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187 Chapter 9 Multiple Jeopardy, 1965–1975 In April 1965 Variety described “what might be called the ‘new’ picture business, a prevailing modus operandi which took a decade to evolve from five separate industry crises.” That modus operandi included: “profitable (hence peaceful) coexistence with television”; the predominance of “studio-packager coproduction deals”; the aftermath of theater divorcement; the arrival of overseas production as something “here to stay”; and the development of “new compensation formulas” for talent (such as gross- and profit-participation deals) as well as “new production-distribution methods.”1 The same article also noted the remarkably high number of films in the preceding five years—forty-three in all—that had earned domestic rentals of $6 million or more. The current season in particular had produced a sequence of massive hits, with Goldfinger, Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, and The Sound of Music all having opened in the preceding six months, and Thunderball and Doctor Zhivago both to appear by the end of the year. The portrait Variety painted of Hollywood was one of achieved stability and prosperity. The proportion of profitable releases overall might have been small, but there seemed to be no limits to the earning power of the most successful films. A boom in suburban cinema building, particularly in shopping malls enclosing two, three, or more modestly sized auditoria under a single roof, and increasing numbers of drive-ins compensated for closures of traditional hard-top picture palaces and suggested a healthy, expanding exhibition sector.2 The studios’ revenues had also stabilized and annual profits were rising steadily, though this was due more to ticket price increases and windfall earnings from the lease of films to television than to any rise in theater attendance. But still there were danger signs. Addressing the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) labor union convention in 1966, the newly appointed head of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Jack Valenti, claimed that the average Hollywood picture now cost $3 million, a 50 percent increase in 188 C H A P T E R 9 five years. Among the consequences of this, he pointed out, had been a further reduction in output as a way of limiting risk and an ongoing trend to produce films more cheaply overseas. If this situation continued, Valenti foresaw “the slow extinction of what we know as the motion picture industry in the United States.”3 Unions’ demands for minimum wages and minimum crews were among the reasons often given for the runaway tendency. Exorbitant payments for leading actors also accounted substantially for increased budgets. The negative cost of Warners’ adaptation of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid ofVirginiaWoolf? (1966)—filmed in standard wide screen and black-andwhite , largely set in domestic interiors, and with a cast of only four principal actors— amounted to $7,613,000, in part because stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton received up-front fees of $1 million and $750,000, respectively, against 10 percent of the gross apiece.4 (Their participation was presumably added to the budget.) Valenti might have been speaking of VirginiaWoolf ’s neophyte director, Mike Nichols , when he told his IATSE audience that “a new breed of movie makers are moving in,” filmmakers who were “breaking away from old traditions” and “looking to the future.” This new breed was being encouraged, he said, by the existence of a more sophisticated audience, the product of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “revolutionary educational legislation [that] has literally awakened a whole new world of potential and promise for film-making.”5 When Darryl Zanuck referred the following month to a “new wave of filmmaking,” he had something different in mind. He was referring to roadshows—in particular, to his own studio’s current reserved-seat attractions The Sand Pebbles, The Blue Max (both 1966), and The Bible, as well as the still-running The Sound of Music. Zanuck took pride in having instilled in Fox a commitment to this “new production concept” [sic], consisting of “advance-sale promotion of a prestige product with an in-bred guaranteed income.”6 The commercial philosophy embodied in Zanuck’s policy was one that, to a greater or lesser extent, all the studios shared. As we have seen, roadshows were released in increasing numbers throughout the second half of the decade. The spread of 70 mm–equipped theaters (727 in the United States by 1968, or 5 percent of the estimated total) guaranteed more space...

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