The Magnificent Seven – The Magnificent 60s

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.

The Annual Xmas Puff

It’s become something of a Xmas tradition that I puff up the books I have written in the hope you will stick them in your (or someone else’s) Xmas stocking. I’ve authored over a dozen publications – from “Behind the Scenes” books (known as “Making of” titles in the publishing business) and compilations of my daily reviews to histories of aspects of the Hollywood business machine, as well as those concentrating on my favorite era (the 1960s in case you can’t guess), and a few relating to my home-town of Paisley in Scotland.

The most popular has been, without doubt, The Making of the Magnificent Seven. Telling the “Behind the Scenes” tale of how one of the most popular westerns ever made wasn’t so initially popular (it flopped in the U.S.). Given the various problems it needed to overcome – loss of three directors, umpteen screenwriters involved, Actor’s Strike. Writer’s Strike, censorship by the Mexican government, the threat of severe editing – it was a wonder it ever saw the light of day.

If you’re keen on this line of Hollywood history you might also be interested in a couple of other “Behind the Scenes” volumes – The Making of The Guns of Navarone (Revised Edition) and The Making of Lawrence of Arabia. For that matter, there is ample “behind the scenes” material in two other books: The Magnificent 60s – looking at the top 100 movies of the decade and which could be retitled “how the decade was born” – and The Gunslingers of ’69 which examines the western in a pivotal year that saw the release of The Wild Bunch, True Grit, Once Upon a Time in the West and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

I’ve possibly had an unusual writing career in that one idea has usually led to another. While researching The Magnificent Seven, two aspects of that film fascinated me. The first, as mentioned above, is that it was a flop but that it became very successful as a reissue. So that sent me looking at the whole issue of reissue/revival. That took me way back to the Silent Era. And given no one else has written so extensively on the subject I guess I can fairly claim to be the leading expert. The result was my biggest book – 250,000 words including Notes – Coming Back to a Theater Near You, A History of Hollywood Reissues 1914-2014.

The Magnificent Seven was also given an unusual kind of release – what was called a “saturation” release with about 750 prints racing from state to state in a staggered release around the country. Eyebrows were raised because that was the way dodgy films were distributed, exploitation and horror films, whipped out of cinemas before word of mouth could kill them off. Because prints already had another pre-designated destination, The Magnificent Seven, no matter how well it played, could not be retained at any cinema, so word-of-mouth was killed stone dead.

But when I did a bit of digging I discovered that the wide release had been in sporadic use since the Silent Era and I told that story in In Theaters Everywhere: A History of the Hollywood Wide Release 1913-2017.

Oddly enough, doing the research for both those books led me to my most unusual enterprise. When you go so far back in time doing research, and digging through the daily and weekly issues week-by-week of the Hollywood trade papers as was my wont, you tend to turn up other interesting facts. One of these was a report that in 1935 Mae West was the highest-paid actor (male or female).

Like everyone else I had assumed that female stars were underpaid compared to their male counterparts. But in digging deeper I came across another article that showed in the Silent Era that Mary Pickford, at the height of her box office powers, substantially out-earned a Charlie Chaplin at the height of his box office powers.

The result of that was When Women Ruled Hollywood – between 1910 and 1948 the top female stars often out-earned the top male stars – which examines the so-called gender pay divide.

Another movie-related hobby led me to a separate string of books. I have a collection of Pressbooks/Campaign Manuals dating from the 1950s. As well as providing, literally, cinemas with adverts in various sizes for a forthcoming movie, these publications (anything from double-sided A5 to 32-page full-color A3) came up with dozens of publicity wheezes. I got to wondering how many of these clever ideas a cinema manager put into practice. So I went down to the museum in Paisley, where I was living, and starting looking through five years’ worth (1950-1954) of the local newspaper the Paisley Daily Express.

In those days, local newspapers in Britian had adverts on the front page not news stories. And the biggest advert here was a block advert listing what was showing every day at the town’s eight cinemas. I didn’t find any examples at all of cinema managers using the ideas suggested in the Pressbooks but I did, as a matter of course, write down what was showing every day at every cinema. So at the end of the process I had five years’ worth of interesting data.

What to do? What else but turn the material into a book, relating the movie-going patterns of this town, what movies and stars were most popular, distribution patterns, B-movies, serials and reissues. That turned into Paisley at the Pictures 1950 (and there have been two sequels so far).

But since I’m not from Paisley, and as ever, in order to write this book, I started digging backwards into the town’s history of cinemas, I discovered that a horrific disaster had occurred in a cinema in 1929 where over 70 children attending a matinee perished. That became The Glen Cinema Disaster.

As a result of researching The Magnificent 60s book I came across so many interesting movies that didn’t fit into the remit, which was to analyze the 100 most popular films of the decade. In fact, I soon became aware, that thanks to academics, I had quite a distorted view of the 1960s cinema. And that nobody had really done any consistent work on popular rather than Oscar- or arthouse-worthy movies. And also, except for critics writing for monthly magazines, newspapers only allocated few hundred words to cover an entire week’s output. So most movies really only got potted reviews of less than 100 words. So I thought I would dig.

The initial result was this blog. But after receiving so many requests to make the material more easily available for consumption, I have started to turn the reviews and “Behind the Scenes” articles into books. Ambitious though this seems, I’m aiming to put into book form, one way or another, reviews on 1,000 films from the decade – and at the standard length I use for the blog, not reduced into capsule reviews like you get in so many other compendiums.

I’m going to have two types of books, splitting the actual reviews into one series of volumes (I’ve reached Volume Two so far) and the Behind the Scenes into another. Eventually, all will be available on both print and e-book formats.

So everything I’ve written is available on Amazon. I’m assuming the link below will take you to my Amazon page (you might find some items cheaper on Ebay) but if not then just put my name into Amazon and my page should pop up.

Even if you’re disinclined to purchase any books, you could do me a good favor by passing on details of my Blog to other interested parties. Currently, I’m approaching 90,000 views a year and I need 100,000 to be welcomed into the holy grail of Rotten Tomatoes.

https://amzn.to/3TjQXfI

Book Review – Dreams of Flight: “The Great Escape” in American Film and Culture

In the history of rousing action cinema few movies are as revered or have produced such a collective cinematic response as John Sturges’ World War 2 POW picture The Great Escape (1963) starring Steve McQueen, James Garner and Richard Attenborough and a host of upcoming stars including The Magnificent Seven alumni James Coburn and Charles Bronson,

Dana Polan’s rich assessment of the film’s making coupled with a superb analysis of the film itself, script, style, themes and directorial bravura is filled with informative nuggets. Eschewing the standard star bio approach, Polan goes much deeper to detail how earlier adaptations for American television and Australian radio (made by novelist Morris West’s company and with Rod Taylor as a German guard) affected the film, how it fitted into the British POW tradition (The Colditz Story etc) and the influence of an American offshoot like Stalag 17.

You might already be familiar with the work of Dana Polan since he has written books on Pulp Fiction, The Sopranos and Jane Campion and another half-dozen books besides. This is an excellent addition to his impressive portfolio.

Paul Brickhill, author of The Great Escape (and other war classics The Dam Busters and Reach for the Sky) had been an inmate at Stalag Luft III so drew on personal experience – including that of tunnel digger – and sketches made at the time of the tunnels to turn out, as co-writer, a precursor Escape to Danger. It was either interviews relating to this or a magazine article or condensation that alerted neophyte director Sturges in 1945/1946 to a potential film. The book, published in 1950, sold a million copies in paperback in the UK alone and was a huge global success. And for independent producers Mirisch, for whom Sturges later made The Magnificent Seven, buying the rights was integral to the director’s pact with that company in 1957 and indeed The Great Escape was mooted as his debut picture for them. When finally greenlit, it was intended to be shot in the U.S. with only 10 per cent taking place in Europe. That it went the other way was due to an unusual set of circumstances.

In his analysis of the picture, Polan makes other interesting connections, first of all to the caper picture where each character has a specific task to contribute to the overall effort. Unusually for a heroic film, he points out that courage is continually undercut, each uplifting moment leading to defeat, the film itself having an essentially downbeat ending, the only true victory found in defiance. And in some respects The Great Escape created a bridge between the gung-ho war films of the 1950s and the more cynical approach to war envisioned in The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now.

Being British, it had never occurred to me how important the baseball glove was to American culture, the glove representing for many a “certain brand of American problem-solving in the face of adversity” although far more universally accepted would be the premise of the motorcycle escape representing the triumph of the spirit even as it results in a more down to earth resolution.

Tracing Sturges’ stylistic development back to post-WW2 B-movies made for Columbia explains the importance of the trademark parabolic shot in driving action forward. Yet for all his stylistic bravura, Sturges was very grounded when it came to the work required to make pictures, for example here adopting coloured index cards to shuffle around pieces of action to best effect.

The script went through various hands – William Roberts and Walter Newman, both integral to The Magnificent Seven, but was finally credited to crime writer W.R. Burnett (who had worked with Sturges on Sergeants 3, 1962) and James Clavell (who adapted The Satan Bug, 1965), himself a POW in a Japanese camp with British writer Ivan Moffat (Giant, 1956) coming in at the last minute as script doctor. A breakdown of the various scripts attributes the Hilts’ cooler baseball bouncing to Moffat who also wrote the scene that changed Hilts from loner to participant.

In a terrific appendix you can discover exactly the problems facing the real escapees and who came up with the book title (clue – not the author) four years after the idea originally surfaced. There’s a fascinating coda about the film’s impact on Hollywood and general culture and Polan takes time out to reflect on the experience of various fans on their virgin encounter with the picture. The movie was a big hit and so well received that when critic Bosley Crowther wrote a negative review the “New York Times” postbag was filled with complaints. Written with tremendous authority and great style, this is one book you would want to find in your Xmas stocking.

Dreams of Flight: The Great Escape in American Film and Culture by Dana Polan is published by University of California Press at $24.95 / £20 in both paperback & ebook. ISBN 9780520379305. It is available on Amazon and Kindle.

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520379305/dreams-of-flight

Behind the Scenes – “The Cincinnati Kid” (1965)

As you can see from the advertisement above, this was originally intended to be quite a different film, directed by Sam Peckinpah and starring Spencer Tracy in the role of ageing poker champ Lancey. The director had just come off one troubled shoot, Major Dundee (1965), and was seeking Hollywood redemption. Two-time Oscar winner Tracy was also hoping to revive his career. Except for what amounted to little more than a extended cameo on It’s A Mad, Mad,, Mad, Mad World (1963) he had not worked since Judgement at Nuremberg (1961). Also initially on board in a small role was Sharon Tate (Valley of the Dolls, 1967)

This was also a big gamble for industry outsider Martin Ransohoff who had moved to the forefront of independent production after The Americanization of Emily (1964) with Julie Andrews and James Garner and The Sandpiper (1965) starring current top-billed royalty Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. He had wheeled and dealed with top studios – MGM, Columbia and United Artists – desperate for quality product. He was planning the biggest movie of his career having purchased the rights to the Alistair MacLean bestseller Ice Station Zebra. Ransohoff was a marketing innovator and long before Robert Evans pumped tens of thousands of Paramount dollars into advertising the book of Love Story (1970) to ensure it rode high on the bestseller charts and thus increased public awareness, Ransohoff had pulled off the same trick for Richard Jessup’s novel The Cincinnati Kid.

Tracy was first to quit, infuriated that he was denied script approval. Essentially, he wanted his role beefed up. But Ransohoff “would not expand his role in any way” and angered at the prospect of playing second fiddle to McQueen the actor walked out, to be replaced by a star with considerably less marquee appeal, Edward G. Robinson.

At least Tracy was able to depart with head held high. Peckinpah was ignominiously fired after shooting had begun. The intemperate director had already locked horns with the producer over a story which had now taken the efforts of four screenwriters – Oscar-winner Paddy Chayefsky (The Americanization of Emily), Oscar-winner Ring Lardner Jr. (Woman of the Year, 1943), Oscar nominee Terry Southern (Dr Strangelove, 1964) and newcomer Charles Eastman (Little Fauss and Big Halsy, 1970) – to knock the book into a workable screenplay without the extra bother of Peckinpah adding his own scenes.

Trade newspaper Variety reported: “Peckinpah’s problems stemmed from his filming of a nude scene that wasn’t in the script but which the director wrote on his own. Last Friday (November 4, 1964) he reportedly excused the featured cast and began to lense the nudie scene using an extra from the cast.” Whether this was indeed Sharon Tate, of whom Peckinpah was reported to have filmed in a flimsy shirt without a bra so that her nipples were showing, is unclear. And although there is an undertone of sex in the actual picture, as delivered by Ann-Margret, it was considerably more discreet.

Strangely enough, Ransohoff was no stranger to the benefits of nudity in his pictures and had fought a losing battle with the all-powerful MPAA, the industry ruling body in matters of censorship, to have nude scenes included in The Americanization of Emily. The nude statue of Elizabeth Taylor in The Sandpiper was permitted, however, and Ransohoff sent hundreds of miniature statues out to influencers as a gift.

Peckinpah did not have final cut so Ransohoff could easily have excised any nude scenes from the finished movie. What was considerably more alarming was that Peckinpah was shooting in black-and-white. Later, Ransohoff would contend that he was outraged by this notion but he surely must have signed off on it at the outset. Whatever the reasons, and some believed fisticuffs were involved, Peckinpah was sacked, leaving a $750,000 hole in the budget.

Production closed for over a month while Ransohoff scrambled for a new director. McQueen was pay-or-play, so if the film was cancelled, the actor was due his entire fee. McQueen had signed on for a fee of $200,000 – or $350,000 depending on who you believe – and $30,000 a week in overtime plus 25 per cent of the profit and a host of extras. McQueen had been initially lined up for a Ranoshoff remake of Boys Town to co-star James Garner, but that proved little more than a publicity flyer.

Replacement Norman Jewison had no reputation for hard-line drama – more at home with light comedy such as Send Me No Flowers (1964) – but was available and more likely to toe the Ransohoff line. However, initially he demurred. It was against the rules of the Directors Guild to step in in such a manner and Jewison required reassurance that Peckinpah was indeed out of the picture, and the film had been shut down, before accepting the job. Theoretically, Jewison received more control of the final cut than Peckinpah. His contract called for him to be in sole charge of the completed picture until after the third public preview. If it wasn’t working by that point, Ransohoff had the right to take over. Jewison exerted control in other ways, denying actors a chance to look at the rushes

Theoretically, McQueen had conceded top billing to Spencer Tracy, but that was not reflected in the artwork MGM put out – the illustration at the top of the Blog appeared in the trade press prior to production. To keep McQueen sweet during the layoff, Ransohoff handed him $25,000 to play the tables in Vegas. Edward G. Robinson had the same worries as Spencer Tracy, fearing his part would be cut to build up the star. In reality, McQueen welcomed going head-to-head with an older star, a situation he had not experienced since The Magnificent Seven (1960) with Yul Brynner.

But if the male stars, under the confident direction of Jewison, gave no trouble, that was not the case with the female contingent. Tuesday Weld came with a heap of personal issues related to becoming, as a child model, the family breadwinner at an early age – nervous breakdown at nine, alcoholic at ten, suicide attempt at twelve. She had never quite achieved stardom, in part as a result of turning down roles like Lolita (1962)

Ann-Margret was the opposite. She could earn nearly as much as McQueen – her fee at some studios was $250,000. However, Twentieth Century Fox was holding her to an earlier four-picture deal which paid a miserly $25,000 per movie, forcing her to lose out on a $150,000 payday in Europe for The 10^th Victim (1965) with Marcello Mastroianni – known at the time as The Seventh Victim, Ursula Andress her replacement – in order to take up a contracted role in the remake of Stagecoach (1966). Her over-sexed screen persona had caused playwright William Inge to remove his name from Bus Riley’s Back in Town (1965).

One of the hottest young stars in the business, she intended to stay that way, and her portrayal of Melba in The Cincinnati Kid pretty much fitted in with audience expectation. She was in such demand that she was under contract to make a total of 17 pictures for five separate studios plus Frank Sinatra’s independent production company. Her deals were with Universal (six pictures), Fox (four), MGM (three), Columbia (three) and United Artists (one). But after dropping out of Marriage on the Rocks (1965) with Sinatra her output for the rest of the decade comprised one movie apiece for Paramount, MGM, Fox and Columbia and four independent pictures in Italy.

MGM spent big bucks promoting the picture and, in particular, the Ann-Margret connection. The studio had put a marker down on Thanksgiving 1965 for the launch date, but was marketing the movie more than six months ahead, the kind of exposure that was normally only allotted to roadshow features.

SOURCES: Christopher Sandford, McQueen: The Biography, Harper Collins paperback (2002) pages 165, 170-176; Penina Spiegel, Steve McQueen: The Untold Story of a Bad Boy in Hollywood, Collins, 1986, p162, 169-173; “Ransohoff To Start Five Films in 6-Month Period,” Box Office, June 17, 1963, p27; “Marty Ransohoff To Seek Code Changes,” Box Office, November 25, 1963, p6; “Ann-Margret Into The Cash Splash,” Variety, July 22, 1964, p5; advert, Box Office, October 9, 1964, p9; “More Cincinnati Kid Books,” Box Office, October 24, 1964, pW-5; “Refuse Spencer Tracy Xincy Kid Script Okay So Actor Takes Powder,” Variety, November 11, 1964, p24; “Jewison Replacement for Sam Peckinpah,” Variety, December 9, 1964, p24; Advert, Variety, March 10, 1965, p80; “Fear Ann-Margret Going Wrongo In Her Screen Image,” Variety, March 24, 1965, p5; “Fox Holds Ann-Margret To Stagecoach, Denying Her For Mastroianni,” Variety, April 14, 1965, 4; Advert, Variety, May 19, 1965, p20.

Farewell, Friend / Adieu L’Ami (1968) ****

This heist picture made Charles Bronson a star, though, like Clint Eastwood a few years previously, he had to go to Europe, in this case France, to find an audience appreciable of his particular skill set. This was such a box office smash in France that it was the reason that Once upon a Time in the West (1968), a major flop virtually everywhere else, turned into a huge hit in Paris. After a decade as a supporting actor, albeit in some quality offerings like The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Great Escape (1963) and The Dirty Dozen (1967), Bronson developed a big following, if only initially in Europe.

Farewell, Friend could also lay fair claim to stealing the title of “first buddy movie” from the following year’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) because, apart from the heist that is central to the story, it is essentially about the forging of a friendship. But it wasn’t released in the U.S. for another five years, in the wake of Bronson’s Hollywood breakthrough in The Valachi Papers (1972), and then under a different title, Honor Among Thieves.

And you can see why it was such a star-making vehicle. Bronson goes toe-to-toe with France’s number one male star Alain Delon (The Sicilian Clan, 1969). He had the walk and the stance and the look and he was given acres of screen time to allow audiences to fully appreciate for the first time what he had to offer. Like Butch Cassidy, the duo share a lot of screen time, and after initial dislike, they slowly turn, through circumstance and the same code of honor, into friends.

Dino Barran (Alain Delon) is the principled one, after a final stint as a doctor in the French Foreign Legion originally turning down overtures from Franz Propp (Charles Bronson) to become involved in a separate major robbery. Propp is an unsavory customer, making his living as a small-time thief who uses a stripper to dupe wealthy marks. Barran plans to rob a corporation’s safe during the three-day Xmas holiday of two million dollars as a favor to the slinky widow Isabelle (Olga Georges-Picot) of a former colleague, for whose death he retains guilt. Propp more or less barges his way into the caper.

It’s a clever heist. Isabelle gets Barran a job as a company doctor whose office is next door to the giant vault. But there’s a twist. Surveillance reveals only three of the seven numbers required to open the combination to the vault. But Barran reckons three days is sufficient to try out the 10,000 possible permurations.

Barran and Propp despise each other and pass the time playing juvenile tricks, locking each other into a room, stealing all the food from the one dispensing machine, winding each other up, while they take turns trying different combinations. But it opens after only 3,400 attempts and they face a shock. The vault is empty. They have been set up to take the fall for a previous robbery that must have been completed before the building closed for Xmas.

And there’s no way out. They are in lockdown, deep in a basement. The elevators can only be opened by a small squadron of guards upstairs. Food long gone, they are going to run out of water. If they use a lighter to see in the dark, or build a fire to get warm, the flames will eat up the oxygen they need to survive in the enclosed space. So the heist turns into a battle for survival and brute force attempts to escape before the building re-opens and they are discovered, exhausted and clearly guilty.

But that’s only the second act. There is a better one to follow, as their friendship is defined in an unusual manner. And there are any number of twists to maintain the suspense and tension. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were close friends when that western began. Here, we see the evolution of a friendship between two forceful characters who express their feelings with their fists.

Delon was a known quantity, but Bronson really comes to the fore, more than holding his own against a top star who oozed charisma. This is Bronson in chrysalis, the emergence of the tough guy leading man screen persona that would turn him into one of the biggest stars in the world. Surprisingly, given his later penchant for the monosyllabic, here he does a lot of talking, perhaps more actual acting than he ever did later when his roles tended to fall into a stereotype.

He has the two best scenes, both character-defining, but in different ways. He has a little scam, getting people to gamble on how many coins it would take for an already full-to-the-brim glass to overflow when a certain number of coins were dropped in. While this is a cute trick, it’s that of a small-time con artist, but watching it play out, as it does at critical moments, is surprisingly suspenseful. The second is the strip scene which shows him, as a potential leading man, in a very poor light, and although thievery is the ultimate aim, it is not far short of pimping, with Bronson standing back while the woman (Marianna Falk) is routinely humiliated. It’s the kind of scene that would be given to a supporting actor, for whom later redemption was not on the cards. It says something for Bronson’s command of the screen and the development of his character that by the end of the picture the audience has long forgotten that he could stoop so low.

It is a film of such twists I would not want to say much more for fear of giving away too much, suffice to say that Olga Georges-Picot (Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime, 1968) and her friend, mousy nurse Dominique (Brigitte Fossey, in her grown-up debut), are also stand-outs, and not just in the sense of their allure.

Director Jean Herman, in his sophomore outing, takes the bold step of dispensing with music virtually throughout, which means that during the critical heist sequence the audience is deprived of the usual musical beats that might indicate threat or suspense or change of mood, but which has the benefit of keeping the camera squarely on the two leading characters without favoring either. Most pictures focusing on character rely on slow-burn drama. In the bulk of heist pictures, characters appear fully-formed. Here, unusually, and almost uniquely in the movie canon, character development takes place during an action film.

Top French thriller writer Sebastian Japrisot (The Sleeping Car Murder, 1965) was responsible along with Herman for the screenplay. Japrisot was a key figure in the French movie thriller scene, churning out, either as original novels or original screenplays, A Trap for Cinderella (1965), Rider on the Rain (1970) and The Lady in the Car with the Glasses and the Gun (1970).

Even without Bronson, this would have been a terrific heist picture. With him, it takes on a new dimension.

The Blog Speaks

I am this week’s guest on the Curiosityness one-hour podcast by Travis DeRose talking about my book on The Magnificent Seven (1960).

Yul Brynner vs. Kirk Douglas: The Battle for ‘Spartacus’ *****

When I wrote my book some years back on the making of The Magnificent Seven (1960) I was aware that Yul Brynner had attempted to set up a project called The Gladiators in direct opposition to rival Kirk Douglas venture Spartacus. What I didn’t know until I came across this fascinating new book, telling the untold story of The Gladiators vs. Spartacus, Dueling Productions in Blacklist Hollywood by Henry MacAdam and Duncan Cooper, was just how close Brynner came to derailing the Douglas production. Indeed, at first it appeared Brynner’s The Gladiators, based on the novel by Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon, The Ghost in the Machine), was a cinch to be first past the post. After winning the Best Actor Oscar for The King and I (1956) and starring in box office behemoth The Ten Commandments (1956), Brynner was set to become a movie mogul after being handed a record $25 million – $230 million at today’s prices – from United Artists for 11 pictures. His first project was The Gladiators on a $5.5 million budget, Meanwhile, Douglas, rejected for the title role in the forthcoming Ben-Hur, his picture Paths of Glory (1957) producing dismal returns, struggled to find funding for Spartacus, based on the book by Howard Fast.

Promotional ad in 1958 for Yul Brynner as Spartacus in ‘The Gladiators.’

There are instances of two studios embarking on similar projects at the same time – sci fi adventures Deep Impact and Armageddon appeared within months of each in 1998 but Warner Bros and Twentieth Century Fox decided to combine competing movies about a skyscraper on fire into The Towering Inferno (1974). Here, as much as efforts were made to combine the projects both actors were determined to continue the battle despite the potential competition. At another point, Brynner sought to recruit Douglas for The Magnificent Seven. The race to the screen went back and forth for a couple of years, Brynner unable to choose between the historical drama and the western, while Douglas had the luck to have as his agent Lew Wassermann, in the process of buying up Universal who determined that Spartacus would be the ideal prestige vehicle to relaunch the studio.

What gives this volume special significance is that the films were being produced against the backdrop of the blacklist, the anti-Communist hysteria stirred by HUAC in the late 1940s/early 1950s. Screenplays for both films were the work of blacklisted writers, Abraham Polonsky on the Brynner side and Dalton Trumbo for Douglas. Polonsky was writer-director of Force of Evil (1948) as well as writer of another quintessential film noir Body and Soul (1947), for which he was Oscar-nominated, before his career was prematurely interrupted. Trumbo was held in even greater esteem, Oscar-nominated for Kitty Foyle (1941), and with A Guy Named Joe (1943) under his belt. While blacklisted, both wrote under “fronts”, Trumbo responsible for the Oscar-winning screenplays for Roman Holiday (1953) and The Brave One (1956), Polonsky successfully switching for a time to television. Both productions proceeded with the need to keep secret the real screenwriters, Ira Wolfert fronting for Polonsky, author Howard Fast unknowingly doing the same for Trumbo.

The parallel tales of two ambitious producers dueling for supremacy and of two blacklisted writers fighting for survival make a thrilling read. At any moment, either production could be killed by revelations about the screenwriters, while the planned films faced a succession of what seemed sometimes insurmountable obstacles. Both movies pursued, for example, the same three stars – Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton and Peter Ustinov. Martin Ritt, initial director for The Gladiators, dropped out while Anthony Mann, in the same position for Spartacus, was fired. Script problems dogged both pictures. Rivalry was conducted openly in the trade press while the productions clashed over the title. Even when Spartacus nudged ahead in the production process, the spiraling budget almost put paid to the endeavor, while The Gladiators hovered in the background, intent on capitalizing should, as appeared for a long time the most likely outcome, the Douglas film flop at the box office.

The third riveting element of this book is a scoop. The authors have located the original Polonsky screenplay for The Gladiators, believed lost for over 60 years, and so are able to contrast the different approaches to the subject of the Spartacus revolution. (In a separate volume, the entire screenplay has been published with annotations and critical commentary by Fiona Radford and background essays by MacAdam and Cooper). Koestler was a cult figure, far better known than Howard Fast, and has remained in the literary consciousness ever since his suicide in 1983. With The Gladiators failing to reach the screen, Polonsky remained under the Hollywood radar for several years before his career revived with the screenplay for Madigan (1968) and as writer-director of modern western Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969) starring Robert Redford. The revelation that Trumbo had written Otto Preminger’s Exodus (1960) and the involvement of Polonsky in The Gladiators helped break the blacklist. Trumbo went on to enjoy a successful official comeback, biopic Trumbo (2105) depicting the tribulations he suffered as a blacklistee.

The book is available from Cambridge Scholars.

Invitation to a Gunfighter (1964) ****

If ever a movie was in sore need of reappraisal it’s Richard Wilson’s western, which encountered both audience and critical indifference on initial release. If you’ve heard of Wilson at all it will, hopefully, either be down to his connection with Orson Welles or from his crime duo Capone (1959) with Rod Steiger and Pay or Die (1960) with Ernest Borgnine. On the other hand, you may be more familiar with the name from the Ma and Pa Kettle series in the 1950s or perhaps raunchy comedy Three in the Attic (1968). Or because he was an unlikely contender for the triple-hyphenate position (writer-producer-director) held on the Hollywood scene by the likes of Billy Wilder and less-heralded figures such as John Lemont on the recently-reviewed The Frightened City (1961).

Wilson was not first choice to direct since the western had been on the Stanley Kramer company slate since 1957 when it was planned for Paul Stanley before it moved in 1961 into Hubert Cornfield’s orbit with a script by James Lee Barratt and then repossessed by Kramer when Rod Steiger was briefly attached. The film, backed financially by Kramer, barely rates a paragraph in the director’s autobiography in which he describes the picture as “an adult western with a somewhat complicated plot.” There’s no getting past the fact that the plot is complicated, but it’s not the plot but the characters that held me in thrall. Kramer thought the film contained elements of High Noon (1952). But for me the starting point was surely The Magnificent Seven (1960) and not just because Yul Brynner played a gunfighter complete with black outfit and cigar. It wasn’t Brynner’s look in the previous western that brought me to that conclusion, but the scene where the gunfighters sit around talking about where their career has taken them – to precisely nowhere: no wives, no family, no home.

Invitation to a Gunfighter makes more sense as an adult sequel to The Magnificent Seven than any of that movie’s other retreads. Imagine that Brynner, despite the boost to his esteem from beating the Mexican bandits, had not shaken off what we would most likely classify these days as a malaise or a depression. He is trying to make sense of a life that has proved unfulfilled. His options are salvation or suicide. At some point he will come up against a quicker gun, so it is suicide to continue in this profession.

But this Brynner is also close kin to Clint Eastwood’s man with no name, the mercenary who takes full advantage of his power in lawless towns, and especially to the later embodiment of such a character in High Plains Drifter (1973). (Perhaps Eastwood got the idea of renaming the town ‘Hell’ and painting it red from the scene where Brynner, fed up with the hypocrisy of the righteous townspeople, goes on a drunken wrecking spree.) However, Brynner is far from anonymous. His name is so rich – Jules Gaspard D’Estaing – that the locals curtail it to the more peremptory Jewel. And this Brynner is cultured. He plays the spinet (a kind of harpsichord) and the guitar, sings, quotes poetry and cleans up at poker. He is sweet to old ladies, but that is in the guise of righting wrongs. And he is defender of the under-privileged, in this case downtrodden Mexicans. He was himself the son of a slave. The most compelling aspect of this picture is that despite knowing so much about him he remains mysterious.

Brynner wasn’t the two-fisted kind of action hero, but more the guy who could disarm the opposition with a mean stare, and charm women with his brooding good looks. As mentioned, the plot is complicated so to get the best out of the picture you need to kind of set that to one side. Simply put, Confederate soldier George Segal, returning from the Civil War, finds his farm has been appropriated and his sweetheart Ruth Adams (Janice Rule) has married someone else, the one-armed Crane Adams (Clifford David). Brynner is brought in to get rid of Segal who is causing a nuisance to the town’s immoral hierarchy.

So the story, rather than the plot, is the interaction between these four. Crane Adams clearly wants any opportunity to kill off his rival. Equally, Segal wants to win Rule back. And Brynner finds himself unexpectedly drawn to the sad, pensive Rule, abandoning the Santa Fe stagecoach on catching a glimpse of her, only hired when the townsfolk discover his occupation. Brynner has a fantasy of taking her away from all this, the pair of them riding off together, and there is no doubt Rule is tempted as he implants himself in their household and shows himself to have everything her husband, or Segal for that matter, lacks. Perhaps the best thing about the movie is that nothing is clear cut. Our sympathy shifts from Brynner to Segal to Rule. Even when Brynner brings the town’s hierarchy to heel, there is no guarantee that will be enough to win over Rule. And if he cannot have her, what does he have? The Eastwood loner never seems to care about emotional involvement, he just takes what he wants, but the Brynner character is more sensitive and does not want a one-sided relationship based solely on power.

For the movie to work at all, Rule needs to engage our sympathies. Having clearly been somewhat mercenary herself in discarding Segal in favor of Crane Adams (presumably not originally disabled), she needs to portray a woman who is not just going to jump at the next best thing. Rule is especially good, far better than in more showy roles in Alvarez Kelly (1966) and The Chase (1966). Never given the opportunity to verbalize her emotions, nonetheless in scene after scene her quiet anguish is shown on her face. Magnificent Seven alumni Brad Dexter and John Alonzo (later the famed cinematographer) have small parts.

I certainly saw a different picture to the “offbeat but confusing western” viewed by Variety’s critic and possibly, for once, because the passage of time has allowed this film to be seen in a new light. Rather than a morality play in the vein of High Noon, I saw it as a character study of a gunfighter knocking on heaven’s door.

Many of the films made in the 1960s are now available free-to-view on a variety of television channels and on Youtube but if you’ve got no luck there, then here’s the DVD.

Industry Insider : Ben Marcus

You’ll probably never have heard of Ben Marcus but without him you would not be seeing movies the way you do these days.

Polish-born Marcus owned a chain of 36 picture houses in Wisconsin and he was growing alarmed at two aspects of a fast-changing business: how long it took for big movies to reach his theaters and the fact that by the time he did get hold of them audience interest had been sapped by their long runs in big city houses.

So he invented the Marcus Plan. In the early 1960s there was no such thing as a national wide release as there is now, the same movie appearing at the same time in every multiplex in the country. Instead, there was a drip-feed down the long tail of a food chain, some movies taking a year or more to complete their release.

There had been some experiments in localized wide release – what was then known as “saturation” – The Magnificent Seven the most high-profile movie shown in this manner, bundled from one small group of states to another over a matter of months, but mostly pictures that went down this route were low-budget exploitationers, gone before word-of-mouth could sink them.

Marcus thought it would make more sense for exhibitors and studios to work together in a concerted fashion, equally contributing to a marketing campaign, to come up with a longer-term strategy for coordinated wide release. So he set up a test project in 1961 and soon had the box office figures to prove that movies as disparate as Operation Petticoat, The Time Machine and Gidget could make more by using the plan than Pollyanna, The Apartment and Ocean’s 11 could without.

Just to prove the idea did not depend on star names or films with an inbuilt attraction, he ran the experiment again, this time revolving around The Trapp Family, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, Hoodlum Priest and Operation Eichmann with nary a star between them and The Great Imposter starring Tony Curtis whose initial prospects had been considered bleak. The Trapp Family was not just already six years old but a foreign picture, made in West Germany, the only element in its favor that Twentieth Century Fox had snapped up the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway hit The Sound of Music based on their story.

The five pictures sent out in this fashion did so much better than expected that trade magazine Box Office called the Marcus Plan a “magic device.” United Artists, Columbia and Universal became enthusiastic supporters and worked alongside exhibitors to develop the idea. But it was the participation of Warner Brothers which took the concept to the next stage.

The studio was persuaded to switch release dates to suit exhibitors and brought forward Robert Aldrich’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane from March 1963 to November 1962 resulting in a release in a thousand theaters in three consecutive waves. It went into profit in the first two weeks and the modern wide release was born.