Camera And Action, page 37
6. Tusher, "Window on Hollywood," 92, 94. Universal Studios' employment pool rose from 200 to 3,000 potential recruits by mid-decade, for instance. Peter Bart, "Hollywood Watching Economics as Well as the Esthetic Things: Picture-Making is Said to be on a More Businesslike Basis Than Before -Quality I Replacing Quantity," The New York Times, 5 July 1964.
7. Leonard Sloane, "At the Movies: Big Costs, Revenues, TV Sales," The New York Times, 23 Oct. 1966. Television stations had always bought films from studios but, as Peter Bart reported, what made the current market different was that "movies started to dominate TV schedules." Peter Bart, "TV-Film Accords Arousing Doubts: Golden Goose Looks Like a Trojan Horse to Some," The New York Times, 7 Jan. 1966.
8. Leonard Sloane, "Paramount Pictures Joins Gulf and Western," The New York Times, 20 Oct. 1966.
9. Leonard Sloane, "At the Movies." See also Leonard Sloane, "Paramount Pictures."
10. Tino Balio, United Artists: The Company that Changed the Film Industry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 197. On the 1st of January, MCA, Inc. (producer and distributor), merged with Decca Records and on May 25, 1966, Universal Pictures became Universal Studios, Inc., a subsidiary of MCA. Among the other divisions were MCA Music, Universal Film Exchanges, Universal International Films, Decca Distributing, and Universal Television. M-G-M owned Robbins Music Corporation, Variety Music, Inc., Miller Music Corporation, the Big 3 Music Corporation and Pine Ridge Music, Inc. Twentieth-Century-Fox controlled Surrey Music Corporation, Twentieth Century Music Corporation, and Movietone Music Corporation. Warners owned Music Publishers Holding Corporation and Warner Brothers Records. The Film Daily Yearbook ofMotion Pictures 49 (1967): 716, 721, 724. By 1966 United Artists had made two million dollars on the soundtrack for A Hard Days Night. The cost of the film was $580,000. M-G-M's royalties from the Doctor Dolittle soundtrack and sheet music helped the company recover the $11 million in production costs for the film. Music rights from The Magnificent Seven brought United Artists a "six figure" sum for using a few bars from the film on the Marlboro ads running on TV and radio. As Vincent Canby reported, "Film music ... has now also become a significant source for recurring profits." Vincent Canby, "Music is Now Profit to the Ears of Filmmakers," The New York Times, 24 May 1966.
11. Paramount advertisement in The Film Daily Yearbook ofMotion Pictures 51 (1969): 879.
12. Balio, United Artists, 197, 198, 201.
13. Leonard Sloane, "Advertising: Movies Termed Unusual Breed," The New York Times, 18 Sep. 1966. Good marketing generally brought in three-fourths of the ad budget at first-run theaters, which usually meant New York. Press-screenings provided the media with lead-time to prepare the promotional story. VIP screenings sought endorsements from leading figures in the educational, political, and religious arenas. These tactics all garnered in-group sales from official endorsement. When film news coincided with a real news event, like debuting a film on a holiday or by using the premiere as a charity benefit, the film gained more advertising ground free of charge. As Tino Balio explained, United Artists, for example, used charities and premieres "to ennoble the picture and perhaps to neutralize any unfavorable critical opinion." Balio, UnitedArtists, 216.
14. Balio, United Artists, 202. The 1960s' marketing strategies followed earlier advertising practices that placed the star as the main draw in advertising a film but in an exaggerated way that typically de-centered the studio and allowed the construction of celebrity status to take on a life of its own outside studio dominance.
15. Peter Bart, "Better Breaks for New Talent: Film Industry Discovers that the Famous Old Stars Are not Worth Their Weight in Box Office Gold," The New York Times, 18 Oct. 1964. Bart's list of disappointments includes Frank Sinatra, Audrey Hepburn, Laurence Olivier, Kirk Douglas and even Marlon Brando. Peter Bart, "Hollywood Watching Economics."
16. Peter Bart, "A Prisoner of the System?" The New York Times, 23 Oct. 1966.
17. Sloane, "Advertising." Companies turned to intense advertising campaigns to bring the film and the new faces to the viewers. For just a first-run or "road show" engagement, marketing ranged from $500,000 to $3,000,000 for one picture. Likewise, for pre-opening promotion a New York showing alone could cost $100,000 to $150,000. Multiply that by twenty-some pictures a year and several companies and the total advertising expenses reached into the hundreds of millions, making the film business a billiondollar-a-year industry. Promotion included expanding coverage in trailers, posters, displays and other forms of publicity.
18. In the early years, the bulk of capital lay in the exhibition end of the business, not in the production. The Big Five had developed a complex distribution system to keep their control intact. The system obliged important producers to negotiate with the studios for distribution. Even independent theater owners preferred the majors because they produced the biggest stars and thus had the most potential for box office sales. During the 1943-1944 season, before the big slump in movie going, the Big Five received around 75 percent of film rental revenue in the United States, the Little Three (United Artists, Columbia, and Universal) took in 20 percent, and the rest 5 percent. See Douglas Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), 12, 21. Films were released exclusively to theaters in cities with large audience potential and high incomes. See also Balio, United Artists, 212.
19. See Garth Jewett, Film, The Democratic Art: A Social History of American Film (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), especially pages 275-281; the United States v. Paramount Pictures (334 U.S., 131); Gregory D. Black, The Catholic Crusade Against the Movies, 1940-1975 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997). He explains, "This case struck down the vertical integration of production, distribution, and exhibition that had been the economic foundation for the glitter and glamour of Hollywood." Even though the Big Five only "directly controlled about 2,800 theaters out of the roughly 17,000 in the United States," their monopolistic practice lay in their capacity to restrict first-run features (of which they produced 90 percent) to play only in the theaters they controlled. As Black has shown, "These theaters playing first-run features were responsible for the majority of film rentals." The Big Five partitioned the American markets according to "spheres of influence," with Paramount dominating 50 percent of the Southern theaters, Fox controlling the West Coast, Warners in the Mid-Atlantic, RKO in New York and New Jersey and Loew's in the premiere place, New York City. Black describes the aspect of monopoly: "Using traditional economic techniques, the majors fixed prices, pooled profits, set how long theaters could play a feature, agreed to exhibit one another's films, and forced independent theater owners to take all the films produced by a studio or take none (block booking)." Black, Catholic Crusade, 69. See Murray Smith for a critique of the assumptions that the injunction period reorganized the kinds of products coming from Hollywood and undermined its oligopolistic nature. Whether this period ultimately created new forms of industry organization is certainly up for debate. Still, the opportunities and changes that were created for theater owners and specific individuals of Hollywood played a decisive role in the direction film as an aesthetic product took during the 1960s. Murray Smith, "Theses on the Philosophy of Hollywood History," in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steve Neale and Murray Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 3-20. National General Corporation (National Theatres and Television, Inc.) assumed Fox's Film Corporation in 1952. Theater operations and film production together in 1950 brought Fox $9.5 million. After separation, it took the company until 1954 to come close to that figure with its approximate $8,000,000 in earnings that year. See The Film Daily Yearbook ofMotion Pictures 49 (1967): 716, 717 and "Fox Film Sets Earnings Mark," The New York Times, 27 Mar. 1964.
20. See Jewett, Film, The Democratic Art, 428-429.
21. Howard Thompson, "Double Feature: Shows and Shops," The New York Times, 7 Mar. 1964. Many center contractors put up the $250,000 cost for theaters, built them, and then leased them to exhibitors.
22. "The King of Intermissions," Time 86 (9 July 1965): 93-94.
23. "Theaters Adapt to Suburban Life: Follow Growth Pattern by Avoiding Downtown Sites," The New York Times, 19 Jan. 1964.
24. Loews was essentially in hotels; Stanley Warner in Playtex; and AB-Paramount in radio, TV, real estate, CATV, and savings and loans.
25. Business Week 2115 (14 Mar. 1970): 29. Locations included Bartow and Tampa, FL; Muskogee, OK; and Saginaw, MI.
26. Paul Leglise, "The Hidden Face of the Cinema Pt. III: An Audience of 12,000,000,000," UNESCO Courier (Feb. 1963): 26-27.
27. "Theaters Adapt to Suburban Life." Fire code regulations were also responsible for eliminating the balcony, since it was typically the smoking area. Renovated theaters with balconies presented the added responsibility to theater owners of prohibiting smoking.
28. Hollis Alpert, "Something New in Movie Communication," Saturday Review 45 (9 June 1962): 54, 55. As Alpert reported, by June 1962, "a two-decker theatre known as Cinema I and Cinema II...open[ed] its double doors and double box office on Manhattan's Third Avenue which, not so many years ago, was a dank, dark street covered over by an elevated connection between the Bowery and the Bronx." Cinema I seated 700 and Cinema 11 300 viewers. Don Rugoff chose the newly transformed "mid-East Side" to showcase a double-decker, the kind with an intimate setting where "coffee is served in the lounge and Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni are served on the screen." Rugoff's plan included "[book] displays, hi-fi listening areas, and an art gallery." He saw the specialized theater as a "compact cultural center" and if New York State would have permitted, he would have served the artsy sophisticates sherry.
29. Ernest Callenbach, "Temples of the Seventh Art," Sight and Sound 35 (Winter 1965): 14, 12.
30. Ibid.
31. For details on rulings, see Black, Catholic Crusade, 66-73. From 1907, when progressive reformers in Chicago forced theaters to obtain permits for screenings, censorship boards nationwide voiced municipal concerns over movies' social influence. In 1915 the United States Supreme Court sanctioned the constitutionality of an Ohio law that required official approval of all films prior to their exhibition in Ohio theaters, but no national censorship code was created.
32. The Production Code of 1930 specified over thirty standards of production. These standards scrutinized topics that were either forbidden or, if used, to be filmed with discretion. Those in question included "crimes against the law," "adultery," "seduction and rape," "white slavery," "miscegenation," "vulgarity," "profanity," "indecent dance movement," "ridicule of any religious faith," "respect for national feelings," and "repellent subjects" such as cruelty to animals and children, hangings, prostitution, and others. The code's "Preamble" recognized "the high trust and confidence which have been placed in [motion picture producers] by the people of the world and which have made motion pictures a universal form of entertainment." Hence, producers accepted their role as entertainers who were also subject to the public trust and to "the life of a nation." See Jowett, Film, the Democratic Art, for a complete copy of the Code in Appendix IV, p. 468, and "Production Code Administration," The Film Daily Yearbook 49 (1967): 616.
33. William Tusher, "Window on Hollywood," 92.
34. Father Daniel Lord, contributor to PCAs code, and well-known lay Catholic Martin Quigley based the role of censor on the shared belief that "entertainment films should reinforce religious teachings that deviant behavior, whether criminal or sexual, cost the violator the love and comforts of home, the intimacy of family, the solace of religion, and the protection of law." Father Lord, Quigley, and Protestant colleagues saw movies as "twentieth-century morality plays that illustrated proper behavior to the masses." In Father Lord's words, the industry had a "special Moral Responsibility" and that meant that film could not be considered the same as a book or a newspaper because of its universality. For that reason, "movies had to be more restricted ... because they were persuasively and indiscriminately seductive. Whereas audiences of books, plays, and even newspapers were self-selective, the movies had universal appeal." Between enticing the viewer with movie palace interiors, glamorous stars, and film itself, Hollywood produced "irresistible fantasy." Because of film's pervasive, sensual nature, the Legion's code determined that "no picture should lower the moral standards of those who see it." Black, Catholic Crusade, 13. For a discussion of criticisms of the League from professors, screenwriters, racial groups and others, see Paul W Facey, The Legion of Decency: A Sociological Analysis of the Emergence and Development of a Social Pressure Group (New York: Arno Press, 1974), especially 2, 178.
35. In 1964, for example, the Catholic League issued 16 "C's" -the largest number since the Legion's inception. Thirteen of those were domestic films. In December, American Bishops issued a report "in preparation for Pledge Sunday," to encourage American Catholics "to renew their pledge of support to the Legion by boycotting theaters that present `objectionable' films."
36. Black, Catholic Crusade, 3. At the same time the code system gained strength, filmmakers declared First Amendment violations and insisted that cinema be subject to freedom of speech just as printed media was. In the mid-1950s, United Artists (a maverick production company to begin with) released two American films without Code Seals: Otto Preminger's 1953 The Moon is Blue, a film about adultery, and, in 1955, The Man with the Golden Arm, a story about drug addiction starring Frank Sinatra.
37. Ibid., 5, 220. American moviegoers spent an estimated $10,000,000 on one foreign film, Zorba the Greek, and one American art film, The Pawnbroker, by 1966. Peter Bart, "The Excitement Is All From Europe," The New York Times, 3 Apr. 1966.
38. See Jowett, Democratic Art, 465-472.
39. Ronald Gold, "Jack Valenti Seeks New Ways," Variety 243.2 (1 June 1966): 1, 52-53. Valenti was offered a $125,000 salary plus expenses.
40. For a full discussion on this film's role in breaking down the censorship codes, see Leonard J. Leff, "A Test of American Film Censorship: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' in Hollywood as Historian: American Film in a
Cultural Context, ed. Peter Rollins (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1983), 214, 216, and 211-229. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was released in 1966.
41. See Richard S. Randall, Censorship of the Movies: The Social and Political Control of a Mass Medium (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968). As mentioned earlier, challenges to the industry had been fought along individual lines with The Moon is Blue (1953), The Man With the Golden Arm (1956), and The Pawnbroker (1964). By the time Virginia Woolfchallenged censorship strictures, the issues went beyond the case of an individual film. The concerns were now understood on the social and cultural level. The PCA had bent the rules only a few years earlier with films such as Hud (1963) when they allowed "bitch' and "bastard" in the script, but the PCA stood firmly against Virginia Woolf. See Leff, Virginia Woolf, 214. Yet, as a Broadway play, the script had the New York intelli- gensia's endorsement and that in itself revealed the unevenness of the Code restrictions on film. The stage had updated itself; it was time for film to do the same.
42. Leonard J. Leff, "A Test," 226. See also "Catholic Office's A-4 Rating To `Woolf'; Industry's own Seal Still Not Bestowed," Variety 243.2 (1 June 1966): 7.
43. "`Virginia Woolf' to Be Shown As a `For Adults Only' Film," The New York Times, 26 May 1966. The clause was "the first ever adopted by Warner Brothers" because, as Mr. Warner noted, "we do not think it is a film for children." See also "Catholics Define `Woolf' Attitude," Variety 243.2 (1 June 1966): 7.
44. Vincent Canby, "`Virginia Woolf' Given Code Seal: Industry's Censors Exempt Film from Speech Rules," The New York Times, 11 June 1966.
45. Martin Quigley, Jr., son of the prominent coauthor of the Code Martin Quigley, declared the Code obsolete in an editorial on July 6, 1966, entitled, "The Code is Dead," in the Motion Picture Herald. For reference to this editorial in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences clip file, see footnote #48 in Leff, Virginia Woolf 227.
46. Vincent Canby, "Filmmakers Show Less Fear of Catholic Office: 5 Movies Condemned in Year but are Released With Tag `For Mature Audience,"' The New York Times, 13 Oct. 1967.
47. Another court sanction in the 1950s authorized the distribution of The Miracle, an Italian film, by declaring it a "significant medium for the communication of ideas." This sanction helped open ways for future questionable aspects of sexual depictions on screen, thereby further defining film's social value. See Leff, "A Test," 228.
48. Vincent Canby, "Czar of the Movie Business," The New York Times, 23 Apr. 1967.
49. Tusher, "Hollywood 1967," 96.
50. Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System, 24. See also Balio, United Artists, for an explanation of United Artists' encouragement of independents. The "independent" trend began in 1951 with the new management team of Arthur B. Krim and Robert S. Benjamin, who reorganized a nearbankrupt United Artists (UA) in February of that same year and changed the company policy from merely distributing to financing independent films. This pacesetter company "started a revolution in the motion picture industry" by redefining the relationship between the distributor-financier-producer-artist (quoted in Balio, UnitedArtists, 3). With industry restructuring and Code break-up, the 1960s made UAs support of independents more possible, but ultimately, opportunity for independents, via UA or not, could hardly have occurred without the Big Five's substantial loss of control with the PCA break-up. Censorship for the Big Five indirectly served as a control of first-run production and exhibition. As Gregory Black has explained, "The majors had agreed they would neither produce nor play in any theater under their control, a film that did not carry the industry PCA seal." First-runs were virtually inaccessible to independents without going through the PCA process. Black, Catholic Crusade, 69.
