Upsurge for the Movies

At the Moscow Film Festival last week, Jack Valenti, go-go president of the Motion Picture Association of America, seemed to be working as hard for old boss L.B.J. as for the M.P.A.A.

Finding the war in Viet Nam a "troubling sore point" among the Soviets, Valenti gave his hosts the highest assurance that President Johnson "wanted peace and an honorable settlement." After all, explains Jack, during his White House days he read "every raw inch of intelligence that crossed the President's desk." Otherwise, Valenti found "the spirit of Glassboro very much alive and breathing" during his mission to Moscow, proudly announced that the dozen U.S. entries pulled more than half the festival attendance.

The box-office news was bullish at home too, as Valenti issued an annual report--his first and the association's first since 1956. Items:

> Box-office gross in the U.S. was up 11% in 1966, to $980 million, and will keep climbing this year. The 1967 projection of $1,005,000,000, though, is far below the all-time high of $1,594,000,000, set in 1947 before TV.

> Overseas grosses of the major U.S. studios last year rose 12% over the 1964-66 average, providing 53% of Hollywood's total take. -- The number of pictures produced by major Hollywood studios is up 22% so far this year, should hit 200 by December, the most since 1961.

> The number of movie houses in the U.S. increased to 13,400, up 400 over last year. The trend is toward shopping-center sites in the suburbs, where 75% of the new houses are located.

Bigger Haul. One factor in the improvement of movie fortunes is the success of road shows, the reserved-seat blockbusters that are increasingly occupying the major theaters. "Road shows," says 20th Century-Fox President Darryl Zanuck, "have put motion back in motion pictures and put the industry back in high gear." It was Zanuck's exploitation of the road show, beginning with The Longest Day in 1962, that turned the Fox ledger's $40 million loss that year into a $12.5 million gain in 1966. Altogether this year, the studios will release eight road-show films, next year at least ten. Last week half of Variety's top ten grossers in the U.S.--Thoroughly Modern Millie, Sand Pebbles, A Man for All Seasons, Grand Prix, and The Taming of the Shrew--were on a reserved, or "hard-ticket," basis.

Zanuck and his counterparts have found, as one of them put it, that "the road show is a gamble over a longer haul for a bigger haul." The haul is longer because hard-ticket attractions involve higher production and promotion costs; and since they generally play only once or twice a day in only one theater, they can't gross as much, even with their higher admission prices, as the standard release that runs five times a day all over town. The haul gets bigger, however, when the hard-ticket show goes into the second-run, or "grind," theaters at regular prices. By that time, it seems like a bargain and often does S.R.O. business. The studios also calculate that the extra prestige and promotion for a road show ultimately enhance its TV sales price.

So far, the road-show gamble has almost always paid off. Despite industry fears, the public has not balked at the $2.50-$5.50 hard-ticket range. "Price is not an objection," says Columbia Pictures President Abe Schneider. "They'll pay anything to see what they want." So willing is the public, in fact, that buyers have already booked up and bought out 78 benefit performances for the Manhattan engagement of Funny Girl. That film, starring Barbra Streisand, only began shooting two weeks ago and won't open until September 1968. Star, a Gertrude Lawrence biography with Julie Andrews ("queen of the road shows"), is expected to open the same week with a record $1 million advance. Inevitably, all this new zip in the industry has inflicted new worries on one or two studio people. "If there are too many special pictures," said an executive last week, "they won't be special any more."

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