box office – Page 2 – The Magnificent 60s

Behind the Scenes: “Bus Riley’s Back in Town” (1965)

Small wonder that Bus Riley’s Back in Town found scant appreciation on producer’s Elliott Kastner’s dance card. He preferred to have people believe that his career began with box office smash Harper / The Moving Target (1966) rather than the two flops – Kaleidoscope (1966) and Bus Riley’s Back in Town (1965) – that preceded it. As his son Dillon Kastner pointed out: “He always preferred to forget his first film. He liked to think his first film was Harper so he never put that title (Bus Riley) on his list of credits for investors.”

After jockeying in the Hollywood trenches for three years, Kastner should have been delighted to finally get his name on a picture after so many potential movies had slipped through his grasp. But he had good reason to want to forget the experience of working on Bus Riley. It sat on the shelf for a year and, minus the involvement of the producer, was “butchered” by the studio.

By the time the movie appeared it was the latest in a long line of failed attempts by former agent Elliott Kastner to get onto the Hollywood starting grid. He had previously been involved in a pair to star Warren Beatty – Honeybear, I Love You with a screenplay by Charles Eastman and Boys and Girls Together adapted from the William Goldman bestseller with Joseph Losey (Accident, 1966) lined up as director. Also on his scorecard were 1963 William Inge play Natural Affection, Tropic of Cancer from the controversial Henry Miller novel and The Crows of Edwina Hill. At the time of the Bus Riley opening, he had acquired a further seven properties.

Bus Riley was never intended as a major picture, the budget limited to $550,000 – at a time when a decent-sized budget was well over $1 million. Shot in Spring 1964, and in post-production in July, release was delayed until Universal re-edited it and added new scenes because Ann-Margret had achieved surprising movie stardom between her recruitment and the film’s completion. Along with Raquel Welch, she became one of the most glamorous stars of the decade and in building up her own career Welch clearly followed the Ann-Margret template of taking on a bucket of roles and signing deals with competing studios.

After making just three movies – A Pocketful of Miracles (1962), State Fair (1962) and Bye, Bye Birdie (1963) – Ann-Margret shot into the fast lane, contracted for three movies with MGM at an average $200,000 per plus an average 12% of the profit, substantial sums for a neophyte. On top of that she had four far less remunerative pictures for Twentieth Century Fox, three for Columbia, Marriage on the Rocks with Frank Sinatra and a couple of others. By the time Bus Riley finally appeared, she had expanded her appeal through Viva Las Vegas (1964) opposite Elvis and top-billed roles in Kitten with a Whip (1964) and The Pleasure Seekers (1964).

Universal also had another property to protect. Michael Parks was one of small contingent of novice actors in whom the studio had invested considerable sums, using them in television roles before placing them in major movies. Others in this group – at a time when most studios had abandoned the idea of developing new talent – included Katharine Ross and Tom Simcox who both appeared in Shenandoah (1965), James Farentino (The War Lord, 1965), Don Galloway (The Rare Breed, 1965), Doug McClure (The Lively Set, 1964) and Robert Fuller and Jocelyn Lane in Incident at Phantom Hill (1965).

However, the introduction of Parks had not gone to plan. He was set to make his debut in The Wild Seed (1965) – originally titled Daffy and going through several other titles besides – but that was also delayed until after Bus Riley, riding on Ann-Margret’s coat-tails, offered greater potential. Kastner had been instrumental in the casting of Parks – whom he tabbed as “a wonderful up-and-coming actor” – in The Wild Seed.

Also making their movie debuts in Bus Riley were Kim Darby (True Grit, 1969) and Canadian director Harvey Hart (Dark Intruder, 1965), an established television name. Hart joined David Lowell Rich and Jack Smight as the next generation of television directors making the transition. Universal was on a roll, in 1964 greenlighting 25 pictures, double the number of productions in any year since 1957.

Falling just behind Tennessee Williams league in terms of marquee clout, playwright William Inge had won an Oscar for Splendor in the Grass (1961) and been responsible for a string of hits including Come Back Little Sheba (1952) – Oscar for Shirley Booth – the Oscar-nominated Picnic (1955) starring William Holden and Kim Novak and Bus Stop (1956) with Marilyn Monroe.

Kastner had persuaded him to turn his little-known 1958 one-act play All Kinds of People into a movie-length screenplay. Inge was initially keen to work on a low-budget picture, anticipating “more freedom with an abbreviated budget.” He asserted, “You don’t have the front office calling you up all the time.” Since the movie was not initially envisaged as a star vehicle for Ann-Margret (and, in fact, she plays the supporting role) he saw it as a “way of breaking up that old Hollywood method of selling pictures before they were made” on the back of a big star and hefty promotional budget.

Unfortunately for him, once Universal realized they had, after all, a star vehicle, the studio concluded that her image was more important than the “dramatic impact” of the film. “When we signed Ann-Margret she wasn’t a big star but in six months she was and Universal became very frightened of her public image. They wanted a more refined image.”

Kastner and Inge were elbowed aside as Universal ordered a rewrite and reshoots. Inge took his name off the picture. The credited screenwriter Walter Gage did not exist, he was created to get round a Writer’s Guild dictat that no movie could be shown without a writer’s name on the credits.

Despite her supposed growing power, Ann-Margret had little say in preventing the changes either. She expressed her disappointment to Gordon Gow of Films and Filming: “You should have seen the film we shot originally. William Inge’s screenplay…had been so wonderful. So brutally honest, And the woman, Laurel, as he wrote her, was mean and he made that very sad. But the studio at the time didn’t want me to have that image for the young people of America. They thought it was too brutal a portrayal. They wanted me to re-do five key scenes. And those scenes completely changed the story. There were two of these scenes that I just refused to do. The other three I did, but I was upset and angry.”

Film historian James Robert Parish refuted Ann-Margret’s recollection of events. He claimed the changes were made at her insistence because she wanted to be the focal point of the narrative rather than Bus Riley (Michael Parks).

Harvey Hart reckoned Universal got cold feet after the audience attending a sneak preview made “idiotic” comments on the questionnaire. Recalled Kastner, “I had nothing but heavy fiddling and interference from Universal.” Even so, given it was his debut production, he wasn’t likely to disown then and didn’t follow Inge in removing his name.

Despite the changes, the movie received a cool reception at the box office. It turned in opening weeks of a “modest” $7,000 in Columbus, “slow” $9,000 in Boston, “modest” $9,000 in Washington, “lightweight” $10,000 at the 1642-seat Palace in New York, “mild” $4,000 in Provident, “so-so” $4,000 in Portland, “not so good” $7,000 in Pittsburgh, “okay” $7,000 in Philadelphia, and $98,000 from 22 houses in Los Angeles with the only upticks being a “good” $7,000 in Cincinnati and a “fast” $7,000 in Minneapolis. The movie didn’t register in Variety’s Annual Box Office Chart which meant it earned less than $1 million in U.S. rentals and was listed as a flop.

SOURCES: Elliott Kastner Memoir, courtesy of Dillon Kastner; “Elliott Kastner’s Partner on Honeybear Is Warren Beatty,” Variety, January 23, 1963, p4; “Elliott Kastner Will Helm Crows for U,” Variety, May 1, 1963, p21; “Escalating Actress,” Variety, May 22, 1963, page 4; “Raid Canadian Director,” Variety, March 4, 1964, p24; “Inge Thinks Writer Contentment May Lie in Creative Scope of Cheaper Pix,” Variety, May 6, 1964, p2; “Ann-Margret Into the Cash Splash,” Variety, July 22, 1964, p5; “Universal Puts 9 Novices Into Pix,” Variety, March 3, 1965, p25; “ A Collective Byline,” Variety, March 17, 1965, p2; “U Stable of Promising Thespians,” Variety, March 17, 9965, p2; “Fear Ann-Margret Going Wrongo in Her Screen Image,” Variety, March 24, 1965, p5; “Radical Kastner-Gershwin Policy: Get Scripts in Shape Way Ahead,” Variety, May 19, 1965, p19; “Warren Beatty Partner and Star of Goldman Tale Via Elliott Kastner,” March 31, 1965, p7; “Picture Grosses,” Variety – March-May 1965.

Behind the Scenes: United Artists Goes to War on a Low Budget – “Submarine X-1” (1968) and Five Others

With the contraction of Hollywood production in the 1960s, cinemas worldwide were always crying for pictures – any pictures – that could take up a weekly slot or pad out a double bill. (The single-bill programming that is standard these days was not welcome in most cinemas, except a prestigious few, and audiences expected to see two movies for the price of their ticket). Indie unit Mirisch had scored such a big hit with aerial war number 633 Squadron (1964) – it recouped its entire cost from British distribution so was in profit for the rest of its global run – that Walter Mirisch persuaded distribution partner United Artists to attempt to capitalize on the idea and thus set in progress a series of war pictures to be made in Britain.

There would be cost savings through the Eady Plan. Each film would have a “recognizable American personality in the lead” and have American directors. Budgets would be held under $1 million. Half a dozen movies were planned, the first appearing in 1967, the last in 1970.

Quite whether James Caan (Red Line 7000, 1965) passed muster as a well-known enough star to qualify as a “personality” at the time he headlined Submarine X-1 (1968) is debatable, as was the presence of James Franciscus (The Valley of Gwangi, 1969) in Hell Boats (1970) and Christopher George (Massacre Harbor, 1968) in The Thousand Plane Raid (1969) though Stuart Whitman (Rio Conchos, 1964) exerted a higher marquee appeal for The Last Escape (1970). Veteran Lloyd Bridges (Around the World under the Sea, 1966) who headlined Attack on the Iron Coast (1968) was probably the best known, but these days that was mostly through television. And David McCallum owed whatever fame he had to television as part of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. double act and the idea that would still be enough to attract an audience for Mosquito Squadron (1969) seemed dubious.

Beyond setting up the project, Walter Mirisch had little to do with the actual production, putting that in the hands of Oakmont Production, which beefed up the action with judicious use of footage from other pictures. Invariably, reasons had to be given to explain why actors with American accents were members of the British fighting forces – most commonly they were represented as Canadian volunteers or might have British nationality by dint of having a British mother.

Storylines followed a similar template. At its heart was a dangerous mission. Leaders were invariably hated for some previous misdemeanor or because they were ruthless and drove the men too hard. If there was romance – not a given – it would border on the illicit. And someone required redemption.

And while none of the stars chose – or were chosen to – repeat the experience, Oakmont established something of a repertory company behind the scenes, writers, directors and producers involved in more than one movie.

*Italian poster (photobusta) for “Hell Boats”. I found Japanese and Australian posters*
*for most of the films in the series*.

Boris Sagal (Made in Paris, 1966) directed both The Thousand Plane Raid and Mosquito Squadron and then made his name with The Omega Man (1971). Paul Wendkos (Angel Baby, 1961) helmed Attack on the Iron Coast and Hell Boats. Walter Grauman who had kicked off the whole shebang with 633 Squadron returned for The Last Escape. William Graham (Waterhole #3, 1967) as the only outlier with just Submarine X-1 to his name.

Veteran producer Lewis Rachmil (A Rage to Live, 1965) oversaw three in the series – Hell Boats, Mosquito Squadron and The Thousand Plane Raid. Another veteran John C. Champion, younger brother of celebrated Broadway choreographer Gower Champion, was involved in a variety of categories. Champion is almost an asterisk these days, best known these days for producing the film Zero Hour! (1957) that inspired disaster parody Airplane! (1980). He was only 25 when he produced his first picture, low-budget western Panhandle (1948). He was behind another four low-budget westerns pictures before Zero Hour!, which had a decent cast in Dana Andrews and Linda Darnell. But that was his last movie for nine years as he switched to television and Laramie (1959-1963), barely reviving his movie career with The Texican (1966) starring Audie Murphy.

He produced Attack on the Iron Coast and Submarine X-1 and was credited with the story for both plus The Last Escape. Irving Temaner produced The Last Escape and received an executive producer credit on Attack on the Iron Coast and Submarine X-1. Donald Sanford (Battle of Midway, 1976) was the most prolific of the writers, gaining screenplay credits for Submarine X-1, The Thousand Plane Raid and Mosquito Squadron. Herman Hoffman (Guns of the Magnificent Seven) wrote Attack on the Iron Coast and The Last Escape.

Cinema managers were not, it transpired, queuing up for the product. Most commonly, when reviewed in the British trade press, their release date was stated as “not fixed” which generally meant that United Artists was hoping the review would do the trick and alert cinema owners.

In the United States, they rarely featured in the weekly box office reports, though Portland in Oregon appeared partial to the product, Attack on the Iron Coast appearing there as support to Hang ‘Em High (1968), Mosquito Squadron supported The Christine Jorgensen Story (1970), Hell Boats supported Lee Van Cleef western Barquero (1970) while The Last Escape supported Mick Jagger as Ned Kelly (1970). To everyone’s astonishment a double bill of Hell Boats / The Last Escape reported a “big” $10,000 in San Francisco, but that proved an anomaly.

In Britain, the movies fulfilled their purpose as programmers, not good enough to qualify as a proper double bill, but accepted as supporting feature for a circuit release on the Odeon chain. Since UA supplied Odeon with its main features, it proved relatively easy to persuade the circuit to take the war films to fill out a program. This kind of second feature would be sold for a fixed price not sharing in the box office gross. However, they were given the kind of all-action poster they hardly deserved.

So in 1968 Attack on the Iron Coast went out with The Beatles Yellow Submarine. In 1969, Submarine X-1 supported slick heist picture The Thomas Crown Affair, which with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway in top form scarcely needed any help securing an audience. Hell Boats was supporting feature in 1970 to Master of the Islands (as The Hawaiians starring Charlton Heston was known). As well as accompanying it on the circuit Mosquito Squadron in 1970 made a very brief foray into London’s West End with thriller I Start Counting and then reappeared a few months later as an alternative choice of support for Billy Wilder flop The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. If you went to see Burt Lancaster western Lawman in 1971 you might have caught The Last Escape – equally it could have been If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be Belgium (cinema managers could choose either).

United Artists, under the financial cost in the early 1970s, pulled the plug on “programmers” such as these. Walter Mirisch in his biography, disingenuously suggested that the six movies had done relatively well. But that wasn’t supported by the studio’s own figures.

Collectively, they made a loss of $1.7 million. Only Attack on the Iron Coast made it into the black and then by only $59,000. Hell Boats lost $700,000. None of the movies earned more than $200,000 in rentals in the United States.

Although Mirisch managed to keep budgets down to around the million-dollar mark, they would have had to be much smaller to see a profit. Ironically, it was the cheapest, Attack on the Iron Coast costing $901,000, that made the most. Submarine X-1 lost $150,000 on a $1 million budget, Mosquito Squadron lost $253,000 on a $1.1 million budget while The Thousand Plane Raid lost $50,000 more on the same budget. The longer the series went on, the worse the losses – The Last Escape lost $449,000 on a $995,000 budget while for Hell Boats the budget was $1.36 million.

SOURCES: United Artists Archives, University of Wisconsin; Walter Mirisch, I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008) p204; Reviews, Kine Weekly – Feb 9 1968, Aug 31 1969, January 1970, April 18 1970; “Flops Loss-Cutting,” Variety, August 26, 1970, p6; “Picture Grosses,” Variety – March 13 1968, May 8 1968, April 24 1968, October 2 1968, June 10 1970, July 1 1970, July 8, 1970, August 12 1970, August 26 1970.

Behind the Scenes: Exploding the Myth of “Jaws” (1975)

Just to follow on yesterday’s reissue of an article of mine regarding the box office of Jaws, I thought it might be timely to ressurect an older article which sets the record straight on some aspects of the movie’s release.

This was in response to the publication of movie critic Richard Schickel’ s Spielberg: A Retrospective which continues to perpetuate the Jaws release myth. I can hardly expect Mr Schickel’s due diligence to cover my own modest tome, In Theaters Everywhere, A History of the Hollywood Wide Release, 1913-2017 (McFarland, 2019), which is now (apparently) the standard text (in case you didn’t know) for all questions relating to wide release, saturation, call it what you will.

Jaws was not a phenomenon in the normal sense. It did not belong to the realm of the unexplained. In fact, mystery was the least part. It was eminently explainable, despite realms of academics and observers regarding its explosion at the box office in tones of wonder. Hollywood loves a legend, especially one of its own making, and the movie did conform to two attractive narratives, that of the tyro director Steven Spielberg coming good and of the movie overcoming a massive budget over-run (from $3.5 million to $8 million) that could have sunk the enterprise at the outset.

Jaws did not not invent the wide release, summer release or the event movie.

To start with the biggest myth – the wide release – that had been around since the 1930s. The Wizard of Oz (1939) debuted on 400-plus. Warner Brothers signed up 400 for This is the Army in 1943. David O. Selznick created a new phrase for wide release, “blitz exhibitionism,” for Duel in the Sun (1946). In 1948 Twentieth Century Fox opened Iron Curtain, Republic Bill and Coo and Allied Artists The Babe Ruth Story at over 500 cinemas. Fast forward to 1960 and The Magnificent Seven’s initial theater haul was 750. Earlier in 1975, studios had gone for saturation broke with The Master Gunfighter opening on 1,000-plus with Breakout starring Charles Bronson claiming the record of 1,400 houses for the opening week.

In fact, far from inventing saturation or the summer blockbuster or even the event movie, the Steven Spielberg picture, was merely an extension, albeit a wildly successful one, of what had gone before. The problem with the scenario of “Jaws the Legend” is that too few people, academics and journalists alike, placed it against the backdrop of not just the previous few years but the prior decades during which saturation/wide release had flourished.

Long before Jaws came onto the scene, the 1970s had changed and the two conditions that had marked out the previous decade, the reduction in studio output and the increase in saturation, were the prime movers. Jaws was not the beginning of a new era, but very much the opposite, the triumphant culmination of an old one.

It owed a great deal to the other 1970s box office phenomena – Airport, Love Story, The Godfather, Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure and The Exorcist. Their most obvious common thread was that they were based on bestsellers and successful books enjoyed a publicity life and after-life all of their own, as well as providing marketing tie-up benefits and journalistic opportunity.

But turning bestsellers into films was not unusual, Gone with the Wind in 1939 the most obvious example. The top three movies of 1953 – The Robe, From Here to Eternity and Shane – were based on bestsellers as were 1958’s leading trio, Bridge on the River Kwai, Peyton Place and Sayonara. The Guns of Navarone (first in 1961), Spartacus (first in 1962), The Carpetbaggers (first in 1964), Thunderball (first in 1966), The Dirty Dozen (first in 1967), and The Graduate (first in 1968) were all taken from bestsellers. Airport, Love Story, The Godfather and The Poseidon Adventure were the number one films of their respective years, The Exorcist second in its.

The subject matter of The Godfather and The Exorcist attracted a mass of newspaper headlines, Love Story because it was such an unexpected hit, while Jaws afforded endless journalistic opportunity. The Godfather, The Exorcist and Jaws all had in common budget and shooting problems. Like Jaws, the theme tunes to Love Story, The Godfather and The Exorcist were million-sellers. Airport apart, none of the biggies boasted established stars, Marlon Brando, although a giant of the 1950s, no longer a box office attraction while Gene Hackman was a potential one-hit wonder prior to The Poseidon Adventure. Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw (Love Story), James Caan and Al Pacino (The Godfather), Ellen Burstyn (The Exorcist) and Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss (Jaws) were virtually unknowns.

The idea that summer was a release desert had not been true for more than a decade, Paramount launching ‘a powerhouse of important product’ – a total of eight pictures – in 1970 – Norwood had 1,400 bookings between May 27 and July 8 in four waves of 450 theaters – more, incidentally, than the number of theaters showing Jaws in its opening week – each running the picture for two weeks. In 1973 Twentieth Century Fox, MGM and Columbia opened a total of 19 movies during the season.

The Twentieth Century Fox schedule comprised the long-awaited reissue of The Sound of Music, Robert Aldrich’s The Emperor of the North, Battle for the Planet of the Apes (the fifth in the series), Jeff Bridges as The Last American Hero (with a tie-up with over 16,000 gas stations) based on articles by Tom Wolfe, and The Legend of Hell House, the whole shebang kicked off in late June by a featurettes on ABC and an eight-day television campaign.

Columbia reckoned it would need a company record 3,150 prints to meet demand for George C. Scott and Faye Dunaway in Oklahoma Crude, Burt Reynolds as Shamus, Charles Bronson in The Valachi Papers, romantic comedy Forty Carats, remake Lost Horizon, and concert documentaries Let the Good Times Roll and Wattstax.

The MGM septet included Yul Brynner in Westworld, Burt Reynolds in The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing and Shaft in Africa. In 1974, Twentieth Century Fox targeted summer with ten movies including Richard Lester period romp The Three Musketeers, heist drama 11 Harrowhouse, chase picture Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, Spys, and the ‘Ape-athon’, a quintuple bill of all the Planet of the Apes pictures, plus another outing for The Sound of Music. Substantial radio advertising was added to usual television/newspaper marketing mix, with stations in 30 key cities running an eight-week campaign.

The studio cleared $35 million over 13 weeks, up $5 million on its previous best summer in 1970. Paramount’s high voltage program included The Longest Yard and Chinatown. But it was not just the majors who recognized the importance of summer, Crown International and American International both reported record business for summer 1974.

The $1.8 million Universal spent marketing Jaws was both a large and modest amount. In proportion to production costs, it was less than Joe Levine devoted to Hercules or to the promotional budgets for four-wallers, and a lot less, than was allocated The Culpepper Cattle Companyor Breakout. That television accounted for 38percent was not astonishing either since research proved that newspaper advertising was more effective.

Although claiming to be the largest amount spent in television spot advertising, compressed into the three days prior to opening and opening day (June 20) itself, it was rather last-minute compared to the selling of The Man with the Golden Gun for which United Artists ran 700 prints of a teaser trailer in theaters six months prior to launch and 30-second advertisements on the ten top-rated television shows well in advance of opening.

The tactic of specifying which television slots of movie would advertise on, as Jaws did, was far from rare, four-wallers specializing in this, and Breakout had done the same. In fact, the record that Universal claimed for Jaws, too, was questionable since Breakout had 42 30-second spots compared to 23 for Jaws. Disney, overall, spent a lot more. Nor did Universal knowingly aim for a summer launch – only shooting delays prevented it opening at Xmas 1974. Nor did publisher and studio jointly adopt the same visual for Jaws from the start – a March 1974 trade advertisement in Box Office differed substantially from the iconic poster.

The marketing device of reporting grosses week-by-week was not novel either. Most the big hitters of the 1960s did not pull in money at top speed. Love Story changed all that. Paramount kept the industry and the wider newspaper planet up-to-date on a weekly basis of the movie’s unprecedented progress. Its $2.46million (actually $2.36million) in three days from 165 was the biggest in history and it set the seal on the industry reporting the weekend rather than weekly gross. The second weekend was $2.49million, the third $2.4million, the fourth $2million and the fifth $2.3million. That the second and third weekends both out-grossed the first, and the fifth weekend out-grossed the fourth, were publicity bonuses. The first five weeks topped $17.5million. Four weeks later, theater count risen to 231, it totaled $28.4million and two weeks further on, on 282 theaters, the gross stood at $35.4million.

When in 1972 The Godfather so quickly gunned down Love Story, it set in motion an ongoing marketing story, and the question facing each new hit, from The Poseidon Adventure to The Exorcist and The Sting, was box office speed and whether it could topple the reigning champion.

By 1975 accelerated grossing had become common: The Trial of Billy Jack hoisted $9 million in five days, The Man with the Golden Gun $5.1 million in a week, The Sting $7 million in two weeks, Papillon $11.25 million in three weeks, Airport ’75 $10 million in a month, Earthquake $7.3 million in a month, The Godfather Part II $22.1 million in under five weeks, Magnum Force $18 million in five weeks.

So when Jaws showed the potential to reach the very top, Paramount raced out of the traps with a series of advertisements showing the gap closing between the new movie and the title holder. This tack in itself was nothing new – The Robe, hoping to catch up on Gone with the Wind, had made a big hullabaloo of reporting opening week’s grosses day-by-day in the trade press and Twentieth Century Fox had capitalized on The Sound of Music’s overhauling of Gone with the Wind.

Jaws simply took advantage of a media ready-and-waiting for an accelerated box office story. Since money was made faster than ever before, box office records fell faster than ever before. It made news precisely because it was sustainable – week after week – an ‘immediate stampede’ at the box office – $14.3 million ($34,900 per theater average) in the first week, $33.8 million in two weeks and three days, $69.7 million in five weeks and three days, $100 million in eight weeks and three days, $150 million in twenty-three weeks. (It did not venture overseas until November, first stop Australia, and then it was a major Xmas release in seven hundred theaters in forty-four countries.)

Substantial questions remain about the Jaws saturation. Although history proved the Universal strategy to be a success, I am not convinced it was as deliberate as suggested nor that Universal had any idea of the winner it had on its hands.

There had been much larger saturations going back two decades and both Trial of Billy Jack in 1974 and Breakout in 1975 had debuted in over 1,000. The number of theaters involved in the Jaws launch was, I shall argue, proof of the studio’s lack of confidence not the opposite.

Studios with what they believed were guaranteed winners had consistently used a different scenario. The Exorcist opened in 24 theaters, Earthquake in 62, Papillon in 109 and The Godfather Part II in 157. Movies that opened in the Jaws range and above – Magnum Force in 418, The Man with the Golden Gun in 635, The Trial of Billy Jack, Breakout and The Master Gunfighter in 1,000-plus – were not expected to last as long. Statistics proved that for features with high box office expectation the slower limited roll-out was the more effective approach. The question really to be asked is whether Universal realistically expected Jaws to bring in rentals in the region of The Exorcist ($66million), The Sting ($68million) and The Godfather Part II ($128.9million) or whether its expectations were more in the Magnum Force ($18.3million) ballpark. I would argue that circumstantial evidence pointed to the latter. No other studio would throw away a prospective gold-plated opportunity on a saturation of the Magnum Force variety unless it reckoned grosses around the Dirty Harry sequel mark would count as a good return on its investment.

I would also challenge whether Universal actually deliberately limited the number of original theater participants. I would suggest it is much more likely that the studio encountered considerable resistance from exhibitors to being asked to hand over 90percent of the gross, agree a 12-week run and contribute to the national television campaign for a movie with an unknown director and no stars. Also, the movie did not, like The Exorcist or The Godfather, open in engagements exclusive to one city, but went multiple from the start, 46 in New York, 25 in Los Angeles; even Airport 1975 only opened in five theaters in New York.

More likely, I would venture, is that the original theater count declined over the blind-bidding controversy and/or when Universal and exhibitors reached a negotiating impasse. Negativity could also have been sparked by the recent experience of Breakout which fell short of box office targets. It certainly strikes of wisdom-after-the-event for Universal to claim this was a deliberate strategy. Nobody spends $1.8million on launch advertising in the hope that it would carry the picture all through summer since that would suggest a paltry $225,000 per week over an eight-week season.

Universal spent nearly two-fifths of the film’s production budget on that kind of launch because they wanted big opening grosses. For the first month, Jaws was restricted to 409 theaters in the U.S., the number increasing to 700 after five weeks and then to 900 after another three weeks, suggesting that exclusivity was part of the deal for initial exhibitors.

A tougher business take on the limited opening was that Universal shot itself in the foot.

With an 800-theater launch, grosses would have been stratospheric, even higher than the movie actually achieved. Ironically, it was roadshow precedent and practice that created the opportunity for Jaws to break all box office records. Without the guaranteed run that roadshows traditionally enjoyed, theaters would have dumped the movie, regardless of grosses, because they were already committed to another feature. Longevity, not opening week grosses, was the key to the Jaws record-breaking.

So if it was not a unique development in saturation that precipitated the Jaws success, or a new way of latching onto summer as an unrealized opportunity, or a breakthrough in publishing or record sales, or a novel approach to television advertising, to what else can you ascribe the movie’s unprecedented success?

Well, the answer is the simplest, the oldest, of all. The public just liked it. It hit a chord the way a raft of movies as different as Gone with the Wind, The Sound of Music and The Godfather before it. And it also benefitted from the public reappraisal of reissues, the idea that you could go back to see a movie you enjoyed again and again. Jaws broke no saturation rules and did not set new saturation boundaries. All the hard work on that had already been done. But it certainly reaped the reward.

SOURCE: Brian Hannan, In Theaters Everywhere, A History of the Hollywood Wide Release, 1913-2017 (McFarland, 2019) p192-195.

Behind the Scenes: The “Jaws” Juggernaut

Given the surprising success of the reissue of Jaws this weekend – it came in second at the U.S. ticket wickets ahead of such new films as The Roses and Caught Stealing – I thought you might like a second look (or a first one) at exactly how Universal created box office history. And it was not the way you would expect. It did not follow the template set out by previous juggernauts.

Naturally, the hoopla surrounding the 50^th anniversary of Jaws concentrates on the budget overruns, director Steven Spielberg’s problems and the mechanical shark, and no one gives a hoot about the most important aspect of the picture – the box office. Sure, it’s always mentioned in passing, because otherwise the movie would have had little impact on pop culture, the driving force of the water cooler effect when so many people see the same movie at the same time it drives word-of-mouth into the stellar regions.

What is little known is how Jaws changed the release system forever. Even The Godfather (1972), its predecessor in topping the box office firmament, while spreading the goodies amongst nabes and the showcase houses did not ignore first run. In fact, for The Godfather Paramount used five New York first run houses – the 1025-seat Orpheum, 1175-seat State I, 1174-seat State II, 599-seat Cine and 588-seat Tower East – to create a pre-emptive strike. This quintet screened the movie exclusively for the first week, permitting the studio to trumpet the record-breaking results.

The other 350-odd cinemas had to wait a further week to get their hands on the gangster saga.

For Jaws, on the other hand, Universal completely froze out New York first run. Not a single first run house was given access to the picture on its initial release on this weekend 50 years ago.

Instead, in New York, Universal went down the showcase route and clocked up just over $1 million in the first three days at 46 cinemas. Prior to Jaws, the only pictures that would open first in showcase in New York and ignore that city’s vibrant first run were those that first run would most likely have declined to show.

With Jaws, across the country Universal was as ruthless in squeezing out first run if it could make a better deal in the nabes and drive-ins. So while Jaws set house records at all the first run houses that were deemed up to standard, it also creamed the nabes and drive ins. Significantly, not all the first run houses chosen would have been the first choice of most studios for a major picture. You wouldn’t have expected this behemoth to end up at the 925-seat Gopher in Minneapolis where it took in $47,000. Similarly, the 900-seat Charles in Boston ($55,000 take) would not have been your first choice (and it’s worth noting that it was only in this city that the movie did not top the week, beaten into second place by Woody Allen’s Love and Death at the 525-seat Cheri Three).

By and large, Universal picked off those first run cinemas that were so delighted to be asked they agreed to the tough terms – a 90/10 split in the studio’s favor and a 12-week run.

Other first run destinations included the 800-seat Cooper in Denver ($53,000 for openers), the 1670-seat Coliseum in San Francisco ($68,000), the 900-seat Southgate I and 550-seat Town Center II in Portland ($55,000 total), the 1836-seat Gateway in Pittsburgh ($70,000) and the 1287-seat Midland in Kansas City ($55,000). In these cities, the premiere outing was restricted to first run.

But while in Chicago the 1126-seat United Artists hauled in $116,000 in the opener, Universal played it canny by screening it simultaneously at four other nabes which brought in another $260,000. It was the same in Cleveland where the 455-seat Severance II was the only first run house among the five cinemas that hoovered up a total of $84,000. The first run 500-seat Goldman in Philadelphia was the only first run location among the total of 15 cinemas that knocked up $312,000.

Elsewhere, echoing the New York approach, first run cinemas were frozen out in Detroit, Buffalo and San Francisco. In Detroit seven nabes gobbled up $350,000, in Buffalo a deuce of nabes snatched $50,000, in San Francisco a trio set about $75,000.

We’ve all seen movies driven to opening weekend box office heights on the back of heavy advertising or hyperbole only to take a dive in the second week. And the fact that Universal was not making an “event” out of its movie by restricting it to first run meant that the sophomore weekend could easily have brought disaster.

Instead, receipts at virtually all the cinemas either beat the first week or fell only fractionally below. The opening weekend appeared to set the tone, every successive day better than the previous one.

Universal immediately set its sights on taking down The Godfather and began posting weekly advertisements in the trade papers hyping its performance at the box office. But in nudging first run out of the equation, it triggered the slow decline of first run houses.

Tomorrow, you can catch on my article that sunk many of the other myths surrounding Jaws, “Behind the Scenes: Exploding The Myth of Jaws.”

SOURCE: Variety.

Behind the Scenes: “The Green Berets” (1968)

As if John Wayne hadn’t endured enough directing The Alamo (1960), he took on an even weightier task with this Vietnam War picture which, from the start, was likely to receive a critical roasting given the actor’s well-known stance on the conflict and his anti-Communist views that dated back to the McCarthy Era of the 1950s. Wayne had enjoyed a charmed life at the box office with three successive hit westerns, Henry Hathaway’s The Sons of Katie Elder (1965) with Dean Martin, Burt Kennedy’s The War Wagon (1967) co-starring Kirk Douglas, and best of all from a critical and commercial standpoint Howard Hawks El Dorado (1967) pairing Robert Mitchum. Outside of box office grosses, Wayne’s movies tended to be more profitable than his box office rivals because they were generally more inexpensive to make.

Columbia had been the first to recognize the potential of the book by Robin Moore and purchased the rights pre-publication in 1965 long before antipathy to the war reached its peak. A screenplay was commissioned from George Goodman who had served in the Special Forces the previous decade and was to to return to Vietnam on a research mission. But the studio couldn’t turn out a script that met the approval of the U.S. Army. Independent producer David Wolper (The Devil’s Brigade, 1968) was next to throw the dice but he couldn’t find the financing.

In 1966 Wayne took a trip to Vietnam and was impressed by what he saw. He bought the rights to the non-fiction book by Robin Moore (who also wrote The French Connection) for $35,000 plus a five per cent profit share. While the movie veered away in many places from the book, the honey trap and kidnapping of the general came from that source, although, ironically, that episode was entirely fictitious, originating in the mind of Robin Moore.

Universal originally agreed to back The Green Berets with filming scheduled for early 1967 but when it pulled out the project shifted to Warner Bros. And as if the director hadn’t learned his lesson from The Alamo, it was originally greenlit for a budget of $5.1 million, an amount that would prove signally inappropriate as the final count was $7 million. Wayne turned down the leading role in The Dirty Dozen (1967) to concentrate on this project. Wayne’s character was based on real-life Finnish Larry Thorne who had joined the Special Forces in Vietnam in 1963 and was reported missing in action in 1965 (his body was recovered four decades later).

As well as John Wayne, the movie was a platform for rising stars like Jim Hutton (Walk, Don’t Run, 1966), David Janssen (Warning Shot, 1967) and Luke Askew (Easy Rider, 1969) who replaced Bruce Dern. Howard Keel, who had appeared in The War Wagon, turned down a role.

Wayne holstered his normal $750,000 fee for acting plus $120,000 for directing. But it turned out The Alamo had taught him one important lesson – not to shoulder too much of the responsibility – and Ray Kellogg for the modest sum of $40,000 was brought in as co-director. It was produced by Wayne’s production company, Batjac, now run by his son Michael. But neither Wayne nor Kellogg proved up to the task and concerned the movie was falling behind schedule and over budget the studio drafted in veteran director Mervyn Leroy – current remuneration $200,000 plus a percentage – whose over 40 years in the business ranged from gangster machine-gun fest Little Caesar (1931) to his most recent offering the Hitchcock-lite Moment to Moment (1966).

But exactly what LeRoy contributed over the next six months was open to question. Some reports had him directing all the scenes involving the star; others took the view that primarily he played the role of consultant, on set to offer advice. Even with his presence, the movie came in 18 days over schedule – 25 per cent longer than planned. Unlike the later Apocalypse Now (1979), it didn’t go anywhere near South-East Asia so the location didn’t add any of Coppola’s lush atmosphere, though the almost constant rain in Georgia, while a bugbear for the actors, helped authenticity.

It was filmed instead on five acres of Government land around Fort Benning, Georgia, hence pine forests rather than tropical trees. President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Department of Defense offered full cooperation. But that was only after the producers complied with Army stipulations regarding the screenplay. James Lee Barratt’s script was altered to show the Vietnamese involved in defending the camp and the kidnapped was switched from being over the border. Also axed, though this time by the studio, was Wayne’s wish for a romantic element – the studio preferred more action. Sheree North (Madigan, 1968) was offered the role of Wayne’s wife but she also turned it down on political grounds. Vera Miles (The Hellfighters, 1968) was cast but she was edited out prior to release.

The Army provided UH-1 Huey helicopters, the Air Force chipped in with C-130 Hercules transports, A-1 Skyraiders and the AC-47 Puff the Magic Dragon gunship and also the airplane that utilized the skyhook system. Actors and extras were kitted out in the correct jungle fatigues and uniforms. Making a cameo appearance was Col Welch, commander of the Army Airborne School at Ft Benning. The sequence of soldiers doing drill was actually airborne recruits.

The attack on the camp is based on the Battle of Nam Dong in 1964 when the defenders saw off a much bigger enemy unit.

This set was built on a hill inside Fort Benning. The authentic detail included barbed wire trenches and punji sticks plus the use of mortar fire. While the camp was destroyed during filming the other villages were later used for training exercises. .

The pressure told on the Duke physically – he lost 15lb. But the oppressive heat and weather of that location – it was mostly shot in summer 1967 – was nothing compared to the reviews. It was slated by the critics with Wayne’s age for an active commander called into question, never mind the parachuting, the gung-ho heroics and the dalliance in an upmarket nightclub.

“In terms of Wayne’s directorial career,” wrote his biographer Scott Eyman, “The Alamo has many defenders, The Green Berets has none.” That assessment, of course, would be to ignore the moviegoers around the world who bought tickets and put the picture into reasonable profit.

Wayne was clear in his own mind about the kind of movie – “about good against bad” – he was making and accommodated neither gray areas nor took note of current attitudes to the war as exemplified by nationwide demonstrations. Co-stars David Janssen, Jim Hutton and George Takei were opposed to the war. Takei, a regular on the Star Trek series, missed a third of the episodes on the second season; his lines were written to suit the character of Chekov, who went on to have a bigger role in the television series. Composer Elmer Bernstein turned down the gig as it went against his political beliefs. “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” heard over the opening credits was not composed for the film, having been released two years earlier.

Most critics hated it – “Truly monstrous ineptitude” (New York Times); “cliché-ridden throwback” (Hollywood Reporter); “immoral” (Glamour). Even those reviews that were mixed still came down hard: “rip-roaring Vietnam battle story…but certainly not an intellectual piece” (Motion Picture Exhibitor). Not that Wayne was too concerned. At the more vital place of judgement – the box office – it took in $9.5 million in rentals (what’s returned to the studios once cinemas have taken their cut) – $8.7 million on original release and a bit more in reissue – in the U.S. alone plus a good chunk overseas.

It was virtually impossible to examine a movie like this without taking a political stance. Other movies covering the same topic were allowed greater latitude regarding authenticity, audiences and critics like appearing to accept that creating watchable drama often took precedence over the facts. Both The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now, considered the best of this sub-genre, clearly ventured away from strict reality. With over half a century distancing the contemporary viewer from those inflammatory times, it’s worth noting that it still divides critics. Or, rather, critics and the general public take opposing views.

Although Rotten Tomatoes deems it “an exciting war film”, the critics voting on that platform gave it a lowly 23 per cent favourable report compared to a generally positive 61 per cent from the ordinary viewer. That contrasts, for example, with a more even split for the likes of Exodus (1960) – 63 per cent from critics and 69 per cent from audiences. However, The Green Berets attracts twice as much interest, collaring 9,000 votes compared to just 4,300 for Exodus.

After this, Wayne’s fee went up to a flat million bucks a picture. “He wasn’t a guarantee of success,” explained his son Michael, “he was a guarantee against failure.” At this point in his career, he was gold-plated. Where other stars in his commercial league suffered the occasional box office lapse – Paul Newman’s career in the 1960s, for example, was riddled with flops like The Secret War of Harry Frigg (1968) – he did not. Especially with a global following, his pictures never lost money.

SOURCES: Michael Munn, John Wayne, The Man Behind the Myth, Robson, 2004; Scott Eyman, John Wayne, The Life and Legend, Simon and Schuster, 2014; Brian Hannan, The Magnificent 60s, The 100 Top Films at the Box Office, McFarland, 2023; Robin Moore, Introduction, The Green Berets, 1999 edition, Skyhorse Publishing; Laurence H. Suid, Guts and Glory, University of Lexington Press, 2002; The Making of The Green Berets, 2020; Review, Hollywood Reporter, June 17, 1968; Review, Motion Picture Exhibitor, June 19, 1968; Renata Adler, “The Absolute End of the ‘Romance of War’”, New York Times, June 30, 1968; Glamour, October 1968; “Big Rental Pictures of 1968,” Variety, January 8, 1969.

Behind the Scenes: United Artists’ Mea Culpa: Why Flops Flopped, 1969-1971, Part Three

Box office hits like Never on Sunday (1960), La Dolce Vita (1960), Zorba the Greek (1964), A Man and a Woman (1966) and Z (1969) gave Hollywood the wrong idea. Studios believed they could take advantage of the cheaper costs of shooting in Europe, set up alliances with critically acclaimed French, Italian, Greek, German and Swedish directors as well as several top overseas marquee names, and create a pipeline of product to fill out release schedules with pictures that were as acceptable to neighborhood cinemas as to arthouses.

The reliance of United Artists on this source was as much to blame for the box office crisis it endured as the other films covered in the first two articles in this series. In many cases, the studio gave directors their head, not reining them in on budgets, allowing several final cut, and assuming that critics and awards at festivals like Cannes, Berlin and Venice would do the job of selling the product to the domestic market.

On the basis of Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski winning the Golden Bear at Berlin for Le Depart / The Departure (1967) starring Jean-Luc Godard protege Jean-Pierre Leaud – and its subsequent arthouse success – UA bequeathed him big-budget The Adventures of Gerard (1970), set during the Napoleonic War, based on a book by Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle, and headlined by rising British star Peter McEnery (Negatives, 1968) and established Italian import Claudia Cardinale (The Professionals, 1966) and a supporting cast including Jack Hawkins and Eli Wallach.

“The picture turned out to be one of the worst disasters in the history of the company,” the company directors told the shareholders. “It was the result of reliance on one of the new fashionable foreign film directors. The picture was beset by problems due to the unprofessional excesses…indulged in by the director.” The outcome was a movie that could not be reshaped into a “more acceptable form” and that ending up occupying “a limbo area between adventure and farce.” Prospects were so poor, the studio doubted if it would even recoup marketing and advertising costs never mind any of the production costs.

Theoretically, Burn! / Quiemada (1969) should have fared better. At least it had a proper star in Marlon Brando, even though his marquee value was being questioned. This had been placed in the hands of Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo whose The Battle of Algiers (1966) had been nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. The studio had hoped to “combine interesting message with entertainment values.” However, personality conflict between director and star saw the picture to go “way over budget.” Prospects remained dim because “despite all efforts to persuade the director to reduce it to realistic length,” it was deemed overlong and “badly cut.” It fell between the stools of the arthouse audience who would have appreciated the message and the action audience who would have welcomed the more commercial elements. It was marked down for “a substantial loss.”

On the strength of a nomination for the Palme D’Or at Cannes for The Shop on Main Street (1965), the studio backed a project by its Hungarian director Jan Kadar. The Angel Levine (1970) attracted investment because the director had achieved “a certain cult,” the recording career of star Harry Belafonte had reached new heights, and the story was supposed to have a special appeal to ethnic groups. “Everything went wrong. The direction and performance came out slow and leaden. The story…didn’t work.” The picture was over budget and overlong. “The director could not be persuaded to make the necessary cuts” resulting in expectation of another “substantial loss.”

Italian director Elio Petri had enjoyed cult success with the offbeat sci fi The 10^th Victim (1965) starring Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress. For A Quiet Place in the Country (1968) he had lined up top British Oscar-nominated actress Vanessa Redgrave and rising Italian star Franco Nero who had played lovers in Camelot (1967). It was greenlit at a time when the studio believed there was a wider market among discriminating audiences for foreign films previously restricted to arthouses. But it had become clear that films in this category faced “inevitable loss.”

You probably haven’t heard of That Splendid November (1969), greenlit to “fulfill a pay-or-play commitment to Italian star Gina Lollobrigida” (Strange Bedfellows, 1965). While targeting the European market, it was hoped it would do additional business in America. It didn’t. Once again, the director (Mauro Bolognini) was allowed too much leeway. He had not been “persuaded to make the changes that would improve its chances” while the studio discovered that La Lollo had lost her marquee luster.

However, United Artists had also committed to potential “breakout” pictures, foreign movies aimed at American arthouses. The bulk of the overseas pictures that had thrived in the U.S. had done so via the arthouse circuit after being favorably reviewed by critics. These were considered relatively low-cost and low-risk investments. But, as events proved, these were as big a gamble as more high-budget projects.

Red, White and Zero / The White Bus (1967) proved “an utter failure” despite the presence of three top British directors, Lindsay Anderson (This Sporting Life, 1963), Oscar-winner Tony Richardson (Tom Jones, 1963) and Peter Brook. Although made for the arthouse market, these proved fewer in number than anticipated when the film was greenlit.

A French heist film entitled Score “would not be made today,” admitted the UA executives. Hoping to capitalize on the caper genre, the studio discovered no one was interested. Three French pictures, Philippe de Broca’s Give Her the Moon (1970) starring Philippe Noiret, The American and Lent in the Month of March (1968), were written off due to the softening of the arthouse market, as was Yugoslavian number It Rains in My village (1968) starring Annie Girardot. French/Brazilian Pour Un Amour Lointain (1968), “one of the poorer foreign pictures,” had such dismal prospects it was denied U.S. distribution. German picture Gentlemen in White Vests (1970) lacked appeal even its home market.

SOURCE: “Comments supplementing notes to Balance Sheet and Statement of Operations of United Artists Corporation for 1970,” United Artists Archive, Box 1 Folder 12 (Wisconsin Center for Theater and Film Research).

Behind the Scenes: “The Nightcomers” (1972)

Marlon Brando’s box office cachet had crashed. He hadn’t made a picture in two years following the flop of Queimada/Burn (1969) which had followed his debilitating box office trend of most of the decade. While his stock remained high enough to headline such big budget numbers as The Chase (1966) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), thereafter confidence in his marquee value tumbled. Apart from Queimada, he had only been signed up for Night of the Following Day (1968), another loser.

But that last picture had brought him into the orbit of independent producer Elliott Kastner (Where Eagles Dare, 1968) who had been a friend of director Hubert Cornfield (Pressure Point, 1962) when they had both worked as agents at MCA. “Although he was crazy,” recalled Kastner, “I loved his writing and his drive.” Kastner was a fan of Cornfield’s earlier movies especially as they had been delivered on short time schedules. “I wanted to do something with Marlon Brando and he wrote Night of the Following Day.”

Brando still had clout in Hollywood. His three-picture deal with Universal obliged the studio to pony up for any (financially viable) projects he put to them. Kastner was delighted to hop over from his base in London to the French location and although the movie continued the actor’s poor reception at the box office, the producer enjoyed the experience.

Brando wasn’t averse to the “resting” that most actors endure, stints of unemployment between gigs. So when the actor approached Kastner to work with him again, it took the producer by surprise. “Marlon wanted to do a film,” said Kastner, “which was unusual for Marlon because he hides from work. He wanted to do a film in Europe and he loved staying at my house in the country. I talked to (Brando’s agent) Jay Kanter (who later became Kastner’s business partner) about it and we gave him a screenplay called The Nightcomers…that Michael Winner wanted to direct.”

Kastner had liked Winner’s output and was equally attracted to the fact that he also worked fast. Winner was contemptuous of directors who shot too much footage, especially “coverage”, filming a scene from too many different angles. But he was also a very fast editor. He took an editing caravan with him on location, and after the day’s filming ended at 6pm he spent the next two hours watching rushes and another two hours after that editing. His editor Freddie Wilson said,” His speed of decision in the cutting room saves a great deal of time and money.”

Winner had been sitting on the screenplay by Michael Hastings for some time. “No one was rushing to finance it,” remembered Winner, until Brando showed an interest. Winner arranged to meet the actor at his “modest Japanese-style house” in Los Angeles. However, insurance proved a sticking point following payouts for Quiemada.

“On a personal level,” recollected Kastner, “I thought he (Winner) was a bully with waiters. He was really nasty to people beneath him. I didn’t have much (personal) respect for him but he was very amusing.”

Due to scheduling conflict Vanessa Redgrave (Blow-Up, 1966) turned down the role of Miss Jessel. Winner also offered the part to Britt Ekland (The Double Man, 1967) provided she could bring some financing to the project. In the end, remembered Kastner, “Michael wanted to cast this girl with this big bust who was a halfway decent actor.” Neither Redgrave nor Ekland could compare in the bust measurement department to Stephanie Beacham, so clearly chest size was not a priority.

Kastner reckoned Brando “would bring plenty of poetry” to the project. It was remarkably cheap even for a star of Brando’s fading attraction. The budget was $686,000, of which Kastner received $50,000 as a producer’s fee plus 30% of the profits. Winner deferred his fee, only paid if the movie made money. At that point, Kastner was leading the way in finding funding outside the studio system. Funding for When Eight Bells Toll (1970), for example, was entirely sourced from an American businessman. For The Nightcomers, Kastner located investment of $100,000 from a company called Film & General Investments. Universal was involved through its contract with Brando – paying him his $300,000 salary for this picture to count as the final one on his contract, but declined to distribute the picture. For another producer, this might have been enough to kill off the project, but not for Kastner, who, following his current practice, intending to sell the completed film to a distributor.

As far as Kastner was concerned the movie went into immediate profit. Joe Levine of mini major Avco Embassy, still riding high after the success of The Graduate (1967) and The Lion in Winter (1968), ponied up $1 million for the worldwide rights plus a share of the profits. But Avco also limited its exposure, selling a 40% share to businessman Sigmond Summer for $1 million. (Judging from later legal documents, Universal retained some financial interest in the picture).

Brando had decided Quint was Irish. To learn the dialect, Brando and Winner got together with a group of Irishmen in the back room of a pub, one whom became the actor’s dialog coach on location.

The six-week shoot, on locations in Cambridgeshire, Britain, with Sawston Hall doubling as the mansion, began in January 1971. There was another reason for the speed of the shoot. Winner had contracted with United Artists to make Chato’s Land (1972) and there was no time to spare between the movies. Over 100 actresses auditioned for the role of the female orphan. Winner, seeking “someone over 18 who looked 11,” selected Verna Harvey (she also won a role in Chato’s Land).

Although Winner had gone to some expense to set up a private dining room for the star at Sawston Hall, Brando preferred to eat with the crew. According to Winner, despite Brando’s fearsome reputation, he knew all his lines, immensely patient with his young inexperienced co-stars, concerned about the crew, and, as importantly, arrived on time and even watched rushes, a rarity among the profession. Brando used earplugs to prevent distraction from extraneous noise. During the shoot Francis Ford Coppola flew over to spend time discussing the script of The Godfather with Brando.

Brando initially refused to have stills taken of him during the sex scene and only gave in after considerable persuasion, though he kept his wellington boots on. He wanted to leave the drunk soliloquy to the end of shooting. Though he was actually drunk after consuming a lot of Scotch, “he remembered his lines immaculately…(and) also matched his hand movements and body movements, which is very important in movies,” explained Winner, “because if you have to cut different bits of film together if the body or hands or arms are in a different position you’re in trouble.”

Jerry Fielding didn’t record his score until July during a three-day session with an orchestra of 80 at Cine Tele Sounds Studio. Despite his editing prowess, Winner realized his final version didn’t work. “The first cut was too fast. For a moody period film I’d just messed up. I put back seven minutes (of footage) and spent another three weeks getting it right.”

Thanks to its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival alongside the likes of Sunday, Bloody, Sunday (1971), it was touted, perhaps unwisely, as an arthouse picture, rather than majoring on the sex and violence. While Variety tabbed it a “grippingly atmospheric thriller,” only two out of the five most influential New York critics gave it the thumbs-up.

A distribution deal was not struck till the end of 1971. Rather than potentially riding along in the slipstream of The Godfather (1972), which was already attracting huge hype, Avco decided that it was better to come out before the Mafia picture than risk being swamped in its wake. But there was confidence in the project. “Joe Levine thought the film was so brilliant we didn’t have to wait for The Godfather,” related Winner.

It launched first in America, opening in February 1972 – beating The Godfather to the punch by a month – at the 430-seat Baronet arthouse in New York. The opening week of $20,700 was rated “nice” and held well for the second week before plummeting to $11,000 in the third week. It was yanked after six weeks.

By the time it spread out into the rest of the country, The Godfather rollercoaster was well into it stride, but the early release had not particularly gathered any pace and in the aftermath of the Coppola movie it was certainly buried. It opened to $6,500 in Boston compared to The Godfather’s second week of $140,000. There was a “scant” $39,000 from 13 houses in Los Angeles, a “modest” $4,000 in Louisville though $5,000 in San Francisco was rated “brisk” and the same amount in Washington “snappy.

Initially, at least, Britain appeared more propitious. It opened in key West End venue the 1,400-seat Leicester Square Theatre to a “loud” $24,700 and though it dropped $10,100 in the second week, the third and fourth weeks improved on the second. Eight weeks into its West End run, when it was still pulling down $13,300, The Godfather put it to the sword with a record-breaking $191,000 from five West End houses. After that pummelling, The Nightcomers managed only three further weeks.

In fact, the movie did surprisingly well, especially overseas. Total rentals came to $1.69 million, a clear million-dollar profit on the negative cost. While less than half a million came from the U.S., and only $160,000 from Britain, the overseas market kicked in the bulk of revenue – $986,000 – possibly because it was released after The Godfather (1972) rather than, as in the UK and the US, before. In the run-up to and in the wake of The Missouri Breaks (1976), it was included in Brando perspectives at the Museum of Fine Arts, where it was presented as a “novel film…lost in the shadow of The Godfather,” and Carnegie Hall. But an attempt at commercial reissue proved disastrous – a “weak” $1200 in Pittsburgh.

Except from a financial perspective, Kastner wasn’t especially impressed, calling it “grim, boring, contemptuous of story, oblique.” Viewers, including me, beg to disagree.

SOURCES: Elliott Kastner’s Unpublished Memoirs, courtesy of Dillon Kastner; Elliott Kastner Archive, courtesy of Dillon Kastner; Michael Winner, Winner Takes All, (Robson Books, 2004); “Production Review,” Kine Weekly, January 23, 1971, p10; “Not So Young,” Kine Weekly, May 22, 1971, p16;“Jerry Fielding,” Kine Weekly, July 17, 1971, p10; “Michael Winner,” Kine Weekly, August 13, 1971, p10; “Nightcomers to Avemb,” Variety, January, 19,1972, p5; “New York Critics,” Variety, February 23, 1972, p35; “Picture Grosses”, Variety, 1972: February 23-April 26, June 7-14; July 19- Sep 27; “Broadway,” Box Office, February 9, 1976, pE2; “Museum of Fine Arts,” Box Office, October 18.

Behind the Scenes: “One-Eyed Jacks” (1961)

A three-hour western epic directed by Stanley Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968), written by Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch, 1969) and The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling and starring Spencer Tracy (Judgement at Nuremberg, 1961) and Marlon Brando. What’s not to like? That all of these major players, with the exception of Brando, had nothing to do with the final product was par for the course for a movie that didn’t reach cinema screens until two years after shooting was completed.

Marlon Brando was riding high when the project was first mooted in 1956. The box office and critical sensation of the 1950s, four Oscar nominations in successive years, winner for On the Waterfront (1954), his price was rising by the minute. And he had ambitions to take control of his career, set up his own production shingle, a trend that was beginning to gather pace.

He established Pennebaker (named after his mother) Productions in 1957 with ex-marketeer Walter Seltzer, producer of 711 Ocean Drive (1950), and George Glass, a former partner in Stanley Kramer’s independent production company. Paramount agreed to back the company. A western, A Burst of Vermilion, was intended as the company’s first offering. Soon there were five movies on the schedule including The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones by Charles Neider.

Brando had paid $150,000 for the rights to the book and a script by Sam Peckinpah. The original title was changed to Guns Up. It was going to mark the debut of the new Pennebaker outfit ahead of other projected movies like Shake Hands with the Devil to star James Cagney and Anthony Perkins (he didn’t make it to the final cast), The Raging Man and Ride, Comancheros (no relation to The Comancheros, 1961) and C’Est La Vie to be filmed in Paris.

Paramount paid through the nose, committing to an unprecedented deal. The studio would fund the entire cost of Guns Up and as well as $150,000 upfront Brando would receive 100 per cent of the profits, Paramount relying on its 27% of the gross as a distribution fee to turn a profit. Stanley Kubrick, riding high after Paths of Glory (1957), was hired to direct. While the studio preferred Spencer Tracy as co-star, Brando wanted old buddy Karl Malden who had co-starred with Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and On the Waterfront, winning an Oscar for the former and a nomination for the latter.

And in part to reflect the Asian community in Monterey, location of the main section of the film, he also wanted current squeeze France Nuyen (A Girl Named Tamiko, 1962) to play his lover in the film, but Kubrick was aghast and instead cast Mexican debutante Pina Pellicer (Rogelia, 1962). There were roles for Katy Jurado (Barabbas, 1962) and recognizable western types like Ben Johnson (The Undefeated, 1969), Slim Pickens (Firecreek, 1968) and Elisha Cook Jr (The Great Bank Robbery, 1969).

Shooting was set for June 1958, then it shifted to September and then November. To Brando’s shock, Kubrick pulled out two weeks before production was due to begin, citing pre-production on Lolita (which, ironically, didn’t go ahead for a couple of years). To salvage the situation, Brando decided to direct. He wasn’t the first actor to go down this route, especially if you count Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Orson Welles as actors first and foremost. Laurence Olivier helmed Henry V (1944) and three others, Jose Ferrer The Cockleshell Heroes (1955), hoofer Gene Kelly Singin’ in the Rain (1951) and Charles Laughton Night of the Hunter, 1955. So he was in good company.

Cameras turned on December 2, 1958. It was an auspicious era for westerns, a total of 41 had appeared that year. Although budgeted for three months, it took six months to shoot in locations like Sonora in Mexico and Monterey in California (where the film was set) as well as Pfeiffer Beach on the Big Sur and the Warner Ranch.

Although prior to shooting commencing the title had changed to One-Eyed Jacks, scoring and editing were well in hand and Paramount announced it as one of its 17 pictures set for 1959 release. In the end Shake Hands with the Devil beat it to the punch as Pennebaker’s initial release, in 1959. But it didn’t favor so well, skipping the more lucrative but riskier Broadway first run in favour of hitting the circuits.

Meanwhile, Brando was angling for a three-hour running time. The budget kept increasing. The original $2m budget had doubled. Eventually, Paramount acknowledged it had cost $5 million though other estimates put it closer to $6 million.

Part of the problem in readying it for release was Brando’s other commitments. He was still a working actor and could hardly resist the offer of a record-setting one million bucks to star in The Fugitive Kind (1960). Even so, the bigger problem was not time, but experience and a first-time director being unable to make up his mind, having shot a colossal amount of footage and having tremendous difficulty trimming it down to workable length. Paramount still had it on the release agenda in 1960. It was going to be a “special release,” which most people took, especially given the running time, to be roadshow.

But by December 1960, the studio had waited long enough and just before Xmas the studio took over the editing and after editing out around 40 minutes from Brando’s three hour cut, Paramount scheduled it for a world premiere in New York in March 20, 1961, in a kind of semi-roadshow – moviegoers could buy in advance but the tickets did not come with reserved seats, which was the whole point of roadshow. Nor were prices hiked, which was gave roadshow its prestige.

Already deemed “Brando’s Folly” and coming in the wake of The Alamo (1960), the John Wayne-directed epic which had flopped in roadshow, commercial hopes were not high. In part, because production had been so long ago it had skipped under the journalistic radar which was concentrating on skewering The Alamo and the equally troubled The Misfits (1961). So it didn’t come trailing disaster. Still, it seemed more likely, audiences would not take to the odd tale which didn’t fit so easily into the western genre. Plus Brando’s previous effort The Fugitive Kind had been his first outright flop.

Turned out, though, Brando still was a major attraction. It snaffled a “huge” $81,000 in its opener at the 4,820-seat Capitol in New York. There was a “smasheroo” $21,000 in Detroit, a “big” $14,000 in Buffalo, a “hotsy” $15,000 in Cincinnati. “Giant” was the preferred adjective, covering $60,000 in Chicago, $32,000 in Philadelphia and $15,000 in Boston.

Rentals (what studios make after cinemas have taken their share of the gross) amounted to a very decent $4.3 million, enough to rank seventeenth for the year. And whereas those figures were considered decent enough, it did “substantially better abroad.”

So, more than likely, against all the self-destructive odds, it earned a profit.

SOURCES: Stefan Kanfer, Somebody, The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando (Faber & Faber, 2008); “Glass, Seltzer in Brando Co Berths,” Variety, April 17, 1957, p22; “Chatter, Hollywood,” Variety, May 22, 1957, p62; “Marlon Brando Guns Up for Paramount,” Variety, April 30, 1958, p22; “Chatter, Paris,” Variety, July 30, 1958, p126; “Brando Gets 100% of Film Profit!”, Variety, August 6, 1958, p1; “Briefs from Lots,” Variety, September 24, 1958, p15; “Marlon Brando’s Own,” Variety, November 26, 1958, p5; “Shake Hands First with Circuits,” Variety, May 6, 1959, p4; “Brando’s Ugly American,” Variety, July 1, 1959, p3; “Par 17 Pix Set for Release,” Variety, July 15, 1959, p5; “Par Division Eyes Upcoming Product,” Variety, November 25, 1959, p22; “Doubt or Delay re Brando’s Jacks,” Variety, August 10, 1960, p3; “Brando Jacks Editing,” Variety, December 21, 1960, p7; Advert, Variety, January 6, 1960, p32; Box Office Figures, Variety, April 5-Jul 24, 1961; “Hoss Operas in O’Seas Gallop,” Variety, August 23, 1961, p16; “1961 Rentals and Potential,” Variety, January 10, 1962, p13.

Behind the Scenes: “The Chairman / The Most Dangerous Man in the World” (1969)

Had things run according to the original plan, we could have seen Frank Sinatra return to a Communist country for the first time since The Manchurian Candidate (1962). But if you had wanted to write a script about the guy who wrote The Chairman, you couldn’t have invented a more interesting character than Samuel Richard Solomonick. He was one of those guy who held every job under the sun before reinventing himself as an anticommunist going by the name of Jay Richard Kennedy and subsequently entering the fields of real estate, radio and brokerage, then landing a gig managing Harry Belafonte and writing the screenplay for I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1955).

By the time he ended up as an executive at Sinatra Enterprises he had a couple of ideas to sell. Forming Jade Productions in 1966 with director Richard Quine (How To Murder Your Wife, 1965), the pair hooked Sinatra’s interest in two projects, Follow the Runner (which would have co-starred Sammy Davis Jr) and The Chairman plus William Holden eyeing the lead in The Wordlings about the population explosion.

*That’s Gregory Peck trapped on the wrong side of the Russian border with Chinese soldiers closing in.*

Sinatra was known for falling out with directors, shunting Mark Robson off The Detective (1968), so whether Quine would have lasted the pace is anybody’s guess. After success with Tony Rome (1967), Twentieth Century Fox briefly toyed with the prospect of pairing Sinatra and new wife Mia Farrow in The Chairman. Originally scheduled to begin shooting on January 1967, that later shifted to early 1968. The notion that the movie also had parts for Spencer Tracy and Yul Brynner was one of those puff pieces that some journalists swallowed.

Despite some enticing projects – he was first name down to direct Catch 22, after Columbia had spent $150,000 buying the novel, and to helm the screen translation of Broadway hit The Owl and the Pussycat – Richard Quine’s career teetered after the flop of Hotel (1967). Making no headway with Sinatra he made instead another flop, Oh Dad Poor Dad (1967) and was effectively put on furlough for three years after failing to finance a movie to star Alex Guinness and Lee Radziwill.

Quine exited The Chairman in May 1967 when former PR bigwig Arthur P. Jacobs took over the production and with Sinatra in absentia turned to British director J. Lee Thompson who had helmed the producer’s debut picture What a Way to Go (1964). And that proved a lucky break for Thompson who had yet to match the success of The Guns of Navarone (1961).

After successive flops – Return from the Ashes (1965) and Eye of the Devil (1966) – Thompson had plenty projects on the boil including a musical remake of Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) with a score by Richard Rodgers and Peter Ustinov playing the lead. Also on his slate was High Citadel based on the Desmond Bagley bestseller; The Harp That Once for Columbia; an adaptation of James Clavell bestseller Tai Pan; a sequel to The Guns of Navarone called After Navarone that would reunite the director with star Gregory Peck and writer-producer Carl Foreman; and Planet of the Apes (1968) to which he and Jacobs held the rights.

While none of these projects – except Planet of the Apes and minus Thompson – came to fruition, the Navarone connection would lead to Mackenna’s Gold for Foreman. In the meantime he had helmed a modest drama, Before Winter Comes (1968) starring Broadway star Topol. When Arthur P. Jacobs greenlit The Chairman, he hired Thompson who looked no further than Peck, connection re-established via the Navarone sequel. They were a four-time pairing – Cape Fear (1962) and Mackenna’s Gold and The Guns of Navarone. Peck was a controversial choice from the Twentieth Century Fox perpsective given he had broken a contract with the studio in 1960 to star in Let’s Make Love. But Jacobs smoothed ruffled studio feathers and paid his star $500,000 plus a percentage. With Jacobs on hands-on duty with Planet of the Apes (1968) – Mort Abrahams oversaw the production of The Chairman and immediately engaged in a budget dispute with the director. Jacobs had initially stipulated $4 million, Thompson believed he required another million. They didn’t quite split the difference, Fox had the film come in at $4.9 million.

Thompson recognized the problems of the script, pointing out that “the hardest thing for Americans about the film’s concept is accepting that China has some competent scientists.” Rather ingenuously, he averred that the movie would have “no political overtones,” while Abrahams retorted that it might have “some political overtones.” It would been obvious to anyone that a picture featuring Mao was bound to have political repercussions, his Little Red Book a massive bestseller on the campus, an album cut of recitations from the book and Edward Albee in 1968 premiering a play called Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung.

Denied access to China, the production team spent four months “reading everything we could get our hands on.” At one point they considered dropping the scene featuring Chairman Mao and lengthening the sequence relating to Peck’s arrival in Hong Kong. In any case, different versions of the Hong Kong environs were shot, some with nude shots of girls in a house of pleasure.

The British Colonial Office in Hong Kong blocked filming there after fears of riots due to the production daring to portray Mao Tse-Tung on screen. Taiwan substituted for China although the locals there were also incensed, so much so they burned an effigy of Peck. Wales, funnily enough, was another location as was London University. Filming began on August 28 and finished on December 3.

Although it might appear that Ben Maddow (The Way West, 1967) wrote his script based on Jay Richard Kennedy’s novel, in fact the novel appeared after the screenplay with Kennedy writing the novelizaton, and it’s more likely that what Maddow adapted was the original Kennedy screenplay. Interestingly enough, around this time Maddow had first crack at the Edward Naughton western novel that became McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971).

It wasn’t the first time Variety got a prediction wrong: “powerful box office attaction” fell far short of the actual results. This proved an annus miserabilis for Gregory Peck. In fact, he had four films, not three, released in 1969. By release date The Stalking Moon technically belonged to the previous year, but it only played a handful of cinemas in 1968, its general release taking place in 1969.

Despite pocketing a total of over $2 million, Peck’s marquee value was in clear decline. Of the Peck quartet, Marooned did best, placing 33^rd on the annual box office chart, with $4.1 million. Mackenna’s Gold (31^st) took $3.1 million in rentals (the amount returned from the gross once a cinema has taken its cut), The Stalking Moon (38^th) on $2.6 million, and The Chairman (41^st) with $2.5 million.

SOURCES: Gary Fishgall, Gregory Peck (Scribners, 2002) p267; James Caplan, Sinatra: The Chairman, (Doubleday, 2015), p724; “7 from 7 Arts,” Variety, March 3, 1965, p4; “Richard Quine,” Variety, July 7, 1965, p20; “Return of Advances,” Variety, October 6, 1965, p7; “Form Jade Prods,” Variety, December 15, 1965, p4; “J Lee Thompson Nearly Finished on 13,” Variety, February 2, 1966, p28; “Catch As Catch 22 Can,” Variety, February 23, 1966, p4; “Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Musical Henry VIII,” Variety, Mar 16, 1966, p1; “Inside Stuff – Pictures,” Variety, March 30, 1966, p22; “Lee Thompson Busily Blueprints His Musical Version of Henry VIII,” Variety, April 27, 1966, p17; “Jay Kennedy Script,” Variety, July 6, 1966, p5; “After Navarone,” Variety, April 19, 1967, p14; “Scripting Red Chinese,” Variety, May 21, 1967, p4; “”Personality Chemistry,” Variety, May 24, 1967, p4; New York Soundtrack,” Variety, Sep 20, 1967, p27; “Pat Hall Noel to Col,” Variety, December 27, 1967, p5; “N.Y. Indie Label Grooves Chairman Mao’s Thoughts,” Variety, April 10, 1968, p56; “Man About Town,” Variety, July 17, 1968, p68; “Jas Clavell to Roll Siege,” Variety, August 21, 1968, p7; “Thompson Wraps Up,” Variety, August 28, 1968, p29; “New York Soundtrack,” Variety, October 23, 1968, p18; “British Bar Fox’s Chairman,” Variety, December 4, 1968, p17; Big Rental Films of 1969,” Variety, January 7, 1970, p15; “Big Rental Films of 1970,” Variety, January 6, 1971, p11.

Behind the Scenes: The Box Office Bump

Ancillary – the famed “long tail” – has all but disappeared. Used to be movie studios could count on up to 90 per cent of a picture’s overall earnings coming after it had completed its initial run in the cinemas. Until streaming cut off ancillary at the pass, that long tail consisted of an extraordinary number of revenue streams. Once a film was out of the cinemas, and assuming it wasn’t going to return in a steady reissue pattern like the James Bond or Disney movies or blockbusters such as Star Wars, its ancillary journey would begin with VHS/DVD (of which there were several sub-streams), then television (again, sub-divided into network, cable, syndication, and specialist operations like Turner) and then you could still be talking remake. Plus, you could bunch up an entire library of old pictures and sell them on again. The beauty of the system was that when movies hit whatever ancillary segment, there was rarely any such thing as an outright buy. Movies were leased. That meant every three or four years they could be sold all over again.

The forerunner of ancillary was network television. Television had begun mopping up old movies by the bucketload in the 1950s, and in such quantities that the attraction of old movies on the small screen prevented audiences seeking out new movies on the big screen and in part accounted for the steady decline of the moviegoing habit. By the 1960s, networks were beginning to fork out big bucks for individual pictures – Cleopatra (1963) going for several million.

By the 1970s, the income from a television showing of a movie could exceed what it had made at the cinema. For United Artists, in the period 1970-1972 (this covers the dates films were made not when released), television sales, calculated on an overall annual basis, brought in at least an extra 24 per cent on top of revenue from cinema release. That figure came from 1970, but in 1971 that shot up to 38 per cent and the following year dipped slightly to 37 per cent. And that was just for the United States. Although other countries tended to pay a lot less for movies, they still paid something and in total might bring in half as much again.

The ancillary gold mine had started to pay off big time. In the 1960s, the amounts networks ponied up for television rights depended very much on initial box office, the assumption being there was some obvious correlation between the numbers who would go to see a particular movie at the cinema and the size of the subsequent television audience. And while it was true the biggest cinematic blockbusters tended to attract the biggest television audiences, it was soon equally clear that television audiences were as segmented as much as cinema ones and therefore the amounts paid by networks for individual movies began to show sharp divergence.

There was no doubting that James Bond ruled the television roost as far as UA was concerned in 1970-1972. Diamonds Are Forever and Live and Let Die, regardless of U.S. box office – the former earning $20 million in rentals (the studio’s share of the box office), the latter $16.2 million – were each sold to American television for the same, princely, sum of $5.2 million, by far and away the most any movie pulled in.

Not far behind was Fiddler on the Roof which netted $5.12 million. But here’s the kicker – the musical earned more than both Bonds put together, a colossal $37 million in rentals. but in terms of attracting a television audience was considered a weaker proposition than both. But musicals were believed to be somehting of a golden goose for television, otherwise how to acocunt for Tom Sawyer which cost networks $2.76 million. Comparatively speaking, that made no logical sense because it had only taken in $5 million in rentals. But family-friendly fare was so rare it had networks duking it out for the rights. A third musical Man of La Mancha went to television for $1.7 million having racked up just$3.7 million at the cinema.

Conversely, networks weren’t remotely interested in films with a sex theme, no matter how well they had done at the box office. Last Tango in Paris had harnessed a colossal $16 million in rentals but was worth only $120,000 (yes, that’s right, $120,000) to any television station willing to show it (heavily cut of course). It didn’t even matter if you took a comedic approach to sex. Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex hauled in $8.2 million at the cinema but only $130,000 from television. But maybe Woody Allen was the problem. Bananas, with a highly-profitable $3.3 million at the box office, could only manage less than half a million from television, the comedian perhaps considered an acquired taste which not enough of the public had acquired.

But television, rather than being viewed as the perennial enemy, was often seen as salvation for under-performing movies, maybe not recouping the entire negative costs but going some way to stem the flow of red ink. And perhaps the more interesting statistics relate to those pictures which earned more from television than they did in their entire U.S. cinema run.

Michael Winner espionage thriller Scorpio headlined by Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon notched up $1.35 million at the cinema but $1.56 million from television. Similarly, Robert Altman’s critically-acclaimed The Long Goodbye with Elliott Gould as the iconic private eye picked up a mere $1 million at the U.S. cinema compared to $1.51 million from a network. Another private eye caper, Hickey and Boggs, teaming Robert Culp (who also directed) and Bill Cosby from a Walter Hill script, had snapped up just $900,000 from cinemas but $1.2 million from television. Cops and Robbers hoisted $1.32 million in small screen larceny as against $1.2 million elsewhere.

Westerns The Magnificent Seven Ride, the fourth in the series, and Ted Kotcheff’s Billy Two Hats starring Gregory Peck and with a script from Scotsman Alan Sharp, both did better financially from television than cinema. The former’s small screen take was $1.16 million compared to $750,000 from the cinema, the latter $1.15 million compared to $440,000. But for The Hunting Party with a top-line cast of Gene Hackman, Candice Bergen and Oliver Reed it went the other way, the $460,000 from television going hardly any way to offset the paltry $800,000 from cinemas.

It’s possible that star power, and weighted towards veterans, counted more in television. As well as Scorpio, Lancaster westerns Valdez Is Coming and Lawman tucked away $1.47 million and $1.5 million, respectively, from their television outings.

SOURCE: “Results of Distribution of Released Pictures (by production year),” MCHC 82, Box 1, Folder 8, The United Artists Archive, University of Wisconsin.