JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 184 из 359Consider Myra Breckinridge. Valley of the Dolls, The Adventurers, and Bloodline . . . to mention just a few.
Even Alfred Hitchcock produced one of those Thanksgiving birds, and unfortunately, it was his last picture: Family Plot , with Bruce Dern and Karen Black. And these pictures only scratch the surface of a list that could continue on for a hundred pages or more. Probably more.
There's an impulse to say something's wrong here. There may well be. If another business-United Airlines, let us say, or IBM-ran their affairs the way 20th Century-Fox ran the making of Cleopatra , their boards of directors would soon be down at the local 7-11 store, buying pizza mix with foodstamps-or maybe the stockholders would just break down the door and wheel in the guillotine. It seems almost incredible to believe that any major studio could even approach the brink of bankruptcy in a country that loves the movies as much as this one does; one might as well try to imagine, you might think, Caesar's Palace or the Dunes wiped out by a single crapshooter. But in fact there is not one major American film studio which has not at least once during the thirty-year period under discussion here tottered on the brink.
MGM is perhaps the most infamous case, and for a period of seven years the MGM lion ceased to roar almost entirely. Perhaps significantly, during this period when MGM was leaving the unreal world of the movies and pinning its hopes for corporate survival upon the unreal gambling world (the MGM Grand in Vegas, surely one of the world's more vulgar pleasure domes), their one major success was a horror movieMichael Crichton's Westworld , in which a disintegrating Yul Brynner, dressed in black and looking like a nightmare revenant from The Magnificent Seven , intones again and again: "Draw. Draw. Draw." They draw . . . and lose. Yul is pretty fast, even with his circuits showing.
Is this, you ask me, any way to run a railroad?
My own answer is no . . . but the failure of so many films released by "the majors" seems more explicable to me than the failure of so many of the horror films released by what Variety calls "the indies." At this writing, three of my novels have been released as films: Carrie (United Artists/theatrical/1976) 'Salem's Lot (Warners/television/ 1979), and The Shining (Warners/theatrical/1980), and in all three cases I feel that I have been fairly treated . . . and yet the clearest emotion in my mind is not pleasure but a mental sigh of relief. When dealing with the American cinema, you feel like you won if you just broke even.
Even Alfred Hitchcock produced one of those Thanksgiving birds, and unfortunately, it was his last picture: Family Plot , with Bruce Dern and Karen Black. And these pictures only scratch the surface of a list that could continue on for a hundred pages or more. Probably more.
There's an impulse to say something's wrong here. There may well be. If another business-United Airlines, let us say, or IBM-ran their affairs the way 20th Century-Fox ran the making of Cleopatra , their boards of directors would soon be down at the local 7-11 store, buying pizza mix with foodstamps-or maybe the stockholders would just break down the door and wheel in the guillotine. It seems almost incredible to believe that any major studio could even approach the brink of bankruptcy in a country that loves the movies as much as this one does; one might as well try to imagine, you might think, Caesar's Palace or the Dunes wiped out by a single crapshooter. But in fact there is not one major American film studio which has not at least once during the thirty-year period under discussion here tottered on the brink.
MGM is perhaps the most infamous case, and for a period of seven years the MGM lion ceased to roar almost entirely. Perhaps significantly, during this period when MGM was leaving the unreal world of the movies and pinning its hopes for corporate survival upon the unreal gambling world (the MGM Grand in Vegas, surely one of the world's more vulgar pleasure domes), their one major success was a horror movieMichael Crichton's Westworld , in which a disintegrating Yul Brynner, dressed in black and looking like a nightmare revenant from The Magnificent Seven , intones again and again: "Draw. Draw. Draw." They draw . . . and lose. Yul is pretty fast, even with his circuits showing.
Is this, you ask me, any way to run a railroad?
My own answer is no . . . but the failure of so many films released by "the majors" seems more explicable to me than the failure of so many of the horror films released by what Variety calls "the indies." At this writing, three of my novels have been released as films: Carrie (United Artists/theatrical/1976) 'Salem's Lot (Warners/television/ 1979), and The Shining (Warners/theatrical/1980), and in all three cases I feel that I have been fairly treated . . . and yet the clearest emotion in my mind is not pleasure but a mental sigh of relief. When dealing with the American cinema, you feel like you won if you just broke even.