The Voice

Hollywood, waiting tensely for the trip to the operating room, heard the clink of the amputation tools. When the Supreme Court held Hollywood's major studios guilty of violating the antitrust laws (TIME, May 17), it sent the case back to the lower court for a tougher ruling on how the studios should divorce themselves from their theater chains.

Last week the Justice Department proposed that Hollywood's Big Five--Paramount, Loew's Inc. (M-G-M), RKO, Warner Bros., and 20th Century-Fox --be ordered to 1) sell their interest in theater chains they partially control (about 1,400 movie houses) within a year, and 2) submit plans on how they expect to get rid of some of their remaining (about 1,600) theaters within the next five. And each time they buy a new theater they would have to get court approval.

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