Until blockbusters arrived—starting in
1975, with Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws,” in
its time the most commercially suc-
cessful film in history—Hollywood re-
leased movies gradually, one set of the-
atres after another. In the “run-zone
clearance system,” a movie would begin
with a heavily publicized first run in
downtown theatres in major cities,
continue on to smaller houses in less
aluent or less fashionable parts of the
city, and then move out to the suburbs,
to smaller cities and towns, and, finally,
to rural communities. A movie that
was disliked by its first wave of view-
ers might not continue through the
system, and the urban sophisticates
who made the initial decision to see it
were heavily influenced by the critics.
In the nineteen-twenties, the pro-
ducer Irving Thalberg recognized that
a pattern of distribution implies a pat-
tern of taste-making. From his position,
first at Universal and then at M-G-M,
he turned Hollywood in the direction
of prestige pictures—movies that “em-
phasized glamour, grace, and beauty,” as
one critic put it. As much as three-quar-
ters of M-G-M’s productions were
A-class features feeding into the most
deluxe of the downtown movie palaces,
a business practice that was fortified,
year after year in that decade, by an urban
industrial boom. A version of this ap-
proach to distribution survived for much
of the twentieth century—as late as the
mid-seventies, a movie could take six
months, or even a year, to finish its the-
atrical run. By then, however, suburban-
ization had transformed the country.
The studios were stuck with a release
pattern designed to flatter a social land-
scape that, by and large, no longer ex-
isted. “Jaws” was a masterpiece by a wun-
derkind director, but it also proved out
a new business model: a gimmicky idea,
bankable stars, and aggressive television
ad campaigns, all of it designed to trig-
ger audience anticipation and drive a
massive Friday-night opening across
thousands of screens—critics and snobs
be damned.
It did not take Hollywood long to
see the commercial possibilities, and the
blockbuster came to dominate the movie
industry. This, it’s been said, signalled
the end of the “auteur” era—a magical
period in American cinema when film
directors were revered as quasi-literary
gods. The truth is more complicated.
“The decade that gave the movie in-
dustry the American auteur also gave
it the broad-audience event film,” the
agent, producer, and film executive Mike
Medavoy notes in “You’re Only as Good
as Your Next One” (Atria), an under-read
and engaging show-biz memoir. Both
trends—a director-driven cinema and
market-tested movies packaged out of
familiar (or “presold”) elements and fa-
miliar faces—exerted an enormous in-
fluence on the Hollywood film culture
of the time; often both were apparent
within a single picture. The tendency
toward artistic surprise on the one hand
and a highly manipulative familiarity
on the other came together and created
the tastes and expectations of movie-
goers for a generation. What Holly-
wood blockbuster can’t trace its ances-
try to “The Godfather,” “The Exorcist,”
“Jaws,” “Rocky,” “Star Wars,” “Annie
Hall,” or “Alien”?
For several years, a balance was pre-
served between commerce and art—or,
really, between a standardized produc-
tion process in search of eiciencies of
scale, and creative individuality. Then
the machinery of wide release was sup-
plemented by a new technology, VHS.
Suddenly, there were video stores all
over America that needed to purchase
at least one copy of every major new
Hollywood movie. In “Powerhouse: The
Untold Story of Hollywood’s Creative
Artists Agency” (Custom House), an
oral history compiled by James Andrew
Miller, Tom Hanks recalls the efect
that this had on Hollywood in the eight-
ies. “The industry used to be so flush
with free money that it was almost im-
possible to do wrong even with a crappy
movie, because here’s why: home video,”
he says. By 1986, video sales and rentals
were taking in more than four billion
dollars. Income from home viewing had
surpassed that of theatrical release.
A Blockbuster video store in Bethesda
or Prairie Village may seem a world
away from the glamour palaces of yore,
but they were alike in one respect: they
depended on the power of a movie star
to signal a picture’s quality. Rows of
cardboard VHS boxes featuring Hanks
or Julia Roberts replaced the old the-
atre marquee. Star power was as strong
as it had been since Thalberg’s heyday.
In the thirties, the actors were owned,more or less outright, by the studios. In
the eighties, actors were free agents and
Hollywood was prospering. A new era,
one ruled not by the studio, but by the
talent agent, had begun. It is this era
that is presently coming to an end.S
ix months before “Jaws” was released,
a group of disafected William Mor-
ris agents founded C.A.A. William
Morris was a classic mid-century op-
eration, bureaucratic and governed by
seniority. “There was little entrepre-
neurialism,” Michael Ovitz, one of
C.A.A.’s founders, says in “Power-
house.” Ovitz had a plan. He would set
aside the more self-serving mytholo-
gies of show business, run an eat-what-
you-kill shop, and become “the most
powerful person in Hollywood.” C.A.A.
aggressively signed up A-list talent,
then ofered studios all-or-nothing
deals. Ovitz came as close to being
a lone Hollywood hegemon as any
one person can—and he did it thanks,
in no small part, to an utter lack of
sentimentality about the movies.
C.A.A. had started out by concen-
trating on television. When it came to
feature films, Ovitz admitted that he
was motivated by the desire to destroy
William Morris. “Our goal was to
break them,” he tells Miller, “and we
did; we blew their movie department
to nothing.”
He did it with packaging, the prac-
tice whereby an agent, or agency, ofers
up all the relevant talent on a project to
the studio. The technique has been
around since the advent of radio as a
mass medium. But, just as wide release
came to dominate theatrical distribu-
tion, the C.A.A. package came to dom-
inate the development of wide-release
films. The best of these movies—“Caddy-
shack,” “Trading Places,” “Beverly Hills
Cop,” “Ghostbusters,” “Back to the
Future,” all C.A.A. packages—were
irreverent, fun, slapdash, and a little cruel.
The worst were ostentatious and empty.
The very worst, like “Legal Eagles,” were
deal memos on celluloid.
Ovitz’s foil for a time was David
Puttnam, a highly regarded British film
producer. Puttnam had made his sig-
nature picture, “Chariots of Fire,” with
a first-time director and no stars, and
without the aid of Hollywood. It was
a commercial triumph and won four