Hollywood's Hottest Summer

Good-time movies clean up at the box office

This is the summer Hollywood will remember as the one when people came back into movie theaters in droves. One smash hit after another is building the biggest box-office crush moviemakers have ever seen, and there is no end to the lines in sight. The perfect summer movie --light, fast moving and uncomplicated --usually turns up every year or two in the form of the "monster hit," that film everybody has to see. In 1975 it was Jaws. Last year it was Star Wars, the most successful film of all time. This year it is Star Wars again. Sweeping into 1,700 theaters last month in the greatest rerun in history, it registered its biggest week ever, and is still outdrawing most of the current crop of new films. But some of those are also doing very well, including Grease, Heaven Can Wait, Jaws 2, Foul Play and Revenge of the Pink Panther. Hence Hollywood's ebullient summer of '78.

The biggest factor in this success is that Hollywood has emerged from ten years of soul-searching, issue-oriented movies with a batch of flicks like Heaven Can Wait and National Lampoon's Animal House that are sheer fun. Paramount Chairman Barry Diller has three big hits --the result, he says, of "a decision to get into pictures that made people feel good."

A hot, humid summer has helped the movie business as well; Marcus Loew, owner of the theater chain, used to say, "It should look like rain, but not rain." Even television is credited with doing its bit by driving people out of the house with its stale summer reruns. Perhaps most important of all, last year's string of mega-hits--Star Wars, Saturday Night Fever, Close Encounters of the Third Kind--has helped put the public back into the movie habit. Says 20th Century-Fox Senior Vice President Ashley Boone: "People are enjoying themselves. I don't know whether they are cheering for the swimmers or the sharks, but they are cheering."

Not always. Some of the new movies have been big budget disappointments, notably Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Despite massive promotion, Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees, and a soundtrack album geared to bring in the kids, this pale attempt to dramatize an old Beatles album is a lame entry. During the first six days of August, one 1,500-seat theater in New York City sold less than 15% of the house at the average showing. I Wanna Hold Your Hand, another Beatles-inspired movie, got a clammy reception three months ago. Notes MCA President Sid Sheinberg ruefully: "I liked it. There was only one thing wrong--nobody wanted to see it." Other big, new movies with this embarrassing ailment include Convoy, International Velvet, Big Wednesday and The Swarm.

Some recent films have been winners only briefly. Thanks to a new practice of opening movies in as many as 1,000 theaters at once, the money can come in before the bad word gets out. The Cheap Detective, for example, opened in 652 theaters in June and made $30 million before dropping off sharply.

As summer draws to a close, there are signs that more serious films could soon end the happy-movie trend. Woody Allen's first try at straight drama, Interiors, broke the house record for its first week in New York. That could be a sign of things to come, or may simply reflect the loyalty of Woody's fans. Even Paramount, which has made the most money from escape flicks this summer, is pinning its fall hopes on Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven, a bleak story about migrant farm workers in Texas.

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