Movies help mark out our lives. Do you remember who you were when you first saw Citizen Kane? I do. Or Casablanca or Singin’ in the Rain? If you give it a moment’s thought, I’ll bet you can come up with an answer.

Movie stars, as has been stated elsewhere ad nauseam, are perhaps as close as we come to royalty.

1916: $10,000.00 per week—that was Charlie Chaplin’s stipend. Plus $150,000.00 in bonus money for signing. 1919: Fatty Arbuckle became the first star in history to be guaranteed a salary of one million dollars per year. Minimum.

“ADD ONE-THIRD FOR THE SHIT” This is a Hollywood expression I have heard used mainly by production managers. Production managers, sometimes called line producers, are at the heart of any film. They are the men who make out the schedules, do the budgeting, and are on call every hour of every day, both before and during and after shooting. When there

It’s important to remember that movies began as a fad—not unlike the Atari games today. No one knew what the future might bring—or if, indeed, there would even be a future—but the present was plenty lucrative enough for even the greediest executive.

Therefore, there will be salaries paid for double (or triple) makeup personnel, many of whom end up with nothing to do. Why production managers bother to engage in these little wars I can’t say—because the studio rarely backs them up. Day after day, the production manager gets pasted. I suppose they hang in because they care. And maybe someday,

The point being this: Movies are a gold-rush business. Anyone interested in what follows had best commit that fact to memory.…

If he saw a pen he wanted, he put it in his bag. A watch, a pack of gum, anything. If the crew member called him on it, the star would make a joke, of course return the object, and the next day the crew member was gone. It got so that at the end of each day, the crew would simply report to the production manager what was taken that day and its

Also, twenty years isn’t that long—not in the career of a professor or a doctor of internal medicine.