Word: pine
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...timeworn wheeze among U.S. movie producers is that a Pine-Thomas picture run backwards would entertain an audience as much as the same film shown in due order. It is the standard opening for the observation that however the film is run it will be a money maker...
Since they formed a producing team in 1940, lank, solemn, ex-pressagent William Hoy Pine, 49, and sleek, peppery, ex-pressagent William Carroll Thomas, 41, have whipped up 30 musicals and melodramas for the nation's double bills. None has come close to an Oscar, but all have been good business...
...first three were made with their own money. They were so fabulously successful that Paramount promptly bought into the gold mine. It agreed to finance all Pine-Thomas productions, pay them 25% of all profits over 170% of the cost of the film...
This gave Pine & Thomas, who call themselves the "Dollar Bills," what few other class-B moviemakers have: a big bank roll and a spigot for their potboilers in Paramount's 11,000 outlets. Result: By last week the Dollar Bills were 1) producing pictures at an average cost of $125,000; grossing an average $600,000 on each, 2) top class-B producers in Hollywood, 3) among the highest paid moviemakers in the business. This year they will collect about $700,000 (before taxes) for their work...
Profits, Not Art. In their early years in Hollywood, Thomas as a producer-writer and Pine as an associate producer (he was once Cecil B. de Mille's assistant) learned that poor planning skyrockets overhead and production costs. Often everybody on the set is idle while the director works out a new plot twist. So Pine & Thomas reduced their plots to two inartistic formulas...