Sir Samuel Hoare sent the following letter to Mr. Pritt:—I was sorry that you were not in your place this afternoon to put to me your questions numbered 37 and 38 about Dartmoor. As you will see. my answers are a complete denial of the statements and implications in your questions, As regards the alleg-at intervals throughout Hollywood's Small Part Player Much Happier Now A new scale of wages has been won for American actors through the efforts of the Screen Actors Guild and its head, Mr, Robert Montgome: The minimum daily pay for extras is now $5.50, instead of the old figure of $3.20. Film cowboys are to re, $11 instead of $5 a day. Small part players who have long bewailed their low earnings are happier now. But costs will be higher by something between $2,000 and $5,000 a picture, and the smaller independent com-anies, who produce 240 of Hollywood's 700 feature pictures a ye: will be chiefly affected. The public will in the end be called upon to foot the bill Several facts of interest emerge from this dispatch, among them the intelligence that cowboys are to be [raid more for their work on the films; their daily wage is raised from $5 to $1l. This is fine for the cowboys, but slightly disquieting for the public comments "The Times." Already we see too few cowboys on the screen "where once they reigned almost supreme; and with the price of each cowboy rather more than doubled we henceforth. see fewer still This would be terrible, Few gentlemen prefer blondes to branches, and Hollywood despite ephemeral successes in other genres, has never yet discovered a more satisfactory kind of picture than that in which all the characters—except the silvery haired old mother, who stayed at home graciously shooting Indians with a musket—used periodically to gallop down a precipice in a heavy downpour of black rain.
It is true that recent cowboy films have shown a slight tendency to degeneracy. Horses, for one thing, have lost that wonderful turn of speed they used to have in the old silent days, and nowadays, even when extended, rarely go faster en the films than they do in real life. Hollywood is badly mistaken if it imagines that this concession to a pedantic naturalism pleases the public taste; we were brought up on horses which could do their seventy or eighty mp.h. with ease over very bad going indeed, and those are the kind of horses that we like.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.