Always alert to mood swings, Hollywood this week is coping with some dauntingly positive portents. Box office numbers are strong, magic money from Oracle, Amazon or Abu Dhabi is materializing and newly muscled majors are greenlighting product.
Some optimists even see hints of a ’60s-style resurgence with bright young filmmakers creating smart young movies. To be sure, they overlook several important differences between ‘then’ and ‘now’: The mismanaged studios of the mid-1960s had no money to spend and no executives left to spend it. Plus, there was no YouTube around to help audition wannabe artists and their projects.
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Chaotic times had closed in on Warner Bros, Fox, Columbia and United Artists, all of which were on the block. MGM was eager to sell not only its huge back lot but also its props and wardrobe.
Meanwhile, icons like Jack Warner or Darryl Zanuck were selling out or retiring. Their relationships with their bankers had been fractured as had their contracts with talent.
With movie audiences drifting off to TV, studio release schedules featured torpor-inducing fare like A Man For All Seasons or The Alamo. Promising young filmmakers, having cobbled together haphazard budgets for an Easy Rider or Bonnie and Clyde couldn’t find coherent support for new ideas.
“The studios simply stalled out and no project could advance without the support of a devoted ‘rabbi’,” observed Ted Ashly, a brilliant if erratic agent and studio executive whose drug problems often interrupted his rabbinical effectiveness.
The ranks of Ashly-like “rabbis” included film buffs who were paying their bills as managers, producers or neophyte studio executives. They were skilled in finding an overlooked novel or screenplay, linking in an appropriate filmmaker, then relentlessly flogging that project until it somehow became a reality.
The “rabbis” knew one another: There would be encounters at Musso and Franks, with martinis flying and vital intelligence exchanged. The projects debated were eclectic: Ted Tanen, a struggling young executive at Universal touted American Graffiti, then panicked and tried to dump it. David Picker was the “rabbi” for X-rated Midnight Cowboy, ultimately released by United Artists. John Calley championed A Clockwork Orange, which anchored at Warner Bros.
I signed onto the youthful “rabbi” ranks, leaving The New York Times to join Bob Evans at Paramount where we had to overcome entrenched opposition to Rosemary’s Baby and Love Story.
In some cases, the young filmmakers themselves had to join the ranks of the “rabbis.” No studio was interested in a New York cop story mistitled The French Connection, but Billy Friedkin coaxed $17 million out of Fox. Richard Zanuck, the soon to be fired son of Darryl, assured him that “this is our last production and it’s all the money we have left.”
To be sure, the Friedkins of that era had no YouTube for auditioning their work. The success stories of today’s aggressive young filmmakers like Curry Barker (Obsession) and Kane Parsons (Backrooms) will likely open doors for other Gen-Zers.
So, too, will the equally dramatic success that befell The Amazing Digital Circus: Last Act, a YouTube series whose eighth episode is playing at 2,300 theaters. Its pilot racked up 440 million views on YouTube.
Ray Nutt, one of its producers, notes that this release pattern proves that “everybody’s learning what Gen Zers are liking.”
If true, the role of the 1960s hard-selling ‘rabbis’ would seem anachronistic – until the next iteration of studio management turns out to be as inert as its predecessors.
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