Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman Page A

that way we were sure to pick up a little money. We didn't believe those preview cards. The movie didn't cost enough money to be that good. " (Italics mine.)
    Money today, as it always has been, is the essential glue that binds the movie powers to each other. But today the talk of money dominates as perhaps never before: The interest rates make it more prohibitive than ever for the studios to borrow money. And the money needed to mount a movie continues to escalate: The average cost of a major studio film today is over ten million dollars, a four-hundred-percent leap from just ten years ago. Everywhere you hear the cry: "We've got to do something to bring down the cost of pictures." I don't see it happening.
    Two examples from pictures I've worked on. Stepford Wives was probably released badly as far as the people involved in the making of that movie are concerned. It has some exploitable elements, but it wasn't Halloween. The best way to release it would have been slowly, praying for favorable word of mouth. The studio threw it on the market in hundreds of theatres immediately. Why? Because the studio's needs are not the same as the needs of the individual pictures, and right then Columbia needed cash flow badly-dollars, and now. Stepford got them some dollars. It was gone in a month, but it served the studio well.
    The other picture I can't name for legal reasons that will shortly come clear. But in this second instance, the studio purposely set out to destroy its own product. Madness? Not at all. (And not at all that unusual either.) There was a change in studio leadership. The old management, the one that had given us a "go," was out. And when new management comes in they all do the same and, for them, the proper thing: They try to prove to their board of directors that the board was correct in firing the old bosses and bringing them in. And one of the ways you do that is you sabotage the old bosses' films.
    This film opened in New York to record-breaking business and within a couple of weeks was gone. Not only did they louse up the booking, when they did advertise it, they kept changing the ads, a sure sign a picture is in trouble.
    I later talked to an executive of the company who had survived the old regime. He said to me: "Look, we're a public company, so I wouldn't say we intentionally ruined the film. We would never intentionally ruin a film, we've got stockholders to report to. But I don't think it's a secret to say that if the old guys were still around, maybe we might have tried a little harder."
    Okay, these films had one crucial thing in common: They were both, relatively speaking, cheap films. They did not have heavyweight directors, they certainly had no major stars.
    We have already talked about studio executives and their thirst for stars. Well, producers want them too. Because if you have a star, not only is your picture automatically "important"- -it's also expensive.
    And the studio can't dump it, can't do anything but fight like hell for it in order to try and salvage their investment. (All that campaigning that went on recently for Pennies from Heaven? That movie was an instant stiff and everybody knew it by the end of its first week. But the studio kept ploughing money into the
    musical, praying somehow they might be able to generate some interest. Pennies from Heaven was a twenty-million-plus movie. If it had been brought in for five, you would never have known it had opened.)
    So the Powers of the industry are sort of like the goony-goony bird that flies in ever-decreasing circles until it gets swallowed up by its own asshole.
    I'm sure of two things about Pennies from Heaven for example: that there is no built-in Steve Martin audience and that, after its failure, Steve Martin's price will go up. That's the pickle the Powers are in: They want movies to be cheaper, while at the same time, every move they make only ensures that movies will become increasingly prohibitive.
    By the end of the eighties,