Word: paramount
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the creation. Right before your eyes, Paramount Pictures will attempt, using a rare blend of ancient skills and modern moxie, to manufacture a blockbuster hit. The blockbuster has, for the last dozen years or so, been cherished as the Miracle Aid cure for an ailing film industry and, for the moment at least, Paramount is rapidly becoming known as blockbuster-broker No. 1. In the way that one picture often constitutes a Hollywood trend, two can make a reputation, and Paramount's current supremacy is based on a pair of recent box office-boggling...
...year-old girl who died?" and "Make him an offer he can't refuse" into household catch phrases have another entry in the giant sweepstakes: a new film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's luminous classic The Great Gatsby. If selling can make it so, Paramount intends for the movie to be bigger than either of its predecessors. "After Love Story and The Godfather," says Paramount President Frank Yablans, "I think of Gatsby as the Triple Crown...
...Jewel. No one markets a movie better than Paramount's own odd couple (see boxes pages 88 and 89). An industrial-diamond-in-the-rough, Yablans, 38, orders the world around like a drill sergeant and employs a primal scream as casually as most people sneeze. The slight, agile Evans, 43, given to longpoint collars and cashmere sweaters, projects a kind of artless charm and wide-eyed aestheticism. But he is as obsessive about what he wants and is credited with being the figure who has, in show-business parlance, turned Paramount around. He runs day-to-day production...
...decided we would avoid the old Louis B. Mayer v. Irving Thalberg-style battles for power," says Evans. "We wanted to be like brothers." To post some fraternal boundaries, the men decided to split tangible rewards evenly. Both have the same amount of Paramount stock and make equal base salaries (a reported $250,000). It is hard, however, for two aggressive men not to covet the major credit for a success as gaudy as Paramount's. A recent 16-page advertising flyer-approved by Yablans -for new studio productions displays his photograph but fails to mention Evans...
...setting." Yablans calculates that the "totally choreographed" campaign has created some 1.5 billion impressions of Gatsby in the collective moviegoing mind, a statistic as unprovable as it is absurd. More important to Yablans, who is tightfisted as well as two-fisted in his business dealings, "the price was right." Paramount has spent a mere $200,000 for publicity and promotion so far, and it dipped into its $1.5 million paid-advertising budget for the first time only two weeks ago. The rest has been free...