ENTERTAINMENT: Script for Success

(2 of 2)

The trend to blockbusters means an inevitable cutback in middle-cost (between $500,000 and $1,000,000) and cheap pictures. But the middle picture with quality can still sell well, e.g., United Artists' The Defiant Ones. Cost: less than $1,000,000. Says Producer Jerry (Peyton Place) Wald, whose pictures brought in half of 20th Century-Fox's earnings last year: The Pride and the Passion, which Fox did not make, "cost $6,000,000 and lost $2,000,000. Charging horses or armies or camels are not important. What is important is eliminating the second-rate or inferior merchandise."

Confident that they can turn the trick, so many independent moviemakers have arrived on Hollywood's changing scene that movie finance has become an interwoven tangle, no more predictable than the color of a starlet's hair. Directors are producing, actors are directing, and almost everyone in Hollywood has his own corporation.

Oil Wells & Girdles. To make up for the cut in picturemaking—and compensate for what the independents are grabbing from the till—the big, established movie companies and even large theater chains have branched out into dozens of other fields, ranging from oil drilling and real estate to electronics and girdles. Virtually every major movie company has set up a record-making subsidiary, using it to stimulate sales of movies featuring their singing stars. Many companies decided to join up with their long-feared rival, have taken to producing TV shows (Warner Bros, alone is working on twelve TV series) or renting their facilities to TV.

TV is even giving many low-budget studios a second and profitable lease on life by using their facilities to make TV films fast and cheaply. Hollywood's best example: Republic Pictures, the first major studio to concentrate on TV production. Republic had been losing money regularly on its pictures, was heavily in the red when it finally got out of the movie business entirely last year, concentrated on making TV films. Result: in the year ended Oct. 25, the company reported operating income of $4.2 million compared to a deficit of $724,697 in the previous year.