CHAPTER 10
MERE ANARCHY: THE CINEMA OF DISINTEGRATION
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PACKAGING CONCEPTS
The fragmentation of production coincided with the merger of the major distribution companies with larger corprate groupings. The period from 1966, when Gulf and Western took over Paramount, to 1969, when Kinney National Services merged with Warner-Seven Arts, saw an upheaval in company ownership more substantial even that that of the early 1930s. The majors diversified, predominantly into other media, or were absorbed into conglomerates attracted
by their undervalued stock, their film libraries and their real estate. However, the reorganization of the industry that followed diversification was a less fundamental change than that provoked by the Paramount decrees. By and large, it extended the effects of divorcement. The merger with other media concerns, particularly the record industry, was in a sense only an extrapolation of the majors' post-
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Paramount commitment to a power-base in distribution rather than production, and the growth of independent production completed a process begun in the early 1950s.
Hollywood's acquisition by conglomerates has, to a degree, merely been the swapping of one set of distant masters for another. The new landlords of the Dream Factory, like their predecessors, have pursued the primary motivation of profit; on occasion obtained by slum clearance projects like Kirk Kerkorian's sale of M. G. M. assets to build a Las Vegas hotel, or the urban renewal program of Century City on the back lot of the Fox studios. But if Hollywood has shrunk physically under corporate ownership, with its volume of production declining from 196 features in 1969 to 106 in 1978, its business remains much the same, and in one respect only have the new patterns of ownership made a significant difference to the way it conducts that business. The role of the mogul has been abolished: Hollywood's recent studio executives are men under different influences from those of Warner or Cohn. They share a trait common
among corporate management, of frequent mobility of employment. Where Mayer ruled M. G. M. from 1924 to 1951, the studio saw six different studio heads in the years between 1968 and 1979. Only Warner Brothers and Universal had the same management team throughout the decade, while career structures like that of David Picker are increasingly the norm. Picker became President of United
Artists in 1969, left to go into independent production in 1973, became head of production at Paramount in 1975, and returned to independent production for Lorimar in 1977.
This pattern of short tenure in senior management helped to remove the last vestiges of any identifiable studio styles. By the mid-1970s the post-Paramount attitude of regarding each production as a one-off event had reached a point where none of the majors any longer possessed a recognizable identity either in its personnel or its product.
The corporate acquisitions and the economic crises of the late 1960s occasioned the removal of the old guard. Box-office failures combined with the spectacles of the counter-culture (Haight-Ashbury, Chicago, Woodstock) to offer further evidence that Hollywood's liberal consensus was no longer adequate to the demands of a more youthful and volatile audience. The accepted explanation was that the industry had lost contact with its audience because there were too many old men with too much control over production to encourage the right material. In response,
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Hollywood engaged in an unparalleled wave of parricide. Its most conspicuous victims were the last surviving moguls. Jack Warner sold his interest in the studio in 1967 to embark on a notably unsuccessful career in independent production. Darryl Zanuck lost the last in a series of proxy fights at Fox, and retired in 1971. Between 1966 and 1973 all the majors acquired new, much younger production heads, drawn as often as not from outside the immediate confines of Hollywood.
The more public search for the kid genius director concealed a more enduring palace revolution giving power to a younger generation of executives whose previous careers were most likely to have been in television, talent agencies or "creative management."* If the personnel changed, the professional ethos remained the same. Heads of production continued to insist on their ability to gauge an unstable public taste, and to argue that the nature of the industry militated against predictable profit margins.
