Movie Magic: A Marketing Memoir

by Bill O'Hare

Overview

When you work on Hollywood blockbusters as a senior marketing executive at DCA, Continental Distributors, MGM, Cinema Center Films, Paramount, and Columbia Pictures, you meet some people.

For Bill O'Hare, that meant working with movie stars like John Wayne, Steve McQueen, Lee Marvin, and Elvis Presley--just to name a few.

Growing up as a kid in Lake Placid, New York, he never dreamed he'd end up working with such stars or that they'd actually listen to what he had to say.

In this behind-the-scenes memoir, O'Hare looks back at how he helped timeless films such as Doctor Zhivago, The Dirty Dozen, Viva Las Vegas, A Man Called Horse, and the 1967 re-release of Gone With the Wind become box-office smashes.

He also looks back at box-office busts such as Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Lee Marvin's Monte Walsh and Le Mans.

Join one of Hollywood's leading marketers from the 1950s to the 1980s as he celebrates his craft and reminisces about being chauffeured in a Rolls-Royce with Sophia Loren, spending time at a race track with Steve McQueen, and enjoyingMovie Magic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781491785201
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	09/16/2016
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.46(d)

Read an Excerpt

Movie Magic

A Marketing Memoir

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By Bill O'Hare

iUniverse

Copyright © 2016 Bill O'Hare and Matthew O'Hare
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4917-8520-1

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CHAPTER 1

Century Theatres and DCA

Motion-picture-theater owners have never had a strong presence in marketing movies to consumers; however, Century Theatres went beyond the norm and offered a very popular, bimonthly brochure of coming attractions that listed titles, stars, and start times, distributed at the theaters. In those days, all theaters changed programs twice a week and played double features, or two movies for the price of one. With four movies a week showing at forty theaters each, the brochure could include information about as many as 160 movies. This advertising program was the pride of the company, so all the executives scrutinized it and highlighted all its mistakes. I wanted a shot at producing this and was prepared to accept the consequences if it didn't work out. I cajoled and coaxed management and even got the brother-in-law involved to give me the assignment. The horizon was getting brighter. This project even gave me a leg up on getting my next marketing job.

When Century Theatres formed Distributors Corporation of America (DCA), a national production and distribution company with ambitious goals, I was a long-shot contender to get the marketing role, but I landed it in 1955. Designing advertising, publicity, and promotional campaigns that directly affected the financial success of a movie was a quantum leap from producing advertising brochures. It was an extraordinary opportunity, and with minimal experience but lots of enthusiasm, I started the learning curve. If I had been aware of the responsibilities and the intricacies involved with the job, I would have passed. But with a lot of professional help, I got the hang of it and soon discovered that if I did my homework, I could pull all the disparate parts of a campaign together and direct marketing that would appeal to moviegoers.

A movie that had tremendous potential for DCA was regrettably shelved because of some unforeseen politics. DCA had great hope for Finians Rainbow, based on the hit Broadway musical of the late 1940s, and wanted to develop it into an animated feature. Excited about the prospects, the company focused all of its resources on the project, producing a fabulous soundtrack with Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald. However, the project was never realized because John Hubley, the talented and controversial director, was subpoenaed to appear before Joe McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee, known for its role in investigating alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having ties to communism. Yes, John was on this committee's list, and he pleaded the Fifth Amendment, which ultimately led to the picture becoming a victim of that ugly era. Remarkably, today, over forty-five years later, Finians Rainbow is being considered as an animated movie using the original DCA soundtrack.

Unfortunately, DCA only had a brief history. By 1958, the company found itself overextended and encountered rocky financial times. Consequently, it closed production doors. But despite its unsuccessful run, DCA produced some interesting movies, including I Am a Camera, based on a celebrated Broadway show starring Julie Harris; Rock, Rock, Rock, the first rock-'n'-roll picture, with an all-star rock-'n'-roll band led by Alan Freed, starring Jackie Wilson, Chuck Berry, Connie Francis, and Tuesday Weld; Long John Silver, starring Robert Newton; and Rodan: The Flying Monster, which shock jock Howard Stern still talks about to this day.

Rock, Rock, Rock A DCA Film Starring Tuesday Weld, Chuck Berry, Alan Freed, Teddy Randazzo, LaVern Baker, Frankie Lymon, and Connie Francis

In the midfifties, I didn't understand what was happening. Kids were stomping in the aisles, jumping in their seats, and going wild over music that I didn't understand. Little did I realize that I was witnessing a revolution — the introduction of rock 'n' roll.

The more I got involved in Rock, Rock, Rock, one of the first rock-'n'-roll pictures in movie history, the more exciting it got. The story was loosely based on the early rock phenom Frankie Lymon, and the cast had an all-star group of rockers, including Chuck Berry and Jackie Wilson. Teddy Randazzo, who was hot at the time, played Frankie Lymon, and Tuesday Weld made her movie debut as his romantic interest. Connie Francis did a number of voice-over songs, while Alan Freed, the controversial New York City disc jockey who spearheaded the rock movement in its early days, reprised his disc jockey role in the picture. All the elements were in place. Enthusiastic audiences responded in droves and went wild over the picture, and parents didn't quite comprehend what was going on.

The movie was also playing at the Loew's Theatres in New York City, which only added more excitement and prestige. You see, in 1957, the Loew's Theatre empire was the number-one exhibition company in the country. They were especially strong in New York City with Loew's State and the Capitol Theatres in Manhattan and their neighborhood theaters, the Valencia in Queens and the Paradise in the Bronx. These theaters had been built in the 1920s and '30s and were living reminders of the grand movie palaces of that era. They were equipped with enormous stages for live performances, as well as large orchestra pits. The lobbies were vast and chandeliered, and Roman columns generously contributed to the ambiance. The ceilings of the Valencia and Paradise were blue-and-white simulations of the heavens, and when the spotlights played over the stars and the clouds, you thought you were in heaven. Everything was designed to add to the thrill and awe of going to the movies. Collectively, these four theaters had twenty thousand seats.

Loew's Theatres played the best movies that the majors had to offer, and it was rare that an independent film was selected to play there. When they elected to play Rock, Rock, Rock, I was a bit stunned and more than a little apprehensive. This was big-time show business with big-time players, and I had an integral role to play.

The Rock, Rock, Rock exhibition contract with Loew's called for a live performance by the cast at each of the theaters playing the film. The talent would reprise their roles from the movie and perform any impromptu songs they wanted to throw in. My job was to manage this event. We scheduled two performances a night at separate theaters, and my task was to corral Alan Freed and the rest of the group at 5:00 p.m. and get them to the theater on time. Tuesday Weld and her mother and Connie Francis and her parents weren't a problem, but getting the hard-driving, heavy-boozing, cocaine-inspired rockers was another story. They weren't getting paid for this gig, and as far as they were concerned, they were going to compensate for this by having a good time — and that they did. Booze and drugs flowed freely and continuously, and all I could do was supervise and hope for the best.

We always arrived late at the theaters when audiences were impatient and noisy, but when Freed, who relished his self-proclaimed title of the king of rock 'n' roll, took over the microphone and waxed his magic, all was forgiven. Each performance lasted forty minutes, and audiences were enthralled and left the theaters deliriously happy. Chuck Berry would strut across the stage with his guitar, Tuesday Weld would say hello, Connie Francis would sing her two songs, and then the highlight, Jackie Wilson, would come out. After he finished his final rock-'n'-roll number, he would sing the Irish ballad "Danny Boy," and the audience would do a one-eighty and go from verging on hysteria to total silence. You could hear a pin drop. It was an extraordinary piece of showmanship.

Capping these wild days was an ironic moment. My final chore of the day was to escort Connie Francis to the Port Authority Bus Terminal on West Forty-Second Street, where her straitlaced, Italian Catholic parents would meet us and take her home to New Jersey. If the parents had known what their daughter was being subjected to, the likelihood of Connie Francis being on that tour with that wild bunch of rock musicians would have been next to nil.

Life wasn't very kind to these early rock pioneers. Alan Freed, who died at age forty-three, was constantly battling booze and drugs, as well as the infamy of being on the take, getting kickbacks from record promoters. Frankie Lymon also suffered from addiction and died at age forty-four. Jackie Wilson, who was a major womanizer, was shot by his wife for cheating. His promoters went into damage control and hatched an elaborate denial scheme, blaming his fate on an obsessed fan. Unfortunately, he later suffered a heart attack while performing and lived in a vegetative state for years before finally dying at an early age. Chuck Berry defied the odds, however, and performed well into his seventies, while Connie Francis and Tuesday Weld went on to successful movie careers. As a film, Rock, Rock, Rock came up short on artistry. In fact, it was a bad movie, but it had perfect timing. It made a lot of money for the financial backers and for the producers, Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg, who both went on to make careers out of low-budget exploitation movies. For me, it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

CHAPTER 2

From DCA to Continental Film Distributors

The sixties were tumultuous, and many of our traditional values and institutions were challenged. The Vietnam War came into our living rooms and seemed to drag on endlessly. Jack and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated. Richard Nixon followed Lyndon Johnson into the White House, and the country remained polarized over the war. Woodstock happened, and the Beatles invaded America. Movies were also developing a sharper edge. I had a great decade.

In 1958, I became director of advertising, publicity, and promotion at Continental Film Distributors, a company that enjoyed an outstanding reputation for handling specialized international films that the critics embraced with a passion. Continental was a small company with a big pipeline direct to the avant-garde British filmmakers going against tradition and making controversial films about the working class. For centuries, the British establishment had regarded themselves as benevolent rulers, but their own laboring class thought otherwise. This group always worked hard and lived under conditions that would make a Southern sharecropper's life seem idyllic. The British were also great at making films about their finest hour, along with stories from medieval times, and they're still doing it today. Witness Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love in 1998,along with the 2011 Academy Award winner, The King's Speech. They also had the war films down to a science. British filmmakers had largely ignored contemporary films with social significance, but a group of angry and articulate young filmmakers were about to change all this.

In rapid succession, Room at the Top, A Taste of Honey, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, and This Sporting Life, all films dealing with problems of the British working class, came to the screen and hit the marketplace with a resounding impact. Critics saluted filmmakers Tony Richardson, Jack Clayton, Lindsey Anderson, and Karel Reisz; recognized writers Alan Sillitoe, Robert Bolt, and John Osborne; and applauded actors Laurence Harvey, Albert Finney, Richard Harris, Tom Courtenay, Rita Tushingham, Rachel Roberts, and Joan Plowright.

These pictures and their stars, writers, and directors all became darlings of the critics and the media, and art-house audiences couldn't get enough of them. All of these pictures were distributed in the United States through the now very prosperous and highly visible Continental Film Distributors. I found myself right in the midst of this new energy, and it was very exciting.

Walter Reade Jr., who also owned movie theaters in Manhattan and New Jersey, owned Continental, while Irving Wormser, a highly respected film distributor, was its president. Irving, a dour man in appearance with a heart of gold, was my father figure. He hired me, and I reported to him.

Walter was a colorful character, very pompous, tall, ramrod straight, and impetuous and always with a carnation adorning his jacket lapel. He had inherited theaters from his father and was driven to exceed his father's successes. To a large degree, Continental Film Distributors fulfilled this need by giving Walter an international platform to discuss international cinema. He became a spokesman and an expert for this new wave of eagerly awaited films, and he also built some of the finest state-of-the-art theaters in New York City, including the Coronet, Baronet, and Ziegfeld in Manhattan, which are all still coveted by film distributors as choice locations for their product.

However, Walter had a darker side that called for total obedience. If he proposed an idea, no matter how harebrained it was, he meant it as a command. Some of his ideas were so outrageous they were unforgettable. AromaRama, according to Walter, would revolutionize the movie-going experience by offering real odors to match on-screen action, such as burning rubber from a car chase or cordite from gunshots. One character might be identified by the smell of pipe tobacco and another by the pleasant fragrance of freshly cut flowers. This system was put into the DeMille Theater on Broadway without being tested, and it was a disaster. The ugly smells overwhelmed the pleasant ones, and this ugliness was piped through the theater's ventilation system, leaving audiences teary-eyed and Walter with an empty theater. Today, he would undoubtedly be sued for this. Wonderama, another untested product, was a blatant rip-off of Cinerama and was equally disastrous.

I'm fearful my tenure at Continental would have been short-lived if I had been reporting directly to Walter, but a tension was building between us nonetheless. After three years, he announced he was bringing in Al Florshimer, a lovely guy who was a marketing executive in Walter's suburban New Jersey theater chain, to be my boss. To me, the handwriting was clear. Let's be realistic; theater exhibition was on the bottom of the movie chain, so theater owners didn't participate in the making of movies, nor were they involved in the marketing process. They licensed films to show in their theaters; they placed advertising material prepared for them in their local papers; and they sold lots of popcorn. However, Al's background didn't qualify him for this position, and Walter knew it.

The day I was told that Al Florshimer was going to basically be my new boss at Continental, I started a job search and explained to Irving Wormser, the president of the company, what had happened because he hadn't been apprised of Walter's plans. Further, I also told Irving that if he could be of any help, I'd appreciate it. Irving was one of the nicest men I ever knew. He had been a senior sales executive at Columbia Pictures and maintained continuing relationships with Leo Jaffe and Rube Jackter, Columbia's chairman and executive VP, respectively. Irving didn't hesitate to help, and within days, I had a luncheon interview with Bob Ferguson, newly appointed VP of marketing at Columbia, to discuss my joining the company in a senior advertising capacity. We got along famously until I told Bob I was looking for a salary of four hundred dollars a week, which was a big paycheck in those days. Consequently, the lunch ended in a hurry. I always suspected that Bob was shocked at my salary request because he wasn't making much more than that himself.

I also enlisted the aid of my friend Arthur Canton, who was cofounder of the public relations company Blowitz & Canton, a powerhouse with deep-rooted connections at all the major studios. The firm also did a lot of work for Continental. When I explained my dilemma to him, he arranged for me to meet Dan Terrell at MGM, who coincidentally, like Ferguson, had just been appointed VP of marketing. After three interviews with Dan, he offered me the job of advertising director at the salary I was looking for, and I accepted it on the spot. I didn't wait to get back to my office before calling Irving to explain what had happened. Irving repeatedly asked me if I had accepted the position, and when I queried him on this, he said we would discuss it when I got back. Amazingly, Columbia had called Irving the same day asking for permission to talk with me about joining them, and Bob Ferguson had called seven times. Columbia Pictures was prepared to meet my terms. I believe this made me the only guy to ever be offered such a position from two major studios on the same day. After I joined MGM, Walter and I stayed in touch. As a matter of fact, he was fond of saying that I was one of his "boys" who had gone on to the big time.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Movie Magic by Bill O'Hare. Copyright © 2016 Bill O'Hare and Matthew O'Hare. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface, xi,
Introduction: Getting My Foot in the Movie Door, xv,
Century Theatres and DCA, 1,
From DCA to Continental Film Distributors, 9,
From Continental to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), 23,
From MGM to Cinema Center Films (CCF), 69,
From Cinema Center Films to Paramount Pictures, 129,
From Paramount to Columbia Pictures, 137,
Life after the Studios: O'Hare & Associates, 143,
Conclusion: That's a Wrap!, 161,
Acknowledgments, 167,
Index, 171,