Roadshow!: The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s Hardcover Author: Visit Amazon's Matthew Kennedy Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0199925674 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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A Look Inside: Roadshow!: The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s [Click Images to Enlarge]
Peter O’Toole and James Coco are directed by a script-wielding Arthur Hiller on Luciano Damiani’s “depressing” set for Man of La Mancha. This was the film that killed the roadshow in America once and for all. From the collection of Photofest.
Director William Wyler and star Barbra Streisand confer during the filming of “Don’t Rain on My Parade” in Funny Girl. Body language suggests the two have switched jobs. Streisand is sitting in producer Ray Stark’s chair. From the collection of Photofest.
The Finian’s Rainbow gang: director Francis Ford Coppola, stars Petula Clark, Don Francks, and Fred Astaire, producer Joseph Landon and star Tommy Steele. From the collection of Photofest.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* The Hollywood roadshow picture—a movie that opened slowly, a few markets at a time, with hoopla and reserved seating and higher ticket prices—dates back to the silent era. Big-budget musicals were a roadshow staple in the 1940s and ’50s, and by the ’60s, most musicals were roadshow pictures (and, not incidentally, cash cows). This hugely entertaining book tracks the decline of the Hollywood musical, beginning with what appeared to be the genre’s high point: the back-to-back-to-back financial successes of Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, and The Sound of Music. As film historian Kennedy notes, with success comes imitation, and the major studios, in some cases out of sheer desperation to turn a much-needed profit, raced to churn out as much product as they could. This led to a veritable avalanche of mediocre to downright awful movies like Doctor Doolittle, Paint Your Wagon, Star!, Camelot, The Happiest Millionaire, Darling Lili, and oh so many more. The author’s research is impeccable, his story fascinating (Greed! Desperation! Ego! An utter failure to understand what audiences wanted!), and his writing lively (he calls The Great Waltz, based on the life of Johann Strauss, “a great big lump of meh”). There were successful musicals in the mid-to-late ’60s, of course, and in the early 1970s (Fiddler on the Roof, for example, and the revolutionary Cabaret), but they were few and very far between—the studios’ relentless quest for more musical material and for the huge profits they hoped to reap essentially killed the big-budget musical. Kennedy sounds pretty upset about that, and, after reading this fine book, you will be, too. --David Pitt
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- Hardcover: 320 pages
- Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (January 2, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0199925674
- ISBN-13: 978-0199925674
- Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
The phenomenon of gargantuan roadshow film musicals (with their high-priced reserved seat tickets, intermissions, souvenir booklets) engulfed Hollywood in the mid-1960s to the early 1970s. The huge commercial success of Twentieth Century-Fox’s 'The Sound of Music' (1964) seemed—at the time—to provide a heaven-sent salvation for Hollywood studios then buckling under the strain of diminished filmgoer attendance, changing tastes of moviegoers, and the downfall of the studio system. Using the philosophy that much bigger is always much better, Tinseltown studio honchos recklessly rushed to make mammoth song-and-dance screen projects such as 'Doctor Dolittle' (1967), 'Camelot' (1967), 'Star!' (1968), 'Hello, Dolly!' (1969), 'Paint Your Wagon' (1969), and 'Man of La Mancha' (1972). How these already gigantic financial investments skyrocketed into astounding fiscal irresponsibility and sank at the box office from lack of sufficient creative control is the meat of Matthew Kennedy’s fine new book 'Roadshow!: The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s'.
Kennedy weaves an engrossing tapestry from an impressive array of facts as he relates how these overblown productions were born in haste, went awry in the craziest ways, and then floundered disastrously at the box office. What makes this excellent book so absorbing is the author’s colorful, highly readable chronicle. It smartly juggles the antics of dictatorial studio executives, often misguided creative talents, and desperate marketing gurus as they jumped blindly over the cliff of reason and entertainment value. What resulted from this chaos were colossal movie musicals misfires.
Kennedy’s study of this little-explored area of Hollywood film history is an extremely satisfactory mix of detailed research, astute observations, and flavorful narrative.
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