Word: sound
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Sound tracks have become the key to orchestrating a box-office...
...performed by Kenny Loggins, was sent to radio stations six weeks before the movie opened. A second single from the movie, Shalamar's Dancing in the Sheets, was released three weeks later, and a third, Bonnie Tyler's Holding Out for Hero, a week after that. The sound-track album and a promotional video also came out weeks before the movie. When the film itself finally opened around the country in mid-February, the groundwork had been laid: Footloose the movie was the nation's top-grossing film for the first three weeks of its release...
Footloose is probably the most sophisticated example yet of the prominent role that musical sound tracks are playing in the marketing of Hollywood movies. Music used to be merely an afterthought or, at best, a happy byproduct of the movie. But the success of Saturday Night Fever in 1977, with its hit Bee Gees score, taught Hollywood a valuable lesson: rock sound tracks can be not only big sellers but big promotional tools for the films they embellish. The lesson was resoundingly driven home with last year's Flashdance, whose album (4.9 million copies sold...
Flashdance was just one of five sound tracks that ranked among the 50 top-selling albums of 1983 (along with Staying Alive, Yentl, The Big Chill and Return of the Jedi), and Hollywood will try to launch several more in the coming months. The most elaborate after Footloose may be Streets of Fire, a futuristic rock fable directed by Walter Hill (The Warriors, 48 Hrs.) and featuring Marine Jahan, the unbilled dancer who doubled for Jennifer Seals in Flashdance. Scheduled to open in June, the film includes songs by Stevie Nicks, Tom Petty and others...
Producers insist that the sound-track boom has not marred their judgment of what makes a good film. Moreover, even the youngest of the new Hollywood moguls can recall the heady months following Saturday Night Fever. The studios scrambled to duplicate that film's success and came up with such box-office flops as FM, I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Says Footloose Executive Producer Daniel Melnick: "If you don't have a picture the audience really enjoys, you could have 100 hours a week on MTV and it wouldn...