Roadshow! The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s
by Matthew Kennedy
Oxford University Press. 307 pages, $35
“ROADSHOW” was a film industry term for a big-budget movie featuring overtures, intermissions, and colorful souvenir programs. These reserved-seating-only first runs were swanky affairs in opulent theaters, occasions for families to dress up. Only after they exhausted their exclusive runs in these lavish venues would these movies go into general release. Film historian Matthew Kennedy’s scintillating new book, Roadshow! The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s, is brimming with gossip and back stories about studio hubris and outrageous movie star tantrums that resulted in financial and artistic disasters, ending the lucrative roadshow tradition.
In the mid 1960s, three roadshow musicals—Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, and The Sound of Music—were enormously successful. Every studio wanted to cash in. Director Vincent Minnelli is quoted as saying: “At that time everybody was paying for everything—that was the idea after Sound of Music. Expensive pictures brought expensive profits.” During this mad rush, Funny Girl, Camelot, and Oliver! were Oscar winners that found an audience, as did Goodbye Mr. Chips and Fiddler on the Roof. However, the pile-up of over-produced and under-performing musical corpses included such lightweights as Doctor Dolittle, Sweet Charity, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Paint Your Wagon was a box-office hit, but Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood as singing cowboys—who thought that was a good idea? As gargantuan a star as Julie Andrews was in Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, the bloated Star! and the ill-advised Darling Lili were critical and box-office bombs. Similarly, Barbra Streisand’s star power could not save the vacuous On A Clear Day You Can See Forever or the bizarrely miscast Hello, Dolly! The Zeitgeist had changed, and moviegoers were drawn more to the grim realism of Midnight Cowboy, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, and Easy Rider. But that didn’t prevent the studios from investing in inflated star vehicles. The final straw was when the moribund Man of La Mancha was rolled out with Peter O’Toole and Sophia Loren in 1972. The roadshow era collapsed into immediate obsolescence. Matthew Kennedy’s assiduously researched book details the profligate spending as properties languished in development hell for years, changing producers, directors, stars, and composers. André and Dory Previn’s eighteen songs for Goodbye, Mr. Chips were tossed out when composer Leslie Bricusse was brought in. The composers were paid $85,120 for their efforts, which was still less than the amount paid out to Lee Remick ($100,000) and Samantha Eggar ($125,000) to vamoose so that Petula Clark could eventually star. Kennedy delivers some delectable gossip from his research in archives and production files. When Rex Harrison was cast in Doctor Dolittle, he demanded that Sammy Davis Jr. be fired or he wouldn’t take the job. Davis was let go; Harrison quit anyway, only to be replaced Peter O’Toole, who in turn was replaced by—Rex Harrison. The latter’s drunken outbursts regularly disrupted the filming, earning him his nickname of “Tyrannosaurus Rex.” The production of Hello, Dolly! was also quite contentious. There was no love lost between the leading actors. “What I needed was Rhett Butler to sweep me back up again,” Streisand kvetched. “What I got was Walter Matthau.” During the filming, Matthau yelled to Babs: “Everyone on the set hates you” and that she was “a pipsqueak who didn’t have the talent of a butterfly’s fart.” An official production report noted only “a delay in shooting that afternoon from 3:28 pm to 4:50 pm caused by an argument between Matthau and Streisand.” Rather than get mired in annotated footnotes of film history, Kennedy engages readers throughout with his charming storytelling. The book is bustling with juicy tidbits: Shirley MacLaine, Bob Fosse, Francis Ford Coppola, Fred Astaire, Josh Logan, and Gene Kelly all have an entrance, and tales are told! Clearly the author loves film, and Kennedy conveys this enthusiasm to readers in this morality play of studios imploding from misguided excess. A tad wistfully, he concludes: “A bit of good old movie magic died with the roadshow.” ________________________________________________________ John R. Killacky is executive director of Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, a renovated art deco roadshow movie palace in Burlington, VT.
