At the end of 1968, Variety printed its annual list of the highest-grossing movies of all time. One-third of the top twenty had opened in 1967. Highest of all was The Graduate, which eventually became the third-most successful movie in history, surpassed only by The Sound of Music and Gone With the Wind. The movie ran in theaters for almost two years. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner became the eleventh-highest-grossing movie ever. Valley of the Dolls and The Dirty Dozen finished sixteenth and seventeenth, and To Sir, with Love was in a nineteenth-place tie with Bonnie and Clyde, which grossed more than six times as much in 1968 as it had in 1967, even surpassing the James Bond film You Only Live Twice. In the Heat of the Night was rereleased after its Best Picture win and finished its initial run with a solid worldwide gross of about $16 million, five times its production and marketing budget.1 Doctor Dolittle returned just $3.5 million in rentals to 20th Century-Fox, less than 15 percent of its production and marketing costs.2
The success of the pictures in the class of 1967 focused Hollywood’s attention on a new generation of moviemakers and moviegoers and heralded what is now seen as a second golden age of studio moviemaking that lasted roughly until the late 1970s, when audience tastes and demographics changed once again and the dawn of the summer blockbuster era generated a durable new economic model for the movie business. But old Hollywood—the Hollywood of producer-and studio-driven product intended to reach the widest possible audience—didn’t disappear; it simply reinvented itself. Even at the height of the new-Hollywood revolution, when Altman and Coppola and Mazursky and Scorsese and Friedkin and Schlesinger were dominating the conversation, the studios were beginning to find a way of creating and selling their product that didn’t depend so much on directors. In 1970, Universal, the last-choice studio for much of the previous decade, released Airport, the first movie in what soon came to be known as the “disaster” genre. It quickly became the most popular movie since The Graduate. Many of the films that followed it—The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, The Swarm—were written by Stirling Silliphant, who died in 1996 at age seventy-eight.
By the spring of 1968, Warren Beatty had begun to develop an interest in John Reed and the Russian revolution. After the Academy Awards, Variety columnist Army Archerd reported that Beatty was “off to Mexico—‘to get away from the phones.’ And then maybe to London before his big opus—a film in Russia.” That plan changed when Beatty became actively involved in politics for the first time, working on Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign. When he returned to acting later in 1968, it was as a last-minute replacement for Frank Sinatra in George Stevens’s little-seen drama The Only Game in Town. Beatty turned down Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for the chance to work with Stevens, and never regretted his decision. Throughout the early 1970s, he continued to collaborate intermittently with Robert Towne on the screenplay for Shampoo; they finally made the film in 1975, after Towne’s breakthrough success with the screenplay for Chinatown. Seven years after that, Beatty got around to Reds.
Robert Benton and David Newman teamed up as screenwriters on several more projects, from 1970’s There Was a Crooked Man … to 1982’s Still of the Night, while also pursuing separate careers, Newman as a screenwriter and Benton as a writer-director. Benton went on to win three Academy Awards, for writing and directing Kramer vs. Kramer and for writing Places in the Heart. Newman died in 2003 at age sixty-six.
In late 1968, Arthur Penn directed Alice’s Restaurant, an adaptation of Arlo Guthrie’s eighteen-minute comic talking-blues song that was one of the first studio movies to deal explicitly with the anti–Vietnam War movement. Penn won a Best Director Oscar nomination for the film and followed it with Little Big Man, a project on which he had been working since before signing on to Bonnie and Clyde and on which he worked, once again, with Faye Dunaway. The success of The Thomas Crown Affair in 1968 made Dunaway one of the most sought-after young actresses in Hollywood; she followed the film by returning to work for her theater mentor, Elia Kazan, playing a thinly disguised version of Kazan’s wife, Barbara Loden, in the director’s widely panned adaptation of his own novel The Arrangement. Dunaway then joined Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man, which was a major popular success.
In 1969, just two years after it acquired the company, Seven Arts sold Warner Brothers to Kinney National Service, an owner of parking garages. Later that year, Jack Warner left the company he and his brothers had founded. He produced only two more movies, 1776 and the long-forgotten Dirty Little Billy, both of which were released by Columbia Pictures. One of his last unrealized ambitions was to make a gangster movie the way it “should be made.”3 He died in 1978, soon after his eighty-sixth birthday.
Shattered by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, Norman Jewison left the United States, turned in his and his family’s green cards,4 and moved to Europe after completing the film Gaily, Gaily. In 1969, Jewison made good on his promise to help his longtime friend and colleague Hal Ashby break into directing, producing Ashby’s debut, the comedy The Landlord. The seven films Ashby directed in the 1970s received twenty-four Academy Award nominations. Ashby died in 1988. He was fifty-nine.
Jewison’s next several movies, including the musicals Fiddler on the Roof and Jesus Christ Superstar, were made abroad. Fiddler on the Roof, which opened in 1971, was one of the last successful reserved-seat road-show musicals, which, in the few years since Doctor Dolittle and Camelot, had become a virtually extinct genre, a victim of changing tastes and the failure of Hello, Dolly!, Star!, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Paint Your Wagon, On A Clear Day You Can See Forever, Song of Norway, Sweet Charity, Half a Sixpence, and The Happiest Millionaire.
After winning his Academy Award, Rod Steiger received only one offer for a major role during the next year. He talked of playing Macbeth onstage and of his ambitions to portray Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and Edgar Allan Poe in movies, but nothing came of it. “There was absolutely no explanation,” wrote Claire Bloom. “It is just the luck of the game. Rod lay on the sofa in the living room and watched sports programs on TV.”5 Steiger fell into a deep depression; in what he later called his “dumbest career move,”6 he turned down the one offer he got, which was for the title role in Patton. Steiger felt that had he starred in the movie, he might have had a chance at Marlon Brando’s role in The Godfather. Steiger went on to appear in nearly one hundred more movies before his death in 2002. In 1999, thirty-three years after they worked together on In the Heat of the Night, Jewison cast him in a small role in The Hurricane, the story of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter.
In the summer of 1968, Jack Valenti decided to abandon the Production Code once and for all. Later that year, the Motion Picture Association of America unveiled its first movie ratings system, designating all films with a rating of G, M (Suggested for Mature Audiences), R, or X. The week that the first set of movie ratings was announced, Production Code chief Geoffrey Shurlock retired at the age of seventy-four; he died in 1976. The ratings system was revised several times thereafter; Valenti defended it zealously even after his retirement in 2004, after thirty-eight years running the MPAA. He died in 2007.
Richard Zanuck was forced out of his job running 20th Century-Fox at the end of 1970, after three years during which the studio lost over $100 million, despite the release of Planet of the Apes, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Patton, and The French Connection. “What did me in was the big musicals,” he says. “Doctor Dolittle, Star! and Hello, Dolly!—three bombs in a row. Unfortunately, that more than counterbalanced the great success of all the other pictures that I did. What can you do? Nobody had crystal balls.”7 Zanuck partnered with David Brown, one of the few 20th Century-Fox executives who had sounded a note of caution about movie musicals in the late 1960s, to form Zanuck /Brown Productions. Two of their first movies were The Sting and Jaws.
Mike Nichols and Lawrence Turman each received 16 percent of the profits from The Graduate. After its success, Nichols and Buck Henry re-teamed as the director and writer of Catch-22, an $18 million adaptation of Joseph Heller’s novel that began production in early 1969. The film was Nichols’s first financial failure. Two weeks after the 1968 Academy Awards, Joseph E. Levine sold his company, Embassy Pictures, to the Avco Corporation for $40 million in stock. In the fall of 1968, the new company, Avco Embassy, released its first reserved-seat road-show film, The Lion in Winter. The movie was Katharine Hepburn’s first picture after the death of Spencer Tracy and won her a second consecutive Best Actress Academy Award in the spring of 1969.
Nichols still owed Levine one more movie and rebounded from Catch-22 by directing Carnal Knowledge for him in 1970. Levine resigned from Avco Embassy in 1974 to become an independent producer. He died in 1987.
Dustin Hoffman came back to New York after the Academy Awards. In the summer, he began work on his next movie, John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy. His salary rose from the $20,000 he had been paid for The Graduate to $250,000. In September, Hoffman returned to working in the theater, starring in the Broadway play Jimmy Shine. Elizabeth Wilson came to see the performance and have dinner with her “son.” When she got into Hoffman’s limousine after the show, “these young girls surrounded the car,” she says, “and they started pushing it back and forth and shouting, ‘We want you! We want you! We want you!’ My God, they practically tipped the car over. It was like he was one of the Beatles.”8
“What I’m trying to do is keep my feet on the ground,” said Hoffman in 1968. “This sudden stardom stuff completely knocks you out of perspective.” Hoffman visited his psychoanalyst twice a week.9 In 1969, he married his longtime girlfriend, Anne Byrne.
“It’s nice, and slightly frightening, and it’s not going to last,” said Katharine Ross of the dozens of offers that came her way after the success of The Graduate. “I want to do something that is really good. … But how do you decide as an actress what’s really going to be good? I can’t tell. If I saw a part with a lot of horseback riding, I’d say ‘Hey, that’s good.’”10 Soon after, Ross signed to costar in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
After Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Stanley Kramer made six more movies before retiring. None were financial or critical successes. (The first of them, 1969’s The Secret of Santa Vittoria, was the last screenplay written by William Rose, who died in 1987.) “Stanley would get an idea for something contemporary,” says his longtime associate Marshall Schlom, “but by the time it would get to the screen, it was old news.”11 But the immense financial success of Dinner allowed Kramer to weather his failures; his share of the film’s profits, which he received incrementally through the 1970s, totaled more than $4 million.12 Kramer died in 2001 at the age of eighty-seven. Since 2002, the Producers Guild of America has given an annual award in his name, administered by his widow, Karen, to a producer “whose work illuminates provocative social issues.” Among the winners have been Good Night, and Good Luck, Hotel Rwanda, and An Inconvenient Truth.
Katharine Houghton made a handful of films after Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, but “the movie showed me,” she says, “that Hollywood was just not my calling, that the movies were not where it was gonna be for me, and that I should go back into the theater.”13 She continues to work as an actress and playwright.
Leslie Bricusse tried his hand at a movie musical one last time with 1970’s Scrooge. The film was to star Rex Harrison, but two weeks before production was to begin, Harrison dropped out, citing illness. He was replaced by Albert Finney.
Richard Fleischer directed twenty-two more movies after Doctor Dolittle, none of them family musicals. He died in 2006 at age eighty-nine.
Unhappy with his new assignment at The New York Times, Bosley Crowther officially retired from the paper in September 1968 to take a consulting job with Columbia Pictures, but he continued to write about movies, publishing several books of criticism in which he revisited old films. In 1977, he returned to Bonnie and Clyde. In his reconsideration of the movie, he called it “clever and effective,” admitted that Beatty and Dunaway brought “interesting and affecting emotional range” to their roles, and wrote that he now appreciated Arthur Penn’s calibration of lightheartedness and bloody violence, which made the movie’s climax “shattering and sad.” Bonnie and Clyde, he concluded, was “a landmark. … No film turned out in the 1960s was more clever in registering the amoral restlessness of youth in those years.”14 Crowther died in 1981.
After Doctor Dolittle, Arthur Jacobs’s career as a producer was saved by the huge popularity of Planet of the Apes. The film spawned four sequels, all of which he produced. In May 1968, soon after the Academy Awards, Jacobs married his girlfriend, Natalie Trundy; he found small roles for her in all of the Apes sequels. Jacobs never lost his enthusiasm for movie musicals. Undeterred by the failure of Doctor Dolittle and Goodbye, Mr. Chips, he went on to produce popular children’s musicals based on Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in the early 1970s. In 1973, while working on the latter film, he suffered a fatal heart attack. He was fifty-one.
Shortly after the 1968 Academy Awards, Sidney Poitier was named the biggest box office star in America in a national poll of theater owners, the first time a black actor had ever held the top spot. He was, he told an interviewer, “totally free—owned by no man or woman.”15 It didn’t matter; as Poitier himself had predicted, his days as a movie star were over. In the face of increasingly brutal and public attacks—“Even George Wallace would like that nigger,” said H. Rap Brown after seeing Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner16—Poitier retreated, by degrees, from the very public life that he had led. He gave fewer interviews, he spent less time in the United States, and while he continued to make movies for several more years (including two in which he reprised his role as Virgil Tibbs) before a twelve-year retirement from screen acting that began in 1977, none of them had the cultural or popular impact of the three films he made in 1967.
Poitier rarely spoke in detail of the pain he felt at being jeered as a symbol of accommodation to white America. Stanley Kramer urged him to keep working, to try not to think about the insults, to stay focused.17 As ever, Poitier kept his own counsel. A couple of years after their rift, he and Harry Belafonte repaired their friendship; in 1972, Poitier stepped behind the camera for the first time to direct Belafonte in Buck and the Preacher. He went on to direct eight more movies.
In 1967, shortly before the release of In the Heat of the Night, Poitier told a reporter that he had always tried to “make a positive contribution to the image of Negro people in America” with the roles he had chosen. “I guess I was born out of joint with the times,” he said. “I have not made my peace with the times—they are still out of kilter. But I have made my peace with myself.”18
1. Interoffice memo from Norman Jewison, July 3, 1968, Jewison Collection.
2 “List of All Time Box Office Champs” and “Big Rental Films of 1968.” Variety, January 8, 1969; and “List of All Time Box Office Champs.” Variety, January 7, 1970.
3. Thomas, Clown Prince of Hollywood, op. cit., p. 300.
4. Author interview with Jewison.
5. Bloom, Leaving a Doll’s House, op. cit.
6. Gorman, Steve. “Oscar-Winning Actor Rod Steiger Dies at Age 77.” Reuters, July 9, 2002.
7. AI with Zanuck.
8. AI with Wilson.
9. Klemesrud, “Dustin Hoffman: From ‘Graduate’ to Ratso Rizzo, Super Slob,” op. cit.
10. Champlin, Charles. “The Graduate’s Girl Friend.” Los Angeles Times, January 22, 1968.
11. AI with Schlom.
12. Columbia Pictures memo, April 17, 1968; Columbia Pictures memo from Phil Leonard to Stanley Kramer, January 6, 1970; and letter from Edwin E, Holly to Sam Zagon, December 17, 1971, all from Kramer Collection, UCLA.
13. AI with Houghton.
14. Crowther, Bosley. Reruns: Fifty Memorable Films (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1978).
15. Sanders, Charles L. “Sidney Poitier: The Man Behind the Superstar.” Ebony, April 1968.
16. Hoffman, Sidney, op. cit.
17. AI with Karen Kramer.
18. Barthel, “He Doesn’t Want to Be Sexless Sidney,” op. cit.