Studio (9780307817600) Read Free Page A

had been provided with a thirty-two-page four-color annual report which attested to Twentieth Century Fox’s robust financial health.
The Sound of Music
, with a gross approaching $100 million, was the most successful film in motion picture history, there were over thirty other feature films in various stages of production, and the television department had ten shows totaling nine hours of prime-time viewing on the network airwaves. Gross revenues of the company were $227,259,000 for fiscal 1966, earnings before taxes $23,763,000, net earnings after taxes $12,504,000, earnings per share of stock $4.28. Richard Zanuck’s salary was $150,000 with an additional $150,000 a year deferred; one television producer was being paid $435,000 a year, another $365,000 a year.
    With the reading of the financial statement, the meeting was thrown open for questions. There were no complaints from the stockholders. A resolution was introducedpraising Darryl Zanuck for his running of the company. Less than two hours after it began, the annual meeting of the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation was adjourned.
    Five years before, the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation had been flat on its back. In 1962, Fox lost $39.8 million after taxes, and in the three preceding years the company had lost an additional $48.5 million in feature film production. To keep itself going, the Studio had sold 260 of its 334 acres just outside Beverly Hills to the Aluminum Company of America for $43 million. In Rome, production had started on
Cleopatra
, which began to sop up money faster than Fox could pour it in. The Studio was dying. Bankruptcy threatened, the sound stages were closed, the parking lots were empty. Spyros Skouras was fired as president, and Darryl Zanuck, after first threatening a proxy fight, was elected to take his place and save the sinking ship.
    The reversal of fortunes of the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation had long interested me, for the vicissitudes of that studio seemed to suggest not only the
modus operandi
of all studios, of all motion picture people, but something else as well: I had the feeling that by spending some time at the Studio I could get close to the texture of life in the subtropical abstraction that used to be called The Motion Picture Capital of the World; that by watching motion picture people at work I could see and perhaps understand their ethic. I had been exposed to the motion picture industry at oblique angles ever since I arrived in Los Angeles in 1964, and some of its working arrangements seemed to me farmore magical than that glamour for which the Industry was noted: there was the way in which failure escalated the possibilities of success, the way in which price bore no relation to demand. There was the way in which millions of dollars were gambled on ephemeral, unpredictable and, uncomfortably often, invalid ideas of marketability. There was the way that many, perhaps most, people in the Industry remained unconscious of their own myths and superstitions. There was the Eldorado mood of life in the capital, the way in which social and economic fortunes could shoot up or plummet down, as in a mining boom town, on no more than rumors, the hint of a rich vein, the gossip that the lode was played out.
    All this seemed interesting to me, and not entirely for its own sake: the truly absorbing aspect of the motion picture ethic, of course, is that it affects not only motion picture people but almost everyone alive in the United States today. By adolescence, children have been programmed with a set of responses and life lessons learned almost totally from motion pictures, television and the recording industry. It is difficult to banish the notion of one’s own life situations as part of a scenario, appropriately scored: “Lara’s Theme” for an ill-starred love, “Colonel Bogey’s March” for indomitable courage, “Waltzing Mathilda” for bittersweet apocalypse. Few situations fail to evoke a cinematic