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135 Chapter 7 Colossals and Blockbusters, 1949–1959 In what Variety called a “giant step back toward normality,” the period 1949 to 1951 saw a rise in major studio output but a substantial reduction in operating costs.1 With the box office now in recession, budgets and shooting schedules were cut. Careful advance planning helped eliminate wasted footage. Overheads were reduced by laying off permanent staff at all levels. Even executives and “above-the-line” talent (directors, producers, and stars) took pay cuts, often in return for profit or gross participation . In these three years combined, only eight films cost more than $3 million to produce, and of these only one more than $4 million.2 According to one theater manager, “Super-dupers . . . are not worth the playing time, and film costs are too high in comparison to admission charges. Exhibitors have lost enthusiasm [for them] because there is a negligible profit.”3 Paramount president Adolph Zukor conceded that the industry still needed films with “abnormal staying power” to attract a more discriminating public, but added that “big, outstanding pictures [did not] necessarily mean very costly ones. Pictures need brains, not money. The talk that high-cost pictures attract the public is not correct. Give me brains and I’ll make good pictures.”4 But it was not long before the lessons of the box office forced a return to bigness. While the domestic market was depressed, the overseas market gradually returned to a more stable basis as agreements were reached with each of the major European countries that had imposed currency restrictions. However, considerable sums in film revenues were still prevented from being converted into dollars for remittance to the United States. With the availability of these blocked funds for local use, location shooting abroad came to seem a desirable option (see the next chapter for more detailed discussion). In advocating “Global Production,” Darryl Zanuck stated: “Hollywood makes pictures for the whole world and therefore should consider the whole world as a shooting location. This, I believe, will be a stimulus to the box-office both here and abroad.”5 Zanuck claimed, with some justice, that his studio was in the 136 C H A P T E R 7 forefront of this development. Fox had recently produced a number of location-shot films, including the period epics Prince of Foxes (filmed in Italy) and The Black Rose (filmed in Britain and Morocco). However, the devaluation of European currencies, especially the British pound (whose dollar exchange value fell by one-third), threatened to reduce the value of overseas earnings.6 To recoup costs as quickly as possible, Prince of Foxes was premiered simultaneously in fifteen countries. According to Variety this was “one of the fastest playoffs ever accorded a top-budgeted film” and “the first time any picture [had] been given such a worldwide sendoff.”7 Prince of Foxes and The Black Rose were also in the vanguard of a revival of the costume adventure, a genre that was to remain a staple of both Hollywood and international production for the next two decades. The Black Rose was one of a number of large-scale films that had been intended for production several years earlier, but were postponed because of the costs involved. Planned for shooting in Britain in 1947, it was canceled because of the ad valorem tax dispute and concerns over its budget, initially projected as high as $5 million. Adaptations of the pseudo-biblical best sellers Quo Vadis? and The Robe had been announced for production during the war, but shortages of materials and manpower led to their cancellation also.8 The postwar recession posed similar problems for big pictures, and most costume films of the early 1950s were modestly produced by the standards of recent years. In 1950, Warners’ The Flame and the Arrow and Disney-RKO’s Treasure Island were each made for less than $2 million, while MGM’s Kim and King Solomon’s Mines each came in at under $2.5 million despite extensive overseas location work. (In contrast, MGM’s The Three Musketeers [1948] had cost $4,474,000.) While this period produced few films with superbudgets, there were also few superhits. George Gallup’s Audience Research Institute estimated that the average Apicture of 1949 was seen by three million fewer Americans than in 1946. Variety’s annual box-office charts showed no films with domestic rentals exceeding $5.5 million for the years 1948...

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