Boy Meets Facts

These are some of the facts which George Gallup has uncovered as the result of a year's polling of the U.S. cinemaudience. R.K.O.'s able new President George Schaefer after a peek at private, unpublished Gallup polls of the habits, likes and dislikes of U.S. cinemaddicts, had commissioned the huge piece of research. R.K.O. put up the money for the most thorough study of the cinemaudience ever made.

Dr. Gallup set up the Audience Research Institute--a group of special pollsters separate from his American Institute of Public Opinion, which makes his news paper surveys. Headed by a bright young Scot named David Ogilvy, the new institute made 194 surveys and proceeded to destroy many a cherished Hollywood illusion. Some of its findings:

> Hollywood's boast that 80,000,000 people attend the movies weekly is exaggerated. That is the number who stay away from the cinema each week. Those from five to 85 who do go average 54,275,000 a week. In 1940 those admissions added up to $700,000,000 cash--far short of the billion-dollar-a-year box-office gross claimed by the Hays office.

> While 11,500,000 cinemaddicts sit in their favorite cinemansions of an average Sunday, 34,000,000 radio fans listen to Jack Benny on the air. On an average Monday 5,428,000 go to the movies; 26,000,000 stay at home to hear the Lux Radio Theatre program.

> Hollywood's contention that 75% of its audience is female is out of joint. The figure is 51%. This proportion is bad news for moviemakers who see only a box-office advantage for pictures that appeal more to women than to men. But it varies for each picture. Of those who saw Rebecca, 70% were female. Arizona's audience was 75% male. Men go alone more often than women.

> Women don't go for comedians. In pictures and on the air comics appeal to at least twice as many men as women.

> Dr. Gallup has yet to find an audience outside New York City which wants pictures about Hitler or the Nazis. This supports Hollywood's experience to date with propaganda pictures, most of which have fizzled at the box office.

> People grow out of the habit of going to movies. Chief reason : they get married, have babies, and spend more time at home. Ace cinemaddicts are 19-year-olds, who buy some 2,080,000 tickets weekly. Laggard are those over 30, who give the box office just 35% of its take. Typical movie goer is 27 years old, earning $28 a week.

> Because 65% of the U.S. bolts its evening meal before 6:30, 90% before 7:30, movie-goers have plenty of time to sit through double features. They keep only 4% of the current U.S. cinemaudience out of the cinema. People are over whelmingly for them in towns showing double features, against them in single feature towns. In New York City, which has both, 63% of the movie-goers want double features. But many former cinemagoers no longer attend pictures because of them.

> Hollywood's star system sells tickets. But there are only about 60 stars (eight to a studio) who amount to much at the box office. Their tendency to make fewer pictures (because of income tax, etc.) may cost some of them their stardom--at least three annual pictures apiece are necessary to maintain their marquee value (power to sell tickets). Playing two of them together in a picture is an economic waste, for the pair can sell more tickets separately.

> A majority of cinemagoers think movie stars are not overpaid.

> No. 1 U. S. box-office draw is Spencer Tracy. Next 13 favorites with boys and men are all males. Reason: male cinemaddicts prefer action pictures which in evitably feature men. Women cinemagoers' favorite 14 are evenly split between male & female stars. But women generally go to pictures to see women. Most cinemaddicts are inclined to bestow their greatest affection upon stars of their own age and sex.

> Advance publicity is very important to a picture's box-office success. Example: The week before the better of two of 1940-41 's outstanding young-girl pictures* opened, 48% of U.S. movie-goers had heard about it. It cleaned up in the first-run theaters, where most of Hollywood's pay dirt lies. The week before the other's opening only 4% of the people knew about it. Its first-runs were a flop. By the time it hit the second-runs 70% as many people as saw the former wanted to see the latter. Hollywood had missed the boat.

> The horse, symbol of adventure, is on his way out as a standby of the Western picture. His most likely successor: the airplane.

Conclusions: From now on competition from radio and other entertainment media and an increasingly more critical public are likely to make flops flop harder, give Hollywood all it can do to stay out of the red. No picture can expect to achieve a big box-office success without drawing customers from all age levels and groups. But there is no sure-fire formula for producing that kind of picture.

At present Hollywood is missing the velvet by failing to make pictures for people over 30 years of age in the average and above-average income groups. Unable to bear the increasing cost of producing pictures for the majority markets and watching them turn into expensive flops, Hollywood is faced with these alternatives: 1) to try to exist by making pictures solely for the 19-year-olds; 2) to make less costly pictures for distribution to population segments--e.g., youngsters, oldsters, highbrow, lowbrow, Broadway, small towns, etc.

*Necessarily, according to Dr. Gallup, nameless.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.