Adventures in the Screen Trade (7 page)

A sadder example of this social need for equality was a move the Orion people made. They also had to prove they were still heavyweights, so they made a zillion deals. Including one where they gave John Travolta control of any movies he did for them. Travolta was then maybe twenty-five with two leads be- hind him. Giving someone with that lack of track record control only betrayed Orion's desperation. Which was sad, at least for me, because they were, when at UA, maybe the top group in the business. But maybe it was worth it to them, since they could then say, "Look, everybody, we've got John Travolta."

S Number Two: Shorthand

It speeds things up when you have stars. If you say, "We're do- ing a Goldie Hawn picture," you don't have to go on. The per- former sets the framework of the product. If you say you've got Chariots of Fire, you're going to have to go on and on explicating just what it is that you're talking about.

This shorthand is especially helpful to the business people at the studio.

This past holiday season, UA had four pictures out in the marketplace. (A different UA group, by the by, than the people who bought the Talese book-who'd come and quickly gone.) It was a tremendous lineup and quickly describable: "We've got Peter Fslk in a raunchy comedy. Richard Dreyfuss in a Broadway smash, Lemmon and Matthau together again with Billy Wilder, and Steve Martin in a musical." It's no wonder with product like that, they were able to get

fabulous bookings in the best theatres all around the country. And with those fabulous bookings what did they achieve? The four films-All the Marbles, Whose Life is It Anyway?, Buddy, Buddy, and Pennies from Heaven-probably lost a minimum of fifty mil- lion dollars, maybe as much as seventy-five.

But they got booked in theatres. Which is the name of the game for the business people at the studios. Should we be surprised at the theatre owners grabbing those movies? Of course not, they'd have been out of their gourds not to. Should we be surprised at the failures of the films? A very faint maybe. Clearly, this is hindsight, which never fails. And again, nobody ever knows. But each of these films had a giant problem attached. Let's take them in the order in which they opened.

The Ffeter Falk film. All the Marbles. In description it still sounds terrific. It's a raunchy comedy in which Falk plays the manager of two gorgeous girls who are tag-team wrestling part- ners. It takes place, for the most part, in raunchy tank towns, with Falk always the hustler. And no one plays that kind of sleazy character better than Peter Falk. The problem: The movie takes pro wrestling seriously. We know that when Bruno Sammartino enters the ring, he's pretty much a shoo-in. He may get pounded, he may be beaten almost senseless. But one way or another, he's going to triumph. Whether pro wrestling is actually rehearsed or not, I have no idea. But the outcome is not in doubt.

All the Marbles treated each match as if it were the pro football playoffs leading toward the Superbowl. The matches, we were asked to believe, weren't fixed or phony, any more than the seventh game of the World Series. Would an audience buy that premise? When I saw the movie they sure didn't.

The Richard Dreyfuss film. Whose Life Is It Anyway? This was certainly a famous show on Broadway: Tom Conti won the Tony for his performance, and then, with tremendous publicity, Mary Tyier Moore took over the part, for which she was also awarded. But it was never much of a commercial hit. I don't think it ever had a single sellout week. It was well reviewed-as was the movie-but perhaps the problem was the subject mat- ter.

Whose Life deals with a young sculptor who is totally crippled in an auto accident. He's incapable of moving from the neck

down. And the story is that of his right to have himself killed. Coming Home dealt with a cripple, too, and it did business. But it was a romance. And no matter how the ads for Whose Life tried to sell you that it was about life, it wasn't - The ads on F.I.S.T. tried to tell us it wasn't a story of a labor union organizer but about a man. But hey, that man was a labor union organizer. And Whose Life dealt with death. Would the audience want to see such subject matter? Maybe treated as a fantasy-Heaven Can Wait-but treated realistically? They never have.

The Lemmon / Matthau / Billy Wilder comedy. Buddy, Buddy. Lemmon and Matthau have proved a superb comedy team, most successfully in The Odd Couple back in '68. And Billy Wilder? Unquestionably one of the great directors and one who is most skilled at comedic material. In one half-decade, his comedies included Sabrina, The Seven Year Itch, Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment. But his last major success was lrma la Douce, and that in 1963. Problem: Could their commercial skills be resurrected? Alas, they could not.

The Steve Martin musical, Pennies from Heaven. Martin is a cult figure for young people, and his only previous movie, The jerk, was one of the most successful comedies ever. Martin and Rich- ard Pryor I would think are the top two young comics in the business.

But Pennies from Heaven was a musical. And it wasn't meant primarily to be funny. Set in the Depression, Martin played a down-and-out song plugger who eventually gets sent up for murder. The actors simply mouthed all the songs: The actual voices were real records of the Depression era. So the emphasis on the musical numbers fell, naturally enough, on the dances. And the simple fact is that Steve Martin isn't much of a dancer. Oh, he tried, he executed steps, he obviously worked his buns off learning to be a hoofer. But it was a case of the dancing bear-it's not that he does it well but that he can do it at all. For the truth is, there has never been a Broadway musical in the history of the world for which Steve Martin would have been good enough to get cast in the chorus.

Problem: Can you have a musical succeed in which the main character can't thrill you? I happen not to think so. With Kelly or Astaire, Pennies from Heaven might have gone through the roof. The audience I saw it with began wanting desperately to

love it, and they ended-those who didn't walk out-whipped and silent.

To repeat, this was hindsight. And I think if I had been the studio executive that had a shot at these projects, I would have grabbed them all. Maybe they didn't work on the screen. But they sure sounded great in shorthand. ...

S Number Three: Salvation

As staled, the knowledge of their eventual decapitation is central to the life of the studio executive. And as also stated, when that happens, they will "go indie-prod," which is both easier and more lucrative. So why do the executives care at all if their movies succeed? Because there is a giant caveat involved: the better they've done as executives, the longer their life span, the fatter the deal they can strike for themselves when they're canned. None of the Heaven's Gate group at UA got rich when they were told to get lost.

So it's essential to the studio executive to be, at least for a time, successful.

And since nobody knows anything, and since the studio heads today haven't got a lot of faith in their creative instincts (since they've never been creative), they turn, for salvation, to the one thing that got them where they are: stars.

If you have a slate of films that are low budget and success- ful, as Frank Price had recently at Columbia, you're obviously in great shape. But if you have a slate of low-budget films that stiff, you're not just a failure, you're a double disaster: Not only did your pictures die, you couldn't even attract "elements."

Well, you can't have that. Which is why the cry of every studio executive on the way to the guillotine has been the same: "You can't do this to me, I got you a Charles Bronson picture. I was the one who signed Stallone. Ryan O'Neal only did our movie because we have a strong personal relationship. Kris Kristofferson thinks I'm creative. Jimmy Caan told me personally he wants to work for me again. And so did Donald Sutherland. And Chuck Heston. Liza and Ali and I are buddies. And Lee Marvin and I have dinner together. And . . . and-" -and the blade always falls.

One fact of movie life must always be faced: Stars are kept in orbit by studio executives who are trying to save their own jobs....

THE NONRECURRING PHENOMENON

Studio executives, as we have observed, are totally responsible for what we see on the screen. I'm sure even the biggest stars have some pet subject or another they can't get off the ground-Jane Fonda has been trying for years to make a movie about industrial cancer, for example. We've also noted that they, like the rest of us, don't know what will work. But there is one thing they absolutely, do know, and that is what has worked. Which is why it is safe to say that movies are always a search for past magic.

"Shit, if I could just get Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder to- gether again. I'd be safe." (I know of one project in which the studio bought a book for a producer and had a screenplay writ- ten, which the studio liked, except they wanted one little change in the next draft: The main character had to be changed from white to black. Why? Because Richard Pryor is hot again, that's why.)

They know from their accountants what worked in the past, and they can give you the reasons why. Here is a list of films released in 1981 that look in twenty-five million dollars.

Raiders of the Lost Ark.................................. $90,000,000 Superman II................................................ 64,000,000 Stripes......................................................... 39,000,000 Any Which Way You Can.............................. 39,000,000 Arthur......................................................... 37,000,000 The Cannonball Run.................................... 35,000,000 The Four Seasons.......................................... 26,000,000 For Your Eyes Only....................................... 25,000,000

Ask a studio executive about these successes, and he'll say: "Raiders" Great adventure picture, great special effects, Lucas and Spielberg. Great adventure pictures always clean up. Arthur? Great romantic comedy; always room for a great romantic comedy. And the public was falling in love with Dudley Moore. The rest are really sequels to other hits in one way or another) and sequels always do great. Superman II was a sequel, so was the Eastwood, so was the Bond flick. Stripes was like Meatballs, there's always a market for Bill Murray in a comedy. And Can- nonball was Reynolds in a Smokey rip-off. That everything?" Well, it's almost everything, but what about Four Seasons? Then our mythical studio man says this: "It was Alan Aids and Carol Burnett. They've got a lot of fans."

You respectfully point out that if they have so many fans, why have almost all their previous movies been failures?

There then follows a longer silence before you get his final answer: "Four Seasons? That was a 'nonrecurring phenomenon.' " Remember that phrase.

What it means, of course, is this: It was a freak, a fluke, s once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. The deeper and more important meaning is this: "Get away, boy, you bother me." It's a nonrecurring phenomenon-/ don't haw to think about it.

And why don't they want to think about it? It's too frighten ing-they are responsible for what gets made and they can live with not knowing if what they make is going to work or not. But not even knowing the kind of thing to make-well, the earth opens.

Why haven't there been rip-off's of Kramer Vs. Kramer? (TV ha; done a bunch, but not Hollywood.) Because Kramer was a non- recurring phenomenon. And so was Ordinary People.

Four Seasons had nothing going for it-no movie stars, no violence, it wasn't even all that funny. It was just this lovely movie about-about friendships, for chrissakes. So its success both depresses and frightens studio people. The audience, their audience-well, it shouldn't have gone. And in point of fact it didn't, not m the beginning. Who did?

There is a lot of talk in Hollywood as to what happened to the Sound of Music audience. I mean adults over twenty-five and children under twelve. Executives refer to it as "The Lost Audience." It's gone, simple as that-lost and by the wind grieved, never to come back again, locked forever with their living-room tube. Well, they left their homes long enough to see Four Sea- sons.

And there's one other 1981 hit that I didn't list earlier, because it opened too late in the year for its fate to be known. It's March as I write this, and the ultimate success of On Golden Pond is still not certain: How it does in the coming Oscar battle will affect it, as will the effect that word of mouth exerts. But On Golden Pond is already more popular than For Your Eyes Only, the James Bond film. And it's also passed the Reynolds and the Eastwood and Bill Murray. In fact, it conceivably can catch Superman II, making it one of the fifteen most popular films in American history.

Naturally, it's a nonrecurring phenomenon. Freak casting, they'll tell you. Hank and Hepbum, Jane and Hank, that's all she wrote.

I don't believe that. Granting the skill and charm of those three performers, I think the movie would have worked every bit as successfully with other actors of equivalent skill-say Jimmy Stewart and Bette Davis with Susan Sarandon as their child. Or Jimmy Cagney or Fred Astaire teamed with Irene Dunne or Ingrid Bergman. With Blythe Danner or Sissy Spacek as the daughter.

When I saw On Golden Pond I heard something so wonderful, something I hadn't heard in a movie theatre in years-the sound of middle-aged laughter. Well, you're not going to hear much of that in the future. Do you realize how many copies of American Graffiti the studios have churned out in the last years? Or Halloween? Or Rocky? The stomach turns. Well, On Golden Pond may be bigger than any of them. And I'm sure they'll never rip it off. Because it would mean a total opening up of what constitutes a commercial film. And that's scary-so much more comforting to make Death Wish XXIII.

Maybe the most depressing comment made to me while I was interviewing for this book was by a bright studio guy who told me why On Golden Pond was breaking through. He said, "It's because it's got Jane Fonda in it."

Now, Jane Fonda is a very big star, but the same fortnight that On Golden Pond started, so did Rollover, another Jane Fonda film, only she wasn't the support in Rollover, she was the star- -and it didn't open. Total wipeout. Maybe twenty million down the tubes. This