Word: luxe
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...Pipe & a Pint. By mixing equal parts of glamour and inoffensive blandness, Lux Theater has won a weekly audience estimated at 30 million. The devotees have heard 500 top Hollywood stars broadcasting skillfully warmed-over movie scenarios. For the anniversary, statisticians reckoned that it all added up to 650 shows, 39,120 pages of script, 14,344 musical cues and 68,460 sound effects (including an imitation of a peacock's cry* by the late George Arliss...
Since the Hollywood studio theater seats only 1,400 people ("We get queues as long as the Radio City Music Hall," says Keighley), only a handful of Lux's devoted audience have ever seen their idols in the flesh. To make it up to the others, CBS has distributed a brochure on the stars' "mike mannerisms" that is jam-packed with nuggety information. Samples: Bing Crosby "always rehearses with his pipe clenched between his teeth, even when singing"; Robert Cummings "reads lines from a semi-crouch, like a boxer"; Joan Crawford is a "microphone-clutcher," while Barbara Stanwyck...
Firsts & Fans. Though Lux Theater is careful not to offend, it has its moments of daring. Lux "broke ground in the radio field" by casting such opera stars as Lawrence Tibbett, Lily Pons and Helen Jepson in acting roles. The show boldly signed Radio Comics Jack Benny and Burns & Allen for "their first dramatic parts." And it induced Ronald Colman and Shirley Temple, "long holdouts from radio," to make their debuts...
...East Coast's Trans-Lux theater chain had shocked the industry by passing up Walt Disney's Ichabod and Mr. Toad in favor of The Fallen Idol for its Washington house...
...producers like Rank (Henry V, Hamlet), the sureseaters have been a bonanza. Eagle Lion, distributor of Rank's The Red Shoes, has grossed more from its 40-week run in Philadelphia's Trans-Lux than from all its other pictures in Philadelphia theaters during the same period. Better still, less receipts have to be splurged on costly ballyhoo; a sureseater hit automatically woos the kind of audience that is eager to seek out a good film...