 Bidwell McCormick takes you behind the scenes in Hollywood. Today we are going to tell you of some interesting experiences which took place on several sets in Hollywood. And from time to time, I propose to bring you the voices of stars and featured players themselves, as well as interviews of directors, producers, cameramen and technicians. Suppose you tell us, Nathan, what that story about Henry Hall spending an entire day alternately enacting a death scene and moaning because he hadn't died the day before. Well, Bidwell, it was like this. The veteran actor was portraying an elderly overseas newspaper correspondent who accompanied Errol Flynn's platoon of paratroopers on a mission in objective Burma. His fate was to die from sheer exhaustion after the hazards and horrors of a forced 150-mile trek through dense Burmese jungles. The death scene with Flynn was staged on a hilltop after the weary paratroopers concluded their march by climbing an almost vertical mountainside, stumbling and pulling themselves about 250 yards up the steep slope. The climb was the toughest chore the cast performed in the more than 100 days required to shoot the picture. And as Hall collapsed, he moaned long and loudly. Why couldn't this story have let me die a day earlier, Hall wailed? Death just one day earlier would have let me die down at the bottom of this mountain. But no, I had to make this last futile climb and die on a hilltop. Then the actor grinned and added, boy, I sure could have double-crossed him by really dying on the way up that hill. Well, one couldn't have blamed him much if he had really passed out. And speaking of passing out, the master of ceremonies at the Hollywood canteen nearly passed out recently, but under entirely different circumstances. This was when a scheduled performer failed to show up just at the right time for a program spot, which is pretty serious business when everything is timed to the split second. But it served to get the tract of Janice Page just the break she was looking for. You tell us about it, Nathan. Well, Janice slipped out from behind this knack bar where she'd been dishing up sandwiches and stuff for the boys and staked a claim for herself on the microphone in that vacant program spot. Trained for opera, the green-eyed Tacoma beauty gave the band her key and was often a medley of popular tunes. It all happened, she says, before I knew what I was doing. But there was no such doubt on the minds of several hundred GIs in the canteen's audience that night. They knew what Janice was doing, they liked it, they hollered for more and then some more. Success like that has not overlooked in Hollywood, and the first thing Janice Page knew, she was in pictures. That was the first time Opportunity knocked on the door of lovely 21-year-old Janice with the red-brown hair. The second time was the day Janice signed her Warner Brothers contract after being taken to the studio by talent scout Solly Biano, who was a keen ear for the special knock of Opportunity. Janice doesn't remember who that girl was either, one who somehow couldn't make an audition for the second feminine lead in Hollywood canteen. All she knows is that some girl was absent and she got another break. And she's still getting the breaks and making the most of them too. Someday she's going to find she's become a star. And now a word from your local announcer. Here are a few personalities and production highlights from behind the scenes in Hollywood, presented by Nathan Hale and Manor Ray Ewell. Danny Kaye, he of the deft feet in hilarious pantomime, who made his screen debut in Up in Arms, is making another Technicolor musical for producer Samuel Goldwyn to be called The Wonder Man. The film writes to Life with Father, which is perhaps the most fabulous dramatic hit in American theater history, have recently been purchased by Warner Brothers Studio. Milo Anderson, studio stylist says, accessories are attracting more than an ordinary share of interest this fall. Few women realize the potent possibilities of accessories and the amazing effect they can have on your wardrobe and your morale. Betty Kimbrough, biggest earner of 16,000 extras at work in 1939, has been cast as a hotel guest in the picture Hotel Berlin, now in production by Peter Godfrey. Yuno O'Connor, who appears with little Sharon Moffat in My Pearl Wolf, receives the 1944 award of the Irish American Society. A few books that are scheduled for future production by one of the larger studios are Avalanche by Ray Boyle, All Brides Are Beautiful, Duel in the Sun by Niven Bush, and I'm Thinking of You, Darling, an adventure story by Vincent McHugh in which Cary Grant will star. America's most famous detective, Dick Tracy, will come to life on the screen in a picture adapted from Chester Gowl's cartoon, which will be called Meet Dick Tracy, and will be made with live actors in the manner of the Blondie series. Whistling in the dark won't help you throw off the things you see in Body Snatchers, An Island of the Dead, two spine-chilling thrillers Boris Karloff is working on. It took ten years and two babies to convince Jane Wyatt that she preferred Hollywood to New York. She used to dash to Broadway to do a stage play whenever possible. Then, gradually, to her amazement, she discovered that when walking along Briot Broadway, she pine for Hollywood. After the birth of two sons, the pension for the Great White Way left her. Now, she is happy only in Hollywood. Louis Allen was borrowed by RKO Radio from Paramount to direct Robert Young and Lorraine Day in those endearing young charms, the screen adaptation of Jerome Shoderoff's play. Recent pictures directed by Allen include The Uninvited and Our Hearts Were Young and Gay. Either Louisiana or Florida will be selected by producer Robert Fellows as background for the sequences showing the march of death on Batan in The Invisible Army, in which John Wayne will star. Jack Haley and Anne Jeffries will play the romantic leads in the picture tentatively titled, Follow Your Heart. It's now before the camera under the direction of Anthony Mann. Now, here's a little story. Johnny Weismiller tells about the beautiful horse named Dice. He works within his latest picture. As the story goes, Johnny, who as Tarzan is supposed to understand all animal languages, overheard a wild horse ask Dice how much he was paid for appearing in the picture. I'm getting paid all the good hay I can eat, replied Dice, and that ain't money. Would you like to have a postcard picture of a popular movie star's home? Then just mail a postcard to Bidwell McCormick in care of this station. And now a moment's pause for your local announcer. In taking you behind the scenes in Hollywood, we have the personality close-ups of Sonya Hennie and George Murphy for you today. Okay, Nathan Hale. Three times winner of the Olympic Championship, Sonya Hennie, whose latest film is now being produced by David Lewis, is considered by all odds the finest skater alive. The Darling of Europe, before her first professional appearance in Manhattan's Madison Square Garden in 1936, Sonya's screen services were sought by a quartet of major studios. After signing with 20th Century Fox and completing three pictures, she made a 25,000-mile tour of the country by air. Subsequent tours have been spectacularly successful both here and in Latin America. Her ninth picture, but first in technicolor, is called It's a Pleasure and contains an exacting dance routine for which her partner is Don Loper. The nine Sonya Hennie pictures are one in a million, thin ice, happy landing, my lucky star, second fiddle, everything happens at night, Sun Valley Serenade, wintertime, and now it's a pleasure. While it's a pleasure is a show window for the skating artistry of Sonya Hennie, it also tells with humor, tenderness and finesse the story of how a girl's faith makes a man out of a lovable scam. George Murphy is a practical fatalist, a fatalist because he believes his destiny is all laid out for him. Practical because he also believes that a man can help or hamper his destiny. He refused a double in the automobile crack-up scene in Eddie Cantor's RKO radio musical, Show Business, because he's a fatalist. He's had numerous experiences to justify his belief that his book of life was written in advance. His first brush with death was at the age of 16 when he injured his leg playing prep school football. Infection set in and he was unconscious for three days. He regained consciousness just in time to prevent his family from signing a release to permit amputation of the leg. The treatment which had failed before was repeated and proved successful. The black one with the scythe tried to get him again when he was working in a Pennsylvania coal mine at the end of his junior year at Yale while studying to be a mining engineer. A mine accident crushed him so severely that it was thought he would not live. Again, he won out. The final experience came early in 1943. He and Kerry Grant were in New York getting ready to take a Lisbon clipper on the first leg of a trip to Africa to entertain soldiers. Four hours before the clipper took off, government officials decided it was more important that George returned to Hollywood to appear in This is the Army. The clipper he didn't take crashed in Lisbon Harbor taking the lives of Tamara and other prominent persons and crippling singer Jane Froman. It was fate again. Thank you, Nathan, for these interesting sidelights on the lives of two famous Hollywood people. Next week you are going to bring us the personality close-ups of two more Hollywood personalities. Listen again next week when Bidwell McCormick takes you behind the scenes in Hollywood.