Take One (Nov-Dec 1972)

News Pace The truth 24 times per second. As well.as providing Jack Nicholson with an Academy Award nomination, The Last Detail may create a new myth about train travel in the United States. The story involves a train trip from Norfolk, Va. to Boston, Mass. The trains are all neat and clean. The train stations (in Washington, New York and Boston) are immaculate and orderly — they are also, in reality, all merely different corners of Union Station in Toronto, where most of the film was shot. (If local politicians get their way, Union Station will soon be torn down.) A recent 60-second tv commercial for Husker-Do — a children’s game — contained the phrase “Get It” on a single frame in four places and now the National Ass’n. of Broadcasters and the FTC are investigating their first case of “subliminal” advertising. Some financial statistics about foreign film ““successes”’ in the United States (from a recent article by Vincent Canby in The New York Times): Last Tango in Paris has earned $12,625,000 in less than a year. Z earned $7,100,000. Cries and Whispers has so far earned about $1,200,000 in 803 U.S. theaters. But no earlier Bergman film has earned more than $350,000 in the States. Such foreignlanguage “‘hits’’ as Claire’s Knee and Bed and Board have earned only $410,000 and $372,000 (respectively), compared to The Poseidon Adventure’s $40,000,000 and the estimated $180,000-cost of putting a foreign film into release in the U.S. Survey results in: One recent poll has revealed that movie ads are read by young people (aged 14-25) more often than any other type of newspaper advertising. Movie reviews, on the other hand, ranked seventh (well after comics and sports). In a second nation-wide survey, ten thousand families picked movies out of more than 40 goods and services as being definitely the worst buy in the economy. Less than 6 percent of those polled considered theatrical films a good buy for the price of admission. You might want to send away for wine, beer and cola bottles that, though they look real, break safely and painlessly when applied with force against someone’s skull (for instance). They’re $4.50 apiece (minimum order of three) from: Rosco, P.O. Box 1030, Port Chester, N.Y. 10573. Francois Truffaut used to have a file of 250 complete dossiers — one on every American director from Lloyd Bacon to Fred Zinnemann. He finally presented them all to Henri Langlois of the Cinémathéque Francaise in exchange for a permanent free pass. While editors at Britain’s Thames Television were putting together footage for the program World at War, they came up with the ingenious idea of having lip readers decipher the casual remarks passed between Hitler and his aides and then dubbing them into the film. A whole new industry is born. Producer Radley Metzger is still wondering about a CIA request to borrow a print of his film, Little Mother, whose leading lady bears a striking resemblance to the late Eva Peron. The new anti-pornography law in Winchester, Indiana, was so vividly defined that the local newspaper decided it couldn’t print it — thus preventing it from becoming law. Bob Hope is to produce an hour-long tv special based on The Bluffer’s Guide for NBC. (Take One published sections from the Bluffer’s Guide to Cinema in December of 1970.) From Our Man at the Bar: Sam Peckinpah is suing MGM for $3 million for releasing a version of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid which is “substantially different” from his own final cut. ... The would-be producers of The Hot-Cold War Man are suing director Ken Russell for 40,000 pounds for causing filming to be shelved by cancelling out of the movie after a feud with star Oliver Reed. ... Dominique Sanda is suing John Frankenheimer for dubbing in someone else’s voice over hers in parts of their Impossible Object without asking permission. ... And the stars of The Three Musketeers (including Richard Chamberlain, Raquel Welch and Charlton Heston) are taking legal action against director Richard Lester now that they’ve realized that he was making a sequel to the film at the same time as they were shooting what they thought was to be the one-shot ae Musketeers. They want to be paid for oth. Producer-director Phil D’Antoni figures that, what with his three films (Bullitt, The French Connection, and the current The Seven-Ups), he’s now wrecked well over $100,000-worth of cars. Attendance at Walt Disney World is down 6.5 percent over a year ago. Attendance at Disney Land is down 4.5 percent. Elizabeth Taylor is now the controlling owner of late-husband Mike Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days, having bought out his children’s interests. She apparently plans annual re-releases of the film during the Christmas holidays. The University Film Study Center (Box 275, Cambridge, Mass. 02138) has prepared a comprehensive list of American Politicians on Film — worth sending for (at 25¢ apiece). If you’re beginning to get the idea that all this Great Gatsby bumph we’re being subjected to is part of a master plan — well, you're right. Paramount (which invested some $6.4 million to make the film) has signed up four companies (a men’s sportswear manufacturer, a chain of beauty salons, Ballantine’s Scotch, and the Teflon people), who have agreed to spend a total of $6 million in their promotions related to the film. Plus, more than 50 large department stores across the States will participate in Gatsby tie-ins this month and next. Charles O. Glenn, Paramount’s VP in charge of these things, explained that a number of companies who’d wanted to get in on the promotional action were turned away: “Everybody has called me about Gatsby, from some of the smallest beer companies to some of the most sophisticated textile companies. But our aim is to help the picture in a very special way so that the entire country will be Gatsby-ized.” Production Notes from All Over: Peter Bogdanovich is to produce and direct Bugsy (based on the life of mobster Bugsy Siegel). ... Shooting starts October Ist on Ingmar Bergman’s The Merry Widow, starring Barbara Streisand. ... James Caan has now been signed to star opposite Ms. Streisand in Funny Lady (the sequel to guess what), shooting this month. ... Late spring is the start of filming on The First Deadly Sin, directed by Don Siegel. ... And filming has now been completed on Robert Altman’s California Split, starring George Segal and Elliott Gould. .... Harold Pinter has been signed by director Mike Nichols to write the screenplay for the film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. ... MGM has announced plans to produce FutureWorld, a sequel to Westworld. Chabrol has finished his latest film, Nada, which he describes as “a film more about anarchy than love’. ... Canadian Denis Héroux is currently shooting, in Nice, a film version of the Mort Shuman play Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. ... Martin Scorsese (of Mean Streets) has bought the rights to The Gangs of New York, which he hopes to film after he has completed his current Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (about to be shot) and Taxi Driver. ... And Jacques Demy’s latest is L’événement le plus important depuis que l’homme a marché sur la lune (“‘the most important event since Man walked on the moon”), in which Marcello Mastroianni feels ill, consults a doctor, and discovers that he is pregnant.