The Play's The Thing

Most good playwrights get a break, but screenwriters are under a big bushel. Most screenwriters with big names made them elsewhere, like Ben Hecht, Robert Sherwood, Dorothy Parker. Some, like Grover Jones and Frances Marion, have big names in Hollywood that mean little to outsiders. Others, like Wesley Ruggles' Claude Binyon or Frank Capra's Robert Riskin, won fame as co-members of celebrated director-writer teams. Still others, like Darryl Zanuck and Alfred Hitchcock, got their glory in bigger jobs. As compensation for their comparative obscurity, screen authors work more steadily than playwrights and generally make more money. Last week a highly successful screenwriter started a scheme designed to let him have his cake and eat it too.

Gene Towne, 35, is a baldheaded veteran of 15 years in Hollywood, where he got his start thinking up wisecracks for titles in silent pictures. Since he shifted to writing original screenplays, which his friends told him was a "starvation business," he has starved less than any writer in Hollywood. Seven years ago he teamed up with Graham Baker, a long-faced ex-producer who once fired him. The two rented a dingy $15-a-month office formerly tenanted by a masseur, bought a Rolls-Royce from a well-known producer down on his luck, painted TOWNE-BAKER SCRIPT DELIVERY CAR on its sides, hired an indigent dentist to drive it to the studios for which they cracked out an unrivaled list of successes. Towne & Baker like to work in hats and no shirts (see cut), Towne building up ideas and Baker tearing them down. Their mutual devotion is celebrated in a popular Hollywood story that when Baker was dying of pneumonia last year, Towne climbed into his oxygen tent and revived his partner by threatening to deprive him of screen credit on a forthcoming film.

Towne & Baker need no longer worry about screen credit or having their stories mussed up by somebody else. They are now bosses of their own producing company, The Play's The Thing Productions. Unlike a similar producing venture attempted by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur five years ago, T. P. T. P. will release four pictures through RKO* next year. The four, picked by Towne for their story value: The Swiss Family Robinson (published in 1813), James Fenimore Cooper's The Deer slayer (1841), Tom Brown's School Days (1857) and Alfred Batson's contemporary African Intrigue, dealing with the Agadir incident of 1911. Producer Towne will stress his stories rather than his stars, hopes for big names but will insist on actors to suit his roles. His idol at the moment is George Bernard Shaw, who, after refusing for years to let the cinema tinker with his plays, got Pygmalion made straight into a smash hit. Says Gene Towne: "It took an old guy with a beard to make bums out of all of us."

*Last week RKO, still involved in a five-year-old reorganization, acquired a new board chairman, Richard Cunningham Patterson Jr., who has announced his resignation as Assistant Secretary of Commerce.

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