Youthful Maurice Conn Started his First Film Production with $1000 (1937) 🇺🇸
Scan your library shelves in search of one of chose ancient five-cent masterpieces of fiction, the Horatio Alger novels, and between the faded covers of almost any one of those editions you will find the parallel to the story of our Producer of the Week.
Presented by David J. Hanna
Maurice Conn is the personification of the typical Alger hero. A few years ago his name was meaningless to the Motion Picture Industry; today, at the comparatively tender age of 30, he is widely regarded as one of the most promising men in the production held. Ami. in the few years that have witnessed his rise to recognition, he seems to have absorbed a lifetime of experience.
One thousand dollars (yes, $1000!), plus a wealth of nerve and imagination, were Conn’s assets as he started on his career as a film maker. He resigned his position as associate producer with Nat Levine’s Mascot company to organize his own unit. Renting space at Talisman Studios, he hired Kermit Maynard [Ken Maynard] as his star and produced a Western titled “The Fighting Trouper.” Thus began that unit of Conn’s enterprises known as Conn Pictures. Hardly an auspicious inauguration, but not unlike that of other men now at the top of the ladder in this industry.
From that single Western has grown an organization which will produce between 28 and 36 features this year. The Maynards are now an annual series of 8 outdoor films of established box-office value in action houses.
Two other units, Ambassador and Melody Pictures, comprise the balance of the Conn organization. The former is responsible for the Frankie Darro series, 8 action melodramas that have struck an extremely popular note with the juvenile and matinee trade in neighorhood and rural theatres. They are definitely above average attractions of their class.
Young Mr. Conn this season took his first excursion into higher bracket film production. Sensing the potentialities of Pinky Tomlin’s pleasant vocal and shy comedy talents, he signed the song writer-actor to a long-term contract and plans to make 6 musical features per season under the banner of Melody Pictures, his most pretentious venture. The first Tomlin vehicle, “With Love and Kisses,” is now being released and was sent off to an unusually strong start with the help of a shrewd publicity campaign that featured Pinky’s appearance on Eddie Cantor’s radio program two weeks ago, during which the pop-eyed comic also sang one of the songs featured in the picture. It is alert stunts of that sort that lend credence to the general impression that this young man is headed places.
Conn recently returned from New York, where he met with his franchise-holders to discuss distribution plans for the 1937–38 season. In the course of the meeting he asked the frank reactions of the exchange-men as to his future production plans, whether they felt the need for more Western melodramas or musicals.
“As a result of my survey,” he told this writer, “the bulk of my program next season will be 75% musical and melodrama. To that end our production budgets will be raised and standardized at a forty thousand dollar minimum and a one hundred thousand dollar maximum.”
Asking a producer outright tor his own views on what formula he would lay down for the making of successful pictures is a question we have carefully avoided through out this senes of interviews. Perhaps it has been our fear of receiving a lengthy theoretical dissertation on the virtues and ills of the motion picture industry, with particular stress on the speaker’s virtues. However, on this occasion we blurted out the query in a weaker moment and, to our astonishment, Mr. Conn calmly gave us a formula which we believe should be framed and placed on every producer’s desk in Hollywood.
“The simplest way to insure the success of a picture, or at least to minimize its chances tor failure, is to make it exactly what it is intended to be. A Western should be just that. Today, in an attempt to lure patrons of other types of entertainment, much of the riding and outdoor shots are being replaced by indoor sets. This defeats the producer’s very purpose. The Western fan dislikes the slower moving indoor action and resents any lengthy deviation from the wide, open spaces, where action is a prerequisite.
“On the other hand,” our host and interviewee continued, “it is hardly possible that the lover of the drawing room comedy will find a Western very much to his liking, even though the picture may be camouflaged with parlor sets. So it must be with any type of picture. A melodrama should be melodrama; a comedy, comedy; a drama, drama. Not, by any means, that there must not be digressions that tall naturally into the plot. But they must not be forced or so long that they divert the spectator’s attention to the basic theme. It has long since been proven that it is impossible to please everyone, but, by aiming a picture at a definite type of audience, you will come out with a winner m the vast majority of cases.”
And so, with this prescription lucked away in our notebook and mind, we left Maurice Conn. On our way across the lot, we dropped into the office of Ted Richmond, the man whose exploitation ideas have had much to do with the box-office success of Conn’s pictures. Before long the desk and floor were littered with press sheets, old and new, and from them we gained a factual view of an independent company’s progress — from those first cheaply printed 4-page press sheets down to Richmond’s beauty on Love and Kisses.
By all means, we urge you to keep at least one corner of one eve focused on this Conn outfit.
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Collection: Independent Exhibitors Film Bulletin, January 1937