Adventures in the Screen Trade

by William Goldman

And the money needed to mount a movie continues to escalate: The average cost of a major studio film today is over ten million dollars, a four-hundred-percent leap from just ten years ago. Everywhere you hear the cry: “We’ve got to do something to bring down the cost of pictures.” I don’t see it happening. Two examples from pictures I’ve worked on. Stepford Wives was probably released badly as far as the people involved in the making of that movie are concerned. It has some exploitable elements, but it wasn’t Halloween. The best way to release it would have been slowly, praying for favorable word of mouth. The studio threw it on the market in hundreds of theatres immediately. Why? Because the studio’s needs are not the same as the needs of the individual pictures, and right then Columbia needed cash flow badly—dollars, and now. Stepford got them some dollars. It was gone in a month, but it served the studio well. The other picture I can’t name for legal reasons that will shortly come clear. But in this second instance, the studio purposely set out to destroy its own product. Madness? Not at all. (And not at all that unusual either.)