They reacted by bumping up admission prices. It didn’t help. Instead of a couple being able to see a double feature, cartoons, and a newsreel at thirty-five cents a head, for a first-run picture the tab leaped up to $1.50 and more apiece. Coincidentally, another great American invention had come along in the postwar years, the baby sitter.
Only a handful of households could afford living-in servants after the maids and cooks and butlers had enjoyed a taste of wartime wages on factory assembly lines. It was no longer the thing to do to ask a neighbor to mind the baby while Dad took Mother to the movies. They had to hire a baby sitter at accelerating hourly rates. If Dad stood Mother dinner out somewhere first, a couple of hours watching Luise Rainer knocked the family budget for ten or fifteen dollars. It just wasn’t worth that much. The tide on the sea of gold was ebbing fast.
Then the government started huffing and puffing, and the big empires were gone with the wind. What happened was that the independent theater owners, who’d been pushed around for years, finally nudged the Justice Department into declaring that it was illegal under the anti-trust laws for the same organization to make movies, distribute them, and screen them in its own picture palaces.
This was like the Ford Motor Company waking up one morning to find it had lost all its showrooms. Or Fanny Farmer discovering she could cook up her candy but not run the stores she sold it in. The movie makers, who had never smelled real competition up to date, suddenly realized they were in a tougher grind than the cloak-and-suit business ever was.
There was a moment when they could have had another gilt-edged guarantee of money by the billions if they’d had the sense to see it. The early runners of the television industry came on their knees to Hollywood and begged the movie men to help them. “You’ve got the factories to make the product, we’ll get the outlets to show it,” they said. “Let’s co-operate, and we’ll all grow rich.”
Oh, but the studio heads were too smart for that! They could have held television in the palms of their hands. Instead they jeered: “Who’s going to stay home and watch a little box?” They sneered: “What have you got—women wrestlers and bike races? It’s a fad like Yo-yo. It can’t last. Movies are better than ever.”
Only Paramount sensed the potential in the little boxes when there were no more than half a million of them, with post-card-sized screens, in the country. That studio joined hands with Dr. Allen Du Mont, the pioneer TV scientist, hoping to build a network of Channel Fives. But he was an inventor, not an executive who could put together the necessary hours of daily programming. The idea failed, the network amounted to nothing, and all that Y. Frank Freeman, head of Paramount, could do was watch NBC and CBS forge ahead, while he speculated on what might have been.
The bankers moved deeper and deeper into the faltering movie industry. They had to. They were the people with money to keep it going. They didn’t know a thing about it, but they knew a star when they saw one. To a banker, a star looked like the safest bet in a business beset with more hazards than a steeplechase. The studios found out you could always raise the financing if you showed Mr. Moneybags a big enough star and a script the star liked. Independent producers learned the same lesson and flocked around, waving contracts. Directors, cameramen, every other key employee necessary to make good movies—the banks didn’t want to hear about them.
The ever-loving agents grabbed hold hard. If the industry lived or died on names like Gable, Brando, Hepburn, and Taylor, then, by crikey, their clients were going to grab the steering wheel from the professional producers and studio heads. The only way the stars could be guaranteed enough money to tempt them to work was to give them a slice of the picture’s potential profits on top of salary. The slice grew bigger and bigger and bigger.
In the old days we used to wait impatiently for the studio gates to open at 9 A.M. I couldn’t get there soon enough. Nowhere else did you have such fun. You had companions of your own kind to work with, many of them the finest talents in the worlds of the theater, concert platform, fashion salon. On Saturdays and Sundays we’d hurry back to the studios to hear the orchestras record sound tracks with stars of the musicals, or maybe listen to four hundred Negroes sing spirituals for a Lawrence Tibbett picture.