Unemployment looms in Hollywood

WORDS MISSING //said the cab driver, 'It's finally here.' And he put his thumb and index finger together like a man about to take a pinch of snuff and gave a gentle tug to his T-shirt which had great blots of sweat on it. The summer heat was what he was talking about.

We had a rather freakish heatwave in the middle of May, with a couple of days in the 90s but we were soon back to gorgeous weather and roving thunderstorms and even dry, sunny days as clear as the fall, but this week, bang! The dank south-east wind set in from the Caribbean and the sun glowered at us from dawn to dark and we walked around in the furnace which is New York and about a hundred other American cities in midsummer.

As we trundled down Fifth Avenue and the traffic began to clog at the southern end of Central Park, the driver grew restless. He kept popping his head out and said, 'And the mayor calls this good for New York! Ties up the whole city making movies and calls it good for business. Well, I'll tell you somethin' chum, it's not good for my business.' I paid him off and walked down to the corner of Fifth Avenue at 59th Street and the fountain and the statue of General Sherman that stand opposite the Plaza Hotel. The traffic seemed to be clogged for good.

Parked, partly on the side walk, was a big private bus and nearby, big trailers with cables leading to blinding lights. The last thing New York needed, at that point, was an arc light to make things brighter and hotter. In an oasis of space, ringed off by the police, a crew was milling around. They were busy taking close-ups of the stars. All it takes these days to film one close-up is 40 actors and a crew of, literally, 80. Somehow the director managed to get the traffic moving, except for one bus which had been commandeered as an actor too. The scene, the big scene, called for Liza Minnelli to board the bus, say a line to Dudley Moore who then says, 'I'm not married' and she hesitates on the bus step, changes her mind and steps down. That's all.

It was about 120 degrees in the sun, not counting the reflector lights and they did this over and over. In the end, I'm told they did nine takes. Off on the side, sitting and looking on as imperiously as a Roman emperor waiting for the games to start, was a lean man with a portly face and a snap-brim hat and a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Speaking with only a tinge of complaint, the lean man said, 'I don't think they'd allow it in Piccadilly.'

He said 'Piccadilly' with a ripe intonation that defies imitation, except perhaps by John Gielgud, which is understandable since that is who the lean man was. 'They make films in the streets in London,' Sir John went on, 'but only very early in the morning.' He looked coolly or hotly at the swirling crew and the suffocating traffic and sighed, 'Very, very early'.

Well, behind the police cordon there was a crowd of people craning their necks and mopping their necks, for even in the summer furnace of New York, there are people reared from the cradle to believe that nothing in life, next to a big fire, is as magnetising as seeing a movie being made, even when they discover that filming outdoors is the most tedious form of labour imaginable.

'Acting', a famous actor once said to me, 'is the icing on the cake. It's a bonus. What you have to learn to put up with is the ghastly sitting around.' And nobody believes this until he gets involved with it. I could give you a hundred dreadful examples, but one will suffice.

Some years ago, when we were filming for television a history of America, we'd come to the episode that took in the American Civil War. The director and I had carefully weighed the claims of several famous battles to be THE representative Civil War encounter and, of course, even if there's no such thing, it's essential to, in television, to find a scene, an incident, that's visually striking and close enough to some general truth about the war.

We chose a peach orchard in southern Tennessee at Shiloh because the battle was fought there and we were there at the same time of year, so it was possible to see the blossom and feel the hurt of the contrast between the gentle face of nature and the brutality of the battle. We were all set to go when the sound man signalled a cut, pressed the earphones against his face and said, 'There's a rumble coming from somewhere.' We tried again. Still, the rumble. Then somebody spotted it. Far off to the south, maybe a couple of miles and turning a bend in the river was a huge coal barge. We waited. It took 50 minutes to disappear and get lost on the soundtrack. Ready? Again, please!

Now there was a strange sighing sound in the earphones. A wind had come up, a mere zephyr but on the soundtrack it was like the Empire State building collapsing. We watched the fluttering leaves and the branches bending slightly – two hours gone. 'Do you think', said the director, 'you can sum up the war in two minutes instead of four?' I rattle the brains awhile and say, 'Sure!'

Now a bus arrives with some schoolchildren taking in a battlefield tour. Give them another hour! By now, the sun was going over and the light was turning orange which comes out red on the film. At last, after four hours in all, we had something like silence. I lean against the tree. 'Action!' says the patient director. I start to talk. Suddenly, there's an eruption of sound, an electronic chatter like a small pneumatic drill. It was a woodpecker, about eight feet above my head. That was it. It was beyond reach and it was very busy. We gave up. We wouldn't be back in Shiloh. In the end, I said a sentence or two summing up, you understand, the whole Civil War, voiceover to two still pictures. We did it in a BBC studio in London.

Now this was not... not a bit of bad luck. It was no accident. It is incident to an actor's trade and I thought that Sir John Gielgud and Miss Minnelli and Mr Moore deserved everything they earned for their endless sitting around in blistering heat in the roar of the traffic for a scene that took several hours to shoot and, if successful, would wind up as about eight seconds' worth of entertainment on the screen.

The cost of this infernal bit of work, somebody figured, would be about $20,000. Thirty, forty years ago, the average movie worked to a budget of well under a million dollars. A million-dollar movie was big stuff. Today, the average movie costs $12 million – $6 million to make and another six to advertise, promote and market. That's the figure they budget but time costs money and labour and petrol, electricity. They're all soaring beyond the budget estimates.

So that, for instance, Paramount must be delighted with the success of a so-called low-budget horror film they bought for only one and a half million dollars. They set aside another four million – a mere four million – to film it and market it which, as you'll see, is a rock-bottom bargain these days. They let it out as what we used to call a B-film, no blockbuster and they kept pretty close to the budget. Say, in all, they spent $6, 7 million. So far the movie has been in circulation for no more than a month, so far the movie has grossed 33 millions, but, in the past six weeks, Hollywood has released 20 movies. 'Friday the 13th' is one of two that have more than paid their way. Eighteen will be lucky to recover their costs. In short, the word from Hollywood is that the recession has moved in.

Like any other business, any other industry, Hollywood budgets for the next year on the earnings, the trend, of the last year. Well, 1978 and '79 were what they call 'glorious box office years', so Hollywood, having hit pay dirt decided to mine deeper and wider. They will have 80 films out this year and they're in deep gloom about the number of likely hits. The box office receipts around the country have slumped by 15 per cent already.

Most people put it down, as I say, to the recession but there are other voices, producers, critics who blame the product itself. The president of a famous film corporation says, 'The truth is we're just not making the pictures audiences want to see.' It used to be that the top stars could rescue indifferent movies. This also seems to be an obsolete bit of wisdom.

A number one box office star in the United States not merely of last year, but of the last decade is Clint Eastwood. He's appeared lately as the manager or owner of a wild west show in a movie called 'Bronco Billy'. It was described the other day by the New York Times not in a movie review, but in a financial dispatch from Los Angeles, as a 'devastating failure' and the same is more or less true of the number two star, Burt Reynolds, number four, Robert Redford and the latest picture of the newest star, John Travolta.

Well, after the studio managers and the critics have had their say, one or two executives have come along with a more plausible explanation – it's what the recession is doing to people's movie-going habits. They shop around, they hold back. They go to one movie instead of two. They don't anticipate that they're going to be entertained come what may, they listen to word of mouth. With the result that maybe out of the 80 movies released this year, maybe eight will be hits, a dozen will pay their way. Sixty will go down the drain and, with them, producing companies will fold, studios will begin to see gobs of red ink.

The word Hollywood fears come the autumn is the word that has depressed the steel industry, the auto-mobile industry, the building industry, the word 'unemployment'. A year ago, six months ago, the big spectre that haunted most Americans, according to all the polls was inflation. Inflation has been checked. Now the bogeyman is unemployment. It's the one theme that Senator Kennedy hammers away at in the 'do or die' days of his angry campaign.

Meanwhile, President Carter, stung to the quick by the 80 Americans in a hundred who think he's a poor hand at foreign policy, has been getting himself filmed embracing the Pope, buddying up to Chancellor Schmidt, dancing with Yugoslav peasants, but opinions about foreign policy are a luxury of comfortable people. Now that he's back, he's going to face the toughest ordeal of his re-election campaign. He is going to have to embrace the unemployed.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.