentive Jock Whitney needed. He and his cousin bought 15%--about $1,000,000 worth--of Technicolor Inc., organized Pioneer to make color films for RKO release.

Technicolor, Inc. is almost as strange a concern as Pioneer, and its long career, which is to all intents and purposes the history of color in the cinema, has been even more precarious. In 1914, a young graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology named Dr. Herbert Thomas Kalmus and some of his fellow alumni set out to perfect a color camera for moving pictures. It took them eight years. In 1922, they used their process--named in honor of their college--for their first commercial picture, Toll of the Sea. For the next six years, Technicolor, Inc. prospered mildly because producers found color useful for shorts and special sequences in superproductions. Meanwhile Mrs. Natalie Kalmus, who had posed for the company's early tests, became its color director, which meant that she helped show inexperienced producers, who rented Technicolor cameras and cameramen, how they should be used; and her husband bickered with his associates, principally Dr. Daniel Frost Comstock, in whose name most of Technicolor's basic patents were taken out, until he had control of the company. Dr. Kalmus still runs Technicolor, Inc. and his titian-haired wife, still busily connected with the company, spends her spare time explaining in fan magazines that color will decrease dieting among cinemactresses by making them look slimmer than ordinary black & white photography. Soon after sound revolutionized the industry in 1927, overenthusiastic producers took up color also. A rash of color talkies that began with On With the Show and Gold Diggers of Broadway made Technicolor, Inc., which sold film and rented cameras to producers, more prosperous than before but overtaxed its technical resources. Incompetently produced color pictures helped make cinemaddicts sick of them, convinced cinemagnates that color was impractical and extravagant. By this time Technicolor, Inc. had enough money to experiment with its specialty more thoroughly than before.

The results of their experiment were discussed last week by the man whom Pioneer chose as the first to carry the title of ''color director," which may soon become a familiar and important one in the Hollywood hierarchy. He was Robert Edmond Jones, famed Manhattan scenic designer, who arranged sets and worked out color schemes for both La Cucaracha and Becky Sharp. In 1930, Technicolor cameras had used two negatives, one to record reds and yellows, the other to record blues and greens. The chief faults in this process were that it blurred all outlines, failed to register either pure blue or pure yellow and had a range limited to garish greens and oranges. By 1932, Dr. Kalmus had a new process based on a camera which split light through a three-sided prism onto three negatives (red, blue and yellow), which recorded all the colors of the rainbow with fidelity. By this time the only producer who would listen to him was Walt Disney, whose Silly Symphonies in 1932 were the first movies made with the new three-color process and the ones which inspired Producer Cooper to interest the Whitneys in color. Said Color Director Jones: ". . . Black & white films had never interested me. Nor had the old two-color process, with its limited color range. . . . The technique of color is mechanically perfect now. Just as soon as the public gets a taste for color, it will no more consider going to a 'black & white' movie than it would now think of paying money to see an oldtime silent film. . . . Color on the screen is not only more natural than black & white, it is more stimulating, more exciting, more dramatic. Color, properly selected and composed, can immeasurably enhance the dramatic value of a screen story.''

Enthusiasts like Robert Edmond Jones expect that Becky Sharp will revolutionize the industry as thoroughly as the first talkie, The Jazz Singer (which grossed $3,500,000), did in 1927. Less sanguine observers have suggested cause for doubt. The human ear, which accepted sound in cinema so readily, has been scientifically found to be much less sensitive and hence much less critical than the eye. A wax effigy, much more lifelike than a statue, can still be less impressive, since its effort to achieve reality calls attention to its failure. Hollywood producers, though most of them expect color to arrive eventually, were still timidly dubious last week. That it costs about 30% more than black & white production (for stronger lighting, expert cameramen, special cameras and added film and processing cost) was only a minor reason for their feeling.

Stars. Major cause of Hollywood's fear of color is the fact that if it supersedes black & white film, it will destroy the value of a star whose pigmentation is unsuitable, as sound destroyed the value of squeaky or hopelessly uncultivated ones in 1927. Color experts think that blondes with clearly chiseled features have the best chance. The star of Becky Sharp was chosen because, if the picture does produce a Hollywood upheaval, she is the actress surest to survive it.

Born in Savannah in 1902, Ellen Miriam Hopkins was carefully reared by her grandmother in Bainbridge, Ga. She sang in a boys' choir, won prizes for recitation at the Goddard Seminary in Vermont, studied dancing in New York, persuaded her uncle, a pressagent named Dixie Hines, to get her into the Music Box Revue in 1921. An injured ankle stopped her dancing. In 1925, she made her dramatic debut in Puppets. Another obscure actor in the cast was Fredric March, who played the lead opposite Miriam Hopkins in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde seven years later when both had become famed cinema performers. Currently under contract to Samuel Goldwyn, with a three-months vacation clause, Cinemactress Hopkins flies to spend her spare time in New York, where she acts in a play when she finds one that suits her. Because she likes to live near the water, she last year bought a Sutton Place Manhattan House overlooking the East River, keeps it ready for occupancy at all times. She has a wire-haired fox terrier, an original Matisse, an adopted son named Michael, two divorced husbands. Her friends are socialites as well as cinema celebrities. One of them is Mrs. Joan Whitney Payson.

Becky Sharp, the fourth cinema version of Thackeray's masterpiece, which includes also such Hollywood celebrities as Alan Mowbray, Alison Skipworth, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Frances Dee, Elsie Ferguson, Billie Burke, William Faversham, gives Miriam Hopkins opportunities to appear as a mercenary graduate of a Victorian London school, an unscrupulously flirtatious bride, and finally a declassee chanteuse in a Bath beer parlor. Backgrounds with the strong coloration and three-dimensional depth of fine paintings, costumes of pink and saffron, emphasize those qualities which have hitherto made her acting so much more satisfactory on the stage than on the screen.

The critics who saw the first preview were divided. As to its star, they were unanimous. If Becky Sharp is the success the Whitneys hope, Miriam Hopkins will be considerably responsible. Consequently, in addition to profiting from whatever chaos it may cause in Hollywood, she will, like Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer, have been to some extent its cause.

Sequels. For its distributors to bring Pioneer a profit on Becky Sharp, RKO will have to induce the U. S. public to spend more than $2,000,000 on the picture. At Belmont Park, where he was busy watching the races last week, Producer Jock Whitney was not particularly excited about whether RKO did so. Even if Becky Sharp fails to make production costs, the Whitneys still have their shrewd 15% of Technicolor, Inc., which Becky Sharp is sure to boom. To make sure the boom continues, the strange Whitney cinema company has eight more films in Technicolor scheduled for release, of which the next will probably contain songs and dances.

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