The stars (1962)

as the saying went. The old Hollywood had, indeed, been set up on industrial lines. Movies were interchangeable products— like cans of corn — and you moved as many cans as possible off the shelves and into the stores each year. If you lost money on one line of products, you were sure to make it up on another. The main thing was production. This, of course, entailed a heavy overhead. Assembly lines cost money to establish and to operate; they require much "concrete." The new Hollywood discovered that with fewer theaters in operation (and television forced the marginal ones out of business very quickly) it needed much less product than it once had. With less product needed, it discovered that it needed less "concrete," and far fewer employees. Even some of the moguls' relatives lost their jobs. After much stumbling about in a wilderness of conflicting advice, and many yelping runs down false trails, the movie makers began to operate within a new industrial pattern which emerged by the middle of the decade. The old-line studios became, in effect, real estate operators, loan sharks and comparatively passive distributors of other people's products. They rented their production facilities, loaned money to and distributed the product of independent packagers of various types. Some of these were former employees — directors, stars, even staff producers — -who knew how to write their names or, even better, how to talk awfully fast, and who whirled around town, wrapping "packages" which could be converted into cash for production. They started with a "property," then interested a guaranteed superstar in appearing in the movie version. With him lined up, yet another and another and another could be brought into camp. Add a director and a screenwriter along the way, and the moguls became as children, eager to press money on the operator. Now it quickly became obvious that the key to all this was the star. He could not just be anybody who had once had his name billed above a picture's title. He had to be somebody who, on the form charts, could bring the people in. There were very few such gilt-edged drawing cards in the business, and most of them quickly incorporated themselves and learned to wrap their own packages. This happy few could be lured into other people's pictures, but it came to be considered declasse, if not downright vulgar, to "take money." What one takes, ideally, is a percentage of a film's gross. Second best is a percentage of the profits — which most studios prefer, since 50 per cent of nothing is still nothing, while 10 per cent of a film's gross, even when that gross does not return the cost of making the negative, can be considerable. Obviously there is little long-term security for the star in such a system. He therefore charges what the traffic will bear and there are now signs that the money men are about to revolt against the heavy duties the stars have lately exacted. The handful of stars who have survived and prospered may, in the immediate future, face a dowward revision of the prices they can get. But at last the importance of the star, and to a lesser degree that of directors and writers, is being recognized. This is not only stated in terms of remuneration, but in terms of status. They — or at any rate their agents and managers — are calling the shots now, and as a result they are acquiring something at least as satisfying to the ego as publicity — membership in the real power elite of Hollywood. The results of the big change-over are interestingly mixed. The easy money has virtually disappeared, and that is good. So is the disappearance of the arrogant, unbridled power of the studios. Something like a free market place has begun to exist in Hollywood today. There are many buyers and many sellers of talent, ideas and money, and the old dominance of a handful of tycoons is almost finished. With production spread among so many small companies, the threat of boycott is lessened and pressure groups are denied the leverage they once had on the studios, which dared not threaten their entire output to protect a single controversial film. Because the public apparently wants more adult pictures, and because creative people are finally free to indulge themselves in ideas that would have been vetoed by the frightened Philistines of the old-time front office, films have a new seriousness about them. But, there are "buts." To begin with, there is no American art film tradition. Cast off from the rigid disciplines of studiostyle production, many would-be film artists flounder. They have toiled too long under the old way of doing business and they find, now that they may speak freely, that they can, alas, only talk in the old accents. Many of them were not very fine minds to begin with, and their attempts at seriousness are more laughable — and far less entertaining — than were the standardized items they used to grind out. Many of the new talents are more pretentious than portentous. While the new independence has given us much that is arty, the percentage of the product that is genuine art is not much higher than it ever was; and, remember, the total number of films produced is smaller. In addition, there is an increasing reliance on the superspectacle, frequently Biblical or historical in theme; and these, though often profitable, are even more often regressive as screen art. Then, too, there is a greater reliance on the pre-sold property, the best-selling book or hit play or, as we have seen, the previously success 244