Ready or Not, Here comes Gatsby

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Mia also caused the production's only true crisis by discovering that she was pregnant. A few additional ruffles were sewn to her dresses, and the shooting schedule was speeded up a week. Clayton retreated to London to edit the film. At Paramount the whole hard-sell operation went into its final phase, designed to "peak and bloom" in the last two weeks before the film's release. Color spreads with photos provided by the studio have been planted in 50 newspaper Sunday supplements. Film clips of the New York premiere party at the Waldorf-Astoria will be shipped out overnight to scores of local TV stations.

It was faith in the efficacy of this kind of floodgate flackery that prompted Paramount's exhibitors to come up with that $18.6 million in advances and guarantees. If the film flops, "which God forbid," says Loews Theater Chain President Bernie Myerson, it will be a matter of subtle negotiation how much of that advance cash is returned to exhibitors. Paramount is not legally bound to refund it all, but, explains Yablans cheerily, he would undoubtedly return a reasonable percentage just because the studio will have other films to book with those exhibitors in the future.

Big Bird. Can saturation promotion and publicity, no matter how carefully executed, guarantee a superhit? The virtually unanimous answer from other film industry executives is, not really. "If a film does not work, the public will not see it," says Dick Shepherd, Evans' counterpart at Warner Brothers. "Word of mouth is essential." Jonathan Livingston Seagull, he notes, was an "abysmal failure" as a movie, despite the immense public awareness of the big, beatific bird. Although Warner's own current smash hit The Exorcist is based on a bestseller, Shepherd contends it was really a word-of-mouth success. A pre-release survey, he says, indicated that very few people knew of the book or even what the word exorcist meant.

Shepherd also doubts the claim that Gatsby is guaranteed to recover its costs. "United Artists got good advances for The Fugitive Kind, a Marlon Brando-Tennessee Williams package," explains Shepherd. It opened, bombed and "all the advances just went away."

John Friedkin, head of advertising and promotion for 20th Century-Fox, cites Fox's 1967 "blockbuster" Dr. Dolittle, which went out with a whimper despite a brilliant merchandising job. "All the guarantees and promotion can buy a couple of weeks' business," says Friedkin, "and after that it has to be word of mouth. If the picture is bad, you might as well shoot everybody coming out of the theater—they will quickly enough kill any film."

The word of mouth that has trickled out from those who saw Gatsby at a special screening for Paramount's exhibitors in Beverly Hills last week is inconclusive. The audience was about equally divided.