In 1973, Warner Bros. executive Dick Lederer came into the Hollywood offices of fellow executive Berry Beckerman and tossed the box office numbers of their latest film onto Beckerman’s desk.
“Kid,” Lederer said, “the fun is over.”
But the movie wasn’t a flop, no one was getting fired, and the studio wasn’t shutting down. No, the problem was that their film, despite bad reviews from leading critics, had made more money than they ever could have imagined. In fact, it would become the highest-grossing movie of 1973.
“There are guys in New York,” Beckerman continued, “looking at these figures, saying ‘This is the kind of money you can make in the movie business?’ We’ve been having a good time out here and been very successful, but it’s gonna get real serious after this.”
Any guess what movie prompted the comment? Here’s a hint: the Rene Magritte painting Empire of Light inspired one of the more iconic shots from the film.
Before we can understand what a prescient comment this is, some context. Among film lovers, 1973 is considered one of the best years for movies ever. New Hollywood brats like George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Peter Bogdanovich had released American Graffiti, Mean Streets, and Paper Moon. There were crowd pleasers like The Exorcist, The Sting, Live and Let Die, a great Bond flick. Classics from foreign masters, too, like Last Tango in Paris, Amarcord, Cries and Whispers, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. And we can’t forget Badlands or Papillion or Serpico or…
You get the point. (Another hint hidden in that paragraph, FYI.)
The previous decade had seen the arrival of a new technology called television—unleashing an insecurity across Hollywood that TV would supplant the role of movies in people’s lives. (It didn’t help the 60s was a mediocre decade for film.) But the arrival of the New Hollywood—with directors like Spielberg and Coppola and Friedkin, David Lynch, Mike Nichols, and Brian De Palma, too many to name, really—had assuaged industry fears. Quite definitively, movies were the superior artform, delivering a product not yet possible on TV.
(Last hint above.)
But in early 1973, an industry veteran named Max Youngstein developed “a promotion campaign” that altered the course of Hollywood with a low-budget comedy called Billy Jack. For several decades, film historian Sam Wasson writes in The Big Goodbye:
“…studios assumed the practice of “platform” distribution, in which a film is released gradually, over a period of months, beginning in urban first-run movie houses and disseminated outward to the suburban theaters, hopefully gaining interest along the way. With the modest aid of print ads, the free publicity of critics, and the occasional ballyhoo, the advertising of motion pictures was thus a fairly sedate, even routine affair.”
Pretty different from binging that new, hyped Netflix series over a weekend, huh?
For Billy Jack, Youngstein instead wanted to adopt a release strategy employed by wildlife and exploitation films at the time called “four-walling.” The idea was to oversaturate the market, dump the movie in as many theaters as possible, and rush audiences in before a bad word of mouth could spread. The goal was, as a rival executive noted, to “completely dun” the audience into submission with promotion. And it worked. In its first 60 days in theaters, Billy Jack grossed $887,460, almost breaking the record previously set by The Godfather. Billy Jack, a movie that cost around $800K to produce, would go on to make an estimated $32.3 million by the end of its run.
And while Billy Jack was the first body blow to a changing Hollywood, it was The Exorcist that spelled doom to Dick Lederer and had him declare the party’s over. Because Warner Bros. had “four-walled” The Exorcist, the first time a major studio employed the strategy. And guess what? It worked even better than Billy Jack! The Exorcist grossed an estimated $160 million (that’s in 1973 dollars, by the way, with tickets only costing $3 each!).
Clearly, this was the new way forward for the industry. You still couldn’t turn a terrible picture “into a winner,” Youngstein observed, “but I do say that, regardless of how bad it is, with intelligent and imaginative distribution and promotion, it will do a hell of a lot greater business.”
Just two years later, Universal spent an unheard-of $700,000 on television advertising and promotion on Jaws, a movie with such a troubled production—going $6 million over budget, 100 days over schedule, the screenwriter almost getting decapitated on set, and actor Robert Shaw constantly drunk—that the crew nicknamed the movie “Flaws.” But Jaws made $476.5 million over the years and went on to create the summer blockbuster phenomenon as we know it.
Around this same time, there was a changing of the guard behind the scenes in film studios. Gone were the old heads from the “studio system” days, still captivated by the magic of movies and the aesthetic possibilities of motion pictures. Replacing them were businessmen like Michael Eisner, who had worked in and up the ranks of television. In 1976, he was hired as president and COO of Paramount movie studios and wrote a memo that quickly circulated throughout the company:
“We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective.”
Eisner—who brought in the “television mentality” of endless meetings, “and manufacturing stories and manufacturing movies,” said then-Paramount production chief Richard Sylbert—was wildly successful. So successful, in fact, he was later hired as CEO and Chairman by the Walt Disney Company to revitalize the brand. How did he do it? By reimagining existing IP into animated movies like The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, and Beauty and the Beast. (Sound familiar?)
As Wasson observed on The Bret Easton Ellis podcast, the marketing department is now the most vital organ of any movie studio. Because remember, regardless of how bad it is, a film with exceptional marketing will do great business. It is why Disney spent $200 million marketing each on Avatar 2: Way of the Water and Avengers: Endgame, why Paramount spent $150 million marketing Top Gun: Maverick, and why Warner Bros. spent $150 million marketing Barbie last summer. All these movies made over $1 billion. In Barbie’s case, the Warner Bros. marketers are being hailed as ‘geniuses’ for their ‘iconic’ and ‘innovative’ rollout strategy and receive only celebration for their work while any criticism about the movie lands mainly at the feet of its creators.
It’s all very strange, how we almost seem to like to be seduced by the packaging of something as much as, if not more than, the thing itself. (Reminds me of another Rene Magritte painting called The Treachery of Images.) It also has me wondering—do we really like these things we say we like, or do we just like the way they were sold to us?