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Show Vast Tourist Throngs Irk Film Studios By PA'ctT HARRISON HOLLYWOOD, Aug. 4 The tourist season is at its height. Last month brought about 213.000 visitors to southern California, and August should roll up a total of a quarter , million. Practically all of 'em are , celebrity hunters: the movie peo- pie will testify to that. It s sheer force of numbers, though, that makes tourists something some-thing of a trial for the studios and their people. Actually the folks from Clay Center and Sioux City are a lot better mannered than the brash, insistent local yokels. The former merely want to have a look. An out-of-town lady visitor who got Into the studios on a sheaf of credentials and written requests wss insistent that she not be introduced in-troduced to any of the stars. She said, "Good Heavens! Jf I were to shake hands with Tyrone Powwr or Don Ameehle or Clark Gable I'd faint dead away on the spot!" There are few Instances in which tourists attempt any atrategems to crash studio gates. Sometimes youngsters scale walls or fences to gain entrance toback lots, and from- here they "wander around open-mouthed until picked up and ejected by company police. Quite a number aeek admittance by claiming to be bosom pals, from home-town days, of prominent players. play-ers. But busy players have short memories. They seldom send word to the gate that they'll receive their old friends. My favorite receptionist is one Martha Malloy, at the main entrance en-trance at Twentieth Century-Fox. She says that about 300 people daily come In with frank requests to be shown how pictures are made. For these she has a stock explanation, ex-planation, and a kindly one, to the effect that sound stages are crowded with people who have to work on them, that players are upset by tiptoeing visitors and that it is patently impossible to admit everybody. Most visitors take the refusal In good spirit. A few declare that they'll never again patronise a Twentieth Century-Fox picture. With fair reason they argue that they're the people who pay admUslona, and so deserve a glance behind the scenes. Movie companies realise this fact, and would like to clinch their patrons' pa-trons' favor. But they Just can't make friends and make pictures, too. Fske correspondents for out-of-town newspapers presented a real-problem real-problem until the Motion Picture Producers' association established , an office from which writers were investigated, imposters exposed andl credentials extended to quauneo re- porters. Previously, a studio was likely to receive a dosen visitors daily who claimed to be working on apecial articles for their home town papers, when all they really wanted was the satisfaction of their own curiosity. Quite a few forged letters of introduction in-troduction have been picked up. Some of these letters hsve been used to get work as extras, the bearers claiming that they wanted to write articles from the extra player's viewpoint Such a procedure Is Impossible now, the new Screen Actors' guild code requiring guild membership of every person to appear before the cameras. Recently two burly gents presented pre-sented such a letter at 20th Century-Fox. The wording and spelling spell-ing were considerably under journalistic par, and the men were investigated. . They turned out to be a couple of wrestlers who had appropriated appropri-ated some stationery while visiting visit-ing the sports editor of a mid-wcetera mid-wcetera newspaper. They had thumbed their way to California with the hope of getting j into a studio and selling some sports-minded star on the idea of sponsoring their mat careers. I |