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PART SEVEN
FIFTIES
One day early in 1961, Carl Foreman, an independent motion-picture producer, sat down with New York Times reporter Murray Schumach to survey the remains of the once proud and powerful American motion-picture industry. As they talked, one great studio and two or three minor ones had ceased entirely to exist. Another was renting space on the lot it had once owned and later sold to a producer of filmed television shows. Another was busy exploring for oil and subdividing its lot, its fate as a producer dependent on a multimillion-dollar picture, the cost of which had somehow got out of hand and which, unless it turned out to be the biggest hit in history, might well ruin the studio. Not far away, the grandest studio of them all, M-G-M, having almost destroyed itself by clinging too long to the old ways of doing business, had but recently bailed itself out of trouble by producing a smasheroo called Ben-Hur, and was now once again in trouble because too much had been spent remaking a former hit, Mutiny on the Bounty.
Such has been the caliber of Hollywood industrial statesmanship that it was characteristic of Metro to remake old successes in an attempt to survive rather than to think up something new to do. It was to this general softening of the brain that Mr. Foreman was hyperbolically addressing himself. "The movie business in Hollywood," he said, "is the only business in the history of the United States that set out to destroy itself. ... It is the only business where the men at the top discharged or devoured all the younger men who could have carried on. Hollywood today is in a complete state of anarchy.
"What they have," he continued, "is an ever-decreasing number of stars getting ever-increasing salaries. This is insane." Asserting that it was healthy for movie making to go out into the great world and break out of the confining studio walls, he suggested that the industry might need government subsidies and a training school for new talent. "The bulk of Hollywood movies are old-fashioned and creaky," he declared. "There is nothing here to compare with the ferment in Great Britain, France or even Poland, which is behind the Iron Curtain."
Many things besides television have contributed to the decline of Hollywood in the postwar years. The nation was spending its leisure hours in different ways — in do-it-yourself projects around home, in travel, in self-improvement, in community activities, in God-knows-what. There were, simply, far more demands on the average citizen's time than there once had been, and he had more money and education to spend on more elaborate cultural pursuits than a Saturday night at the movies. In addition, the importation of foreign films, as well as Hollywood's own occasional forays into the realm of genuine art, had convinced him that movies should be something more than a habit, that they could be, at their best, an experience, and that he was quite within his rights to be choosy about them — especially when his longing for trash could be so easily satisfied at home by the mere flick of a switch.
For those who were adaptable there were still fortunes to be made in the Hollywood of the fifties. The operational principle was to avoid getting yourself tied up "in concrete,"
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