Time Magazine in partnership with CNN report: Hollywood: Will There Ever Be a 21st Century-Fox?
Monday, Feb. 09, 1970 Article ToolsPrintEmailReprints A PHONE call jolted awake Paramount Senior Vice President Robert Evans at 4 o'clock one morning last fall. Walter Matthau was on the line—and on the rampage—from the Long Island location of A New Leaf. According to Hollywood Columnist Joyce Haber, Matthau yelled: "If you don't get Stanley Jaffe off this picture, I'm leaving. Who is this twirp?" What, Evans asked, seemed to be the trouble between Walter and the 29-year-old who had just taken over as producer? Matthau explained that while shooting, "I had to go to the bathroom, and Jaffe ordered, 'Finish the scene first.' For God's sake," Matthau spluttered, "I'm the star!"
That, as Matthau now knows, was 1960s talk. Hollywood is at high noon. Stanley Jaffe has leapfrogged over Evans to become chief operating officer at Paramount. The high-priced stars are being cut down to size, and the masters of business administration are taking over the studios, or what is left of them. A new generation of film-company executives are suddenly trying to cope with economic realities that their fathers and uncles refused even to recognize. During the past few years, for example, 20th Century-Fox wasted a great deal of thought on whether and when to change its name to 21st Century-Fox; meanwhile disastrous pictures like Star! and Dr. Doolittle were costing —and losing—millions of dollars.
The nub of the problem is that TV is not going away and people are not going to the movies. Since the 1940s, the population has increased 30%; admission prices have doubled since 1959. Yet last year the box-office gross was 24% less than in 1946. At a time when Hollywood is producing work of greater artistic interest, the studios seem to have lost their moneymaking touch.
Wharton School. In 1969, five of the seven major film companies were in the red and, together, lost more than $100 million. Inevitably, conglomerate wheeler-dealers and proxy challengers have moved in, trying to cash in on such assets as film libraries and real estate. Gulf & Western Industries took over Paramount; Transamerica Corp. and Kinney National Service bought out United Artists and Warner Brothers.
The Stanley Jaffe generation goes into office under siege. However successful, it will go out unsung. It lacks the superstar quality of the Goldwyns and the Mayers and the Cohns. As quote makers, include the Jaffes out. Their English is more grammatical than that of their forebears, but hardly as flavorful. Jaffe, for example, polished his at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Finance.
The mandate is to bring moviemaking into the computerized, cost-controlled business world. The newest enthusiasm in Hollywood film making, therefore, is cutting budgets and cutting losses. Some of that $100 million debit was just a realistic write-off or write-down on properties in the works or even in the can that could never net as much as originally projected. In November, the last tycoon of old Hollywood, Jack Warner, retired from the studio bearing his name. But even before his formal send-off (on Sound Stage No. 7, where the "Great Hall" set from Camelot is still unstruck), 45 of Warner's 62 pending projects were unceremoniously jettisoned. In the old days, a major studio would shoot as many as 50 pictures a year. In 1970, the average will be closer to 15.
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