This past holiday season, UA had four pictures out in the marketplace. (A different UA group, by the by, than the people who bought the Talese book—who’d come and quickly gone.) It was a tremendous lineup and quickly describable: “We’ve got Peter Falk in a raunchy comedy, Richard Dreyfuss in a Broadway smash, Lemmon and Matthau together again with Billy Wilder, and Steve Martin in a musical.” It’s no wonder with product like that, they were able to get fabulous bookings in the best theatres all around the country. And with those fabulous bookings what did they achieve? The four films—All the
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