Predictably, after much spleen-venting yesterday over the remake of The Fury, I did a search for movies released in 1978, the year of the original.
The seventies tend to be remembered as some sort of golden age of auteurism, when Scorsese and Altman and so many others reigned supreme, and all was right with the world. But looking at 1978's releases, what is most striking is the diversity of the mainstream.
The top-grossing movies of the year were Grease and Animal House, which did crazy business, over a hundred million apiece. Most movies, though, earned considerably less than that. A gross in the twenty to forty million dollar range could be considered a hit.
Admittedly, we're talking 1978 dollars here, but still, production budgets were considerably lower. The notoriously overbudget The Wiz cost a then-exorbitant 24 million, but most movies were made for much less. Even Grease, ruthlessly designed to be a blockbuster, only cost 6 million to produce. Those numbers don't count marketing expenses, but those were much less, too--a TV campaign, some print ads, that was about it. Movies didn't open at eighty bazillion theaters and live or die by their opening weekend. Again, using Grease as an example--it opened on relatively few screens in bigger markets, then slowly made its way to neighborhood theaters, small town and drive-ins. It played throughout the entire summer and into the fall, a pretty common pattern at the time.
What all these numbers mean is that the studios could afford to mix it up. With low production and marketing costs, not every movie had to be huge to earn a profit. So mainstream studio releases included everything from upscale items like Movie, Movie, F.I.S.T., The Brinks Job or Comes A Horseman to non-formulaic comedies like Heaven Can Wait or The End, from attempted smash hits like Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Swarm and The Boys From Brazil to proudly stupid epics like Up In Smoke and Every Which Way But Loose and prestige efforts like Days Of Heaven and Pretty Baby.
There were, of course, movies like we have now. Still, aside from a junky sequel (Jaws 2), the horror movies (Halloween and Dawn Of The Dead), testosterone-drenched action fare (The Driver, Straight Time) and "chick flicks" (Girlfriends, An Unmarried Woman) had more on their minds than current efforts in the same basic genres. Even a needless remake of a classic, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, was made in good faith, using the template of the Age Of Anxiety original to explore the dark belly of the Me Decade.
To list these efforts is merely to scratch the surface. I'm not saying these are all good pictures--some of them are profoundly bad--but they're all different from each other, yet clearly designed to appeal to as wide a range of people as possible. Not everything was marketed to one narrow demographic. Back then, everyone went to the movies, and there was always something to see.
