Where Have All the Movies Gone?

Autumn films dry up as Hollywood eyes pay cable

During the past decade, autumn was harvest time for the serious moviegoer, the season for films with hearts of humanism and minds dreaming of Oscars. Often those dreams were fulfilled: four of the last seven winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture (One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Rocky, Ordinary People, Chariots of Fire) were released in major cities between Labor Day and the end of November. In 1980 viewers could see Raging Bull, Private Benjamin and The Elephant Man. Last year there were The French Lieutenant's Woman, Ragtime and Absence of Malice.

This fall, whether by design or default, Hollywood has released only one hit movie (Sylvester Stallone's First Blood) and one critical success (My Favorite Year, starring Peter O'Toole). Many of the other Hollywood pictures this season were not so much launched as dumped--dropped into autumn because they were thought likely to fail against summer or Christmas competition. Frank Price, chairman of Columbia Pictures, which is releasing only the English comedy The Missionary between September and November, sees an answer in the recent past: "Last fall most movies, including the adult films, just didn't perform well at the box office."

Ironically, the autumn product slump comes toward the end of a record-breaking year for Hollywood: a $2.9 billion gross take so far, up 16% from last year. With summer smashes like E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial ($290 million) and An Officer and a Gentleman ($91 million) still going strong, studio bosses may have been reluctant to introduce new products. They may also be wary of making too many movies, what with the average budget today running in excess of $10 million. Says Producer Irwin Winkler: "In 1976 I made Rocky for $ 1 million. Today, even if the actors' salaries were the same, it would cost $6 million to $7 million to make that picture. So there are significantly fewer films being made, and a lot of the more serious films are falling by the wayside."

Huge hits, big flops; elation and depression; glut and famine. Hollywood looks more than ever like a boom-or-bust town. But there is more than meets the eye, cautions one industry expert: "The studio bosses aren't worried that an entire season can now go by without their releasing a single big picture. They're more concerned with fighting a bigger war, for a potentially bigger market: television." In the past two weeks, all six major studios were moving in on pay cable: Columbia, MGM/UA and 20th Century-Fox are reportedly dealing to buy into Showtime, the second largest pay cable network; and Paramount, Universal and Warner Bros. announced an agreement to purchase the Movie Channel, the third largest. The immediate effect is likely to be an increase in the cable licensing fees of popular movies, especially to Home Box Office, the giant of pay TV. The ultimate goal may be to re-establish the studios' control of exhibition, abolished in 1948 by a Supreme Court consent decree.

Next week the autumn logjam will begin to break, as Hollywood releases the first of a promising mix of films. Three movies head the insiders' early line of likely hits: The Toy, a Richard Pryor comedy; Tootsie, starring Dustin Hoffman in drag; and 48 Hrs., an Odd Couple cop film with Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy. Four other films are touted as hot Oscar contenders: The Verdict, in which Paul Newman plays a burnt-out Boston lawyer; Frances, a Hollywood horror story starring Jessica Lange; Sophie's Choice, with Meryl Streep as William Styron's tragic heroine; and Richard Attenborough's epic Gandhi. These four films will be released for selective engagements in a few cities in the hope of garnering media attention and year-end critics' awards. But there will be less time and space available for serious pictures in competition with the inevitable Christmas hits. In shooting for the moon with these ambitious films, Hollywood may end up shooting itself in the foot.

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