Category: Behind the Scenes

Behind the Scenes: “The Psychopath” (1966)

Amicus was part of an unholy triumvirate – the others being Hammer and American International – serving up horror during the 1960s to a global audience. Less prolific than the others, Amicus, headed up by expatriate New Yorkers Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg, had an American distribution deal with Paramount.

However, the pair had been more successful, at least in Britain, on the sci fi front, Dr Who and the Daleks (1965), an adaptation of the highly successful BBC television series, had been a huge hit on the domestic front, with the sequel Daleks Invasion Earth 2150AD (1966) not too far behind. But both had landed like a damp squid in the U.S.

Nor had their previous incursion into the horror fields done much better. Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965) had only managed a release as a supporting feature in Britain. The same fate was accorded The Skull (1965), but only after sitting on the shelf for a year. So a great deal was riding on their third horror picture. The whopping success of Dr Who and the Daleks, at least in Britain, guaranteed them a stay of execution.

“I like making horror films,” said Subotsky, “or perhaps I should say films of imagination rather than reality. The second thing is I like silent pictures. I think you should be able to tell a story visually and not by talking. And in horror films you can have long stretches of action.”

The Psychopath – initially going before the cameras as Schizo – looked a promising venture. The biggest name attached was quite a catch, even if not one who would feature in the picture. Robert Bloch, courtesy of Pyscho (1960), filmed to enormous critical and commercial acclaim by Alfred Hitchcock, was the most famous name in horror. He had penned the story that became The Skull. In addition to buying the rights to his story, this time Amicus lined him up for screenwriting duties.

In front of the camera, Amicus gambled on Patrick Wymark, a big British television star courtesy of The Plane Makers (1963-1965) who was elevated to top billing after playing the second lead in The Skull. Direction was once again by Freddie Francis, who had won the Oscar for cinematography for Sons and Lovers (1960). Francis specialized in horror – helming The Brain (1962), Paranoiac (1963), Nightmare (1964) and The Evil of Frankenstein (1965) before becoming Amicus’s in-house director with Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965) – the first of the portmanteau features with which Amicus would later be associated – and The Skull. 

He was credited with a distinct individual visual style – attracting the attention of Cahiers du Cinema and French critics – and was considered a safe pair of hands. However, that last element was tested here. Halfway through shooting it was obvious the movie was going to come up short in terms of running time. It was already intended to be a tight little feature, at a projected 80 minutes. It was apparent that without substantial changes the movie would come in ten minutes shy of the planned time. Even at 80 minutes, it would struggle to qualify for main feature status. At 70 minutes, it would have no chance.

The producers did not always see eye-to-eye. Although Milton Subotsky had been responsible for setting up the project, Rosenberg soon took over. Complained Subotsky, “I found Max could really be a bully when he wanted and he had nasty temper. I’ll admit I was never good at standing up for myself and he just walked all over me.”

However, when the movie hit the running time stumbling block, Rosenberg had to turn to his colleague for help. Subotsky had written Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, Dr Who and the Daleks and The Skull. Taking a utilitarian approach, Subotsky availed himself of whoever was on set or available.

The burden fell on Robert Crewdon who played the sculptor Victor. Subotsky added his murder scene which was shot in a scrapyard created on the back lot at Shepperton with a batch of old cars purchased for £300. Subotsky apparently also directed the scene since Freddie Francis was busy elsewhere.

However, the running time wasn’t the only problem. Once the picture was complete, it was fairly obvious who the killer was. So Subotsky took over the task of re-editing the movie as well. “Apart from wanting to be a writer, (Milton) wanted to be an editor,” explained Freddie Francis.

Subotsky rearranged the picture so that “every time Patrick Wymark opens his mouth, we cut away from him, and overlaid his dialog, and every time someone replied we overlaid their dialog. And we changed the whole last scene with post-synched dialog and that way we changed the murderer.”

Though reviews were generally positive – “atmospheric thriller” (Box Office), “top grade shocker” (Variety), the   backers were not happy with the result, even the extended version. The extra 13 minutes of footage wasn’t sufficient to win a main release of the British ABC circuit – it went out as support and later was reissued with The Skull. In the U.S. it had a varied, though hardly wide, release. In some cities, Paramount sent it out as support to The Naked Prey. In first run in St Louis, Cincinnati, Boston and Portland, it was the main feature with supports including reissues of Nevada Smith (1966) and Lady in a Cage (1964) Box office was generally “tepid,” “mild” or “dull”. It supported A Study in Terror (1965) in Kansas City and Chamber of Horrors (1966) in Toronto. It didn’t make much money in either country, but did very well in Italy.

Robert Bloch wasn’t pleased either. “The idea is better than the film,” he complained. “It would have made a better one-hour teleplay than a feature.”

This was the third in Amicus’s four-picture deal with Paramount and after The Deadly Bees (1967), the Hollywood studio severed contact.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this company best known for its horror output is that for a considerable period it tried to shuck off that tag. To some extent, it became a horror specialist by default because other projects failed to get off the ground – for example in 1964 it was scheduled to make How I Won the War with Richard Lester for United Artists and Adventure Island based on an Arthur C Clarke tale for Universal – or because a switch into other genres failed to hit the box office mark.

After the dual flop of The Deadly Bees (1967) and Torture Garden (1967), the duo lined up spy thriller Danger Route (1969) and literary drama A Touch of Love/Thank You Very Much (1969) with Oscar winner Sandy Dennis. They should have been followed by adaptations of Ancient Pond by Courtney Brown – described as “a novel of passion and revenge in a war-ravaged city” – and sci fi satire The Richest Corpse in Showbusiness by Dan Morgan, both novels purchased in 1967. But neither was greenlit and eventually Amicus returned to what it did best – horror.

Behind the Scenes: “Deliverance” (1972)

You couldn’t make it like that now, so the ill-informed tale goes. Actors doing their own paddling in canoes, climbing a cliff. But anyone who has watched Leonard DiCaprio and Kate Winslet half-drowning in Titanic (1997) is well aware that it’s just not always possible to use a stand-in for key sequences. Or, for that matter, William Holden breaking in a horse in Wild Rovers (1971).

For a start, there actually were four stunt men on Deliverance, one who was star Jon Voigt’s stunt double. None were credited in the picture, not so unusual in those days, and anyone who knows anything about filming climbing scenes, not least the one where actors are actually crawling across a floor, or where there are, out of sight of cameras, safety facilities underneath, will know that the actors here, though it might get a tad tough, were not risking life and limb. Greater injuries were endured by the stars during the storm scenes of The Guns of Navarone (1961). That said, the movie does benefit from sufficient shots of the actors braving the waters and Ned Beatty nearly drowned and Burt Reynolds cracked his tailbone.

But, of course, danger in moviemaking is relative. There’s scarcely any equivalent to the numbers of deaths that occur in other professions, mining, for example, or industry, and I’m always suprised how easily the Hollywood PR machine is so easily accepted by the public when the peril mentioned is rarely actually perilous at all.

For the scene where the canoe broke, director John Boorman had found a more serene location on a river which was dammed, so he was able to close the sluice gates and lay a rail on the river bed. However, in the event, the sluice gates were opened too soon and the actors engulfed in an avalanche of water.

Should any of the actors show temerity, Boorman would leap into a canoe himself, and paddle downriver over and around various obstacles to show how easy it was.

Deliverance was an unexpected bestseller in 1970, the author an unlikely candidate to hit the commercial jackpot or even to pen such a tale. Ex-adman James Dickey was known for his poetry. Warner Bros bought the book pre-publication about “four decent fellows killing to survive” for $200,000 and more for Dickey to pen the screenplay without working out how it could be filmed. The studio was going through a major transition. In 1970 only three releases had cleared $1 million in rentals; in 1971 the number tripled and the studio was high on a release slate that included Death in Venice, A Clockwork Orange, Summer of ’42, Klute, The Devils, Dirty Harry and Billy Jack.

The studio alighted on John Boorman because he had made Hell in the Pacific (1968) starring Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune, that, while a certified flop, was made under arduous physical conditions in the western Pacific.

After the surprise success of Point Blank, British director Boorman had helmed two flops, Leo the Last (1970) being the other, so he was in the market for the kind of hard-nosed project with which he had made his name. Warner “felt I was the man to take it on,” explained Boorman.

At one point, Warner Brothers planned to team up Jack Nicholson (hot after Easy Rider, 1969, and Carnal Knowledge, 1971) and Marlon Brando, still largely in the pre-The Godfather wilderness. The studio tried to tempt Charlton Heston, who turned it down (“I probably won’t have time to do it”) but consoled himself that WB considered him “employable.” Donald Sutherland also gave it a pass. Dickey agitated for Sam Peckinpah to direct and Gene Hackman to star while Boorman was keen to work a third time with Lee Marvin. Theoretically, Robert Redford, Henry Fonda, George C. Scott and Warren Beatty were considered, but such big names would hardly be compatible with the lean budget.

The final budget was a mere $2 million, not sufficient to attract big name – or even to pay for a score. WB had reservations about a picture without any women in lead roles. Jon Voigt was not a proven marquee name, despite the success of Midnight Cowboy (1969). He only had a bit part in Catch 22 (1970) and his other films, Out of It (1969) and The Revolutionary (1970) had performed dismally while The All-American Boy was sitting on the WB shelf, only winning a release to cash in on Deliverance.

Despite a less than buoyant career, Voigt was reluctant to commit. He resisted making the movie till the last minute. Even after trying to convince himself about the film’s worth by reading out the entire screenplay to his girlfriend Marcheline Bertrand (Angelina Jolie’s mother), it took a telephone call from the director and Boorman demanding a decision before he counted to ten before Voigt signed up. Voigt viewed the film as about how men “lose part of their manhood by hiding, coddling themselves into thinking we’re safe.”

Burt Reynolds was treading water in action B-films like Skullduggery (1970), as the second male lead in bigger films like 100 Rifles (1969) and in television (Dan August, 1970-1971). In his favor, he had the lead in offbeat cop picture Fuzz (1972). But it looks like Voigt and Reynolds took casting to the wire. Both were announced for the film a few weeks before it began shooting on May 17, 1971.

Whether it boosted his career is open to question, but Burt Reynolds’ name achieve notoriety in April 1972, a few months before Deliverance opened, by becoming the first male centerspread in Cosmopolitan.  Billy Redden, as the banjo player, was hired for his physical appearance, clever use of the camera disguising the fact that there was a genuine banjo player concealed behind him doing all the playing. Boorman used snatches of the banjo music instead of coughing up for a proper score. While the credits claimed the “Dueling Banjos” number had been devised by Eric Weissberg and Steve Mandel, Arthur Smith, writer of “Feudin’ Banjos” in 1955, took the studio to court and won a landmark copyright ruling. The tune had received a gold record for sales.

Setting aside any inherent danger in the water, the shore could just be as perilous. A script altercation between Dickey and Boorman ended with the director losing four teeth. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond got into a spat with his union and was slapped on the wrists for operating the camera too often. Filming of the rape scene was uncomfortable for all concerned, even observers. When Reynolds complained the director let the sequence last too long, Boorman countered that he let it run till he reckoned Reynolds, in his character, would intervene.

Despite WB including it in a promotion to its international partners in May 1971 Deliverance, filmed between May 17 – a week later than originally envisaged – and August 1971, sat on the shelf for nearly a year before being premiered at the Atlanta Film Festival in July 1972 with Playboy picking up the tab for flying Reynolds to the event.

These days it would be called a platform release. Deliverance opened in one small house in New York – the 558-seat Loews Tower East – at the end of July and except for Los Angeles didn’t go any wider until early October. Reviews were good, four faves out of five in New York. But it was the box office that caught the eye. An opening day record and an eye-popping $45,000 for the first week took the industry by surprise. It remained at Loews until December. Chicago led the applause in October with a “brawny” $49,000. Everywhere it was hot – “lusty” $26,000 in Washington DC, “socko” $21,000 in Philadelphia were typical examples of the public response.

In what these days would be called counter-programming it went into the New York showcases at Xmas – making off with a huge $589,000 from 46 the first week and $500,000 the second. WB had predicted it might hit $15 million in rentals. The studio was wrong. It scrambled up $21 million. The 1973 tally made it the second best at the box office that year.

SOURCES: Phil Hoad, “How We Made Deliverance,” The Guardian, May 29, 2017; Oliver Lyttleton, “5 Things You Might Not Know about Deliverance, Released 40 Years Ago,” IndieWire, July 30, 2012; Charlton Heston, The Actor’s Life (Penguin, 1980); “Bow and Arrow Party,” Variety, May 20, 1970, p30; “Dickey Ga-Bound,” Variety, January 21, 1971, p4; “Reps of 45 Flags,” Variety, April 14, 1971, p5; “Voigt in Deliverance,” Variety, May 12, 1971, p14; “Runaway Robert Altman,” Variety, December 15, 1971, p4; Advert, Variety, August 9, 1972, p23; “Big Rental Films of 1972,” Variety, Janaury 3, 1973, p7; “Big Rental Films of 1973,” Variety, January 9, 1974, p19. Box office figures from Variety October 11, 1972.

Behind the Scenes: “Doctor Zhivago” (1965)

That Italian producer Carlo Ponti owned the rights to Boris Pasternak’s worldwide bestseller – beating out a bid by Kirk Douglas and Stanley Kubrick – made it easier for David Lean to sever links with Sam Spiegel, producer of his two previous Oscar-winning blockbusters, Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Ponti lined up a deal with MGM who not only gave Lean carte blanche but the biggest ever salary handed to a director plus a generous profit share. Max von Sydow (The Quiller Memorandum, 1966) was Lean’s first suggestion for the leading role while MGM wanted Paul Newman (Cool Hand Luke, 1967) and Ponti was keen on Burt Lancaster (The Train, 1964).

Peter O’Toole (Lawrence of Arabia), fearing another exhaustive shoot, reportedly turned it down. Michael Caine (The Ipcress File, 1965) read for it. Omar Sharif (Lawrence of Arabia), all set to play the smaller role of Pasha, stepped in. Marlon Brando (The Chase, 1966) and James Mason (North by Northwest, 1959) were considered for Komatovsky – the former not replying to Lean’s offer, the laterr dropping out after accepting the role –  before that went to Rod Steiger (The Pawnbroker, 1964).

Front cover for the roadshow launch in the UK in 1966.

Jeanne Moreau (Viva Maria, 1965), Jane Fonda (Barbarella, 1968, who turned it down, then, recanted, by which time it was too late) Yvette Mimieux (Dark of the Sun, 1968), Sarah Miles (Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter, 1970), and, inevitably Ponti’s wife Sophia Loren (dismissed as “too tall” by Lean), were in the running for Lara until, on the recmmendation of John Ford who had directed Julie Christie in Young Cassidy (1965), the part went to the British actress. Audrey Hepburn (Charade, 1963) was Lean’s choice for Tonya until he was bowled over by the screen test by Geraldine Chaplin, the waif-like daughter of Charlie Chaplin, who, in the run-up to release, received the bulk of the advance publicity. Contrary to received wisdom, this was not her debut, she played opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo in Lovely Summer Morning (1965).

So, effectively, Lean was launching MGM’s biggest-ever productions with a cast headed by unknowns, Sharif’s marquee value not up to the mark, every film he had been in since Lawrence of Arabia had flopped and he had never received top billing – and would not here either.

Initially, Lean considered shooting in 70mm in black-and-white but 70mm equipment was deemed too cumbersome and monochrome too risky for such a big film so it was made in 35mm with the intention of blowing it up to the larger format for roadshow release. Ponti reckoned the movie could be made in the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia for $5 million. After switching to the eventual location, Spain, with some sequences filmed in Finland, it cost much more, over $11 million.

The shoot lasted 33 weeks but the production actually took two years and involved 800 craftsmen in three countries. . Original cinematographer Nicolas Roeg dropped out after “creative differences”, replaced by Freddie Young (Lawrence iof Arabia), adding two weeks to the schedule to reshoot Roeg’s scenes.

And for the general release three years later.

Much of what appeared on the screen was illusion. The Red Army charged across an apparently frozen lake at the height of summer, the lake itself non-existent, just a field covered in cement with sheet iron topped with thousands of tons of crushed white marble ironed out by steamrollers so when the horses slid it looked realistic. To complete the picture, a rowing boat was moored at the edge.

Other effects combined direcotrial genius with practicality. Prior to the scne featuring a huge field of daffodils, Lean had filmed three minutes of Zhivago and Lara against a freezing background, everything sprayed gray to remove any hint of color so that the sudden appearance of of the golden flowers cast a spell of spring.  To prevent the flowers  – 4,000 of them imported from the Netherlands – blooming too early, they had been dug up and put in pots to control their growth  and replanted when required. To make snow glisten in another scene, cellophane was spread over wintry bushes and trees.

The sleighs had little wheels fitted to the runners, icicles were made from polystyrene, the balalaika was created by the props team and the interior of the Ice Palace made from cellophane crushed into thousands of creases, paraffin wax and salicylic acid powder creating fantastic shapes. The floor was fashioned from a layer of soap flakes. The train journey went through Spain and in places where there were no railroad tracks, these were built.

Moscow, ten acres of it, rebuilt on a Spanish lot, took 18 months to construct and included 800 yards of cobbled street, the Kremlin, trolley cars and 60 houses and shops. Pasha’s armored train was an authentic replica. Even with the props trickery, Lean wanted to capture the different seasons so that was partly responsible for the long schedule. Sharif has his eyes taped back and his hairline shaved and straightened.

The aftermath of the dragoon charge down the steeets of Moscow was seen through the eyes of Zhivago – Lean’s advice to the actor was to imagine the moment before orgasm –  and it was just as well it worked because Lean had filmed no alternative.

The film intially struggled to attract public attention despite a $3 million publicity budget. Lean was not as marketable as Hitchcock or DeMille. The female leads were unknown, Darling (1965) not yet setting the box office buzzing except in arthouses. Sharif, as I mentioned, had not yet capitalized on Lawrence of Arabia.

“Lara’s Theme” was not yet in the shops – the soundtrack album sold 600,000 copies in a year becoming MGM’s biggest soundtrack seller –  and designer Phyllis Dalton’s furs were a long way from setting a fashion trend. Advance sales for the roadshow openings were poor, only $200,000 compared with $60,000 for Exodus (1961) and $500,000 for Cleopatra (1963). There was even speculation that the Capitol in New York where the film premiered had massaged the opening week’s figures. However, this kind of trickery would have been anathema in the industry, telling the truth about receipts to Variety every week considered the right thing to do, even if they fell short of expectation.

Historical epics had been long out of fashion. Lord Jim (1965) and The Agony and the Ecstasy, also roadshow numbers, were among the year’s box office casualties while a completely different type of movie, bouncy musical The Sound of Music (1965), was cleaning up. It didn’t help that Doctor Zhivago opened at the same time as Thunderball, the fourth Bond, which surpassed expectations with collosal initial box office. Nor did reviewers help. While Variety hailed its “soaring dramatic intensity” and the New York Daily News called it a “haunting emotion-charged drama,” the more influential New York Times slammed its “painfully slow-going and inevitable tedium” and it was condemned by the New York Herald Tribune as a “soap opera.”

In fact, if audiences had been slow to latch on, that was only during the first week, for soon it turned into a phenomenon, ending the decade as the $38.2 million in rentals. Lifetime rentals topped $60 million.  

SOURCES: Kevin Brownlow, David Lean (Faber and Faber, 1996); Eddie Fowlie, David Lean’s Dedicated Maniac (Austin & Macauley, 2010); Pressbook for Doctor Zhivago; “Metro Plots Two Features for Geraldine Chaplin,” Variety, February 24, 1965, p5; “Zhivago LP Soars Over 6000,000 Units,” Variety, August 17, 1966, 43; “All-Time Champs,” Variety, 1993.

Behind the Scenes: The Great 1980s Hitchcock Revival

There was a contract makeweight that studios occasionally ceded, something they viewed as a form of vanity from their opposite number across the negotiating table. That was to be given the copyright to your own films seven years after initial release. Studios didn’t believe the concession was worth much than a few dollars to add to a star or director’s pension, otherwise they wouldn’t have allowed it in the first place. In the 1950s, with remarkably few exceptions, a film was done and dusted on initial release. Should there be any more juice remaining, that would be mopped up by a judicious reissue before the seven-year deadline was up.

Once the studio system collapsed in the late 1940s and long-term contracts became devoid, studios battled each other to win over stars and directors with a proven track record. In his negotiations, Alfred Hitchcock asked for, and received, the copyright for five of the pictures that would later prove to be the ones that formed the cornerstone of his revived critical  reputation.

In 1981, restoration, thanks to Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927), had become big business. But optimism only lasted as long as it took for Warner Brothers to lose a sizeable sum on a restoration of A Star Is Born (1954)  

Fortunately, another reissue poster boy was waiting in the wings. Universal, its classic division now headed by Jim Katz, looking for a follow-up to Napoleon, was in the right place at the right time. Legend has it that Hitchcock movies had gone missing from the circuits. While that was the case regarding the Paramount quartet to which he owned or shared copyright – Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and The Trouble with Harry (1955) – it was not true of the rest of his portfolio.

Critical acclaim for the director had grown faster in Europe than America, one measure of his standing being The 39 Steps (1935) chosen to close the annual Venice Film Festival in 1968.[i] The 39 Steps received a new lease of life in the U.S. in the 1970s as the result of an unusual stimulus. In 1971 PBS television kicked off the year with a five-month weekly series of classic foreign films, including this Hitchcock. Viewers were soon persuaded that there was nothing like seeing old movies on the big screen and following the broadcast the film was reissued in Washington, Pittsburgh and Dayton, in a double bill with The Lady Vanishes (1938), and on its own in Cleveland. [ii]

While exposure in small-capacity arthouses limited earnings, it burnished Hitchcock’s artistic reputation. Both The Lady Vanishes and The 39 Steps continued to entertain new generations of movie lovers and remained popular on repertory programs, for example, in New York and Boston, while The Lady Vanishes, nearly forty years late, made its debut in Japan along with Foreign Correspondent (1940) and Young and Innocent (1937) aka The Girl Was Young.[iii] Remakes of The 39 Steps (1978) starring Robert Powell, best known for the television mini-series Jesus Of Nazareth, and The Lady Vanishes (1980) with Elliott Gould and Cybill Shepherd only served to remind critics of the vastly superior originals.

After Hitchcock’s death in 1980, Universal bought up the Paramount package and in 1983 reissued four of them plus Warner Brothers’ Rope (1948) with new prints and advertising campaigns. Apart from The Trouble with Harry, none could complain of having been undersold or particularly neglected. But they did fit into the “lost classic” category because they were impossible to see, all withdrawn by Hitchcock from the theatrical market for decades, Rear Window, for example, last seen in 1962.

The films would be released in the following sequence – Rear Window, Vertigo, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Trouble With Harry and Rope – targeting small-to-medium first run theaters, which could support a lengthier engagement (seven to ten weeks) without feeling the commercial strain, rather than arthouses. Universal was bullish, demanding new film terms. The advertising campaign was uniform, Hitchcock’s name more prominent than any individual star. Drawing on the MGM Fabulous Four and Chaplin retrospectives, theaters were expected to commit to showing the films one after the other, achieving, in effect, a Hitchcock Festival lasting up to twenty or thirty weeks. No director aside from Chaplin had been honored in this fashion. Retrospectives of John Ford, Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks or William Wyler had been confined to arthouses or museums, individual films shown for one performance, not weeks at a time.

“Initially,” explained Jim Katz, “we’ll attract people who saw the films when they (first) came out but we’re counting on them to spread the word to the younger generation.” The studio viewed it as “an example of preservation and restoration that can also make money.” A commercial retrospective focused around one director appealed because Universal had other candidates, namely Preston Sturges and Douglas Sirk, who could benefit from a similar approach. The marketing employed a clever mixture of the artistic and commercial, where possible the individual films launched at film festivals, Rear Window leading the way by re-premiering at the New York Film Festival on September 30, 1983, beginning its New York engagement at four cinemas before rolling out in fifteen cities during October.[iv]  

The results were spectacular. Rear Window’s opening week in New York commanded $120,000 (equivalent to $400,000 today) running neck-and-neck with other big-budget films of the day, and taking $150,000 in one cinema in Chicago over four weeks. More importantly, when widened out to non-arthouses the movie held its own, with $130,000 from 27 in New York. By the end of November, the nationwide haul was $2.1 million and by the end of the year $3.8 million. Records were broken in Washington, Vancouver, San Francisco and Portland.

While Rear Window had been a big hit in its day, Vertigo had fallen some way short and there were question marks over whether the James Stewart-Kim Novak combination could match the James Stewart-Grace Kelly. While not hitting Rear Window peaks, Vertigo did better than expected, opening with $91,000 from four cinemas in New York, $50,000 in four cinemas in Los Angeles, $35,000 in San Francisco and $19,000 in Philadelphia. In America, the marketing strategy did not quite work out, the films, especially the last two in the series, better in arthouses than first run, but the Hitchcock Festival concept proved a winner. The next year, the reissues were themselves reissued, a double bill of Rear Window/Vertigo chalking up $14,200 in its first week in New York and Rear Window continuing to play the arthouses well into 1985.[v]

On its U.S. reissue Rear Window earned $4 million in rentals, Vertigo $2.5 million, The Man Who Knew Too Much $1 million, The Trouble With Harry $750,000 and Rope nearly $600,000.[vi] In addition, North By Northwest (1959) entered the equation.[vii] By the time the quintet had played out, for patrons suffering withdrawal symptoms, a Hitchcock Film Festival, all the films crammed into one week, rolled out among arthouses in 1985, whipping up nearly $250,000 in five weeks.[viii]

As important, in terms of legacy and commercial fulfillment, was the impact on ancillary markets. Priced at $59.98, the videocassette of Rear Window was quickly certified gold, meaning sales of fifty thousand copies, adding another $3 million in gross revenue. In due course, the entire quintet appeared on video followed by thirteen other Hitchcocks on a special video promotion.[ix] Screenings of rarer Hitchcocks were welcomed with delight and the precursor to theatrical or video release.[x] The five Hitchcock oldies were the most important reissues of the 1980s because, although an event, they were more accessible to the general filmgoer than the silent classics or Hollywood’s string of hard-done-by quasi-classics. Crucially, commercially they fitted in perfectly to the new dynamic, huge sums in theatrical followed by big ancillary sales. Hitchcock demonstrated that the reissue machine need never run dry if properly oiled and maintained through each new technological cycle or anniversary. In 1996 Vertigo underwent more rigorous  restoration and a 70mm version, after its presentation at the New York Film Festival, exhibited astounding commercial appeal – $148,000 from two cinemas in eight days and $800,000 from just eight cinemas in four weeks – and while the reissue was not on the scale of the 1983 revival the grand tally (gross, not rental) was $1.86 million (cueing a further ancillary round) and followed by the restoration of Rear Window which collected another $1.57 million (gross, not rental) in 2000. [xi]

SOURCES: Brian Hannan, Coming Back to a Theater near You, A History of the Hollywood Reissue 1914-2014 (McFarland, 2016) pp425-429.

[i] Brian Hannan, Hitchcock at the Box Office (Glasgow: Baroliant Press, 2104). This formed part of a retrospective of the director’s early films ending with The 39 Steps. Festival director Luigi Chiarini commented: “It seems fitting that young directors and film authors should learn from a great master of cinema.” But the homage was dropped after a festival boycott by U.S. producers. When it ran the next year, the closing film became The Lady Vanishes.

[ii] Hannan, Hitchcock at the Box Office. In 1971  The 39 Steps/The Lady Vanishes took $4,000 at the 150-seat Outer Circle Two ($1.75-$2.75) in Washington; in Cleveland The 39 Steps at the 448-seat World East ($2.50) grossed $3,600 while The Lady Vanishes at stablemate  448-seat World West ($2.50) took  $2,100. In 1972, the double bill grossed $2,300 at the 500-seat Guild ($2.50) in Pittsburgh and at the 1,000-seat Cinema East in Dayton, Ohio, clocked up $2,900 and $1,000. In 1973 it was reissued in Paris and also made $3,200 at the 455-seat Severance ($2.50) in Cleveland. Source: “Picture Grosses,” Variety.

[iii] Hannan, Hitchcock at the Box Office. In 1975, The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes were shown on a split week programme (i.e. one shown on three days and the other one four) at the 900-seat New Yorker Theater ($2-$3.50) in New York and made $4,200. The following year at Boston’s 150-seat Orson Welles II ($1.50-$3) the films were shown as a double bill for $4,800. (The week before, a double bill of the original The Man Who Knew Too Much and Young and Innocent had taken $4,900.) In Japan, The Lady Vanishes on a double bill with Casablanca notched up $14,500 in Tokyo, the fourth week of $9,000 an improvement on the $8,300 of the third. Source: “Picture Grosses,” Variety.

[iv] “Out of Circulation Hitchcock Pix to Be Released by UI Classics,” Variety, August 29, 1983, 3.

[v]  Hannan, Hitchcock at the Box Office.

[vi]  “Big Rental Films of 1983,” Variety, January 11, 1984, 11; “Big Rental Films of 1984,” Variety, January 16, 1984, 16.

[vii] Brian Hannan, Darkness Visible: Hitchcock’s Greatest Film, Glasgow: Baroliant Press, 2014). North by Northwest ran for six weeks in a tiny 199-seat theatre in Washington with weekly takings of up to $11,000, as well as Baltimore, Pittsburgh and Cleveland. In Chicago it was on a double bill with Dial M For Murder and in Boston with Fritz Lang’s Fury. Overall, it had added another $800,000 in grosses since its last major reissue in 1966. Source: “Picture Grosses,” Variety.

[viii] Hannan, Darkness Visible. In Boston the Hitchcock Festival took $7,400 in its first week and $10,000 in its second. In Washington second week revenues outgrossed the first, jumping to $18,000 from $13,700.  Source: “Picture Grosses,” Variety.

[ix] “Majors Gold and Platinum Titles Led by Warner,” Variety, January 13, 1984, X).  Cashing in on the reissues, Universal had sent Psycho out on video. 

[x] In Los Angeles a forty-six-film retrospective in Los Angeles saw rare screenings of his first film The Pleasure Garden (1925) as well as the 3D version of Dial M For Murder (1954).

[xi] Hannan, Darkness Visible. North By Northwest (1959) also received the restoration treatment, but was largely ignored by the public.

Behind the Scenes: From Cinerama to Imax

Given I’m on my annual Cinerama binge, it’s interesting to see how current giant-screen format Imax developed from the previous king of the giant screens, Cinerama.

Quiz question: what connects King Kong (1933) to Cinerama? Follow-up quiz question: what connects Lawrence of Arabia (the man not the film) to Cinerama? Tie-breaker: what connects Cinerama, which had its heyday in the 1960s, to the current Imax.

Merian Cooper, the producer behind King Kong, and Lowell Thomas, the broadcaster whose fame was built on the dramatic footage he took of Lawrence of Arabia during World War One, were both vital to the development of the new screen sensation Cinerama, which made its debut two years before Twentieth Century Fox unveiled Cinemascope.

Both Cinerama and Imax began as vehicles for documentaries, the cinematography they involved initially considered too cumbersome for Hollywood directors to use. Initially, also, both formats were presented in cinemas specifically designed for showing films made in the process.

But, effectively, both Cinerama and Imax followed the same business model, one that Hollywood only too readily appreciated. They were premium priced products. Whereas most items you buy are the same price wherever you make the purchase, movies followed an extended version of the way publishers sold books. Readers had to pay extra to be first in the queue for a favorite author’s latest work, the hardback version of a novel appearing about a year in advance of the cheaper hardback.

In the silent era, Paramount instituted a food chain for movie presentation. Pictures opened first in the big city center theaters at top dollar prices ($2 – the equivalent to $35 now – not unusual in the 1920s) before working their way down a dozen different pricing levels until they reached the cheapest cinemas. As the business developed, although the U.S. cinema capacity grew to around 20,000 outlets, Hollywood reckoned that 70 per cent of a movie’s income came from a fraction of those houses, primarily from the more expensive first- or second-run cinemas.

Treatment of audiences is more democratic now. All tickets cost the same and the food chain is long gone, but in the 1950s and 1960s when Hollywood was battling the beast of television it appeared that audiences could be wooed back to the movies by giving them something bigger and better – and they were happy to pay the price. Imax follows the same pricing strategy.

Cinerama was not just the ultimate in widescreen but it offered visceral thrills. Given camera point-of-view audiences raced down a rollercoaster in This Is Cinerama (1952) and were astonished to see different global vistas presented in their full glory rather than as mere backdrops to actors. And while audience response was astonishing even by industry standards, and receipts tumbled in hand over fist, the concept soon lost popularity as audiences moved on to the more dramatically-accessible Cinemascope and its imitators and by the 1960s the format was more or less dependent on the company spinning out its back catalog in endless reissues.

Hence, the move towards dramatic storylines as instanced by How the West Was Won (1962) and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), both initially presented in the premium-priced roadshow, separate performance, format. In quick fashion, too, Cinerama dispensed with the cumbersome three-lens camera and invented a single-lens alternative which made it much easier for directors.

During the 1960s Cinerama presented another eleven big Hollywood pictures ranging from It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World (1963) and Grand Prix (1966) to Ice Station Zebra (1968) and Krakatoa, East of Java (1969). But as the industry hit the financial buffers at the end of the decade, the writing was on the wall, and although Cinerama invested in 35mm movies like Straw Dogs  (1971) the game was over for the format by 1972.

Imax was pretty soon positioned as its natural successor, unveiled in 1970 in Japan with Tiger Child, the first purpose-built cinema opening in Toronto in 1971 with North of Superior. The screen was much bigger than anything Cinerama or 70mm had offered. It was over three times the size of Cinerama. But it was of different dimensions; where Cinerama went wider, Imax went taller.

But again, the camera was an obstacle for Hollywood use. And like Cinerama, the format’s attraction was sheer spectacle. All the initial output was documentary-based, often with an educational purpose, though soon progressing to what was termed “entertainment” (Everest, 1998) and the movies were short by Hollywood standards, often less than an hour, which permitted Imax theater operators to present a greater number of daily screenings than an ordinary cinema.

Initially, they were not specifically premium-priced, but potentially more profitable because of the number of daily showings. Theaters typically kept 80 per cent of the box office which limited entrepreneurial interest since budgets for these movies were in the $6 million-$12 million range, not low enough to easily turn a profit. The movies could run for months, but there was the same problem as before – shortage of new product.

By 1990 Imax had largely pulled out of exhibition, ownership limited to nine theaters, and out of production.

Oddly enough, it was reissue that revived Imax. Disney planned a reworked version of its classic Fantasia (1940) as a method of generating more money from a picture that had already grossed $184 million on video. Traditionally, Fantasia got its best results from limited release, its previous revival outing shown in a maximum of 500 houses. Nor did Disney agree to the usual financial terms, demanding a 50 per cent share of the box office, rather than the normal 20 per cent.

Fantasia 2000 (2000) was released in 54 cinemas willing to commit to an 18-week run. While every Imax record was smashed, the picture, at a cost of $90 million, didn’t break even. But it did usher in Imax as a reissue vehicle. Disney used Imax for the 10th anniversary relaunch of Beauty and the Beast (1992), bringing in an extra $25 million in rentals. Two years later The Lion King (1994) in Imax brought in $15.6 million and Apollo 13 (1995) $1.7 million.   

Naturally enough, Disney recognized the potential for Imax for new films and made Treasure Planet (2002) in an Imax version. But the big boost came with The Matrix sequels. Both The Matrix Reloaded (2003) and The Matrix Revolutions (2003) were digitally remastered for Imax, the latter the first to be shown simultaneously with the ordinary print.

Nowadays, Imax is part of the release mix, bringing a hefty chunk of premium-priced box office to the overall gross and also, as witness the current Interstellar (2014) a hyped-up reissue vehicle.

SOURCES: Brian Hannan, Coming Back to a Theater Near You, A History of Hollywood Reissues (McFarland, 2016) p5, 10, 12, 295, 297-298; Kim R. Holston, Movie Roadshows (McFarland, 2013 )p 112-113; James B. Stewart, Disneywar (Simon and Schuster, 2008), p346-347; “A Decade of Limited Release,” Variety, February 18, 1998, p23; “Eric J. Olson, “Fantasia Signs Up Increase,” Variety, May 24, 1999, p32; Joseph Horowitz, “A Fantasia for the MTV Generation,” New York Times, January 2, 2000; “Fantasia Hits Imax Record,” Variety, January 4, 2000, p7; “Top 125 Worldwide,” Variety, January 15, 2001, p24; “The Top 250 Worldwide,” Variety, January 6, 2003, p26.

Behind the Scenes: “Number One” (1969)

Apart from Ben-Hur and El Cid, most of Charlton Heston’s movies in the 1960s were domestic box office disappointments. Despite this, he was deemed to be still flying high at the marquee, placed seventh in the annual star rankings just as negotiations began in 1967 for Pro (the title changed to Number One just a few months before release). Given there was little interest in American sports in the rest of the world, it was deemed a gamble. That was not just reflected in the budget – a miserly $1.15 million- but in Heston’s salary of $200,000. He and director Tom Gries (Will Penny, 1968) agreed to “work at substantially lower incomes in exchange for a bigger percentage.”

But to make any decent money, of course the movie had to be a big hit. Compare that to the $750,000 he stashed away for The Hawaiians (1970), admittedly after Planet of the Apes (1968) hit the jackpot, but still. From The War Lord, Heston had “learned actors should not put their own money into scripts,” but taking a pay cut appeared a more sensible route.

The movie was a long time coming to fruition. Initially, the idea had been rejected by National General and Martin Ransohoff of Filmways who worked with MGM. By April 1966, Heston was dejected. “Nothing stirring on Pro,” he recorded in his journal. But he understood the need not to “peddle the project” since “it tarnishes my image as an eminently in-demand actor.” Franklin Schaffner (Planet of the Apes) was initially keen, but dropped out after United Artists insisted on smaller fees against a bigger back end, star, director and producer to share 75 per cent of the profits, the kind of deal you get offered “when you want to make a film more than a studio does.” Tom Gries (Will Penny, 1968) was the next directorial target.

By June 1967, the deal was done for Heston, Gries and Selzer. ”I’m damned if know who will write the script,” noted Heston, “No one very expensive, I guess.” In July, he was in San Diego “investigating pro footballers in their natural habitat.” The NFL agreed to allow the New Orleans Saints to participate. David Moessinger had written two screenplays, Daddy-O (1958) and The Caper of the Golden Bulls (1967), but struggled to meet Heston’s expectations.

The actor felt the writer hadn’t “succeeded in dramatizing the most difficult and the most important element of the story. Why Caitlin feels as he does.” His wife, Lydia, agreed. “If women’s can’t relate to the story, then it’s just a picture about a football player and we’re in trouble.” UA had set a deadline and the screenplay would decide whether it was a go or no. Heston planned to get Gries to work on the script, and he subsequently nailed the vital scene.

Even when UA gave the go-ahead there were problems integrating the shooting schedule with that of the Saints which would require filming training camp in summer 1968 and the rest in the fall. Bob Waterfield was teaching Heston how to quarterback. Soon he would have “delusions of adequacy.”  But the training took its toll in the shape of a pulled muscle. In his first proper game, he was “blitzed” 16 times. He ended one day “taped and doped, in the traditional bed of pain.”

Meanwhile, casting proceeded. Heston had “mixed feelings” about Eva Marie Saint (The Stalking Moon, 1968) and Joanne Woodward (Big Hand for a Little Lady, 1966). Suzanne Pleshette (A Rage to Live, 1965) was considered as well as Jean Simmons (Rough Night in Jericho, 1967) – “I think she’d be good for it,” noted Heston. Finally, he pushed for Jessica Walter (Grand Prix, 1966) – “old enough to be plausible as the wife, young enough to manage the flashbacks” – only to find Gries not so keen and preferring Anne Jackson (How to Save a Marriage and Ruin Your Life, 1968). When the situation was resolved in favor of Walter, Heston discovered she was being lined up for a television drama about pro football. The second female lead went to Diana Muldaur.

Meanwhile, Heston was having trouble with Gries. “His attitude towards this film…is very questionable…perhaps it has to do with his recent achievements as a director in theatrical films…he’s finding the wine a bit heady.” Gries fell behind schedule, but finished ahead of it, saving about $30,000. An important scene showing Walters and Heston in bed before the wedding didn’t work and was cut.

Keeping tabs on the budget was producer Walter Selzer, who had worked with the star on The War Lord (1964) and Will Penny, and, would team up with him again for The Omega Man (1971), Skyjacked (1972), Soylent Green (1973) and The Last Hard Men (1976). “You have to be realistic about the subject matter,” said Selzer. “Every story has a certain price and if you try to cheat on your requirements it shows on screen.” That said, he was king of the penny pinchers. “We didn’t use a single piece of new lumber,” he boasted, meaning they didn’t built a single set, instead adapting or re-using old ones.

On location, he negotiated “locked-in” costs, “a flat pre-arranged price” for variety of elements which had a tendency to become variable, increasing costs, such as space on a sound stage, equipment and the editing suite. Cameraman Michel Hugo had to agree to shoot in any weather. “This is very important. Very often a cameraman will refuse to shoot if the weather is questionable, claiming the shots won’t match and then you have the whole company idle for a day when on location.” He nailed down composer Dominic Frontiere (Hang ‘Em High, 1968), paying him a flat fee, with Frontiere left with the task and cost of hiring an orchestra and rehearsal and recording space.

Despite showing his rear end in Planet of the Apes, Heston was touchy about the sex scene. “It’s not really a nudie scene but an intensely sexual scene,” he explained, “There’s not a bare breast seen.” Heston had enough controversy elsewhere. As president of the Screen Actors Guild he appeared not to note the irony that while he was pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars a picture, he could complain that extras were the cause of the “major increase in costs” of movies.

He was also accused of being hypocritical, signing for Eagle at Escombray, directed by Alexander Mackendrick, to be made by CBS while at the same time, as union leader, pressurizing the Department of Justice to prevent television companies such as ABC and CBS entering the movie business. (It was never made.) For that matter, he shouldn’t have been trying to get National General to fund Pro either, since it owned a cinema chain, and that, too, went against previous Department of Justice rulings.

While Heston like the movie – “some of the best contemporary work I’ve done” – UA did not. The title changed to Number One. By the time the movie appeared, in August 1969, Heston couldn’t have been hotter, thanks to the unexpected success of Planet of the Apes. So the world premiere in New Orleans was allocated a full array of razzamatazz – in the parade were the New Orleans football team, its mascot, cheerleaders and a stream of antique cars, but there was a fire in Heston’s hotel.

Box office was less rosy. There was a decent $179,000 from 32 in New York, a “big” $9,000 in Washington, a “hotsy” $24,000 in Baltimore (and $20,000 in the second week), a “neat” $12,000 in San Francisco and a “trim” $27,000 in St Louis but mostly the figures were “mild”, “okay”, or “fair.” Outside of first run it couldn’t run up any juice. Estimated rentals were $1.1 million, so just about break-even, but United Artists, understandably despite Heston’s contention that it was about a man not American football, refused to give it any meaningful release overseas.

SOURCES: Charlton Heston, The Actor’s Life, Journals 1956-1976 (Penguin, 1980); “All-American Favorites of 1966,” Box Office, March 20, 1967, p19; “Charlton Heston Denies Conflict Between Eagle Role, SAG Policy,” Box Office, January 15, 1968, pW3; “Sports, Flop-Prone Theme Still Dared,” Variety, September 25, 1968, p2; Army Archerd, “Hollywood Cross-Cuts,” Variety, December 18, 1968, p22; Army Archerd, “Hollywood Cross-Cuts,” Variety, February 5, 1969, p34; “Number One Parade To Precede Premiere,” Box Office, August 18, 1969, pSE5; “Falling Stars,” Variety, September 3, 1969, p70; “Critics Wrap Up,” Variety, September 24, 1969, p26; “Variety Box Office Charts Results 1969,” Variety, April 29, 1970, p26.  Weekly box office figures – Variety, 1969 : August 27, September 3, September 10, September 17, September 24

Behind the Scenes: “Viva Maria”(1965)

The shooting of Le Feu Follet in 1963 had proved so depressing for director Louis Malle that halfway through the filming, alone on a Sunday afternoon in his Parisian apartment, he jotted down the two pages that turned into Viva Maria! He had worked with Brigitte Bardot before on A Very Private Affair/ La Vie Privee (1962) but even with her presence it was made in virtual isolation. So he was unprepared for the brouhaha that awaited. The media had created a rivalry between the two stars – Bardot and Jeanne Moreau – which was ironic given it was a film about friendship.

Since this was Brigitte Bardot’s first movie-related trip across the Atlantic, her arrival presaged a media firestorm. Over 250 journalists, most representing international outlets, turned up for the first day of shooting. That media pressure created “an almost unbearable atmosphere.” Days were lost due to publicity commitments, as print journalists, photographers and television crews – including one from France making a 52-minute documentary – descended on the production. Such was the potential for chaos, paparazzi were banned. Bardot was more accustomed to media intrusion than her director, batting back inane questions with practised repartee. The qustion: “What was the happiest day of your life?” brought the response, “It was a night.”

This was only Malle’s sixth film. Unlike other directors who came to the fore in the French New Wave he had not first been a critic, but had attended cinematography school in Paris and his breakthrough came on the Jacques Yves-Cousteau documentary The Silent World (1956). Hired as camera operator, he was promoted to co-director. Both Elevator to the Gallows (1958) and the controversial The Lovers (1960) had starred Moreau. On the back of the critical success of Le Feu Follet/The Fire Within (1963), which won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, Malle struck a four-picture deal with United Artists.

He had been attracted to screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere after becoming aware of his work on Diary of a Chambermaid for Luis Bunuel. They worked together on the script of Viva Maria! while Malle was directing the opera Rosenkavalier in Spoleto, where he had shot A Very Private Affair. Like most French filmmakers of his generation the western was “a very cherished genre.” With Viva Maria! he intended a spin on the American notion of two men, “two buddies,” in action together, along the lines of Robert Aldrich’s Vera Cruz (1954) starring Burt Lancaster and Gary Cooper.

But in movies like Vera Cruz, Fort Apache (1948) with John Wayne and Henry Fonda or John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Red River (1948), the two stars, even if eventually settling their differences, were at odds for most of the picture.

“We thought it could be fun to put Bardot and Moreau in the same situation as Cooper and Lancaster,” said Malle. Both director and screenwriter had enjoyed a rich childhood fantasy based on the book editions of magazines like Le Monde illustre, so, in terms of locale, they provided inspiration. The movie aimed “to combine an evocation of childhood fantasies with a pastiche of traditional adventure films…it was never intended to be realistic – more projection of the imagination. Ideally, I was hoping the spectator would see it with the wonderment of the child.”

The notion of “floating between genres” didn’t sit easily with French critics and he was accused of “trying to do too many different things.” As with any big budget picture, problems multiplied, not just the difficult logistics but with the Mexican government, which, as John Sturges had found on The Magnificent Seven (1960) could take a tough line with movie makers. A previous censor Senorita Carmen Baez had stipulated that movies could not mention the 1910 Mexican Revolution, so to comply with that regulation the action was moved to an earlier date, 1904, and in an “unnamed South American country”

A combination of the number of locations – as well as Churabasco studios in Mexico City, the unit travelled to Guautla, Morelia, Tepotzlan, Cuernavaca, Vera Cruz, Puebla, Guanajuota and Hacienda Cocoyoc – and budget meant that the production could not afford to linger at any one locale, scenes had to be finished off within the planned schedule because the entire unit had to be on the move the next day.

In terms of shooting, Malle explained, “I always had to adjust and compromise…the sky was…desperately blue – the very hard light was a problem for the girls.” Ideally, Malle would have preferred shooting in the early morning or late afternoon, but time pressures and the production caravanserai meant the main scene was shot “with the sun at its zenith.”

Malle was later conscious that the film envisioned in the screenplay didn’t make it onto the screen. The irony, for example, of George Hamilton being cast as a Jesus Christ figure was lost on an audience which took him more seriously than intended. “It was comedy,” observed Malle, “but it was easy not to perceive it as comedy.” Similarly, Moreau’s “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” speech didn’t come across as humorous. “The audience either didn’t get it or took it seriously. That’s the danger of pastiche. It’s a very risky genre.”

He worried that the film’s budget – originally set at $1.6 million – and top-name stars might get in the way of the style of movie he was trying to make. At one point he suggested to UA that they cut the budget, switch to English and hire younger stars like Julie Christie and Sarah Miles, neither of whom at that point had enjoyed career breakthrough roles. The presence of the big stars “transformed the film into something else.”

The shoot was plagued by illness. Bardot and Malle were incapacitated while when Moreau slipped on a stone stairway breaking a shin bone and requiring stitches to a cut under her chin it was the third time she required time off, including suffering an affliction on her first day of shooting. An extra was killed on 24 May 1965 during the filming of the cavalry charge. Whether Malle took time off to get married to Anne Marie Deschodt on April 3 is unclear because, by then, staff were already having to work overtime to make up for lost days. The budget mushroomed to $2.2 million. Four weeks behind schedule, the movie, which had begun shooting on 25 January 1965 finally wrapped in June.

For its opening bookings in New York, at the Astor and Plaza, beginning 20 December 1965, the film was subtitled – by playwright Sandy Wilson of The Boyfriend fame no less – but thereafter was dubbed, Malle unhappy with the outcome, especially with the actress for Bardot. In the run-up to the launch, there was media overkill. Bardot  was mobbed by the media on arrival at JFK airport (and also on departure) and held another press conferences in New York.

Small wonder the press were so hyped. Bardot, considered the sex symbol of the decade, was putting in her first personal appearance in the U.S. While the movie opened to “smash” business at the Astor and Plaza first run, and knocked up a decent $127,000 from 25 houses on New York wide release – not far off A Patch of Blue on $160,000 from 27 but miles behind The Chase with $292,000 from 28 – that level of box office wasn’t repeated elsewhere.

In retrospect, it was obvious Bardot lacked the marquee status the studio anticipated. The bulk of her movies had played at arthouses or seedy joints, and they had all been sold on the kind of sexuality that kept them outside the mainstream. Noted Variety, “Brigitte Bardot has not made a box office dent in more than three years but her popularity with the press doesn’t seem to have flagged.” A not unknown phenomenon, of rampant media coverage not translating into receipts. A battle with the local censor in Dallas didn’t help. So all the hoopla was to no avail – it flopped in the U.S.

Elsewhere, the publicity teams took a more upscale approach. In Paris, the Au Printemps department store, the largest in the city, devoted a series of window and internal displays to the movie promoting different fashionable aspects. It finished third for 1966 at the Parisian box office, with 602,840 admissions not that far behind Thunderball’s 806,110 admissions but had twice the audience of the nearest U.S. competitor Mary Poppins and did three times the business of Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, the next American movie on the list.

In Britain, flamboyant hairdresser Raymond created 24 different hairstyles as a fashion tie-in while Le Rouge Baiser created a different lipstick for each of the two main characters. Overall, it proved “one of the most successful fashion tie-ups ever,” the results seen at the box office.

It opened in London’s West End at the newly-built Curzon Mayfair which specialized not so much in arthouse pictures but upmarket, classy, fare, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) followed it. It ran for eight weeks before embarking on a circuit release and returned to the West End the following year as support to another Moreau vehicle 10.30pm Summer. Bardot and Moreau were nominated for Baftas in the Best Foreign Actress section. It was ranked third out of foreign releases in Switzerland, sixth in Germany and made the top ten in Japan

Oddly enough, in socialist countries “it was very well received” and at Berlin University, according to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, “they were fascinated.” The two women represented different aspects of the struggle against repression, one promoting armed struggle, the other trying to achieve revolution without violence.

Overall it was a profitable venture. The poor $825,000 in U.S. rentals was compensated by an overseas tally of $4.1 million which meant, in the United Artist profit league for 1966, it finished seventh.

Malle only completed two pictures in his four-picture UA slate – Le Voleur / The Thief of Paris (1967) being the other. Another project set in the Amazon in 1850 came to nothing as did a separate deal to direct Choice Cuts for Twentieth Century Fox.

SOURCES: Malle on Malle, edited by Philip French (Faber and Faber, 1993) pp45, 49-54; “Bardot Due in Mexico,” Variety, December 9, 1964, p26; “Louis Malle’s Four for United Artists,” Variety, January 13, 1965, p3; “Bardot Swamped by Mex City Newsmen,” Variety, February 3, 1965, p17; “Filming Viva Maria in Mexico,” Box Office, February 15, 1965, p12; “Arnold Picker Chides Malle’s Pace,” Variety, April 7, 1965, p2; “No Newsmen at Can-Can,” Variety, April 28, 1965, p13; “Jeanne Moreau Injury,” Variety, May 19, 1965, p3; “Complete Viva Maria,” Variety, May 25, 1965, p15; “Extra Killed in Viva Maria Bit,” Variety, June 2, 1965, p5; “UA’s Viva Maria Booked for Astor, Plaza for Xmas,” Box Office, November 8, 1965, pE2; “Paris Window Display,” Box Office, November 22, 1965, pB1; “Malle Dickers UA on Three Films,” Variety, December 15, 1965, p5; “Picture Grosses,” Variety, December 22, 1965, p9; “International Sound Track,” Variety, December 22, 1965, p26; “TV Crafts Greeting to Bardot,” Variety, December 22; “Maria Viva $110,000,” Variety, December 29, 1965, p20; “Curzon Premiere for Viva Maria,” Kine Weekly, February 24, 1966, p3; “Viva Maria,” Kine Weekly, February 24, 1966, p21; “New York Showcase,” Variety, March 23, 1966, p10; “UA’s Location Plans Span Globe,” Kine Weekly, May 26, 1966, p36; “Thunderball As Topper,” Variety, June 1, 1966, p3; “1965-1966 Paris Film Season,” Variety, June 15, 1966, p25; “Story As Before,” Variety, July 13, 1966, p17; “Texas High Court Denies Viva Maria Re-Hearing,” Box Office, October 31, 1966, p7;  “U.S. Majors,” Variety, January 18, 1967, p24.

Behind the Scenes: Edward Zwick Uncensored

“I will never forget how casually Maria (Schneider of Last Tango in Paris fame) unbuttoned Joey’s shirt to hold her breast in one hand while eating a bagel with the other,” is just one of the memorable lines in director Ed Zwick’s (of Glory fame) memoir,  a very candid portrait of working in Hollywood. Glamor and grit ride side by side as he goes from being a celebrity-struck newcomer to dragging tears out of Harvey Weinstein, hearing all about Julia Roberts’s love life, endless battles on set with Brad Pitt, being offered a beer by Paul Newman in the star’s house and digging into the untapped emotional reservoir of Tom Cruise.

His mentor, director Sydney Pollack, allowed Zwick to observe as he prepped Out of Africa (1985). Pollack had a complicated relationship with Robert Redford. The star “was infallibly late.” Opposite personalities. Pollack was “voluble, excitable and punctilious” while Redford was “taciturn, laconic and laid-back.” Dealing with a proper star can be disconcerting. Asked what it was like to direct Barbra Streisand in A Star Is Born (1976), Frank Pierson said, “I wouldn’t know.”

Pollack offered Zwick sound advice about screenwriting. “Plot is the rotting meat the burglar throws to the dogs so he can climb over the fence and get the jewels, which are the characters.” Zwick’s first script, with writing partner Marshall Herskowitz, for Tri-Star, was a drama, Drawing Fire, about a Secret Service agent’s relationship with a corrupt cop. Dustin Hoffman wanted to play the lead. In conversation, Hoffman took “damn long to get to the point.” His involvement collapsed over his fee.

Jonathan Demme was originally slated for About Last Night (1986), an adaptation of David Mamet’s play Sexual Perversity in Chicago. When he pulled out, Zwick got the gig. If stars Rob Lowe and Demi Moore seemed very comfortable with the intimate scenes, that was because they had previously been an item. The movie did surprisingly well.

For a follow-up, Zwick passed on Thelma and Louise (1991) in favor of a different road picture, Leaving Normal (1992), originally set to star Cher and Holly Hunter. Jessica Lange entered the frame when Cher dropped out. After Hunter quit, Zwick signed up Christine Lahti and Meg Tilly. The picture bombed.

Next up was Shakespeare in Love with a script by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard to star Julia Roberts who, as it happened, couldn’t help falling in love with her co-stars, that included by now Kiefer Sutherland, Dylan McDermott and Liam Neeson. To play William Shakespeare, she wanted Daniel Day-Lewis, sending him a card that said, “Be My Romeo,” but he was already committed to My Left Foot. Casting for her co-star was cancelled while she maintained that, actually, Day-Lewis had agreed. Only, when Zwick contacted him, that turned out to be fantasy.

With casting renewed, Zwick and Roberts saw, among others, Ralph Fiennes, Russell Crowe. Hugh Grant, Colin Firth and Sean Bean. But none clicked with the star, although oddly enough she later teamed with Grant in Notting Hill (1999). It could conceivably have gone ahead with Paul McGann. A full screen test was arranged. However, it was obvious at that point that Roberts hadn’t nailed her English accent. She quit, leaving Universal $6 million out of pocket.

The movie remained in cold storage for two years. Then Harvey Weinstein came calling. But not at the price Universal demanded. For the next few years, Zwick kept trying to interest actors with the requisite marquee heft such as Kenneth Branagh, Winona Ryder, Jude Law, even Mel Gibson and Johnny Depp. By coincidence, Ryder was best buds with Gwyneth Paltrow and showed her the script. Since Paltrow was Weinstein’s go-to actress, she convinced the producer to come back in. But the consequence of that was that Zwick was pushed out. Or so Weinstein believed, until he was sued. Which meant that when the movie was awarded Best Picture at the Oscars Zwick was on the stage.

Comments Zwick wryly, “ As I stand there…listening to Harvey’s prepared, saccharine, self-serving acceptance, it occurs to me to shove him over the edge of the stage into the orchestra pit. Faced with the choice of committing an act of violence before a worldwide audience of 100 million movie fans or false modesty, I make the wrong choice.”

Alvin Sargent (Paper Moon, 1973) signed up for a “hefty fee” to adapt Jim Harrison’s novella Legends of the Fall (1994). Not only was he “maddeningly slow” but after a year’s work he “hadn’t been able to figure out how to do it.” William D. Wittliff (Country, 1984) was next to take a crack before Zwick called on Marshall Hershowitz’s wife Susan Shilliday – who had been story consultant and story editor on Zwick’s television show thirtysomething – to do a rewrite. Tom Cruise and Robert Duvall were briefly interested. Brad Pitt rode to the rescue.

“It’s not enough,” muses Zwick, “that a movie star be handsome; good-looking actors are a dime a dozen. And it’s not just the way the light and shadow plays on someone’s bone structure. It’s the unmistakeable thing behind their eyes, suggesting a fascinating inner life. We don’t know what’s going on inside their heads, but we definitely want to and that’s enough.”

Pre-production Tri-Star got cold feet and demanded Zwick knock $2 million off the budget. Instead, the director and Pitt halved their fees in exchange for a bigger backend. Four weeks before shooting was due to commence, they were short of a female lead, though Paltrow, among others, had read for the part, ending up with relative newcomer Julia Ormond (The Baby of Macon, 1993). Days before shooting, Pitt quit. Or tried to. He could go as long as he paid all the costs of preparation. So Pitt remained. After two weeks of shooting, Zwick was $1 million over budget, largely due to costume issues.

“There are all sorts of reasons an actor will pick a fight,” notes Zwick, and he had more than his fair share of them with Pitt. Although the movie’s resultant commercial success doubled both their salaries, they didn’t talk for a year – and never worked together again.

Denzel Washington didn’t want to do Courage under Fire (1996) until Zwick introduced the idea of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a new idea at the time. Matt Damon really did almost fall out of a helicopter. As Washington and Damon did a scene together “it was as if a spell had been cast over the set,” all watching the birth of new screen great. Screen improvisation isn’t all about fashioning new lines. It’s about an actor finding “emotion in an authentic way.” For the scene where Washington returns home, Zwick placed a bike along the walkway. Washington’s reaction to this unexpected obstacle was to pick it up and set it upright.

Tom Cruise originally passed on the John Logan script for The Last Samurai (2003) that Zwick felt was “still uncooked.” Uncooked or not, Russell Crowe, incidentally, was interested  in the Japanese lead. Zwick did a rewrite. Cruise liked the rewrite. “What struck me most as I got to know him was his insatiable appetite to keep improving.” Cruise was one of the actors whose involvement was an automatic green light for a studio. After completing another draft with  Hershowitz, Zwick got a call to go see Robert Towne (Chinatown, 1973). He went in dread. Towne “had an informal arrangement with Tom whereby he sometimes quietly rewrote his movies.” Instead of confrontation, Towne was encouraging. “Apparently, he just wanted to take my measure.”

There’s an animatronic horse – costing a million bucks – that appears for a few seconds in The Last Samurai in order for it to appear to the audience that in fact a horse was falling on Tom Cruise for a scene that would not have been possible, in the days before CGI, just with a stuntman. Zwick’s biggest problem on the picture was how to puncture Cruise’s self-assurance, get him to the “right emotional place…to touch some vulnerable part in him.” Zwick realized that simply asking the actor to go deeper wouldn’t work. It would look forced.

So just before shooting the critical scene, Zwick asked Cruise about his eight-year-old son, Connor. “I watched as he looked inward, and a window seemed to open and his eyes softened.” Zwick gently nudged him into position. “Go.”

Movie fans often wonder how a director gets into the movies. Usually, each tale is as odd as the last, a lucky break, meeting the right studio executive at the right time, coming across a studio hungry for your type of picture just at the ideal moment. Zwick has an odd an introduction. Living in Paris on a fellowship to observe experimental theater, he managed to creep onto the set of Love and Death (1975) and pepper Woody Allen with questions and he had a sneak preview of the Annie Hall (1977) script.

On returning to the U.S., he was accepted onto the American Film Institute’s director program. There were 26 pupils in the class, Zwick was one of six invited back for a second year. There, he struck up a lifelong friendship with Marshall Hershowitz. While studying, he read 10 scripts a week for United Artists, fell in with a merry band of more experienced Hollywood hands including Paul Schrader, Michael and Julia Phillips and Oliver Stone. After an improbable series of coincidences, he got  was employed as story editor for the tv series Family (1976-1980). Still aiming for a movie slot, he watched in horror as David Puttnam (Chariots of Fire, 1981) lasted for only six minutes of a private screening of Zwick’s 30-minute student film.

There’s not one of Zwick’s movies where he doesn’t regale you with an interesting anecdote about a star. More importantly, he provides insights into how movies are made, often touching on details that would not be obvious to anyone outside the business.

Ed Zwick, Hits, Flops and Other Illusions, My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood (Gallery Books) is available in print and kindle.

Behind the Scenes: “Glory” (1989)

Want to hire Matthew Broderick? Then you better be prepared for his mother. Worse, there was no get-out clause. Tri-Star Pictures, an offshoot of Columbia, was only making the movie because of Broderick, whose marquee value was based solely on a completely different type of picture, namely Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). Yes, he had won a Tony aged 21, and this was his sixth picture, of which only War Games (1983) hit the box office mark.

But the actor had a great deal to contend with in his personal life, grief and guilt as a result of driving his car into the wrong lane, crashing into an oncoming vehicle, killing two and seriously injuring himself and his passenger Jennifer Grey. His mother had been seriously ill, also. Glory proved another ordeal. “Nothing I might have done could possibly rival Matthew’s role in the theater of cruelty that was about to begin,” wrote director Ed Zwick in his memoir, Hits, Flops and Other Illusions (2024).

The same accusation of being a lightweight could as easily been levelled at Zwick, his only movie being About Last Night (1986), which though with serious undertones, was basically a modernized rom-com. He was best known for television, as writer-producer on thirtysomething (1987-1991), that “despite its success was an intimate, whiny talkfest.”

Broderick’s mother, Patsy, made her presence felt almost immediately. Before shooting commenced, the actor quit. Patsy didn’t like the script. By this point, Zwick hadn’t even met Broderick. Zwick received the news while on holiday in a cabin in the mountains. Communication was primitive, virtually walkie-talkie style. Eventually, Zwick agreed to look at the actor’s notes on the screenplay.

The script issues should have warned Zwick what he was taking on. At that time the film was called Lay This Laurel, the title of a monograph by Lincoln Kirstein, about the assault on Morris Island by the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the project initially on the slate of Bruce Beresford, Oscar nominated director of Tender Mercies (1983). Kevin Jarre, with just a ‘story by’ screen credit, for Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), to his name, had written the screenplay. “The script is perfect,” averred Jarre when Zwick demanded a rewrite. Beyond a slight polish and a shifting around of some scenes, Jarre wouldn’t budge. So Zwick took on the rewrite.

Broderick’s notes were within the realm of expectation, mostly to do with his character. But then he sent the script to Horton Foote (To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962), whose daughter he was dating. Then to Bo Goldman (One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1975). Neither writer took on the script and Goldman assured Zwick the script was fine. Then, the final bombshell. At her son’s insistence, Patsy was to work on the script. “I’m sure she was capable of warmth,” noted Zwick, “but I was never treated to that side of her, from the moment we met,” going through the script page by page, “she was contemptuous, demeaning and volatile,” her son sitting in silence. Amendments suggested by Patsy were readings from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and a scene where Broderick’s character was persuaded to take command of the regiment by his screen mother, to be played by his real mother.

As it happened, long before Broderick turned up, Zwick had been shooting footage from the 125th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg where 20,000 men in full uniform and weapons re-enacted the conflict. On a $25,000 budget, Zwick shot 30,000 feet including a cavalry charge, and created what was known in Hollywood parlance as a “sizzle reel.” Many of the re-enactors turned up as extras.

Cary Elwes (The Princess Bride, 1987) took a salary cut for his role. Zwick had been impressed by Denzel Washington in A Soldier’s Story (1984) and Cry Freedom (1987) but couldn’t afford him until producer Freddie Fields chipped in some of his fee. Morgan Freeman’s career was on an upward turn after an Oscar nomination for Street Smart (1987). Zwick found acting chemistry between this pair and Jihmi Kennedy and Andre Braugher. The actors “were hearing music I couldn’t even imagine,” wrote Zwick, “yet during each session, a transcendent moment, usually unwritten, could occur.”

Initially, however, Zwick felt he was making a disaster, “the lighting was too bright, the costumes were too new, and Matthew (Broderick) seemed uncomfortable in his role.” Luckily, a storm intervened. Not to provide rest or for Zwick to regroup. A mere storm wasn’t sufficient cause to postpone the scene of the regiment’s arrival in Readville. In the attendant fog, they were bedraggled, ankle-deep in mud, shoulders hunched against the lashing rain. Zwick realized that was the look he was after. He approached cinematographer Freddie Francis to shoot “without lights” in order to capture a similar mood. “Why didn’t you say so, dear boy?” was Francis’s encouraging response.

The next day, the first tent scene, provided another surprise. “I stared open-mouthed at the utter transformation that had taken place. Overnight he (Denzel Washington) has become Trip. Volatile. Funny. Mesmeric…it was impossible to take your eyes off Denzel…I had been in the presence of greatness. I’d never seen an actor command the focus by doing so little.”

Andre Braugher, in his debut, was also a revelation, after he’d mastered the art of hitting his marks. Once, during rehearsal for a scene, Zwick noticed that Morgan Freeman never looked Broderick in the eye. “Just as I was just about to move the camera to catch his look, I realized he was making a point of not looking at him…as a black man who had lived a lifetime wary of being punished.” Despite the traumas over the script, Broderick’s performance was “pitch perfect.”

The most emotionally powerful scene is the whipping. Twice, Zwick filmed Washington receiving three lashes. “But there was something more to be mined.” Making an excuse, Zwick asked Washington to re-do the scene, but then told John Finn, applying the whip, not to stop until Zwick called “cut.” Finn had delivered eight strokes before Zwick found what he was looking for. “The shame and mortification were real now… and in the magic of movies…a single tear appeared, catching the light at the perfect moment.”

Directorial sleight of hand in the battle scene compensated for limited budget and insufficient extras. Taking note of Kurosawa’s Ran (1985), Zwick filmed one “big image of each significant moment of the battle using the entire contingent.” The trick was to go back and shoot it all over again with a smaller group but each time filling the frame top to bottom with soldiers fighting. “When it’s cut together, the larger image stays in the audience’s mind as long as they’re never allowed to see blank space at the peripheries of the frame.”

To add to the battle, they let loose rockets and explosions on the night sky, almost losing a $300,000 camera car in the process. Much of the exposition, including the Patsy Broderick scenes, ended up on the cutting room floor. While Kevin Jarre had become a “cheerleader” for the film, Broderick and his mother walked out of a preview with the actor demanding to do his own cut of the movie. Zwick refused.

Released in December 1985, Glory was nominated for four Oscars including best director. Washington won Best Supporting Actor, Freddie Francis for Cinematography and Donald O. Mitchell, Greg Rudloff, Elliot Tyson and Russell Williams II for sound. Tri-Star refused to advertize in Black media. Zwick considered any “pushback” of Broderick’s character being perceived as a “white-savior narrative” as a “left-wing canard.”

SOURCE: Ed Zwick, Hits, Flops and Other Illusions, My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood (Gallery Books) 2024, pp69-105.

Behind the Scenes: The Rise and Fall of the Mini-Majors

Commonwealth United, the makers of A Black Veil for Lisa (1968) reviewed yesterday, was one of a flood of new entrants to the movie business in the middle to late 1960s. Variety, which always liked to put an easy label on things, tabbed them “mini-majors,” “near majors” or “instant majors” in the belief that any outfit that could string together a substantial annual output was worthy of being considered a contender to become a major player in the great movie game.

A caste system had operated in Hollywood since the 1930s. The “Little Three” of United Artists, Universal and Columbia were considered inferior to the likes of the “Big Five” of MGM, Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox, RKO and Warner Bros. By the  1960s the smaller units had been promoted and Disney had taken the place of RKO. But with product at an all-time low, the U.S. Government was inclined to rethink its stance on monopoly and permit cinema chains to enter the business – the Paramount Decree of 1948 having expressly forbidden the opposite, of studios owning cinema circuits.

National General was the first to challenge the government dictat. The Government in the 1940s had prevented Hollywood studios from becoming involved in television but now did something of a U-turn in permitting television giants ABC and CBS to invest in movies made under the aegis of ABC-Cinerama and Cinema Center, respectively.  More legitimate operations, by original Government standards, were the likes of Commonwealth United, American International (AIP), Embassy Pictures, and smaller units like Sigma 3 (in which producer Marty Ransohoff had a stake), Independent-International, Continental (backed by the Walter Reade arthouse chain) and Cinema 5.  

The mini-majors could make movies much faster than the established studios which had millions of bucks tied up in projects, books and plays, paid for and never made, deals with talent that didn’t work out, as well as bigger overheads and interest on loans running at $2 million a year per studio. For a short period the newcomers did well in the box office sweepstakes, in 1970, for example, Cinema Center beat Warner Bros in market share. And with the product well running dry and big studios being more selective about release dates, that still left considerable “playing time unused by big companies” that could be filled by “low-voltage commercial product.”

I’ve covered the National General tale before so suffice to say it did most of the heavy lifting in challenging the Paramount Decree and made such pictures as The Stalking Moon (1968) with Gregory Peck and Eva Marie Saint, Elvis in Charro! (1969), El Condor (1970), and James Stewart and Henry Fonda in The Cheyenne Social Club (1970) and was influential in the distribution of films made by other mini-majors.

Commonwealth United began as a real estate company formed in 1961 that took over the Landau-Unger movie production company in 1967 and began the serious business of creating a large enough movie roster that would make it welcome to the distributor. In these product-famine  times, anybody who could produce a movie could get a distributor, but the terms of the deal, if you were a one-off, favored the distributor. To achieve any kind of box office parity, you needed to show substantial intended output. Its initial entry into the business was as a distributor, in 1968 handling the U.S. release of spy thriller Subterfuge (1968) with Gene Barry, jungle picture Eve (1968), The Angry Breed (1968) mixing bikers and the movies, and heist picture Dayton’s Devils (1968), before biting the bullet with Italian-made A Black Veil for Lisa with British star John Mills top-billed.   

Commonwealth United couldn’t quite make up its mind whether to go down the A-movie or B-movie route. Its follow-ups to A Black Veil for Lisa were women-in-prison epic 99 Women (1969) and erotic thriller Venus in Furs (1969). But when it headed into the mainstream, it hit a box office barrier. Yugoslavian epic The Battle of Neretva (1969) with Yul Brynner flopped. Peter Sellers and Raquel Welch – snookered into fronting its lavish brochure, see photo above – couldn’t save The Magic Christian (1969). Robert Altman’s That Cold Day in the Park (1969) with Sandy Dennis, Julius Caesar (1970) starring Charlton Heston and The Ballad of Tam Lin (1970) with Ava Gardener all went down the tubes. The company closed down in 1971.

The bigger hitters, at least initially, promised more. Cinema Center, set up in 1967 using National General for distribution, and headed up by ex-Fox chief Gordon T. Stulberg, snagged deals with the likes of Doris Day, Jack Lemmon and Steve McQueen. Launch item  With Six You Get Eggroll (1968) starring Day and Brian Keith was followed by some potential box office bonanzas – The Reivers (1969) and Le Mans (1971) with McQueen, John Wayne in  Rio Lobo (1970) directed by Howard Hawks and Big Jake (1971), Richard Harris as A Man Called Horse (1970), Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970) with Dustin Hoffman and Faye Dunaway, William Holden in The Revengers (1971) and Lee Marvin and Gene Hackman in Prime Cut (1971).

But there was a high end price to pay. As with United Artists in the 1950s, Carolco in the 1980s and streamers today, big stars and directors took advantage of ambitious smaller companies. The price of even playing the game was high. Sure, there was reward. Little Big Man took in $15 million in rentals, The Reivers $8 million, Big Jake $7.5 million, A Man Called Horse $6 million. But that couldn’t stop the flow of red ink on calamities like early Michael Douglas vehicle Hail Hero (1969), Rod Taylor as a private eye in Darker than Amber (1970), Who Is Harry Kellerman (1971), Joseph Losey’s existential thriller Figures in a Landscape (1971) and a over a dozen more. Twenty out of 27 movies made a loss, the cumulative total running at £30 million. By 1972 CBS had had enough and closed shop.

ABC released its pictures through an offshoot of Cinerama called Cinerama Releasing Corporation. It, too, struck occasional gold. Charly (1968) won an unexpected Oscar for Cliff Robertson. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They (1969) did the same for Gig Young and helped Jane Fonda be recognized as a serious actress. And big names signed on: Ingmar Bergman for The Touch (1971), Sam Peckinpah and Dustin Hoffman for Straw Dogs (1971). Robert Aldrich made three – The Killing of Sister George (1969), Too Late the Hero (1970) and The Grissom Gang (1971). With its biggest hit They Shoot Horses only picking up $5.5 million in U.S. rentals and For Love of Ivy (1968) with Sidney Poitier $5 million and the bulk of the others striking out, ABC pulled out of the movie business in 1971.

Cinema owner-turned-distributor Joe Levine had been a thorn in the side of Hollywood for many years especially after his imported Hercules (1958) showed you could sell anything to the American public if you put enough advertising dough behind it – a notion he signally undercut when all the money in the world couldn’t turn Jack the Ripper (1959) into a hit. He turned more legit, in Hollywood eyes at least, by teaming up with Paramount for The Carpetbaggers (1964) and Nevada Smith (1966) and funded Zulu (1964) – a hit most places except the U.S. After the critical and financial success of The Graduate (1968) and The Lion in Winter (1968) he sold Embassy to one of those conglomerates that had started sniffing around the business, Textron, and the company was renamed Avco Embassy. Kept on as president, he quit in 1974 and Avco Embassy pulled out of movies a year later only to re-enter the fold in 1977 and under Robert Rehme shift into lower-budgeted numbers like The Fog (1980) and Time Bandits (1981). He increased turnover fourfold. In later years, the company changed owners and names several times.

Some of the less well-publicized orgaizations lasted longer. Independent-International, set up by Sam Sherman, Dan Kennis and Al Adamson in 1968, kept budgets down to an average $200,000 a picture and reckoned that even with limited opportunity could pull in rentals of $300,000. After the success of biker picture Satan’s Sadists (1968), the company put 13 movies in circulation without troubling the New York first runs. Typically, a movie would garner 4,000-6,000 playdates. That company is still in existence.

Going back to where we started with Commonwealth United, you’re probably very familiar with American International for its Edgar Allan Poe, beach party and biker pictures. But in 1969 after co-founder James Nicholson quit and the company went public with the aim of entering the Hollywood mainstream, it relied on Commonwealth for distribution, releasing 31 pictures in this fashion. Beginning with adaptations of classics like Wuthering Heights (1971) and Kidnapped (1971) and moving onto big-budgeters like Force 10 from Navarone (1978) and still dipping into horror and exploitation AIP coninued in one guise or another until 1980.

SOURCES: “Nat Gen Readying 7th Film,” Variety, November 16, 1966, p4; “Instant Majors: A Short Cut,” Variety, October 25, 1967, p5; “Same Upper Uppers,” Variety, October 30, 1968, p12; “Commonwealth: Near Major,” Variety, February 19, 1969, p5; “Commonwealth Full Sell,” Variety, May 7, 1969, p7; “Nat Gen Rolling Six,” Variety,  October 8, 1969, p6; “Topheavy Film Studios Fade,” Variety, October 29, 1969, p1;  “Nat Gen Denies Phase-Out,” Variety, August 12, 1970, p5; “1970 Domestic Theaters Sweepstakes,” Variety, January 13, 1971, p38; “Today’s Majors As Instant,” Variety, July 21, 1971, p7; “American Int Expected Inheritor of Cinerama Releasing,” Variety, July 31, 1974, p3.

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