THE STAR-MAKER

You've read it more than once: Hollywood in the days of the Big Picture and the Big Studio and the Big-little man at the top, here called H. P. Koenig, H. P. for short—or possibly L. B. for Mayer. The studio is called Magna, and the era's the once-golden Forties, right after the death of H. P.'s protege-geniusdirector-crown prince (Thalberg?). David Cole is imported as the new possibility—he's a director from New York—and before very long he's bucking H. P. who (like Mayer) breaks those he makes. Now Cole is told to destroy fading star Lora Lindsay; she helps out by killing herself. Then he's to do a Biblical, Via Dolorosa, using the very difficult Christopher Swift, who can only be shot the four hours a day that he's on a heroin lift. Nonetheless, Cole comes through, and the pic looks like millions until H. P., determined to sell it as a block booking, brings the whole house of cracked cards down with him. You know the route—excess footage and footprints from Grauman's Chinese to Forest Lawn—and you know the readership for whom it's commercially auteured.