40,000 Copyrighted in U.S.; Cinema Centre May Exhaust Vocabularies It was estimated recently from Hays' office figures, that the motion ure screen has used up approxi-ately 40,000 copyrighted film titles and is fast drawing toward the point where those little words and phrases n't be stretched and twisted any further. Maybe producers will forced to turn to the front of the book and start all over—or possibly send out their offerings under such trite labels as "Claudette Colbert—
Noi 33" or "Paramount Special, No. 167." Pretty sad state of affairs if a place like Hollywood ever ran out of words.
There has always been a couple of schools of thought in the studios on the matter of movie titles. Some, like Sam Goldwyn and Ernst Lubitsch, hold that titles don't mean a thing Goldwyn makes a mint of money out of a movie ramed "Wuthering Heights," which many exhibitors stuck up in their lights as "Withering Heights." Lubitsch's greatest directorial success, Garbo's finest performance and MGM's biggest money maker in a good many months were all wrapped up in a feature titled "Ninotchka." One theatre owner wired MGM a warning, "Sto releasing your pictures in code! Later he apologized, for the run brought him his biggest cash gate of the year.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.