The daily worker., 1933-08-18
FLA SH ES
and

BY LENS

Charlie Chaplin is old and tired
Woman's Home Companion is
printing his autobiography beginning
this week. -. Winfield Sheehan, who
asks $750,000 as the price for the
immediate cancellation Of his con-
tract with Fox, was once secretary
to Police Commissioner Waldo of
New York City =. This gentleman
before whose organizing genius"
Hollywood trembles, was implicated
in the 1910-11 graft and murder
scandals. =. Following headlines
appeared in the New York Times for
April 80, 1914: CALLS SHEEHAN
THE MAN HIGHER UP "Alice
Walker (the keeper of a house of
prostitution) Testifies She Paid
Graft to Supposed Agent of Waldo's
Secretary" . Sheehan was saved
by personal intervention of William
Fox and his millions and from then
on sky-rocketed into "higher up
fame in Hollywood. For further
details refer to Sinclair's "Upton Sin
clair Presents William Fox" +.
Anyway, such is the stuff whereof
great men are made.
No, it isn't correct, as stated in
Comrade Lerner's letter, that the
Daily is blindly uncritical of all So
Wet productions. See Vern
Smiths review of "Man With the
Camera" S. BIS piece on eagle of
the Caucasus" and some others. :.
Nor is it altogether fair to say that
Judith Knights letter is "the typical
attitude of great MANY comrades
and Daily Worker readers" )"
Comrade Platt informs me that
Sol Lesser, the man responsible for
turning Eisenstein's revolutionary
Mexican film into dull Hollywood
western" was a leading producer
of flag-waving and draft films dur
ing the World War.
M-G-M has extended the contract
of that White Russian emigre direc-
tor, Richard Boleslavsky, responsible
for row of pro-Czarist pictures like
"Rasputin and the Empress" etc.
The Workers Film and Photo
League is instituting the Harry Alan
Potamkin Scholarship Fund to send
one of its members to the Moscow
State Institute of the Cinema for a
short intensive study course. This
is to be yearly award and will be
accorded to the member Of the
League who has done most during
| tba x,aor +n f,,ytha,, +ba oo,,.o of ~ :
revolutionary movie. 81
Will the wise boys who say all die
tatorships are alike please explain
why the Soviet kino is growing by
leaps and bounds, both in quantity
and artistic quality, while the Italian
fascist film died a day after the
march on Rome, and the much-in-
flated German bourgeois film is now
dying of pernicious anemia under
Hitler's heel.
: The Motion Picture Herald >>~orts
that researchers find Hollywood
films to be composed of: Love, rs
per cent; Crime, 27 per cent; and
Sex, Is per cent. Leaving mere
33 per cent to be accounted for. -.
A strange oversight? Maybe not.
/. :. Send in your guesses as to the
nature of the mysteriously missing
80 per cent. And | think one
single guess ought to do the trick.
And what's that about Bella
(''Dracula") Lugosi's reported sym
pathies for Communism
The great electrical trusts will
soon plunge into the television game
for which they hold the important
patents. :. Hence all the noise about
the wonders of the new inventions
in the field of electrical scanning.
The financial octopi of Wall Street
are giving up hope of making talkies
pay for themselves. And if tele-
vision turns out to be as unprofitable
financially, the fact that it will prove
a better channel than the film for
capitalist propaganda ought to be
quite consolation. :. The broad
casting of sound films over a nation
wide network of relays makes all
other known methods of disseminat-
ing war propaganda, for instance,
seem like Intellectual whispers. :.