6/25/23
Newsletter #377
The Crack of Dawn
For a long time, I have quietly harbored a suspicion that my arrival in Hollywood in 1976 sounded the death knell of the film business. The Hollywood where I arrived was the same Hollywood that had been there since 1913. Each studio made about 50 movies a year (one a week. When asked why he made so many crummy movies, Ronald Reagan replied with a grin, “Jack Warner didn’t want them good; he wanted them Tuesday”), and their mission statement was something like this: every year we will produce five movies that are as good as we can possibly make them, sparing no expense, with our biggest stars, and these are our “Oscar pictures,” with which we hope to win awards. We will also make 10 movies – the A-pictures – that have a decent budget, at least one name actor, possibly two, and the best production possible that the producers assigned to the film can figure out how to deliver at a reasonable, but not extravagant, budget. We will also make another 30 films: our A- and B+ and B movies, that will simply be as good as they’ll be at their varying lower budgets. And we’ll also make five “special interest” films, that include movies made for kids, but hopefully adults can sit through them. Kids were at the bottom of the list. All the studios basically believed: let Disney make the kids’ pictures. We’re adults; we make movies for adults.
Then came the summer of 1975. I hitchhiked to L.A. and was visiting that summer, but I hadn’t moved there yet. That’s when the Hollywood algorithm fell apart, which might have been due to my presence, but maybe not. Anyway, until then the studios idiotically believed that kids didn’t go to the movies in the summer; they worked, or they went to the beach, or took summer school, or practiced the violin. Keep in mind that all the studio heads were Eastern European Jews, with insane work ethics, and therein lies the mistake. Jack Warner, Louis Mayer, Adolph Zukor, Carl Laemmle, etc., didn’t have a clue what American kids did during the summer, nor did they care. Due to their upbringing and beliefs, they more than believed, they knew, that all kids thought the way they did, which was, “If I don’t work as hard as I can all summer, Cossacks will rape my mother and sister.” What these old-world immigrants thought that they knew, was really what they believed was right, and best for the kids – they should work hard in garment factories all summer long, because it’ll do them good.
Well, of course, that had nothing to do with how American kids thought, and soon – say by 1920 – many of these kids didn’t have to work during the summer, or at least they could work part-time, and they had some money. In any case, if any studio bothered the check their demographics back then, which they didn’t, ultimately the head honchos didn’t care. They thought they knew something.
As I am somehow telling my stories backwards these days, on my birthday (three years before I was born), August 17, 1955, during the summer, Universal Pictures released their B+ production, To Hell and Back – the Audie Murphy story starring Audie Murphy (who looks too young in the movie, which is 10 years after he actually did those things) – and it was a smash success. In fact, To Hell and Back was Universal’s highest-grossing film for 20 years, until 1975, when, more than likely, they mistakenly released Jaws in the summertime. When the livin’ is easy, the cotton is high, and why not see a movie? For 20 years Universal, and the rest of Hollywood, couldn’t figure out that the summer was actually the best moviegoing season, particularly when, in the 1930s, movie theaters were the first businesses to install air conditioning. The sign in the ticket window said, “It’s Kool inside,” referring to Kool cigarettes, which you could smoke in the theater (in their own section). The shit-for-brains Hollywood executives couldn’t even look at the release date of To Hell and Back. August 17. The summer. My birthday, for goodness sake.
Then, blowing the whole deal in Hollywood, in 1976, I arrived. This was the last year the adults were in charge. The nominees for Best Picture were: All the President’s Men, Bound for Glory, Network, Rocky and Taxi Driver. These films were intelligent adult motion pictures, made by intelligent adults, for intelligent, or even moderately intelligent, adults. They weren’t made for kids. Shit, kids couldn’t even get in to see Network or Taxi Driver because they were rated R.
I was only 18, but I thought, that’s a perfectly reasonable five films to nominate for Best Picture. If Network would have won, I’d have been happy (Paddy Chayefsky got Best Screenplay). If Taxi Driver won it would be too good to be true, so it wasn’t true, and I was still surprised that they had the guts to nominate it. For me as a perspiring low-budget filmmaker, Rocky winning was great. Very satisfying, and a good sign for the future of low-budget movies. It was the surprise KO. It’s a cheap movie, and it’s a good movie, with, I daresay, a brilliant script by Sylvester Stallone.
The 1976 Oscars were presented on Feb. 10, 1977. Four months later, on May 25, 1977, Star Wars was released. It wasn’t quite summer; it was late spring. I was in line at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood for the first matinee showing of Star Wars. William Katt, who co-starred in Carrie (1976), a film that I loved, was in line behind me. I didn’t speak to him. Me and my friend Rick were impressed enough with Star Wars to sit through it twice. Little did we know, that was the day Hollywood died.
Because that was the day success with a movie could be boiled into an algorithm. You couldn’t do it with Jaws in 1975 because it was too unique. It wasn’t possible to have a giant shark in every movie. However, with Star Wars in 1977, that luckily had no movie stars making big money, the algorithm was plain: lots of space effects, bland young leads, loud music, release in summer = money. And if you can hook them into a franchise of this thoughtless drek, it’s even better.
That’s where we are now. And I can’t stop thinking of the end of Easy Rider (1969). Captain America (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) have made it all the way across the United States. They have the money, they have the cool bikes, and Billy says, “We made it, man, we made it.” Captain American looks off into the distance and says, “No, man, we blew it.”
I didn’t understand that as a kid; I do now.
It looks like a clear sunny day.
That's hysterical. He seemed like he was in a good mood.
I'll check it out