Top Branch

Moviegoers know Burt Lancaster as an exuberant athletic type, at his best when there's something to swing from. But while Actor Burt Lancaster has been brachiating with Gina Lollobrigida (in Trapeze) and Caribbean wrongdoers (The Crimson Pirate), Independent Producer Burton Stephen Lancaster and his business partner Harold Hecht have been shinnying to a top branch in the Hollywood jungle.

Hecht-Lancaster's last five pictures, including Marty, which won four Academy Awards, are expected to gross $42 million (on a $7,343,000 investment). The partners' deal with United Artists, which releases their films, gives them 70% to 85% of the profits. Since 1947 Hecht and Lancaster have produced eleven films--all box-office successes. They already have impressive plans for spending $40 million in the next three years.

Era of Independents. Short, round-faced ex-dancer (with Martha Graham), ex-Hollywood Agent Harold Adolph Hecht, 49, who runs the business end of the partnership and shares authority with Lancaster, is convinced that this is the era of independent producers. Small production outfits are multiplying, and such major studio chiefs as Darryl Zanuck and Jerry Wald have recently quit their jobs to form independent companies.

Hecht first saw Lancaster act in Burt's only stage venture, the 1945 Broadway flop A Sound of Hunting. They began talking independent production immediately, and two years later they had filmed the B-minus chiller Kiss the Blood off My Hands.

Lancaster, now 42, who was an acrobat for five years (for the Kay Brothers Circus, nightclub shows and Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus), then bounced through two tongue-in-cheek swashbucklers (The Crimson Pirate, The Flame and the Arrow). He tried directing (The Kentuckian) with indifferent success, plans in future to concentrate on producing, act occasionally. He has great respect for Hecht, "an enormously well-read and literate man, a bright, shrewd man."

The Fun of It. Paddy Chayefsky's Bachelor Party, which went on location in New York last week, will be the first of 14 new films to be made by the Hecht and Lancaster Companies (it will be Hecht, Hill & Lancaster next year, when onetime Scriptwriter James Hill joins the partnership). Projected films include The Way West, from A. B. Guthrie Jr.'s Pulitzer Prizewinning novel with Lancaster and probably James Stewart, Gary Cooper and Katharine Hepburn; First Love, with Audrey Hepburn, adapted by John van Druten from the Turgenyev novel; George Bernard Shaw's The Devil's Disciple, with Sir Laurence Olivier, Montgomery Clift and Lancaster; and Bandoola, to be filmed in Ceylon with Sophia Loren.

With success apparently assured, the partners show no inclination to relax. They keep a seven-days-a-week, ten-hour-a day schedule when a picture is hot. And Lancaster stays in condition with 6 a.m. sprints around the U.C.L.A. track when he is in town.

Says Producer Lancaster: "We've reached the point now where we've stopped thinking about money. Our success has done a nice thing for us. We have the bread and butter. It's been a healthy operation, and it doesn't matter if we have $250,000 or $2,500,000 in the bank. The thing from now on is the fun in moviemaking."

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