Story Conference (Warner Bros., Vitaphone, 1934)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, October 18), after the Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Nights” showing of the 1927 Tod Browning/Lon Chaney vehicle The Unknown, they put on Story Conference, a quite engaging 1934 short starring Lillian Roth, who burned out her career on alcoholism and poor choices in men in the 1930’s and made a comeback of sorts via a sensationally successful autobiography (co-authored with Gerold Frank, who’d later parlay his experience with self-destructive stars with his 1975 biography of Judy Garland, and Mike Connolly) published in 1954 called I’ll Cry Tomorrow. This got filmed in 1955 by MGM with Susan Hayward, Hollywood’s go-to girl for alcoholics then, as Roth. (I’m pretty sure this was the first film ever to depict an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting on screen.) Story Conference casts Roth as herself, a major Broadway star brought to Hollywood by “Terrific Pictures” – only they don’t have a script for her (an all too common occurrence among movie producers in the 1930’s, who’d sign people without a clear idea of just what they were going to do with them: witness Paul Whiteman and King of Jazz). So studio head Eugene Von Grona (as himself) gathers a bunch of writers to brainstorm a story for Roth, and they have a number of intriguing ideas which the film’s director, Bert (Bert Matthews), shoots down. The short was produced by Warner Bros. and their subsidiary Vitaphone (though they’d abandoned the original Vitaphone sound-on-disc process by 1931 and were shooting sound-on-film like everyone else, they kept Vitaphone as a trade name for their band shorts into the 1930’s), and not surprisingly they parodied a number of Warners’ then-current feature films in this one.

The high point was “Alimony Hotel,” in which they took the premise of “Honeymoon Hotel” from the 1933 Warners musical Footlight Parade and flipped it. The number takes place in Reno (at the time when Nevada was a mecca for divorcing couples because it was one of the first states to institute no-fault divorce; all you had to do is live there for six weeks and at least pretend to be planning to relocate there permanently, and quite a number of “divorce hotels” sprang up for people needing a place to stay for the legally obligatory six weeks) and features a number of women joyously waving their divorce decrees in the air and celebrating their newly regained singlehood. The film opens with a group of women singing a song to the glories of working in Hollywood, “Working in the Movies,” and an amusing scene, a Western parody, in which all the parts (including the moustachioed villain) are played by women. The film also features two vocal groups, The Sizzlers and The Three Minutes; The Sizzlers were all male but I can’t find out anything online about The Three Minutes and (unlike The Sizzlers) they made just this one film. There’s also a weird rural comedy number called “Down the Old Back Road” that’s far inferior to the other songs from the film (all the others were by Cliff Hess but this was by Herman Hupfeld, who wrote “As Time Goes By” and “Let’s Put Out the Lights and Go to Sleep”) and for some reason doesn’t feature Lillian Roth; and an even odder number called “If I Were a Millionaire,” done as a duet between Roth and a mediocre Irish tenor who’s unidentified on imdb.com. This sets up a nice production number in which the various chorus girls are turned into items of jewelry, the sort of thing Busby Berkeley was doing in the big-budgeted musical features this one was parodying. Story Conference was a genuinely charming bit of Hollywood self-parody, directed by Roy Mack from a script by Eddie Moran, A. Dorian Otvos, and Cyrus Wood – and it’s hard to imagine that the real-life process of coming up with the story for this one wasn’t as lame as the story conference depicted in it!