Bottom-Line Time in Hollywood

1978 's hits (and flops) were full of surprises

In the '30s, when times were tough, movie audiences lined up for screwball comedies, wonderful bits of fluff like Bringing Up Baby with Katie Hepburn and The Awful Truth with Irene Dunne. In 1978, a year of falling dollars and rising prices, audiences often made similar choices. Thought was out. Thrills and chills and, most of all, sheer fun were in. Films that did well were ones that packed an old-fashioned entertainment wallop. "There was a big desire for mindless excitement this year," says Gene Stavis, director of Manhattan's American Cinematheque. "Whether it's laughter or screams, anything that gets the adrenaline going gets people into the theater. We are in an era when people are looking for a jolt."

Heading the high-energy jolters were Grease, which was the hit of the summer, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Saturday Night Fever, both of which came out toward the end of 1977 and dominated the screens for the rest of the winter. All three have pulled in something like $130 million apiece, and two--Grease and Fever--not coincidentally star John Travolta, who this time last year was known only to TV viewers. The hungry white shark, or his bereaved mate, that gobbled up the dollars in the summer of 1975 swam back for another big bite in Jaws II, which grossed $98.6 million. Heaven Can Wait, Warren Beatty's good-humored remake of the 1941 fantasy Here Comes Mr. Jordan, grossed $72 million, and The Goodbye Girl, another film from late 1977, grossed $82 million. Though it opened only this month, Superman seems to have taken wing already, with an estimated $12 million gross in its first week.

The surprise hits of the year amply confirmed that escapist trend. Made for a mere pittance ($2.5 million), National Lampoon's Animal House, a high-velocity farce about fraternity life in the '60s, has made $102 million. Crude and silly, Animal House has an abundance of animal spirits, which is what audiences seem to want. Whatever the reason for its success, "Animal House is just the beginning, not the end," says Paramount Head Barry Diller. "That kind of Saturday Night Live consciousness, that visual entertainment, will become a" staple," Another zany sleeper was Up in Smoke, one long giggle to the age of dope, dealing mainly with the encounters between two aging potheads and the law. Smoke's budget was $1 million, but it has already grossed 38 times that.

The jolts did not have to bring belly laughs. As always, people liked to be scared. Probably the biggest hit of the fall was Midnight Express, the hyped-up story of an American college boy's escape from a Turkish jail. Without any visible means of box-office support, i.e., genuine stars, or even a few recognizable players, Express has already made $52 million. At the same time, the era of the disaster movie appears to be over. It cost $14 million to shoot The Swarm--the price of honey being what it is these days--but audiences decided that bees, even when they are threatening humanity, were, well, just bees, and the producers were the only ones to get stung.

Flops and near flops, for the most part, were not thoughtful and highfalutin, but many of them tried to be. Who'll Stop the Rain, which wanted to say something about the drug culture, opened in August and died in the marketplace within two months. Audiences also wisely avoided Sylvester Stallone's F.I.S.T., a tedious fictionalization of the life of Jimmy Hoffa, and were almost as wary of Paradise Alley, Stallone's futile attempt to re-create sweaty 1940s realism. Convoy, Ali MacGraw's comeback vehicle, did not get rolling, and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which had all the energy of a wilting lily, never managed to strike up a tune.

Italian Director Lina Wertmuller's first English-language picture went by a title so long that some moviegoers could not finish lip reading it: The End of the World in Our Usual Bed in a Night Full of Rain. It also suffered from an insurmountable problem: for the first time American audiences could understand what Wertmuller was saying. Warner Bros., which had plans to finance two other Wertmuller pictures, quietly changed its mind and gave her a map of Rome. One of the few movies able to quell the mind-numbing trend was Paul Mazursky's marvelous An Unmarried Woman; it grossed $62.5 million and made Jill Clayburgh a star. Some pictures did well but not very well, or at least not as well as their backers hoped. Chief among those was The Wiz, the black version of The Wizard of Oz. Just about to go into wide release, the movie will probably make a profit, and it appears to have made a crucial inroad among white audiences. But it will almost certainly not be the blockbuster Universal counted on.

Divining public tastes makes moviemaking a very high-risk enterprise. Still, film folk have a set of "rules." One of them is that TV actors cannot succeed in movies. John Travolta has apparently smashed that rule to jam. "The thing always was that people wouldn't pay $4 to see what they could see on television," says Agent Michael Black. "It's not true any more." Another rule still seems intact, though: today's audiences will not step into a theater simply to see a star. Dustin Hoffman did not pull them into Straight Time, Henry Winkler could not do anything for The One and Only, Elizabeth Taylor failed to save A Little Night Music. Farrah Fawcett-Majors could smile, smile, smile and not make Somebody Killed Her Husband into a movie the somebodies wanted to see.

What will be the hits of 1979? Whatever they are, they will probably not be like those of 1978.

Says Paramount's Diller, whose company had more hits than any other: "If you apply 1978's trend to next year, you're going to fail. I believe in going against everything, and I think audiences will want to be challenged, provoked and moved." Maybe so. But producers who agree might bear in mind that the hit of 1977, Star Wars, was revived in 1978 and for two months made everybody else look sick at the box office. (Long since the movie earner of all time, it has now grossed $267 million worldwide.) Why? Apparently because a younger and younger film audience is delighted to see a show it loves not once but four and five times.

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