Film History: 1980s Film History

The decade of the 1980s tended to consolidate the gains made in the seventies rather than to initiate any new trends equal to the large number of disaster movies, buddy movies, or "rogue cop" movies that characterized the previous decade. Designed for mass audience appeal, few 80s films became what could be called 'classics'. By the end of the 80s era, most films were not designed for adult audiences (such as Driving Miss Daisy (1989)), but for teen audiences (for example, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989)).

After the innovations of the 70s, films in the 80s were less experimental and original, although there was a burst of films eager to capitalize on new special effects techniques - now available. Predictions were grim for the industry - production costs were soaring while ticket prices were declining. The average ticket price at the beginning of the decade was about $3, and over $4 by the end of the decade, while the average film budget was over $18 million. However, fears of the demise of Hollywood proved to be premature.

The Search for a Blockbuster:

The personal cinema of 70s auteur directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg was now superceded by the advent of the "blockbuster" phenomenon that they had created (with The Godfather (1972) and Jaws (1975)). The industry continued to pander to the tastes and desires of young people - one of the negative legacies of Star Wars (1977) of the late 70s.

Steven Spielberg's and George Lucas' names have often been associated with the term "blockbuster" - and their films inevitably continued to contribute to the trend during this decade, such as The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Return of the Jedi (1983), and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982).

Following this model, Hollywood continued to search, with demographic research and a "bottom line mentality," for the one large "event film" that everyone (including international audiences) had to see (with dazzling special effects technology, sophisticated sound tracks, mega-marketing budgets, and costly, highly-paid stars). Most event movies, scheduled to be released at advantageous times (at summer and Christmas-time) would take expensive fortunes to produce - but they promised potentially lucrative payoffs.

Big Losers, Flops and Bombs:

There were a number of highly-touted films of the era that fared very poorly. Within a few years, it was becoming clear that blockbusters would not always insure instant profits and success:

Auteur Michael Cimino's and United Artists' incomprehensible, over-long (originally a 5-hour version that was cut down to 219 minutes) epic Western film Heaven's Gate (1981) about Wyoming's Johnson County wars cost almost six times above-budget to produce (at about $44 million) and stunned its studio by becoming the biggest flop in film history at the time (US box-office was about $1.5 million) - it lost at least $40 million. The film was immediately pulled and then re-released five months later (after being shortened by 70 minutes) - and still failed. UA's corporate parent, Transamerica, had to sell the studio to MGM for only $350 million as a result. [UA was responsible for earlier hits Midnight Cowboy (1969), Annie Hall (1977) and the James Bond films.]

Since then, the film has been synonymous for any film facing major financial disaster. Bank-rolled support for independent 'auteur' directors of the New Wave of 70s directors (who controlled their own production costs with little studio oversight) ended when this film's egotistical director (Best Director winner for The Deer Hunter (1978)) was criticized as being self-indulgent, financially irresponsible and ego-driven. The end of the era also arrived due to similar failures by other auteurs: Peter Bogdanovich with At Long Last Love (1975), Martin Scorsese with New York, New York (1977) and even Steven Spielberg with 1941 (1979). [Martin Scorsese's planned film project Gangs of New York (2002) (with 10 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture), first conceived in 1978, was shelved as a result, and released many years after initial plans and screenplay completion.]

MGM/UA's and Terence Young's Korean War epic Inchon (1981) with Laurence Olivier (as General Douglas MacArthur) was produced by Rev. Sung Myung Moon and his Reunification Church - it was an embarrassment that was quickly withdrawn, with a budget of about $50 million and a US box-office of only $5 million.

Hugh Hudson's (famous for the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire (1981)) miscalculated historical epic of the American Revolution was WB's Revolution (1985), with star Al Pacino miscast as an 18th century New York fur trapper. It grossed only $200,000 on a budget of about $30 million. The film's colossal failure curtailed Hudson's major directorial efforts until the big-budget I Dreamed of Africa (2000) 15 years later, and Pacino wouldn't star in another film for four years (until Sea of Love (1989)).

John Huston's first and sole musical, Annie (1982), a dull, uninspired major flop (that barely broke even) - inspired by the Broadway musical. The rights to the show were sold in 1978 for $9.5 million, the highest amount ever at the time.

Howard the Duck (1986), based on Steve Gerber's 70s Marvel Comics character, and from executive producer George Lucas, was one of the worst and least successful big-budget films ever made. This Universal film grossed about $16 million on a budget of $37 million.

The highly-anticipated Shanghai Surprise (1986), produced by Handmade Films (headed by the Beatles' George Harrison), starred newlyweds: diva singer Madonna and volatile actor Sean Penn. Lacking a coherent plot and without any chemistry between the two leads in poorly-acted characterizations, the overlong film failed miserably (with a box-office take of only $2.3 million with a budget of $17 million) and was nicknamed "Flop Suey".

Columbia Pictures' and writer/director Elaine May's Ishtar (1987), was a poor imitation of the Hope/Crosby/Lamour "Road" pictures. It was a very expensive comedy film ($55 million) with only a small box-office gross of about $13 million, was a tremendous disaster and one of the worst films ever made - in spite of its stars Warren Beatty, Isabelle Adjani and Dustin Hoffman (who won an Oscar the next year for Rain Man (1988)!).

Writer/director Terry Gilliam's (of Monty Python fame) deeply-troubled but visually-captivating fantasy production of The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen (1989) was a major failure, due to production delays, legal issues, and on-location difficulties. Despite four Oscar nominations, it had a US gross of only $8 million with a film budget of about $45 million.

At the end of the 80s, director Brian De Palma's political satire Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), vaguely based upon Tom Wolfe's best-selling saga about stockbroker Sherman McCoy, featured multi-million dollar contracts for its miscast stars Tom Hanks and Bruce Willis. Savaged by critics, it had a budget of $47 million, and grossed only about $16 million.

Unexpected Successes:

Louis Malle's low-budget, overly-long My Dinner With Andre (1981) with fascinating dinner conversation between actor/playwright Wallace Shawn and theater director Andre Gregory.

Victor/Victoria (1982), set in 1930s Paris, in which Julie Andrews pretended to be a man -- pretending to be a woman, something that confused James Garner.

Milos Forman's Best Picture-winning Amadeus (1984), a biopic (adapted by Peter Shaffer from his own play) without big-name stars and about genius Mozart (Tom Hulse) and a rival composer named Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) vying for the favor of an Austrian king.

James Cameron's The Terminator (1984), in a story about Sarah Connor - the future mother of John, the leader of a human rebellion against the machines (exemplified by the brutal cyborg T-800 played by Arnold Schwarzenegger), established an action film genre that extends to the present day.

The musical comedy Little Shop of Horrors (1986), originally a Roger Corman horror film in the 60s, about a florist shop that spawned a hungry plant named Audrey II that consumed demented dentist Steve Martin as one of its victims; its song "Mean Green Mother From Outer Space" was Oscar-nominated.

Tim Burton's ambitious, hyped and over-marketed production of a dark-shaded Batman (1989) - a Warners' mega-hit film promoted with lucrative merchandising that became the blockbuster hit of the last year of the decade, with an over-the-top performance by Jack Nicholson as the villainous Joker ("Where does he get those wonderful toys?") and comedian Michael Keaton in a serious, dual role as the comic book hero - the dark avenger of Gotham City.

Big Business Entertainment:

Film budgets skyrocketed due to special effects (expensive digital effects) and inflated salaries of name-recognition stars (and their agents). Big business increasingly took control of the movies and the way was opened for the foreign (mostly Japanese) ownership of Hollywood properties. To save money, many more films were being made in non-US locations by mid-decade. A number of the studios were taken over by multi-national conglomerates as their entertainment divisions:

United Artists (acquired in 1969 by airline tycoon Kirk Kerkorian and temporarily abandoned) was bought and merged with MGM in 1981 to form MGM/UA; the company's film library was bought out by media mogul Ted Turner in 1986 for his cable TV channel, Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.; then, in 1990 MGM was purchased by Sony Entertainment of Japan - home to both Columbia Pictures and TriStar Pictures (see below)

20th (or Twentieth) Century Fox was taken over by oil tycoon Marvin Davis in 1981 and then entered into a 50% shared ownership with Australian publisher Robert Murdoch in 1985, becoming part of Fox, Inc. The film production unit was renamed simply Fox Film Corporation in 1989, and by the end of the century became known simply as Fox

Columbia Pictures was purchased by the Coca-Cola Company in 1982; (Tri-Star Pictures, created in 1983, was originally a joint venture of Columbia Pictures, HBO, and CBS); Tri-Star Pictures bought Loew's Theaters in 1986; British film producer David Puttnam briefly headed Columbia Pictures for a few years beginning in 1986; the Sony Corporation of America purchased Columbia Pictures Entertainment, Inc. and Tri-Star Pictures from Coca-Cola for $3.4 billion in 1989, re-naming itself Sony Pictures Entertainment; in 1992, Sony Pictures Classics became an autonomous company within Sony Pictures

in 1966, Paramount became a wholly owned subsidiary of Gulf + Western Industries, Inc; in 1989, Gulf + Western was reconfigured and renamed Paramount Communications, Inc.; then in 1994, Paramount merged with Viacom International

MCA/Universal (which had officially merged in 1962) became a powerful TV production company, and started its organized studio tours - one of LA's most popular tourist attractions; they were acquired by Matsushita Electrical Industrial, Co. in 1991; in June 1995, The Seagram Company Ltd. (VO) purchased a majority equity in MCA from Matsushita; then in late 1996, MCA Inc. was renamed Universal Studios, reclaiming its heritage as one of the industry’s oldest and most prestigious movie studios

Walt Disney Productions remained as one of the few studio-era survivors, with Michael Eisner as chairman and CEO beginning in 1984; it set up Touchstone Pictures in 1984 to make feature films that appealed to adult audiences; Buena Vista was Disney's distributor

Warner Communications merged with Time, Inc. in 1989 to become Time-Warner, Inc., a component of the media empire AOL-Time Warner

A few independent film companies, such as New Line Cinema and Miramax, began to make more experimental and offbeat films to fill the gaps provided by the major studios.

Because costly film decisions were more in the hands of people making the financial decisions, not the film makers, movies were made only if they could guarantee financial success, thereby pandering to a few select, well-known star names attached to film titles without as much attention paid to intelligent scripts. With this kind of pressure, the most popular film stars demanded higher salaries, up front, and well as a percentage of the film's gross take, earning as much as $20 million. Budgets and actors salaries skyrocketed out of control, and powerful agents for agencies such as Creative Artists Agency (CAA) negotiated outrageous deals.

New Technologies: Home Entertainment-Video, Cable TV, and Sound:

Cable TV networks, direct broadcast satellites, and 1/2 inch videocassettes (in the VHS format) in the 80s encouraged broader distribution of films. Sales and revenues from pre-sold theatrical features for videocassette reproduction and cable TV distribution contributed increased percentages for studios' earnings - sometimes outpacing box-office profits. [In an influential decision, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Universal v. Sony Betamax (1984) that home video-taping for personal use was not a copyright infringement.]

Many studios entered the business of producing films for commercial TV networks, and the release of their films for the home entertainment-video market became a profitable rental-sales business. The pre-recorded video of Disney's Sleeping Beauty (1959) brought sales of over a million copies when it was released in 1986. And then to illustrate the burgeoning video industry over the next few years, 1988 sales of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) surpassed 15 million!

Tri-Star Pictures Motion Picture Company, one of Hollywood's major producer/distributors, was created in 1983 as a joint venture of CBS Inc., Columbia Pictures, and Time-Life's premium cable service Home Box Office (HBO) (founded in 1972). HBO and Showtime both functioned as producer/distributors in their own right by directly financing films and entertainment specials for their own pay-television cable stations. [In 1989, Time Inc. merged with Warner Communications, becoming the major media giant Time-Warner.] The spread of access to cable television (and satellite broadcasts) threatened traditional one-screen theatres and film attendance. On the other hand, multi-plex movie theatres with multiple screens spread across the country during the 80s, while the number of drive-in theatres drastically declined.

Multi-track Dolby stereo sound, the THX sound system (named after George Lucas' first feature film), and Dolby SR ("spectral recording") (all designed to produce higher quality sound, noise reduction, surround-sound and other special effects) were introduced in the 70s and 80s, and advertised as a special feature for films such as Amadeus (1984) and Aliens (1986). The first movie to be shown in a THX-certified auditorium was Return of the Jedi (1983). [In 1992, a new technology dubbed Dolby Digital was introduced to movie-goers in Batman Returns (1992), and then DTS Digital Sound made its debut in Jurassic Park (1993).]