Boxoffice - May 2019

TIMECODE
BY KENNETH JAMES BACON
BOXOFFICE BAROMETER
BEFORE EXHIBITORS SWEATED THROUGH OPENING WEEKENDS AND
ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORES, BOXOFFICE MEASURED A DIFFERENT KIND OF PRESSURE
PART 5 OF OUR 12-PART DEEP DIVE INTO THE BOXOFFICE ARCHIVES
Above: the well-worn cover of a wartime edition of Barometer.
Below: a full-page ad from 1942 reminding exhibitors that Selznick
pictures made them a lot of money. Gone with the Wind holds the
record for the highest Barometer score: 486%.
>> If you log on to Boxoffice’s new and improved website—just launched!—
you’ll see a table of daily film grosses. The industry has been focused and fixated
on these numbers ever since Spielberg unspooled Jaws in a billion theaters in
the summer of 1975. OK, so it was about 400, but that was an unusually high
number of screens in 1975. The Godfather opened in just five theaters in 1972.
Film grosses weren’t widely reported in the media in the early years of this
magazine. Since films were rolled out more slowly, national numbers were not
a meaningful measure of a film’s quality or financial success. Just as Tip O’Neill
once said, “all politics is local,” so too was exhibition: operators didn’t care how
a film did in New York, they cared about how a film performed in the tiny
town next to their tiny town. To that end, Boxoffice founder Ben Shlyen and
his team measured film performance not by dollars, but by average performance.
Operators reported receipts as a percentage of their average daily take.
If a film grossed at least 120 percent more than a theater’s average haul, it was
deemed a hit. This measurement was dubbed the Boxoffice Barometer, and it
was these percentages that were posted in the magazine each week. Every year
from 1935 through 1976, Boxoffice published a special annual edition that
summarized these results for the entire exhibition season.
During the 1962–63 season, for example, 403 films were released into the
market. Of those, the Barometer designated 144 as hits, that is, they each
earned at least 120 percent of a theater’s average take. The top film that season
at 385 percent? Cleopatra. After the Taylor-Burton epic followed Son of Flubber
(286%), Promises! Promises! (274%), Lawrence of Arabia (261%), and Gypsy
(257%). Films that dipped below the 100 percent threshold included Seven
Seas to Calais, Nine Hours to Rama, Five Miles to Midnight, and Stagecoach to
Dancer’s Rock. Even The Three Stooges in Orbit did better than 100%—it was
likely my 50 cents when I saw it at age 10 that put it over the top.
In addition to Barometer scores for all 403 pictures, the magazine also
included previews of the coming season, a feature on each of the 12 monthly
Blue Ribbon Award winners, an in-depth analysis of the exhibition industry,
and the results of an annual poll designating the top stars of the day. Bette
Davis thanked this magazine for being voted the number one female star in a
full-page ad you can see on page 98.
The annual Barometer publication, typically 160 pages and occasionally hard
bound, also was an opportunity for stars, directors, and producers to thank exhibitors
with full-page ads of varying degrees of self-aggrandizement. You can see a
sampling of these on the facing page. The Hitchcock ad on the lower right—and
that‘s the complete ad—ran unchanged for more than a decade. Just his selfpenned
caricature. An ad from 1943 is just a blank page with one word, set small,
in the center: “Bing.” Stars of lesser celebrity bought—or their agents bought—
fractional ads in the back of the book. Remember George Tobias? He played
Abner Kravitz on “Bewitched” for seven seasons. He bought a small thank-you ad
in the November 1943 issue of Barometer. I know it’s a little late, but on behalf of
Boxoffice and the exhibition industry, “You’re welcome, George.”
112 MAY 2019