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The Runaway Audience
and the Changing World
of Movie Exhibition
Audiences
To paraphrase 20th Century-Fox producer Jerry Wald, Hollywood's real problem in the 1960s was not so much "runaway production" as it was the "runaway audience."1 A high point for movie attendance in the United States was reached in 1946 when an average of 90 million admissions to movie theaters were recorded weekly,2 constituting a record 75 percent of the estimated "potential audience" nationwide.3 During the next ten years, however, average weekly attendance dropped rapidly: 1956 figures set weekly movie theater audience figures at 46 million;4 four years later, in 1960, that figure was 40 million; attendance plummeted to 20 million by 1970.5
The steadily shrinking movie theater audience in the United States was caused by the impact of television accompanied by changing demographics and lifestyles. A few media historians, such as Douglas Gomery, correctly argue that "the rapid innovation of over-the-air television took place... after the initiation of the decline in attendance at notion picture theaters."6 The claim is statistically correct, but it is misleading. Movie theater attendance began to decline from its 1946 peak before television became widely available in the United States. Nonetheless, television was a primary cause of the subsequent decline in film attendance.
Across the United States, the spread of television was uneven. There television first became available movie attendance declined most quickly. Whenever an additional broadcast channel was added in any market, the decline in movie theater attendance accelerated immediately and spread the most rapidly.7
While television took away a substantial portion of the audience from motion-picture theaters, it did not necessarily mean that great numbers in the American population were necessarily losing interest in seeing motion pictures. Over time it became clear that Americans still wanted to see movies but were quite satisfied to view them at home on the small screen of a television set. That was central to America's changing film culture during the 1960s. For example, when THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (1957) was shown on ABC Television in September 1966 it drew an estimated audience of 60 million. Consistently throughout the 1960s, a national, prime-time broadcast of a feature film by a major network did exceptionally well, even though comparatively few equaled the draw of an "event" film like THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI. Neither the small screen and poor sound of the average television set, nor the periodic commercial interruptions, compromised a film's entertainment value enough to prevent large audiences from watching and enjoying nearly any kind of movie on television.8
THE ERODING MOVIE THEATER BUSINESS
Throughout the 1950s and the 1960s, the spread of television had a clear and devastating impact on the business of motion-picture theater ownership and the profitability of the entire exhibition sector of the American movie industry. The erosion of the movie theater audience in the United States, however, was attributable to factors that went well beyond the advent and rapid spread of television across the nation.
In 1946, the Census Bureau predicted that the population of the United States would reach 163 million only by the year 2000. Instead, because of the unexpected and unprecedented number of births in the United States between 1948 and 1955, that figure was reached forty years earlier, in 1960. Moreover, the post-World War II "baby boom" was reflected in rapidly changing American folkways and lifestyles. As late as the World War II period, 15 percent of American women reached the age of thirty having never been married. B' 1960, that percentage had fallen below 7 percent 9 According to one interpretation, these statistics document that young Americans in the post-World War II era were expressing their preference for "the psychic benefits of having children over other forms of consumption."10 That argument, however, is problematic because it claims too much insight into deep and complex human motives as based on raw statistics. A more modest conclusion holds that the social and cultural consequences of rapidly rising marriage and birth rates in the United States daring the postwar period determined the remarkable shifts in where much of America's middle-class population lived and how that population would spend its leisure time during the 1960s.
America's marriage and baby booms fueled the unprecedented growth of the nation's suburbs. By 1960, nine of the nations fifteen largest urban areas had suburban majorities. During the 1960s, 95 percent of the growth in metropolitan areas in the United States occurred in suburban populations.11 In addition to television, these burgeoning suburban populations had a continually increasing variety of leisure-time diversions available to them-outdoor sports, parks for recreational use, swimming pools, tennis courts, golf courses, howling alleys and other indoor recreation centers, organized sports like little leagues, school athletics, country clubs, campgrounds, resorts, and automobile travel on new super-highways. While television was the most prominent direct competitor to the movie theater for Americas leisure time and leisure spending, the motion-picture industry confronted a variety of activities that were expanding exponentially during the 1950s and 1960s.12
Movie theaters, moreover, were in a terrible position to try to follow middle-class America's exodus from the cities to the suburbs. Suburban land values rose quickly. Since the major Hollywood companies were prevented by federal antitrust decisions from owning movie theaters, the burden for expansion of cinemas to the suburbs was left largely to independent owners of the new theater chains.13 With suburbanization came changing patterns of life within America's cities. Increasingly, "downtown" business districts were abandoned after business hours, and impoverished neighborhoods grew up around them. The growing suburbs were overwhelmingly white; only minuscule increases in the number of African American suburbanites occurred throughout the 1960s.14
Many movie theaters in American cities dated back to the 1920s and were palatial in size. Significant numbers of those houses would be converted to other uses or abandoned entirely during the 1960s. Indeed, the impact of eroding movie theater attendance and the growth of the suburbs produced clear racial effects in the exhibition sector of the American motion-picture industry. The decade began with a struggle by African Americans to integrate movie theaters in cities throughout the South, where they had previously been relegated by "Jim Crow" practices to the balcony seats; the 1960s ended with substantial numbers of urban movie theaters located in or near the central business districts of major cities all across the United States drawing nearly allblack audiences.15 This fact reflected the continuing social realities of the 1960s that effectively separated the races in the United States geographically, even as rapid legal progress was made against segregation. In Hollywood production, however, it also meant that even if the audience was clearly delineated by race, there would nonetheless be a new receptiveness to black talent and themes in feature production, ranging from the file adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry's drama A RAISIN IN THE SUN (1961, Daniel Petrie), to the dark satire of PUTNEY SWOPE (1969, Robert Downey).
THE PRODUCTION INDUSTRY RESPONDS
In its initial response to the advent of television and the decline of the movie theater audience, Hollywood tried to win back audiences with techniques that exploited the movie theater's capacity to offer superior picture and sound to those of television. Largescreen formats, such as CinemaScope, 3-D, VistaVision, Todd A-O, and Cinerama, were introduced. Some of the innovations flopped, such as 3-D, while others, like 70mm widescreen, continued to be favorably received throughout the 1960s. There were many problems with the technologies, and retrofitting movie theaters to exploit them were costly. The real problem, however, was that the films produced in the new formats still relied on Hollywood's classic story formulas, sentiments, and themes.16
The impact of television, changing demographics, and the ways in which America's middle-class families spent their leisure time not only decreased the numbers of people who went to movie theaters, but also radically altered the composition of the remaining audience. "Today people go to see a movie; they no longer go to the movies," said Robert Evans, the young, newly hired production chief at Paramount, in 1967. "The theater audience for movies had narrowed dramatically and had become increasingly selective," he added.17 By the late 1960s entire segments of the potential moviegoing audience had been lost to the industry. For example, the only studio still making films aimed solely at children was Disney.
At the beginning of the 1960s many in the industry were arguing that "family films" were finished. By the end of the decade, industry pundits claimed that features aimed at the "family" market could no longer attract the adolescents and young adults who had become the mainstay of the movie theater box office; furthermore, such features actually increased the risk of alienating that adolescent and young adult audience from the habit of moviegoing.18 More than just a decline in the number of moviegoers and a segmentation of the audience was happening during the late 1960s. Films that appealed to one niche were not just ignored by other portions of the potential audience, but were frequently condemned by them. The cultural polarization of the late 1960s was challenging and potentially destructive for an industry so market-driven as the Hollywood feature film.
As early as 1961, Variety had begun publishing obituaries for the Hollywood happy ending: "The sicko ones are making for box office health more readily than the happier movies."19 As youth and distinct ethnic subcultures began demanding specific representation of themselves and their alternative values in feature films, Hollywood's celebration of the idea of the American population as a "melting pot" deteriorated in the second half of the 1960s.20 European art films made considerable headway in the American market throughout the 1960s as well, catering to audiences primarily in urban areas and college towns. The art film audience was self-defined as better educated, more sophisticated, and more cosmopolitan in its tastes than the adherents of mainstream feature films, and it constituted a niche market entirely distinct from the more traditional moviegoing audience upon which classic Hollywood had depended.21
The art film audience was symptomatic of the growing differentiation and segmentation of the traditional mass audience for movies during the 1960s. By 1966, when the film critic Stanley Kauffmann published an article identifying what he called the "film generation," motion pictures were emerging as a flash point in American society's cultural wars and generational conflicts.22 As the first wave of baby boomers reached the age of eighteen in 1966, their coming of age as moviegoers was simultaneously being greeted and spurred on by an increasing number of film festivals, college courses about film, and the writings of "serious" film critics, such as Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael, and Stanley Kauffmann.23
Much of the mainstream establishment in Hollywood, of coarse, appeared intent on resisting the potential emerging changes in American film culture. Confronted with growing evidence of the success of "art cinemas" and of the foreign films shown in them, for example, Jerry Lewis testily asserted that there were "only twenty sophisticates in the world" and that he wasn't interested in making movies for them.24 Katharine Hepburn excoriated the pretensions of "arty' features made by European directors, castigating in particular the enigmatic final scene in BLOW-UP (1966, Michelangelo Antonioni) in which the protagonist picks up an imaginary ball and tosses it to two mimes playing tennis: "There's no bunk in our pictures-unlike in BLOW-UP we play tennis with the ball."25
As art houses made inroads into the exhibition sector of the industry, especially on the East and West coasts, foreign films gained a following during tile 1960s that was duplicated neither before nor after that decade. The provocative question for producers in the United States, however, was whether the film generation was truly being drawn toward forms of the art film-which were more sophisticated and mature in theme as well as being "cutting edge" aesthetically-or whether the emerging American film culture was better represented through a blending of modified Hollywood formulas served up with more sensationalistic effects. Between the appeal of art film and traditional Hollywood fare, the low-budget films of Roger Corman, producer/director at American International Pictures, best defined the directions in which feature films were going after the mid 1960s. Adolescents and young adults who had been raised in the American suburbs of the late 1950s and early 1960s favored eclectic and slightly rebellious films, ranging from horror and softcore sex movies to action-adventure films populated with characters whose screen presence invariably expressed some measure of alienation and existential angst.26
Year by year, throughout the 1960s, the demographics of movie theater attendance in the United States shifted toward younger, unmarried people.27 The decrease in movie attendance among middle-aged Americans was steady, but among middle-aged women the drop was even more abrupt and deeper. By the beginning of the 1960s, movie theaters all over the country were closing during the daytime as the audience for "matinees," traditionally composed almost entirely of females, disappeared.28 Women had been a majority of filmgoers in the United States from the end of the World War I to the 1960s. During the 1960s, as the total audience for theatrical films in the United States declined, the remaining audience was decidedly younger and increasingly male. That prompted producers and distributors to abandon such genres as romances and bioepics. By the late 1960s, the young, male movie audience for movies appeared to be most interested in stories and characters challenging their own sense of adolescent boredom and their parents' conventional values. Moreover, and perhaps most interestingly, these elements also appealed to the tastes of educated sophisticates living in metropolitan areas who were becoming more vocal in their criticism of American society and culture during the late 1960s. They identified at a more intellectual level with the visceral and emotional rebellion of restless, alienated young suburbanites.
Exhibition
It could be argued that the major Hollywood companies had actually been well served by having been forced by the government during the 1950s to divest themselves of the motion-picture theaters they owned. Although the exhibition sector remained a major part of the industry during the 1960s, it was far more troubled than the production branch of American cinema. In 1965, the U.S. Department of Commerce estimated that movie theaters still accounted for over 90 percent of the total capital investment in the industry, with much of that expenditure in old and decrepit buildings in undesirable locations. Operating costs remained relatively high for movie theater owners while their average annual profits tottered at a trifling average of just 3 percent nationwide throughout the 1960s.29
Movie theater owners had to confront the irony that the sane Hollywood companies forced by the government to sell off their movie theaters were able to increase their control over the distribution of feature films during the 1960s. Facing dwindling audience demand for their movies, the Hollywood majors cut back on the number of productions; since there was less product available, the distributor could exert greater control over it. The increasing dominance over smaller inventories allowed the major distributors to introduce the so-called "floor figure" as a common basis for rentals to movie theater operators. This system, which gave the distributor a guaranteed rental per film plus 10 percent of a film's actual attendance, replaced the historic rental system called the "house nut" that had been based solely on actual attendance. As a result, film distribution earnings steadily grew at the cost of the exhibitors.30
The American film culture being fashioned during the 1960s was largely unfavorable to exhibitor interests. The exhibition sector experienced extraordinarily rough financial times and business conditions during the decade: they were caught between rapidly changing demographics; often bound to choose between making substantial capital investments in older theaters located in the inner cities or selling the properties at a loss (or even abandoning them altogether); and they were squeezed financially by feature film distribution now monopolized by the Hollywood majors.
DRIVE-INS
The first "outdoor movie theater" was opened in 1933 by a New Jersey chemical manufacturer and accommodated 400 automobiles.31 This new movie exhibition idea, however, did not catch on immediately. At the time, the United States was still in the throes of the Great Depression, and the ensuing years of World War II did not prove conducive to an appreciable growth in the number of drive-ins. After the war, however, America's changing demographics, expanding automobile culture, growing middle class, and burgeoning suburbs supported the swelling of drive-in theaters. In 1945, there still were fewer than 300 drive-ins nationwide. By 1956, that number exploded to 4,500. During the same period, roughly 4,200 indoor theaters in the United States had closed,32 which suggests an almost one-for-one replacement of "hard-top" theaters (industry term) by drive-ins. While numerically valid, the statistic was deceptive and easily open to misinterpretation. In fact, few drive-ins were the equivalent of a standard indoor movie theater. They accommodated far fewer patrons on average, and they, were open only for several months of the year in many parts of the United States. A disproportionate number of drive-ins built in the late 1940s and the early 1950s were in small town or semirural locations. Only late in the 1950s did the number of drive-ins near the booming suburbs accelerate. In hindsight, moreover, the expansion of drive-ins to locations in or near the suburbs appears, in most instances, to have occurred too late to fully capitalize on population shifts throughout most of the United States.
Suburban drive-in theaters constituted an especially good business investment so long as they were located at the fringes of developing areas where land could still be purchased relatively inexpensively.33 In most places, however, land values had already risen so high by the suburban real estate boom that building drive-ins in ideal locales was rendered financially impossible. The number of drive-ins peaked just prior to the end of the 1950s, when they briefly accounted for nearly one-third of the movie admissions nationwide. The potential for their further development, however, was to be seriously compromised by a variety of factors in the 1960s.34
The peak of just over 6,000 drive-in movie theaters was reached in 1958.35 After that, the number began to decline in direct proportion to the increasing demand for suburban property and its rising cost.36 During the 1960s, drive-ins constituted a significantly larger portion of the total number of movie screens in the Southeast and the Midwest than anywhere else in the nation. A 1967 government survey established that the highest proportion of drive-ins to conventional movie theaters was 41 percent in Alabama; while the lowest, in New York state, was 15 percent. Still, there was no easy or simple formula by which to arrive at the relationship of drive-ins to enclosed movie theaters. Montana, the most sparsely populated (per capita) of the continental states at the time, for example, had a drive-in to indoor theater ratio of 30 percent. Exactly the same ratio was found in densely populated Massachusetts. Fast-growing California, with a lifestyle emblematic of American automobile culture and suburbia, however, had only 223 drive-ins out of its 971 movie theaters, which at 23 percent was a lower ratio than in either Montana or Massachusetts.37
Even when they had accounted for roughly half of the nation's screens at the end of the 1950s, drive-ins never fully captured the idea of moviegoing for most Americans. They provided a second-class movie experience, even though more and more drive-ins began showing first-run movies during the 1960s.38 The projected image was usually noticeably inferior to a movie theater; audio-tinny, piped-in sound from small speakers placed on or just inside the vehicle's window-was always inferior. Inclement weather was another problem. Viewers were subject to cold or heat, and even with mild temperature conditions unexpected thunder or wind storms could ruin a night at the drive-in. In some locations alongside major highways, lights and noise were bothersome.
There were definitely appealing aspects of the drive-ins: teenagers could talk with their friends during the movie, or make out, and small children could sleep in the back seat while mom and dad watched a movie and saved on the cost of a baby-sitter. Still, the aesthetic experience and the entertainment value of watching a movie at a drive-in was severely compromised for nearly everyone. Mel Wintmen, executive vice president of the General Cinema Theater chain, summed it up in a decidedly insightful malapropism at the very end of the 1960s: "The future of the drive-ins is in the past."39 In August 1960, Variety reported that twenty-five cinemas were operating as shopping center hardtops nationwide. The same article profiled two especially successful shopping center cinemas, one in Miami Beach, Florida, and the other in Bergen, New Jersey.40 A year later, Box Office concluded, "A new star in the motion picture firmament is the shopping center theater," and added "drive-ins require too much land area."41 As climbing land values in the suburbs made opening new drive-ins prohibitively expensive, and the wrecker's ball demolished deteriorating or abandoned old theaters in America's inner cities, smaller and more cost-efficient "multiplex" cinemas began spreading.
The shift toward this new type of movie theater put a growing number of movie screens closer to where suburban audiences lived and shopped, and promoted a restructuring of exhibition that become more profitable. In 1963, Stanley H. Durwood of Kansas City, Missouri, pioneered a major shift in movie theater construction when he opened a cinema in a shopping center that consisted of two small theaters served by a single projection booth, thus saving significantly on labor and projection costs.42 From this innovation, Durwood built AMC Entertainment, Inc., into one of America's largest-grossing theater chains over the next two decades, ultimately operating 218 theaters with more than 2,700 screens in the United States and a handful of foreign countries.43
In the struggling exhibition sector of the American motion picture business in the 1960s, Durwood's fundamental concept of the multiple-unit indoor theater was quickly accepted as the model for innovation in movie theater design and a blueprint for future development.44 Multiplex cinemas afforded to their owners obvious commercial advantages as compared to single-screen movie houses that operated with traditional projection practices. While older movie theaters and drive-ins were closing in record numbers by the mid 1960s, multiplex cinemas were opening with greatly reduced per-screen capital investment and the added promise of significantly lower labor costs for operation.45
By January 1966, the Hollywood Reporter could report that the construction of over five hundred new cinemas, nearly all of them suburban multiplexes, was being planned across the United States for the coming year alone. At the same time, the Theater Owners Association (TOA), the trade organization of the nation's movie theater owners, was issuing dire warnings about the potential for "overbuilding" screen capacity, even at the most desirable of suburban locations.46 While many economic and demographic indicators pointed toward dwindling profitability overall for theatrical exhibitors of movies, specific multiplexes in particular surburban markets immediately proved to be excellent investments.
Commonly, such cinemas were built with cinder block in simple rectangles in complexes containing from two to eight separate theaters that normally ranged in size from a hundred to three hundred seats each. They were staffed by a minimum number of employees, increasingly younger in age, who could handle the entire business-from selling tickets, to providing refreshments, to starting the projection system, to cleaning out refuse left under seats.47 For nearly all of the new multiplexes, location in or near a shopping center was imperative. During the late 1960s the presence of a multiplex cinema was becoming so increasingly attractive for nearly any major shopping center in the United States as to be considered a commercial necessity. The "foot traffic" through the mall could only increase with the opening of a cinema, since some of the people had come there primarily to see a mode. Parents might leave children at the movies for a couple of hours while they shopped. Large shopping center parking lots afforded moviegoers free and accessible parking, and since many multiplex cinemas were open after the major stores in the shopping center closed, they essentially extended the use of the center later into the night. As a result of the rise of the suburban shopping center multiplex, weekday movie matinees began to return to regions of the country from which they had disappeared. By the late 1960s, other retail merchants in many shopping centers actually began subsidizing movie theaters in order to have the centers open for longer hours.48
Based on the model of the shopping center multiplexes, renovation of selected older urban theaters into multiscreen houses commenced toward the end of the 1960s, especially along the eastern seaboard. In Boston, Massachusetts, for example, the large student- aged population prompted the Sack's chain of theaters to revive its in-city exhibition. Sack's "Cheri," a three-plex, opened in autumn of 1968 as the world's first selfproclaimed "drive-up." The "Cheri" provided an on-premises garage with parking for a thousand vehicles, which constituted an equivalent in the downtown business district to the copious free parking offered at suburban malls. The Sack's chain considered this amenity an absolute necessity to make the concept of the drive-up financially viable.49
NEW OPERATORS AND NEW OPERATIONS
As the type of movie theater was changing, so, too, theater ownership was becoming concentrated in the hands of new entrepreneurs. General Cinema and National Cinema Corporation rose to prominence in the exhibition sector. General Cinema epitomized the new theater owner of the 1960s, accounting for a chain of over 200 cinemas by 1970, almost all of which were in shopping centers and in new buildings. General Cinema pioneered a form of niche diversification for its operations. Branching out into the ownership of soft-drink bottling plants, they held a considerable investment in a tertiary business that provided one of the staples of the increasingly profitable movie theater concession business. This model then became typical for movie theaters.50
While rising profits were earned from concessions, however, an old and venerable profession in the exhibition sector of the movie industry swiftly faded. In the early 1960s, the heavily unionized group of motion picture projectionists were forced nationwide to agree on having one operator, rather than two, in the booth for a 35mm feature. Prior to that time, when so many large theater chains had been owned by the wealthy Hollywood majors, the unions had been able to win favorable terms of employment for projectionists. Through those years, the requirement that every theater projection booth have a projectionist and an assistant had been standard. That practice could be justified for training purposes and quality control, or condemned as union feather-bedding. Regardless, a combination of factors during the 1960s effectively doomed the practice, and the trend toward multiscreen cinemas and smaller seating capacities per screen quickly eroded the projectionists' position. In right-to-work states, primarily in the South and parts of the Midwest and Rocky Mountain regions, the profession of projectionist was all but eliminated by the end of the 1960s. Elsewhere, the specialized profession retained little power, even when its members kept up their union affiliation. Given the enormously changed demographics of the moviegoing audience by the late 1960s, then, the most typical ingredients for exhibitor success became a combination of shopping center locations, multiscreen operations, free shopping center parking (or the "drive-up" concept), limited seating per screen, projection automation, and the elimination of projectionists from the payroll.51
As mentioned earlier, Hollywood producers beginning in the early 1950s had tried to win back their declining audiences with widescreen innovations and 3-D. They even tried presenting several features in "Aromarama" or in the competing "Smell-O-Vision" system, where audiences experienced naturalistic odors pumped in and sucked out of the theater.52 3-D and such other gimmicks quickly fell by the wayside. Widescreen formats prevailed, but there were only several hundred "first-tier" theaters nationwide that were capable of presenting films in 70mm.53
Along with technical schemes intended to draw audiences to the theaters, marketing ploys were developed to elevate the prestige of the moviegoer's experience. The reserved-seat "roadshow" movies survived until the late 1960s, when they fared poorly with the adolescent and young adult audience that had come to dominate the demographics of America's moviegoing public.54 Box-office disasters for two big-budget roadshow musicals produced by 20th Century-Fox-DOCTOR DOLITTLE (1967) and STAR! (1968)-effectively ended the practice of imitating stage theaters and other performance events with the advanced sale of reserved seat tickets for specific showings of large-scale, big-budget movies.55
Mainstream motion-picture exhibition in the United States by the late 1960s was beset by a fundamental irony: just as widescreen and surround-sound innovations were reaching technical perfection after a decade of missteps, exhibitors were bringing audiences to cinder-block spaces with one- to two-hundred seats and using projectors with special compensators that showed a sharp but small image on a screen that often was no further than thirty feet from the projection booth.56 Critics complained about the transition to smaller theater spaces and smaller screens, claiming the magic and myth of motion pictures were being dealt a fatal blow by the multiplexes.57 Almost all of America's great, single-screen movie palaces were gone, and along with them the ushers and usherettes, as well as nearly every other amenity that had characterized moviegoing in America's larger cities from the 1920s well into the 1950s. The exhibition aesthetic that emerged during the 1960s was defined entirely by functionality and commercial efficiency.
By the end of the 1960s, the theatrical exhibition of motion pictures succeeded to the extent that movies were now being shown where much of the audience was-in the suburbs. Increasingly, this meant that the exhibition of movies had come to be tied in with other diversions, such as shopping, that appealed to the adolescent or young adult moviegoer with disposable income. One film historian goes so far as to conclude that the multiplex put an end to people over thirty-five going to the movies.58 It is equally plausible to argue that people over thirty-five had ceased going to the movies in significant numbers before the mutliplexes arose as a logical consequence of the suburbanization of so much of the American population.
"That's what I like about our industry"-proclaimed master of ceremonies Bob Hope, in opening the Academy Award presentations for the year 1961-"the big moment for Hollywood movies comes to you from Santa Monica on television."59 Indeed, in 1960 the annual Academy Award ceremonies had been moved from Hollywood's aging Pantages Theater to the Civic Center in the seaside community of Santa Monica, located due west of Los Angeles. By then, a national television audience of nearly 80 million throughout the United States was guaranteed to tune in to the annual Oscar presentation ceremonies. That figure would remain relatively constant throughout the decade-even as the actual audience for motion pictures in America's theaters was cut in half over the course of the 1960s. Moreover, with the international distribution of the taped Academy Award show for television broadcast in other countries, the "Oscar" ceremonies became a global event.60 As the broadcast became a reliably popular and staple television entertainment event, the very medium that had contributed so heavily to undermining the mass appeal of theatrical movies to American audiences began serving as the primary new vehicle for exploiting Hollywood celebrity and exposing the artistry of the movies to a mass audience worldwide.
Arthur Freed had taken over producing the Academy Awards in 1959. Four years later, Freed would be named the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Bob Hope, who served as master of ceremonies for the majority of the shows during the 1960s, received the Academy's first Gold Medal of recognition in 1966.61 Indeed, both Freed and Hope were significant figures in the lessening of tensions between the motion picture industry and television broadcasting. Hope had never been greatly popular on radio, but via the movies he emerged in the 1950s as a great success on television. Freed took the mastery of spectacular staging he had learned at the MGM film studios to television during the 1950s and then repackaged this showmanship during the 1960s to celebrate and promote movies worldwide through the Academy Award ceremonies.
The honors, to Freed and to Hope, reflected the Academy's appreciation for their contributions to the event that had become the centerpiece of the Academy's existence by the 1960s. Neither of their contributions, however, was without controversy. The show itself inevitably reflected ongoing tensions between the motion-picture industry establishment and the television broadcasting industry, which even the abundant talents of Freed and Hope could not overcome. One especially nasty editorial published in a Los Angeles newspaper criticized the 1961 Awards ceremony as being covered "like a news event" and ridiculed the entertainment value of the program, calling it "worthy of being put on in a high school gymnasium."62 industry trade journal, The Film Bulletin, railed against master of ceremonies Bob Hope's sarcasm at the expense of the movie industry: "Don't continue to misuse the greatest billboard in the world," it cried. The Awards ceremony for 1961 ran 134 minutes, and even the producers agreed that it was too long.63
In response to widespread criticism of his performance the previous year, Hope was dropped by the Academy from his master of ceremonies role for the 35th (1962) Academy Awards. Frank Sinatra took over for him in 1962, and Jack Lemmon filled the role in 1963. Hope was restored as the master of ceremonies for the 37th Academy Awards, which took place on April 5, 1965. By then, the television show itself was being developed more in the direction of an elegant entertainment spectacle. Joe Pasternak, who had taken over as producer, insisted on having fountains built on stage for the ceremonies over the vehement opposition of ABC's Dick Dunlap, who thought that their trickling waters would prove to be too loud and distracting.64 The following year, the Kodak Corporation assumed sole sponsorship of both the television and radio broadcasts of the ceremonies. Since Kodak, the world's largest manufacturer of camera films, had a central and natural relationship to the motion-picture industry, many Hollywood observers deemed this move both appropriate and long overdue. In the mid 1960s, movie industry insiders were still very critical of an Oscar show that was interrupted by advertisements for toothpaste and sundry other products.65 In 1966, the Awards were telecast in color for the first time. The following year, the distinction between "black-and-white" and "color" categories for motion picture camera achievement was finally dropped, merging them into a single award for cinematography.66 The 41st Award ceremonies were postponed for two days following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The telecast won praise for restraint and dignity in the aftermath of this tragedy.67
Major changes occurred the following year. The ceremonies were moved from Santa Monica to the new Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the County Music Center in downtown Los Angeles. Although this location was not geographically in "Hollywood," it was more stately than a setting two blocks from a pier and a ferris wheel. The show's starting time was moved up to 6:30 PST (9:30 P.M. on the East Coast), and the dress code was relaxed to permit men to wear tuxedos, instead of tails. Deciding to rework the show, the Academy's new president, Gregory Peck, limited Bob Hope to a brief appearance and turned the presentations over to ten personalities who were dubbed "Friends of Oscar": they were Ingrid Bergman, Diahann Carroll, Tony Curtis, Jane Fonda, Burt Lancaster, Walter Matthau, Sidney Poitier, Frank Sinatra, Rosalind Russell, and Natalie Wood.68 Hope was back as the solo master of ceremonies for the 42nd Academy Awards for the year 1969.
THE ART HOUSES AND THE NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
During the 1960s, a mass audience could still be drawn to movie theaters by exceptional roadshow movies and still remained fascinated with the allure of Hollywood celebrity and glamour, especially through the televised Academy Awards. However, an entirely different niche audience was being cultivated simultaneously by some movie exhibitors in the United States.
In the late 1950s, a distinct portion of the American audience began to exhibit an interest in foreign films. This breakthrough for foreign movies at the box office occurred in 1958 and not with the release of a film by one of the great European auteur directors; rather, it came with the American distribution of AND GOD CREATED WOMAN, starring Brigitte Bardot (1957, directed by her then-husband, Roger Vadim), which earned more than $4 million in the United States.69 A wave of European art films, directed by such notables as Alain Resnais, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Ingmar Bergman, followed quickly. By the early 1960s, labeling a cinema an "art house," or promoting a movie by calling it "New Wave" could translate into considerable box-office profits for niche exhibitors in the United States.70
Movie theaters called art houses sprang up during the early 1960s, quickly accounting for over 500 screens nationwide.71 Such movie theaters were often converted older theaters or other older buildings in larger cities and college towns.72 The art houses, to a large extent, defined themselves by not showing mainstream Hollywood movies. Their programs were targeted at a young audience, but not adolescents. The rising number of young adults in the population, and changing social and cultural conditions, meant increasing numbers were continuing beyond their high school graduation to some form of post-secondary education. They formed the main demographic of art house audiences.
Art cinemas were distinctive in concept. They might feature an espresso bar in the lobby in lieu of a popcorn machine, for example. They were disproportionately located in the Northeast, on the West Coast, and in either large cities or smaller towns populated by significant numbers of college students. Their audiences tended to be focused in their tastes, often to the extent that devotees of the art house cinemas did not necessarily patronize other movie theaters showing mainstream Hollywood movies. The 1960s was the great decade of growth for the art house. By the 1970s, the long and steady growth was over, although a considerable number of art houses would survive well into the future showing a very identifiable mix of foreign films and low-budget American features labeled "independent."73
Along with the developing art house film culture of the 1960s came the rise of the film festival in America. The major festival linked inextricably with the growing import of European art films to the United States-the New York Film Festival-began on September 1, 1963, and opened to sold-out houses in the 2,300 seat Philharmonic Hall at the new Lincoln Center on Manhattan's West Side. Immediately, the New York Film Festival established itself as the premier gateway into U.S. distribution for foreign films.74 Throughout the 1960s, the New York Film Festival (NYFF) would remain the most important vehicle for introducing American audiences to foreign films. In this regard, the Festival played a central role in advancing the importance of foreign films in American cinema culture and added impetus to the growing number of art cinemas nationwide. The NYFF was significant in the rising culture that asserted the art film as a distinct and clearly superior form of cinema that could he distinguished definitively from Hollywood commercialism. As the critic Robert Gessner wrote in the Saturday Review in 1964: "The second season of the Lincoln Center Film Festival reminded New Yorkers once again what most urban Americans realize, namely the most imaginative and intelligent film, is likely to come from abroad."75
Under the directorship of Richard Roud and Amos Vogel the Festival advanced a concept of film that conscientiously contrasted the global interest in "serious film" to Hollywood's notion of movies as entertainment for mass audiences.76 In 1965, regular seminars on aesthetics and criticism, organized by the renowned film historian Arthur Knight of the University of Southern California, were added to the NYFF schedule and became a continuing feature.77 Festival organizers and promoters understood that the timing of its founding, and the earliest years of its success, coincided chronologically with a rapidly shifting cultural scene predicated on the emergence of the "film generation." As Amos Vogel asserted in 1965, "Films have finally arrived in international cultural circles among the young people. There is much more excitement about films than about legitimate theatre. For young people [film] is their art-the twentieth-century art form."78
Notes
1. Variety (Weekly), July 5, 1961.
2. Frederic Stuart, The Effects of Television on the Motion Picture and Radio Industries (New York: Arno Press, 1976), p.12.
3. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage Press, 1994), p.321.
4. Stuart, Effects of Television, p.10.
5. Terry Christensen, Reel Politics (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p.112.
6. Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992).
7. Stuart, Effects of Television, p.19.
8. Robert Stanley, The Celluloid Empire: A History of the American Motion Picture (New York: Hastings House, 1978), p.237.
9. Landon Y. Jones, Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation (New York: Ballantine Books, 1980), p.11, 12.
10. Gomery, Shared Pleasures, p.28.
11. William Issel, Social Change in the United States, 1945-1983 (New York: Sehocken Books, 1985), pp-87, 88.
12. Aubrey Solomon, Twentieth Century Fox: A Corporate and Financial History (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1988), pp.147, 148.
13. Variety (Weekly), May 25, 1960.
14. Issel, Social Change, p.100.
15. Gomery, Shared Pleasures, pp.155-170; see "Movie Theaters for Black Americans."
16. Robert Brustein, "The New Hollywood," in Gerald Mast, ed., The Movies: Documents in the Cultural History of Film in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p.685.
17. Time, December 8, 1967, p.72.
18. Variety (Weekly), February 24, 1960, p.3.
19. Variety (Weekly), April 26, 1961, p.1.
20. Emanuel Levy, And the Winner Is... The History and Politics of the Oscar Awards (New York: Ungar, 1987), p.83.
21. Mason Wiley and Damien Bona, Inside Oscar: The Unofficial History of the Academy Awards (New York: Ballentine Books, 1993), p.332.
22. Stanley Kauffmann, "The Film Generation: Celebration and Concern," in A World on Film (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), pp.415-428.
23. Peter Lev, The Euro-American Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993) p.73.
24. Variety (Weekly), October 24, 1962.
25. William K. Zinsser, "Quo Vadis, Hollywood,- Look, July 11, 1967, p.14.
26. Mitch Tuchman, "Independent Producers; Independent Distributors,' in David Pirie, ed., Anatomy of the Movies (New York: Macmillan, 1981), pp.90-90.
27. Time, December 8, 1967, p.66.
28. Box Office, May 29, 1961, p.3.
29. Cobbett Steinberg, Reel Facts: The Movie Book of Records (New York: Vintage, 1982), p.40.
30. A. D. Murphy, "Distribution and Exhibition: An Overview," in James E. Squire, ed., The Movie Business Book (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1981), pp.244, 245.
31. Newsweek, July 8, 1963, p.54.
32. A compilation of excellent statistics on the number of "four wall" theaters and outdoor theaters in the United States between the 1920s and 1975 is found in Christopher H. Sterling and Timothy R. Haught, The Mass Media: Aspen Institute Guide to Communication Industry Trends (New York: Praeger, 1978), pp.34, 35. See also Frederic Stuart, "The Effects of Television on the Motion Picture Industry," in Gorham Kindem, ed., The American Movie Industry (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), pp.263 ff.
33. Gary R. Edgerton, American Film Exhibition and an Analysis of the Motion Picture Industry's Market Structure, 1963-1980 (New York: Garland Publishing Company, 1983), p.32.
34. Albert E. Sindlinger, "Finding Lost Audiences," Variety, Special Anniversary Issue, October 1961, p.12.
35. Suzanne Mary Donahue, American Film Distribution: The Changing Marketplace (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987), p.109.
36. Edgerton, American Film Exhibition, p.33.
37. United States Department of Commerce 1967 Census of Business: Selected Services, Motion Pictures (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Publishing and Printing, November 1970).
38. Variety (Weekly), April 27, 1960, p.1.
39. Edgerton, American Film Exhibition, p.34.
40. Variety (Weekly), August 24, 1960, p.3.
41. Box Office, May 29, 1961, p.6.
42. John Belton, Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp.212, 213.
43. "Stanley H. Durwood Obituary," Kansas City Star, July 16, 1999.
44. Steinberg, Reel Facts, p.39.
45. Edgerton, American Film Exhibition, p.34.
46. Hollywood Reporter, January 13, 1966.
47. Steinberg, Reel Facts, p.40.
48. Box Office, July 22, 1968, p.2.
49. Box Office, September 30, 1968.
50. Gomery, Shared Pleasures, pp.89-92.
51. Charles Higham, Hollywood at Sunset (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972), pp.175, 176.
52. SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers Magazine), March 1960, p.25.
53. Belton, Widescreen Cinema, p.178.
54. Justin Wyatt, "From Roadshowing to Saturation Release: Majors, Independents, and Marketing/Distribution Innovations," in Jon Lewis, ed., The New American Cinema (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), pp.66, 67.
55. Belton, Widescreen Cinema, p.179.
56. Box Office, September 30, 1968.
57. Jerry Lewis, "Observations of a New Motion Picture Producer," Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, Motion Picture Study Collection, n.d.
58. Gomery, Shared Pleasures, p.101.
59. "Script for the 33rd Academy Award Ceremonies," Center for Motion Picture Study, Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, Beverly Hills, California.
60. Cecil Smith, "Oscar's Up for Grabs," Los Angeles Times Weekly Magazine, April 16-22, 1961, pp.2, 3.
61. Hollywood Reporter, April 16, 1966, p.6.
62. Rick DuBrow, "High School Gymnasium Next?" Los Angeles Evening Lookout, April 10, 1962, p.22.
63. Film Bulletin, April 16, 1962, p.2.
64. Hollywood Reporter, April 19, 1966, p.19.
65. Academy Files, 39th Award Ceremonies, Center for Motion Picture Study, Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, Beverly Hills, California.
66. "Rules for the Conduct of the Balloting for the 40th Academy Awards," Center for Motion Picture Study, Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, Beverly Hills, California.
67. Motion Picture Daily, April 11, 1968, p.4.
68. Paul Michael, The Academy Awards: A Pictorial History, 5th ed. (New York: Crown Publishing, 1982), pp.142-144.
69. Lev, The Euro-American Cinema, p.13.
70. Jacques Sichier, Nouvelle Vague (Paris: Editions (In Cerf, 1961), p.22.
71. Thomas Schatz, Old Hollywood/New Hollywood: Ritual, Art, and Industry (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), p.175.
72. Box Office, September 30, 1968, p.6.
73. Michael F. Mayer, The Film Industries (New York: Hastings House, 1978), p.63.
74. Variety (Daily), September 6, 1963, p.3.
75. Robert Gessner, "The Handwriting on the Screen," Saturday Review, October 10, 1964.
76. Hollis Alpert, "Cinema: The Global Revolution," Saturday Review, October 5, 1963.
77. Film Daily, June 4, 1965, p.1.
78. Film Daily, September 9, 1965, p.7.
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