Boxoffice-November.2001

SPECIAL FEATURE: Books On Cinema——
GREENE ROOM
An Excerpt From "Hollywood Migraine," A Collection
of Articles and Interviews by Entertainment Journalist Ray Greene
HOLLYWOOD MIGRAINE:
THE INSIDE STORY
OF A DECADE IN FILM
by Ray Greene
Merlin Publishing
336 pgs./$ 15.95
"Megaciratits Incorporated "
few months ago
A
1 was fortunate
enough to spend an afternoon in
the company of a legendary and
still active film producer whose career
extends all the way back into the early
1950s. His conversation was wide ranging,
opinionated, at times cantankerous,
and instructive in almost every regard.
He had war stories to tell: delightful
tales of colorful personalities in exhibition
and independent distribution, of
booking deals cut at the last possible
minute in bare-bulb back offices, of
improvised strategies that beat his competitors
to the punch. In a few quick sentences
he conjured up a time when the
men who made the movies and the people
who screened them sat down face to face
to hash out the details of getting product
to the public, a time long gone in an
industry where both distribution and
exhibition are mostly run by vast bureaucracies
as opposed to the gut instincts of
a hustling handful, flying through each
deal by the seat of their pants.
Our conversation wandered into the
contemporary exhibition scene. He was
mindful of the technological transformations
of the past decade or so, of the
improvements in presentation that have
done so much to bring audiences back
into moviehouses. But he sounded an
interesting cautionary note I hadn't
heard elsewhere when he said that, the
way things were going, the film industry
might easily blunder its way into a situation
not unlike the one it got caught up
in during the late '40s and early '50. To
describe what he meant, he actually used
the word "antitrust."
What this very experienced industrywatcher
was getting at is at the core of
several of the more overwhelming trends
in the exhibition field during recent
times. In the late '40s, when studioowned
circuits booked studio-created
product for studio-derived profits, the
U.S. government decided that much of
exhibition was in fact operated according
to monopolistic principles. The
result became known as the "consent
decree": the court-ordered divestiture by
the studio production centers of the studio-owned
circuits, an event which split
the exhibition field wide open for a time.
By 1953. when MGM— the last
Hollywood holdout—severed its lies to
the Loews Inc. chain, studio ownership
of moviehouses was a thing of the past.
Or so it seemed.
In fact, though it took a few decades.
many of the studios have again become
important partners in the exhibition
field. The word "partners" is significant
here: In most cases, major circuits with
direct studio ties are co-owned rather
than owned outright by their studio foster
parents, an important distinction in
drawing analogies with the past. The
word "studio" is also in need of redefintion,
since the vast, multi-tiered, full-service
entertainment corporations of today
(in which movie production and distribution
rarely account for the primary revenue
stream) are a far cry from the one
company, one product" approach of
Hollywood's formative moguls.
Put succinctly, there is not today and
probably never can be anything resembling
the closed dominance over
American production, distribution and
exhibition that a handful of companies
exercised half a century ago. The situation
is far more amorphous than it once was.
Vast independent circuits such as
Carmike, Regal and United Artists sit
atop the list of exhibition's largest companies
and a close examination of the manner
in which those circuits with direct studio
ties formed studio alliances indicates
that, in most cases, they are a haphazard
by-product of a more general and industry-wide
trend toward consolidation.
That consolidation itself, however, is
both the biggest exhibition story of our
time and an at least potentially worrying
development for the long term. The
building spree of the last five years has
seen the U.S. market grow in terms of
sheer screen count at an unprecedented
rate. North America, already the most
well-screened and competitive movie
market in the world at the start of the
1990s, has now become an almost "kill
or be killed" competitive situation. This
is particularly true in those coveted population
centers capable of sustaining the
modern equivalent of the movie palace:
the state-of-the-art megaplex of 20
screens or more, a type of build for
which there was no prototype a decade
ago, but which has emerged in the 1990s
as the industry standard.
Though offering multiple opportunities
for economies of scale, megaple.xes
are costly to build and costly to operate,
and therefore need to maintain a high
rate of attendance to stay profitable.
That the time was right for such a development
within the exhibition industry is
demonstrated by the overall success of
the megaplex model at luring audiences
back into the American moviehouse; the
continuing and uninterrupted climb in
the U.S. attendance figures charted by
the National Association of Theatre
Owners (NATO) and the MPAA in
recent years can be attributed in no
small measure to the lure of megaplexstyle
complexes in urban and heavily
populated suburban markets.
Still, there is grumbling afoot. Last
year NATO president Bill Karto/ian used
the occasion of his address to exhibitors
at the industry's ShoWest convention to
coin a phrase that snapped into focus a
fear already on a lot of people's minds.
and he did so in terms worthy of an 1 1th
commandment: "Thou shall not Ontario
one another." The reference, of course,
was to the infamous competitive situation
that two major, well-run. seemingly ratio-
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