Word: transamerica
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Nobody in the movie business, where negative thinking seldom intrudes, can remember a summer so financially successful. United Artists, a subsidiary of the San Francisco conglomerate Transamerica, is scooping up wads of money from Rocky, which has grossed more than $100 million, Network ($30 million), The Pink Panther-Strikes Again ($40 million) and Woody Allen's Annie Hall, which took in $14 million in only seven weeks. Competitors are openly envious. Sighs Charles Bluhdorn, chairman of Gulf + Western, which operates Paramount Pictures: "I saw the first 15 minutes of Rocky, and I said, 'Why the hell didn...
...towers. Chicago, the birthplace of the skyscraper, has set the pace. It has tapering buildings, round ones and free forms; dozens have been completed in the '70s. Over them all broods the 110-story Sears Tower, with its pinwheeling arrangement of setbacks. In San Francisco, the 48-story Transamerica building looks like a cross between an oil derrick and the Pyramid of Cheops. The latest statement-if not the last word-is New York's: its shimmering 34-story One United Nations Plaza, designed by Architects Roche/Dinkeloo and opened last month, has taken a form as abstract...
...course, is not always-or even usually -borne by the studio. De Laurentiis, Levine and Coppola, for example, are independent producers who raise much of the production cost themselves; the studios put up part of the money and take care of distribution. Thus United Artists, a subsidiary of Transamerica Corp., will pay only 20% of the cost of producing the two war movies. Indeed, studios are generally loath to spend as liberally as in the era of Cleopatra. Says MCA President Sidney Sheinberg: "If Jaws had cost $20 million, we would not have made...
...were startled by the apparent lack of security precautions. They flashed their tickets but underwent no check against guest lists, no opening of purses or X-raying of briefcases. "There's more security on an airliner than there was for the President at that moment," recalled John Chase, a Transamerica Corp. vice president. A perspiring Ford pushed through the milling guests...
...whole movie industry has changed dramatically since Aubrey joined it eight years ago. Several of the six remaining major Hollywood companies have become mere subsidiaries of profit-directed conglomerates like Gulf & Western Industries (Paramount) and Transamerica Corp. (United Artists). High-cost extravaganzas have become as rare as singing cowboys and have been replaced by Aubrey's genre: lowbudget, high-profit black films (Cleopatra Jones) and Kung Fu films (Fists of Fury). What future role Jim Aubrey may play in the new Hollywood that he helped shape is a question that will have to wait for his announcement of what...