NEWSPAPERMEN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 March 1940, Page 9

NEWSPAPERMEN

THE HOLLYWOOD IDEA. Do newspapermen wear their hats in the office? Do they prefer to sit on desks father than chairs, and subsist on a bottle that they keep hidden in a bottom drawer? Are they always making love to beautiful brunettes, and yet do they always find , time to scoop the rival paper with the solution to the crime of the year? The answers are no. even in the United States, except in the movies. Why, then, is the fourth estate so consistently played false on the screen? Hal Roach, who, as both producer and director of "The Housekeeper's Daughter," makes his contribution to the irregularity, has an explanation for this recurrent phenomenon. He

believes that it is because the public has grown so used to the cinematic conception of the star reporter that they will not accept a substitute, no matter how genuine. As Myrna Loy once phrased it in “To Mary, With Love:” “Everybody says that the movies should be more like life, but I think that lite should be more like the movies.” A lot of other people seem to think the same way. When “The Housekeeper’s Daughter” was being produced, therefore, Roach was faced with a problem. A great deal of the action of the comedy takes piace in and around a newspaper office, and it is up to the producer to decide whether the journalists in the picture would conform to reality or to type.

Ho made a test. He had a single scene of the film shot two ways, once as a newspaper office actually is and once as is usually depicted on the screen. Then he held a miniature “sneak preview" in the studio projection room for a group of extras and studio stenographers who. he considered. represented a good cross-section of the motion picture audience. Almost to a man they found the realistic scene “unconvincing” and the typical one "swell." '

Ever since “The Front Page” Hollywood has been publicising its conception of newspapers and newspapermen til! today this conception is more familiar to the public than the reality, and any variation on the theme is instinctively challenged by those who swallow ihe Hollywood “hooey.”