Robert Evans’s natural glamour would surely steal him the official black-tie birthday gathering, with its triple-decker dais and fourteen-foot birthday cake, so it seemed only fair, at least to Frank Yablans, that he would assume the honor of giving a dinner party for Zukor at the Bistro, across from Paramount’s offices on Canon Drive. Based in New York, Yablans had no claim to the Bistro, widely recognized as Evans’s turf. “Yablans was very good at his job as a distributor,” Peter Bart recognized. “But he was very greedy. There were fights between him and Evans between who would get a bigger piece of Chinatown, battles to the death about points. Every time they got together, instead of talking about the movie, they would talk about numbers. [Yablans] couldn’t stand the idea that Evans might make a lot of money on this picture and he wouldn’t.” By his own admission, it was only about power for Yablans; it always had been. “I wanted to be president of a major company,” he said. “I didn’t care what kind of company it was as long as I was the number one guy.” It was only by chance that he made it to Hollywood. “I didn’t particularly like movies,” he said.
From her place at the Beverly Hilton, Joan Didion observed the ceremony with something like admiration. On a formal occasion such as this, she saw Hollywood’s worn but lasting rituals, despite their hyperbole and abstruseness to outsiders—those “gripped by the delusion that ‘studios’ have nothing to do with the making of pictures in modern times”—reaffirm its strength and survival.
When the lights came up, John Calley didn’t know what to say. The Exorcist, his movie at Warner Bros., violated just about every stronghold of good taste. “What in the fuck did we just see?”
He loved the movie, but—Satan, vomit, a little girl masturbating with a crucifix, “Your mother sucks cocks in hell!”—he was too afraid even to preview it. Would people see this thing?
There was a time, decades earlier, when the question almost didn’t matter. The Hollywood practice of “block booking” (pioneered by Adolph Zukor, as it happened) forced theaters to take films en masse, good and bad, sight unseen. It was a boon for the studios, guaranteeing audiences for their product, curbing competition from independent producers and distributors, and minimizing advertising costs. But block booking ended with Hollywood’s first golden age, as the major studios, felled by antitrust decision in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (1948) were divested of their theater chains and the lucrative, risk-averse distribution practice they had grown accustomed to.
In place of block booking, studios assumed the practice of “platform” distribution, in which a film is released gradually, over a period of months, beginning in urban first-run movie houses and disseminated outward to the suburban theaters, hopefully gaining interest along the way. With the modest aid of print ads, the free publicity of critics, and the occasional ballyhoo, the advertising of motion pictures was thus a fairly sedate, even routine affair. The budgets of most Hollywood films weren’t yet high enough to require exorbitant advertising campaigns to earn back their exorbitant costs (Chinatown came in at just around three million dollars), providing the studios a supple climate of acceptable risk both for the artists and the executives. Said executive Alan Ladd Jr.: “What’s a couple-million-dollar movie to a corporation?” In 1973 he could have been speaking for all of Hollywood.
That changed.
It was Tom Laughlin, director of the very-low-budget Billy Jack (eight hundred thousand dollars by one count), who had unintentionally dealt the first blow. Two years earlier, when Warner Bros. signed to distribute Billy Jack, Laughlin asked for and received approval of publicity and advertising, and was guaranteed a voice in the overall strategy for the film’s release. But Warner Bros. broke their promise, Laughlin claimed, dropping the picture in twelve cities—no advertising. The film did no business. Incensed, Laughlin flew to a theater in Minneapolis and spent five thousand of his own dollars to “revise their method of selling it,” and to his astonishment, it worked. Ticket sales for Billy Jack jumped and Laughlin reported his triumph to Warner Bros. vice president of advertising, who vowed to reconsider the film’s release strategy. But it didn’t take. Laughlin sued Warner Bros. in February 1972, the studio settled in December, and, early in 1973, it planned to rerelease Billy Jack with “a promotion campaign,” according to Warner Bros. VP and general sales manager, Leo Greenfield, “that will be better than many first run features receive” based on “an entirely new advertising and exploitation campaign for the film.”
The campaign, developed by Max Youngstein, president of Laughlin’s distribution company, would change the course of Hollywood.
An industry veteran, Youngstein had observed the release strategy of low-budget wildlife and exploitation films, “four-walling”—oversaturating the market to generate quick returns before potentially bad word of mouth cut them short—“and for years,” he recalled, “I had been trying to get some company to follow their pattern with respect to a really top quality picture such as Billy Jack in this way but I had gotten nowhere.”
Then came Billy Jack. Youngstein continued: “We adapted every proven principle of distribution and merchandizing from General Motors to Coca-Cola, Revlon and the companies which had four-walled the so-called nature pictures. We added quite a few innovations of our own.… We booked it not into a single theater or two theaters or even 20 theaters, but in our first week we booked the picture into over 60 theaters.” The results were extraordinary; in the first week alone, Billy Jack grossed more than a million dollars. In its first six days at sixty-one four-wall situations throughout L.A., Billy Jack grossed a phenomenal $887,460, approaching the record held by The Godfather, which made just over a million at fifty-four sites. “I have checked my personal experience,” Youngstein wrote, “and every possible company I could find, and my conclusion is that this is the highest gross for any picture, either new or old, ever to be realized during a similar period for a single picture in that number of theaters in Southern California.”
All of Hollywood took note. The lesson, according to one executive, was that a “filmgoer should be able, after being completely dunned relentlessly by the campaign, to fall out of bed and find a theater where Billy Jack is playing.”
“Completely dunned relentlessly.”
“I don’t claim that a terrible picture can be made into a winner,” Youngstein had learned, “but I do say that, regardless of how bad it is, with intelligent and imaginative distribution and promotion, it will do a hell of a lot greater business than if you just let it go down the drain because there are a few poor opening engagements.”
“Regardless of how bad it is.”
Billy Jack would make, by one estimate, $32.3 million.
Accordingly, Warner Brothers “four-walled” The Exorcist, “the biggest production,” Variety wrote, “to be four-walled on a large scale by a major [studio].”
The movie came out in time for Christmas.
Leading critics Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, and Vincent Canby all hated it.
At three dollars a ticket, The Exorcist grossed, by one account, an estimated $160 million, a staggering sum for any picture, but for such an apparently niche offering, unprecedented. What was happening?