The Establishment Judges:
Academy Awards for
Best Picture

The Academy and the Industry Establishment

Founded in 1919, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences quickly became a core institution of the Hollywood establishment. While the Academy had many functions, after World War II its primary responsibility was to distribute awards of merit.¹ For nearly two decades, the Academy Awards for achievement in motion pictures, which had originated in the late 1920s, were chosen by a panel of ten governors of the Academy and presented at annual ceremonies attended primarily by industry professionals. In 1946, however, participation in the selection process was greatly expanded so that nearly all guild and union members in the motion-picture industry might have some role in the nominations. Under these new rules, which remained unchanged through the 1960s, voting was by category (e.g., cinematographers voting for the awards for cinematography, editors for the awards in editing), and all of the roughly three thousand Academy members were eligible to vote on best picture for each year.²

With the spread of television during the 1950s and the 1960s, the annual telecast of the Academy Awards ceremonies increasingly became a centerpiece in the promotion of specific movies and the American cinema in general. In addition, as the Hollywood studio system declined through the 1950s, a financial and professional advantage accrued to individual producers, actors and actresses, and production personnel who received an Academy award, or, in some instances, just a nomination. By the early 1960s, industry insiders estimated the expected increase in gross earnings for any movie selected as best picture to be in the range of $1 million to $5 million. In the growing free-lance production environment of Hollywood, Academy Awards translated directly into increased leverage for the recipients to favorably negotiate future deals.³

During the 1960s, some complaints in Hollywood about the politics of the Academy Awards referred back to the 1950s and the federal government's anti-communist investigations of Hollywood. Rumors were widely spread across the industry, for example, that both EXODUS (1960, Otto Preminger) and SPARTACUS (1960, Stanley Kubrick) were passed over for nominations in the best picture category because the screenplays had been written by Dalton Trumbo, who had earlier been blacklisted and briefly imprisoned for his unwillingness to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee of the U. S. Congress. Of greater concern among industry professionals during the 1960s, however, was the perception that nominations and the Academy's voting were becoming increasingly influenced by the concerted public relations campaigns undertaken on behalf of specific movies and their talent. The nomination of THE ALAMO for best picture in 1960, for instance, was widely attributed to the blitz of advertising in the entertainment trade papers on its behalf.⁴

While some critics regarded the Oscars as emblematic of Hollywood's fundamentally shallow commercialism, other Hollywood insiders countered that the "Academy types" were living in an "ivory tower," and that they were unable to exploit the full potential of either the Academy Awards themselves or the televised ceremonies at which they were presented each year. For an industry that underwent a significant downturn in production in the early 1960s, and in which confusion abounded over cinema's changing audience and how to appeal to it, the matter of how the Academy Awards should be handled and how the ceremonies should be produced for television became flash points for debate. Bitter articles and editorials in the industry trade papers gave play to those debates.

Nonetheless, throughout the 1960s, the Academy Awards presentation lumbered along without major changes. Although the assumed politics surrounding the nominations and selections for the Oscars continued to be hotly debated by Hollywood pundits, and the format and length of the award ceremonies were perennially criticized, no true attack upon the Academy occurred. It was among the many "establishments" in American society that drew unfriendly fire as the culture wars erupted nationwide in the late 1960s, only to survive its detractors relatively unscathed. Thus, although it would be highly problematic to interpret what the award of each specific Oscar meant during any specific era, including the 1960s, the selection of the best picture for each year was indicative of what the Hollywood "establishment" considered to be the cinema's highest achievement of the previous year.

Best Picture, 1960-1969

The Academy's selection for best picture for 1960 was THE APARTMENT, co-written by I. A. L. Diamond and Billy Wilder, the movie's director. This comedy followed the same pair's highly successful. SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959). The protagonist of THE APARTMENT, C. C. "Bud" Baxter, is an insurance company clerk played by Jack Lemmon, who lends his apartment to several adulterous bosses for their amorous liaisons. Shirley MacLaine played an elevator operator in Baxter's building, and Fred MacMurray was the most obnoxious of Lemmon's bosses. THE APARTMENT was the last black-and-white movie to win the Academy Award for best picture for over thirty years, Until SCHINDLER's LIST (1993).

Jack Lemmon in THE APARTMENT (1960), Billy Wilder's best
picture winner and the last black-and-white film to win the
award until 1993.

In many ways, THE APARTMENT was a vintage Hollywood comedy: witty, wordy, fastpaced, and highly polished. At the same time, however, it was considered updated and daringly hip. As the British film critic Derek Mousey wrote, "Some people may find THE APARTMENT sordid and immoral. It is. It's meant to be. It's also funny and pathetic and the funniest soursweet comedy Hollywood has made in years."⁵ It was rare for a comedy to stand up so well across a number of the major nomination categories for the Academy Awards, but THE APARTMENT did. It was an exception, however, precisely because its underlying and unrelenting moral bleakness meshed with the sardonic and pessimistic mood that a great many films would cultivate later in the 1960s.

THE APARTMENT was produced in the standard medium of classic Hollywood cinema, black-and-white film, but its trenchant portrayal of the emptiness of middle-class American life and values was "late sixties" to the core. The film was nominated in several categories, including directing, writing (directly for the screen), cinematography, art direction and editing. Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine were nominated for best actor and best actress, respectively. Although neither of them won an Oscar, both were awarded the British equivalents of the Academy Awards for their performances.

Walter Mirisch, the film's producer, was a model for Hollywood's new breed who were becoming dominant in the business during the 1960s. Building on his strong personal ties throughout the industry, Mirisch and his brothers, Harold and Marvin, were running a firm in the late 1950s that provided business and legal services to independent producers. The Mirisches specialized in arranging financing, distribution, and marketing for films. They worked with many studios, but their primary focus was a contractual relationship with United Artists, the Hollywood studio that had pioneered financing pictures by dealing directly with the creative forces who made them.⁶ That arrangement worked for over sixty features during the 1960s.

Mirisch repeated his role as the producer of the Academy Award's selection for best picture with WEST SIDE STORY (1961, Robert Wise). With a book by Arthur Laurents based on Romeo and Juliet, music by Leonard Bernstein, and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, Jerome Robbins directed and choreographed the musical during its long run on Broadway. Initially, Robbins was also hired to direct the movie, but less than a month into rehearsals United Artists demanded that he move aside for Hollywood veteran Robert Wise. Robbins stayed on long enough to direct several of the musical numbers, but was then sacked altogether. In typical fashion for a changing and increasingly freelance Hollywood, Robbins remained in the credits as co-director. Wise, who began his career editing CITIZEN KANE (1941, Orson Welles), eventually was given complete creative control over WEST SIDE STORY and was credited as a co-producer.⁷ Still, even when the directorial issues had been ironed out, many industry pundits considered the casting for the movie weak. Natalie Wood, hardly known for her singing voice, played the lead as Maria, with three males-Richard Beymer, Russ Tamblyn, and George Chakiris, none of whom was considered a major star-as major characters among the rival teenage gangs in New York City on which the story focuses. All fared extremely well with the critics.⁸

A scene front WEST SIDE STORY (best picture, 1961), directed by Robert Wise.

WEST SIDE STORY opens with helicopter shots of Manhattan's soaring skyline as the camera gradually moves closer toward the street in a tenement neighborhood, where the sounds of staccato finger-snapping draw the viewer into the menacing neighborhood being fought over by rival gangs called the Sharks and the Jets. Shot on location on the streets of the West 60s in Manhattan, where condemned buildings were about to be razed for the construction of Lincoln Center, the film had a decidedly gritty look. WEST SIDE STORY captured Oscars in ten categories, but its commercial prospects for enormous earnings were considered to have been compromised. Advance "roadshow" sales for the film registered over $250,000 in the five largest cities of the United States,⁹ but the picture was over two-and-a-half hours long and was considered an extremely high risk for foreign distribution.

Into the early 1960s, Hollywood pundits in general continued to fear that nearly any musical film was a potential disaster with audiences abroad. Wise had further increased the distributor's risk by insisting on having the songs in WEST SIDE STORY subtitled, rather than having the numbers dubbed into foreign languages and sung by singers who were already well known in their own countries.¹⁰ Musicals had a reputation in Hollywood of faring poorly in markets overseas largely because it was believed that foreign viewers had trouble following a story line conveyed largely by lyrics that were sung in American English. Wise's persistence and ultimate victory with using subtitles showed the influence that a director now had in the American feature film industry. Moreover, Wise's insistence on gambling on foreign audiences accepting songs in the original American English paid off and marked a turning point in the industry's attitude toward musicals and their prospects for large earnings abroad. WEST SIDE STORY was a runaway success internationally; the film even played one of the major screens in Paris, the Georges V Cinema, for a record 218 weeks (just over four years).¹¹ In addition, the domestic box-office success of the film was still so phenomenal into the middle of the decade that in 1966 Mirisch turned down an offer from NBC of over $3 million for a single telecast of the picture.¹²

Both THE APARTMENT and WEST SIDE STORY contained elements that were considered daring for the time, but neither of them could be considered a landmark film. By contrast, the Academy's selection for best picture for 1962 was a landmark production. Co-produced by Sam Spiegel and David Lean, who had also been production partners for THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (1957), LAWRENCE OF ARABIA had complete financial backing and a distribution deal with Columbia Pictures, although the production company of record was listed as Horizon Pictures, Ltd. of Great Britain. Three years in the making and with a production cost of more than $15 million (originally budgeted in the $7 million to $9 million range), LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, based on British playwright Robert Bolt's first film script, was by far the most ambitious and expensive project with which Columbia Pictures had ever been involved.¹³ Columbia claimed that it had not even reached the break-even point on its expenses until 1965, nearly a full three years after the films theatrical premiere. In this reckoning, however, Columbia's bookkeeping was disguising the steady stream of company earnings for those three years generated through its distribution fees.

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA was a solid box-office success, even though the film received decidedly mixed reviews from a number of major American critics when it was first released. The New York Times initially labeled it a "camel opera," although later, at Academy Awards time, the paper published a second review that was more positive.¹⁴ Much of the criticism that greeted the film was based on the fact that it was constructed as a vast spectacle that many people thought simplified the protagonist's character and his career.¹⁵

While LAWRENCE OF ARABIA disappointed a number of mainstream critics in the early 1960s, it nonetheless left decidedly strong and positive impressions on at least two younger viewers who would mature into prominent American filmmakers. Steven Spielberg, who was fifteen years old when the movie premiered, later recalled, "LAWRENCE OF ARABIA was the first film I saw that made me want to be a moviemaker." Martin Scorsese, five years older than Spielberg, continually refers back to his first viewing of the film, repeatedly praising it as "one of the great cinema experiences."¹⁶ In 1998, when the American Film Institute assembled its list of the "One Hundred Greatest American Movies" as determined by the votes of fifteen hundred leaders from the American film community, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA finished fifth overall, placing it in the highest position of any feature released during the 1960s. With its best picture selection for 1962, the Academy actually appeared to get ahead of the cultural curve for a change.

Although produced in Great Britain, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA was classified as "American" by the Academy. The following year's best picture, TOM JONES (1963, produced and directed by Tony Richardson), by contrast, marked the first time since 1948 that a film formally classified as British won the award. Based on Henry Fielding's eighteenth- century novel, TOM JONES presented to its audiences a lusty, rollicking, and uninhibited romp. At the time, a popular cartoon in the New Yorker depicted a man asking his psychiatrist, "What's my problem? Tom JONES depressed me."

Released three years after the Federal Drug Administration in the United States approved an oral contraceptive commonly known as the Birth Control Pill,¹⁷ and just as the emergent contemporary lifestyle described by the phrase "Swinging London" was becoming identifiable internationally, TOM JONES was openly sensual, celebrating sexuality in a lighthearted and upbeat manner in ways that Hollywood production had not yet approached. Joyce Redman's sexual predilections in the role of a merry seductress openly preferring younger men, for example, foreshadowed by a half-decade her Hollywood counterpart in the character of the predatory and sullen Mrs. Robinson in THE GRADUATE (1967).¹⁸

Tony Richardson's direction brought to TOM JONES a playfulness that grew directly out of the willingness of the French New Wave to draw self-conscious attention to the filmmaking process. Many of these were old-time movie devices, of course, that dated back to the silent era. The French New Wave, however, had reintroduced and highlighted them for the purposes of self-conscious fun and as self-reflexive devices within the parameters of the European "art film's" inquiry into the deeper nature of the cinema experience itself.¹⁹ Tom, for example, carefully places his hat over the camera lens before making love, and the movie freely uses subtitles, asides by actors to the audience, freeze frames, and jump cuts, which classic Hollywood had strictly avoided.

Scenes from the lusty romp TOM JONES (best picture for 1963), directed by Tony
Richardson.

TOM JONES appeared at the right moment to challenge traditional sexual mores and pretensions, doing so in a manner that found broad support in the audience through genuine wit and pervasive good spirit. Even with a cast that included Albert Finney, Susannah York, Hugh Griffith, and Diane Cilento, the film had been produced for under $1 million. Released by United Artists, its enormous box-office success occasioned a new flood of American investment into British production. For Tony Richardson, however, TOM JONES proved his only major hit as a director with the American mass audience. Over time, the influence of the film, too, proved almost entirely as an icon of cultural change and attitudes toward sex in the early 1960s, rather than heralding new directions in cinematic art.

By contrast to the modest budget of TOM JONES, the next year's best picture, MY FAIR LADY, directed by Hollywood veteran George Cukor and starring Audrey Hepburn, was a $17 million production that no one ever would accuse of displaying either new aesthetic or cultural directions. With this role Hepburn became Hollywood's second actress to be paid over $1 million dollars for a picture (Elizabeth Taylor was the first), even though she couldn't manage a satisfactory Cockney accent and a singer named Marni Nixon had to perform all her songs, which Hepburn lip-synced. Julie Andrews won the best actress award that year for her lead in MARY POPPINS, whereas Audrey Hepburn was not even nominated for MY FAIR LADY. That may have registered as personal vindication for Andrews, who had created the role of Eliza Doolittle in the stage version that played on Broadway, but for the executives at Warner Bros., who turned her down for the movie version, her Academy Award could not have mattered less. MY FAIR LADY earned record grosses for its "roadshow" sales at 150 movie theaters across the United States, ²⁰ and had reported $46 million in earnings worldwide by the end of its first year in distribution.²¹ Premiering in a year during which the Beatles first toured the United States, conquering teenage audiences everywhere they went, it is easy to overlook that many American adolescents liked MY FAIR LADY, too. The film's opening in Hollywood, for example, was greeted by crowds of screaming teenagers police estimated to exceed 15,000 on the sidewalk outside the Egyptian Theater.

The following year's best picture was another musical, THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1965), produced and directed by Robert Wise, whose success with WEST SIDE STORY in 1961 had clearly rekindled the industry's interests in movie versions of hit Broadway shows. Once THE SOUND OF MUSIC premiered on screen, the publicity department of 20th Century-Fox started touting it confidently as "the most popular film ever made," which indeed it was until being displaced from that ranking in the late 1970s.²² It grossed $11 million more than MY FAIR LADY in its first year,²³ and, better yet, had cost less than half as much to produce.²⁴ THE SOUND OF MUSIC fared well with reviewers for local newspapers²⁵ and even with a few national critics, most notably Bosley Crowther and Judith Crist, who treated the film well in general while lavishing praise on Andrews, who lost out in her bid that year for a repeat Oscar as best actress. Crowther's and Crist's positive critical assessments, however, were overshadowed by the opinions of most national critics who ridiculed THE SOUND OF MUSIC as being shallow to the point of mindlessness. The Saturday Review criticized its "lukewarm liberalism that seeks to transform a modest tribute to "Edelweiss" into a stirring anti-Nazi song of protest."²⁶ Notably, even that "lukewarm liberalism" apparently was enough to cause THE SOUND OF MUSIC to fail in only one major film market in the world-West Germany ²⁷ Germans, however, weren't the only ones who did not like the film.²⁸ Stanley Kauffmann complained that he should be given a special award "for sitting through this Rodgers and Hammerstein atrocity, so studiously saccharine that one feels that one has fallen into the hold of a tanker bringing molasses from the Caribbean."²⁹ More surprisingly, perhaps, John E. Fitzgerald of the National Catholic Film Office concluded, "While the story is as joyous and wholesome as anyone could want, the plot of this Austrian torte is as full of holes as a Swiss cheese."³⁰

Julie Andrews singing about her favorite things in THE SOUND OF MUSIC (best picture
for 1965), directed by Robert Wise.

The other musical of the decade that took a best picture Academy Award was OLIVER! (1968). While hardly drawing the negative criticism that greeted THE SOUND OF MUSIC, OLIVER! achieved only modest box-office success. Long in the planning,³¹ OLIVER! was yet another of those productions, essentially British in its cast, crew, and production venue, that was financed by and produced for Columbia Pictures in conjunction with Highland Films, Ltd.

Two years earlier, A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS (1966), another Columbia-Highland production, won the Academy's best picture award. With a screenplay by Robert Bolt, who won that year's award for best screenplay based on material from another medium, the film was based on the life of Sir Thomas More, the devout Catholic who resigned from the service of King Henry VIII of England rather than assist the king in violating the Church's authority by marrying Anne Boleyn. Produced for a budget of under $2 million, A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS was shot at Shepperton Studios near London and had neither the swashbuckling action, nor the adventuresome heroes typically found in Hollywood historical epics. It was based on what the critic Philip K. Scheuer described as the best drama written for the stage in English during the 1960s,³² and could be said to have beaten out the movie version of what was arguably the best drama written for the American stage during the 1960s, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf- A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS was a serious drama with a cast devoid of Hollywood "names": the lead was played by British stage actor Paul Scofield, who won a best actor award for what was his first film role. During the entire decade of the 1960s, it was most likely that A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS benefited more at the box office from its Academy Award for best picture than did any other winner. The film had decidedly modest earnings across the United States, but business picked up markedly after its selection by the Academy.³³

An even greater surprise to both pundits and the public, however, was the Academy's best picture selection for 1967. The award ceremonies that year were postponed for two days following the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and took place on April 10, 1968. The Academy's voting had resulted, as it turned out quite poignantly, in a best picture award for IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (directed by Norman Jewison and produced by Walter Mirisch). The film concerned an African American detective from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who ends up solving a murder in a Mississippi town by working with the local white sheriff. Starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger, with a haunting theme song performed by Ray Charles, and filmed on location in Sparta, Illinois (not Sparta, Mississippi), the film was based on a classically strong script by Sterling Silliphant, who won the writing award that year. IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT, which dealt with the relationship between two people who did not wish to be involved with each other, beat out two films that year that each had enormous appeal to the emerging young audience, BONNIE AND CLYDE and THE GRADUATE, as well as a second film that year starring Poitier, who played a highly successful physician engaged to marry a white woman in GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER.

Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight in MIDNIGHT COWBOY (best
picture for 1969), directed by John Schlesinger.

The best picture selection for 1969, by contrast, was MIDNIGHT COWBOY, a gritty drama set at the margins of life in contemporary New York City. Earlier in the decade, a script reader at United Artists had evaluated the novel by Leo Herlihy on which MIDNIGHT COWBOY was based and recommended against its adaptation for the screen "because the action goes steadily downhill."³⁴ By the very end of the 1960s, however, the script was perceived as eminently producable precisely because it was aimed at an audience receptive to its highly negative portrayal of disintegrating urban life in America and the hopeless situation and abject alienation' of the movie's main characters. The film was directed by John Schlesinger, whose inventive and saucy DARLING (1965), starring Julie Christie, had been produced in Great Britain and nominated for a best picture Academy Award.

Joe Buck, played by Jon Voight, travels from Texas to New York believing that he will find women ready and willing to pay him for his sexual services. There he meets a street character named Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), who strikes up an acquaintance with Buck and promptly tries to con him. The two eventually become friends, however, and the remainder of film explores their unlikely relationship until Ratso becomes so ill that Joe must steal money to take him on an escapist bus trip to Florida.

Branded with the scarlet letter "X" in the new MPAA ratings system, MIDNIGHT COWBOY nonetheless encountered absolutely no difficulties at the box office. In fact the "X" subsequently was changed to an "R" rating in 1971 without a single frame being cut from the film. By 1969, the film's "downer" story, gritty New York milieu, and raw attitudes toward sexuality were widely and easily accepted among both critics and the moviegoing public. Writing in the New York Post, Archer Winsten summarized mainstream critical response to the movie: "MIDNIGHT COWBOY is the kind of solid work that stays superbly in one piece, a statement about our time and people that doesn't have to stand back and orate."³⁵ Despite having given the film its "X" rating, the MPAA, the motion-picture industry's trade organization, selected MIDNIGHT COWBOY as the official entry of the United States to the Berlin Film Festival. The International Catholic Film Office also gave MIDNIGHT COWBOY its imprimatur by labeling it the movie of 1969, stating that it offered viewers "the best articulation of man's problem from a Christian viewpoint."³⁶

The Academy Awards' Best Pictures: A Summary

With the Academy's best picture choices for the decade, the Hollywood establishment left a valuable record of self perception within the industry. The 1960s began with the naming of THE APARTMENT, the last black-and-white feature selected as best picture for more than thirty years. It was a wry script, set in mid-town New York City amid a world of businessmen morally adrift. The 1960s ended with the selection of MIDNIGHT COWBOY, a bleak descent into New York Cites netherworld of drifters and losers at the margins of society and living in the midst of a crass and self-obsessed metropolis. THE APARTMENT was the best of Billy Wilder's films, capping his career as a director of often cynical movies that nonetheless sustained their humor. It reveals a flicker of the troubling discontent brewing beneath the surface of American materialism and success, whereas MIDNIGHT COWBOY is a troubling descent into the exploration of 'a wealthy society's dark underside. In between, the Academy's best picture selections bore witness to the unprecedented symbiosis and complicated production alliances between Hollywood and Great Britain that resulted in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962), TOM JONES (1963), A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS (1966), and OLIVER! (1968).

Sidney Poitier in IN THE HEAT of THE NIGHT (best picture for 1967), directed by
Norman Jewison.

Among the four musicals that won best picture awards during the decade, WEST SIDE STORY (1961) and OLIVER! (1968) shared a darker dramatic side, while MY FAIR LADY (1964) and THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1965) presented worlds full of light, color, and upbeat joy-even amid class repression and Nazi oppression, respectively. From one point of view, the 1960s could be perceived as the decade that saw the "last hurrah" for musical films based on Broadway hits and intended to appeal to a truly mass audience of all ages. In another sense, however, their production values pointed clearly toward the high concept films that would become centerpieces of the new Hollywood aesthetic that became fully articulated after the arrival of the "blockbuster" with STAR WARS (1977).³⁷

LAWRENCE of ARABIA, with its brilliant cinematography and its extraordinary exploitation of widescreen aesthetics, was the most pictorial of the best picture selections for the decade. It was the one film that truly embraced an emerging emphasis on visual sensation and the visceral power of the screen, rather than relying primarily upon the conventions of classic Hollywood scripting. By contrast, the best picture of 1967, IN THE HEAT of THE NIGHT, could be seen as a throwback to classic Hollywood movies that revealed, primarily through dialogue and classic development of character, a human relationship that strained plausibility, but which tugged at all the right emotions for the mass audience. This motion picture's selection by the voting members of the Academy can also be seen as coinciding with Hollywood's underlying political liberalism, which by the late 1960s had become fully reestablished as an accepted facet of the movie industry's facade. Whatever else it did to America culturally, the late 1960s created an atmosphere in which the film industry could leave behind the politics of fear that had spread throughout the community during the "Blacklist" era of the 1950s. By the end of the 1960s, Hollywood filmmaking was no longer a "conservative" undertaking in any normal use of the word.

Notes

1. Pierre Norman Sands, A Historical Study of the Academy of Motion Pichire Arts and Sciences (New York: Arno Press, 1973). pp, 31-35.

2. Rules for the Conduct of Balloting: The 33rd Academy Awards for 1960, Academy Awards File, Center for Motion Picture Study, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California.

3. Ralph L. Williams, "Oscar Win Worth $$$," Los Angeles Citizen-News, April 18, 1961, p.12.

4. Close-Up, March 9, 1961.

5. Derek Mousey, "And I Name This Hollywood's Finest Comedy in Years," London Sunday Express, July 24, 1960, pp.52, 53.

6. For a comprehensive and insightful study of United Artist's central role, beginning in the early 1950s, in leading the transition from studio-owned productions to financing independent producers, see Tino Balio, United Artists: The Company That Changed the Film Industry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); see also Balio's own chapters in Tino Balio, ed., Hollywood in the Age of Television (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990).

7. Judy Sloane, "Call Sheet: WEST SIDE STORY," Film Review, June 1994.

8. James A. Crenshaw, "Call for a Ghost in a Hurry," Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, February 17, 1963.

9. Film Daily, August 24, 1961, p.7.

10. Variety (Daily), August 4, 1961, p.18.

11. Hollywood Reporter, May 12, 1966, p.12.

12. Variety (Daily), September 21, 1966, p.1.

13. Variety (Daily), December 17, 1962, p.2.

14. Cliff Rothman, "The Resurrection of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA," Los Angeles Times, January 29, 1989, p.32.

15. Stanley Kauffinann, "LAWRENCE OF ARABIA: The Re-Release," New Republic, April 17, 1989, p.60.

16. Glenn Collins, "LAWRENCE OF ARABIA the Way It Should Be," Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, December 21, 1989, p.F-1.

17. Angus McLaren, The History of Contraception: Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp.240, 241.

18. Stephen Holden, "An Angry Man Found Himself in TOM JONES," New York Times, August 21, 1994.

19. Paul Monaco, Ribbons in Time (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp.50-54.

20. Hollywood Reporter, October 2, 1965, p.2.

21. Variety (Daily), October 20, 1965, p.4.

22. Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, October 29, 1964, p.32.

23. THE SOUND OF MUSIC, Publicity File, 20th Century-Fox, the Center for Motion Picture Study, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California.

24. Hollywood Reporter, March 2, 1966, p.19.

25. Hollywood Reporter, December 23, 1964, p.6.

26. "THE SOUND OF MUSIC," unsigned review, Saturday Review, March 20, 1965.

27. Variety (Weekly), March 12, 1967, p.10.

28. See her summary of negative criticism in Julia A. Hirsch, "THE SOUND OF Music": The Making of America's Favorite Movie (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1993).

29. Stanley Kauffmann, "Review: THE SOUND OF MUSIC," New Republic, March 20, 1965, p.22.

30. John E. Fitzgerald, "The Hills Are Alive," Our Sunday Visitor, February 28, 1965, p.3.

31. Variety (Daily), April 17, 1964, p.7, and Los Angeles Citizen-News, July 20, 1964, p.10. At various times, the motion-picture version of OLIVER!, which had opened on the London stage in 1960, was projected with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton playing the leads and Peter Sellers cast as Fagin.

32. Philip K. Scheuer, "Man' Becomes Profession Movie for All Seasons," Los Angeles Times, December 11, 1966, p.39.

33. Variety (Weekly), April 12, 1967, p.5.

34. Kenneth Turan, "Why Joe Buck and Ratso Live On," Los Angeles Times Calendar, February 20, 1994, p.12.

35. Archer Winsten, "MIDNIGHT COWBOY," New York Post, May 26, 1969, pp.52, 53.

36. Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, July 11, 1969, p. F-1.

37. See Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movie and Marketing in Hollywood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).