Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This is the summer Hollywood will remember as the one when people came back into movie theaters in droves. One smash hit after another is building the biggest box-office crush moviemakers have ever seen, and there is no end to the lines in sight. The perfect summer movie -light, fast moving and uncomplicated -usually turns up every year or two in the form of the "monster hit," that film everybody has to see. In 1975 it was Jaws. Last year it was Star Wars, the most successful film of all time. This year it is Star Wars again. Sweeping...
...biggest factor in this success is that Hollywood has emerged from ten years of soul-searching, issue-oriented movies with a batch of flicks like Heaven Can Wait and National Lampoon's Animal House that are sheer fun. Paramount Chairman Barry Diller has three big hits -the result, he says, of "a decision to get into pictures that made people feel good...
Whatever its other merits, a movie thriller cannot go anywhere without an exciting story. This may seem an obvious point, but somehow it is lost on Hollywood's more headstrong producers. Two years ago, Robert Evans unveiled Marathon Man, a showy production that hopped all over the world without ever arriving at a credible or coherent plot development. Not to be outdone, Producer Jon Peters has now brought forth Eyes of Laura Mars. Like Marathon Man, this film is long on trendy settings, high-priced actors and vicious murders, but devoid of narrative thrills. Peters is betting-incorrectly-that...
...problem with The Swarm, in which it sometimes seems that the character actors may outnumber the bees. There is much evidence that heavy cutting took place after shooting (why no one thinks to do this before the cameras turn, when it is ever so much cheaper, is one of Hollywood's enduring mysteries), since many scenes have nothing much to do with one another. The most egregious error of this sort concerns a geratic triangle involving Olivia de Havilland, Ben Johnson and Fred MacMurray that has no relation to the insect world. Then, too, one wonders about Michael Caine...
These days Simmons races around in yellow aviator-shape glasses and flashy shirts, hopping between Manhattan and Hollywood. He has a twelve-movie deal at Universal, and will follow Animal House with a film version of Lemmings. Veteran Lampoon writers, in various combinations, are at work on film scripts for Simmons and themselves...