Considering the legal and political entanglements facing the business at present, news that two-thirds of all salaries of $200,000 or more reported for 1937 were collected by executives or personalities of the screen world couldn't have come at a more inopportune time.
Frankly, the nation's fourth industry has just about arrived at the crossroads of its comparatively short existence as the world's most popular amusement medium.
Federal and state suits and investigations are heckling it on every side. The government is preparing to launch court action against eight major companies, charging them with being huge monopoly. Anything can happen in that suit.
The Neely anti-block booking bill, which many believe would wreck present-day distribution methods, is being pondered by a Senatorial committee.
An Illinois legislator wants a bill passed forbidding any theatre owner from showing a picture in which the principal actors have been divorced more than twice.
In 30 other states of the union censorship and other regulatory leg-isolation are being pushed for immediate action.
"And then this high-salary bombshell had to drop," moaned a Hays office spokesman. "The reaction throughout the country can't be anything but bad, Each year these lists are printed, it undoes all our efforts to publicize the real facts—that 90 per cent, of our wage earners never get more than $3,000 a year. The average fan unconsciously gets an idea that our office boys must be fabulously wealthy."
The heaviest publicity blow, of course, fell on Louis B. Mayer, who put the movies on top of the salary heap as the highest-paid person in the' country.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.