Press Agents Ordered not To Publish Salaries Sideliners along film row sat in on another little miracle recently, writes Harold Heffernan to the "Oregonian." And no shopgirl Cinderella crashing to overnight fame in the starry movie heavens was involved, either.
Instead, one gazed at the strange spectacle of a great industry, its very structure built on ballyhoo, crying out bitterly against "too much pubticity."
Hereafter, if a star signs a five-year contract netting $3,000,000 or collects $50,000 for making a single picture, you aren't so likely to blink at the figures in the public prints. Not if the press agents can help it, anyway.
It's an open secret in the film colony that publicity departments again were ordered to crawl into a shell in the matter of dollar publicity.
Once before, about five years ago, the Hays office promulgated a similar command, but it was quickly routed. This time, however, there's a "must" rider attached. Weird salaries paid to stars and million-dollar blurbs about production costs aren't just the thing to publicize any more.
You may have guessed the real reason behind this sudden reversal in ballyhoo methods. Trace it to those income revelations for 1937.
They struck official Hollywood like 'a bombshell, and, while the figures are well off the front pages and the nation is again perusing ominous news from Europe, the tycoons of movieland are still staggering dizzily from the effects of what they term "undesirable publicity."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.