The Envelope, Please

Everyone has something nasty to say about the Academy Awards. But there is no more to say about the Awards than there is to say about a political convention--everybody votes their own interest. Peter Davis talks about Vietnam, Sinatra talks about Italians, the Academy itself lobbies against politics and that is as important a war for their own industry as they can wage. Movies are a business, and although it was not always so, the Academy Awards are their biggest ad. When I was out at the Oscars a year ago, Jack Haley, who was producing the awards show made it clear: "Look it, we have two hours of television time for which we're getting paid for Christ's sake, and 75% of the country is watching. By next week a half-billion people will have seen the show. A half-billion people buddy! You can't buy publicity like that!" It's dollars, baby, dollars. Movies fought off television in the fifties (Norma Shearer refused to buy one, none of the old hard-liners would have them in their houses) but now they've submitted to realities and they use it.

You have to be there to sense the mania connected with the Oscars. Television has cooled us off so much that we forget that there is something going on, live when we watch the Awards. Three thousand people are sitting on tacks, and it's not because they're worried about prestige--they're worried about their lives, their salaries, their rank in the Hollywood hierarchy. The winner of the Best Picture of the Year award is likely to double, maybe triple its gross profits in the months following the show. A Best Actor can ask for a half-million dollars plus percentage of the profits in his next movie. A Best Supporting Actor jack nicholson can become Jack Nicholson. A cliche maybe, but you can feel the goddamn tension. It's like you have Scoop, Mo, Hubert, Ed and Lloyd, and one of them is going to get it on television in an envelope, instead of watching the action in the privacy of a hotel suite. Do you think any of them wouldn't lose his bowels on the spot right there? One of you is a Rhodes Scholar, one of you makes the Yankees, one of you is a MILLIONAIRE! It is not like being Queen for a Day, it lasts after the show, and is wielded, invested, squeezed. Sure it's Movies, but Movies is Business and Business is the business of America.

The movies are sitting tighter these days than they have for some time. Hollywood went through scare periods when it was not clear what could be sold to the public, if anything. Old tyrants retired, sank and died; every year some old lion still in power was being proclaimed the last tycoon. Television killed the first set of old men, angry stockholders and ravenous conglomerates killed the second. Louis B. Mayer, the feared stable master of the great M-G-M dynasty, went under in 1951; Darryl F. Zanuck, truncheoning all comers, held out twenty years longer, finally going under with the Japanese planes in his $25,000,000 Tora, Tora, Tora! They were monarchs, intuitive monarchs. But they were the "I wouldn't-let-my-daughter-see-a-movie-like-that" types, despite the fact that they did worse things than any movies they imagined could show. Their successors, though some still have tinges of the old craziness (Frank Yablans, just-fired head of Paramount, wants to be President of the United States--It Can Happen Here) are essentially businessmen. Every studio but Twentieth Century Fox has been acquired by a conglomerate, and the products show it. You could see it Tuesday night on the show. Francis Ford Coppola, accepting the Best Picture Award for God-father II opened his speech, "When Charlie Bluhdorn came to me with the idea for a second part..." Charlie Bluhdorn. Charlie Bluhdorn of Gulf and Western, baby, Zanuck lost his job at a stockholders meeting.

The wizards are looking for mass-sellable illusions, but even that is turning around. When Midnight Cowboy was chosen Best Picture in 1969, it represented the accession of the big boys to the idea that "Art" and business could be mated without killing the baby. That is the new Hollywood, An old-timer confided to me one afternoon in L.A. that the only reason the San Fernando Valley was built was for use as a backdrop in an M-C-M musical. It was recently smashed to dust for Earthquake. "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain." Oz orders Dorothy when she comes wise to his act. "I'm a very good man, it's just that I'm a very bad wizard," he says when the jig is up. But the jig is not up in Hollywood because the wizards have learned how to read charts and work computers. Just because of that this may be the twilight of the old movies--in fifty years there will probably only be revival theaters. Everything will be piped home, first run onto big TV screens in the living room. We'll pay for our movie tickets on the phone bill. That's what Hollywood media prophets tell me anyway. We'll be seeing awards for "Best Holographic Effects in a Documentary" and the winner will come up and say something nasty about President (Julie) Eisenhower and her foreign policy. Then he'll get booed down because President Eisenhower is a personal friend, benefactor and symbol of about half the people there. And Bob Hope will make a joke about it.