Two-Toned Blau

On a Hollywood sound stage, an experiment in bilingual moviemaking began rolling last week. The picture: F. Hugh Herbert's Broadway hit, The Moon Is Blue (TIME, March 19, 1951). Tough-talking

Director Otto (Forever Amber) Preminger was barking commands. He started each scene with "Los!" and ended them abruptly with "Noch einmal"--or less frequently, "Sehr gut!"

At times, Vienna-born Preminger would turn to his cameraman with a sigh: "You must be firm with Germans. They are raised differently from us and react better if one is absolutely rigorous. Only patience will get us what we want." When the German cast moved off the set, Preminger called for his English-speaking actors--David Niven, William Holden, Maggie McNamara and Dawn Addams--and shot the same scene with less difficulty--and less patience--in English.

The two-language version of one movie is strictly a moneymaking device. The German market for U.S. films is booming (yearly net for Hollywood: about $5,000,000). But, explains Preminger, pictures with a German-language sound track usually outgross the U.S. products, and one of the reasons is that "the German people would rather have even mediocre pictures in their own tongue than dubbed American pictures." Dubbing German dialogue into The Moon Is Blue would have cost Preminger about $6,000. But he calculated that the cost of importing a small German cast and making the German version (about $120,000) might earn a 90% bigger gross in Germany.

In all, Die Jungfrau auf dem Dach* will cost only about 15% more to film than the English picture alone, and the extra shooting time will come to only about ten days.

*Translation: the Virgin on the Rooftop; the story concerns the finding of true love atop the Empire State Building.

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