Roadshow!: The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s, by Matthew Kennedy
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Roadshow!: The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s, by Matthew Kennedy
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Full-page newspaper ads announced the date. Reserved seats went on sale at premium prices. Audience members dressed up and arrived early to peruse the program during the overture that preceded the curtain's rise. And when the show began, it was--a rather disappointing film musical.In Roadshow!, film historian Matthew Kennedy tells the fascinating story of the downfall of the big-screen musical in the late 1960s. It is a tale of revolutionary cultural change, business transformation, and artistic missteps, all of which led to the obsolescence of the roadshow, a marketing extravaganza designed to make a movie opening in a regional city seem like a Broadway premier. Ironically, the Hollywood musical suffered from unexpected success. Facing doom after its bygone heyday, it suddenly broke box-office records with three rapid-fire successes in 1964 and 1965: Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, and The Sound of Music. Studios rushed to catch the wave, but everything went wrong. Kennedy takes readers inside the making of such movies as Hello, Dolly! and Man of La Mancha, showing how corporate management imposed financial pressures that led to poor artistic decisions-for example, the casting of established stars regardless of vocal or dancing talent (such as Clint Eastwood in Paint Your Wagon). And Kennedy explores the impact of profound social, political, and cultural change. The traditional-sounding Camelot and Doctor Dolittle were released in the same year as Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, representing a vast gulf in taste. The artifice of musicals seemed outdated to baby boomers who grew up with the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations, race riots, and the Vietnam War. From Julie Andrews to Barbra Streisand, from Fred Astaire to Rock Hudson, Roadshow! offers a brilliant, gripping history of film musicals and their changing place in our culture.
Roadshow!: The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s, by Matthew Kennedy - Amazon Sales Rank: #2179493 in Books
- Published on: 2015-10-01
- Released on: 2015-11-26
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.10" h x .80" w x 9.20" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
Roadshow!: The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s, by Matthew Kennedy Amazon.com Review A Look Inside: Roadshow!: The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s [Click Images to Enlarge] Peter O’Toole and James Coco are directed by a script-wielding Arthur Hiller on Luciano Damiani’s “depressing” set for Man of La Mancha. This was the film that killed the roadshow in America once and for all. From the collection of Photofest.
Director William Wyler and star Barbra Streisand confer during the filming of “Don’t Rain on My Parade” in Funny Girl. Body language suggests the two have switched jobs. Streisand is sitting in producer Ray Stark’s chair. From the collection of Photofest.
The Finian’s Rainbow gang: director Francis Ford Coppola, stars Petula Clark, Don Francks, and Fred Astaire, producer Joseph Landon and star Tommy Steele. From the collection of Photofest.
From Booklist *Starred Review* The Hollywood roadshow picture—a movie that opened slowly, a few markets at a time, with hoopla and reserved seating and higher ticket prices—dates back to the silent era. Big-budget musicals were a roadshow staple in the 1940s and ’50s, and by the ’60s, most musicals were roadshow pictures (and, not incidentally, cash cows). This hugely entertaining book tracks the decline of the Hollywood musical, beginning with what appeared to be the genre’s high point: the back-to-back-to-back financial successes of Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, and The Sound of Music. As film historian Kennedy notes, with success comes imitation, and the major studios, in some cases out of sheer desperation to turn a much-needed profit, raced to churn out as much product as they could. This led to a veritable avalanche of mediocre to downright awful movies like Doctor Doolittle, Paint Your Wagon, Star!, Camelot, The Happiest Millionaire, Darling Lili, and oh so many more. The author’s research is impeccable, his story fascinating (Greed! Desperation! Ego! An utter failure to understand what audiences wanted!), and his writing lively (he calls The Great Waltz, based on the life of Johann Strauss, “a great big lump of meh”). There were successful musicals in the mid-to-late ’60s, of course, and in the early 1970s (Fiddler on the Roof, for example, and the revolutionary Cabaret), but they were few and very far between—the studios’ relentless quest for more musical material and for the huge profits they hoped to reap essentially killed the big-budget musical. Kennedy sounds pretty upset about that, and, after reading this fine book, you will be, too. --David Pitt
Review "Everyone who loves the films of Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, and Gene Kelly wonders what happened to movie musicals after the 1960s. Roadshow! is an extensively researched and engagingly written account of the demise of musical film during those decades of tumultuous cultural upheaval." --Philip Furia, co-author of The Songs of Hollywood
"High of budget and misplaced of ambition, roadshow musicals define an arresting--and quite troubling--moment in the history of film. With meticulous research and a suitably critical eye, Matthew Kennedy details the plunge from feast to famine, from bounty to bankruptcy, from The Sound of Music to Song of Norway." -Richard Barrios, author of A Song in the Dark: The Birth of Musical Film
"Matthew Kennedy has written a colorful, entertaining and well-researched history of the Hollywood musical's greatest moment of crisis. This book helps to fill an important gap in our understanding of the postwar American film industry." --Sheldon Hall, Senior Lecturer in Stage and Screen, Sheffield Hallam University
"Hugely entertaining...the author's research is impeccable, his story fascinating and his writing lively." - Booklist
"In Matthew Kennedy's zesty, detailed investigation...we see one of America's most vital art forms implode so badly that it all but dies out...Yet the book does not read as a funeral. Mr. Kennedy writes with a sense of humor, opening up the bizarre backstage of these events." - Ethan Mordden, The Wall Street Journal
"'What were they thinking' is the subtext of virtually every page in Matthew Kennedy's informative history of the Hollywood roadshow...Kennedy's wincingly detailed chronicle of out-of control spending and egos makes it clear that many of the musicals he focuses on deserved to die, but he doesn't think the roadshow itself deserved to go with them." - Wendy Smith, The Washington Post
"Film historian Kennedy, in an erudite yet fetchingly entertaining style, traces the demise of ostentatious budget-busting Hollywood musicals...Kennedy juxtaposes the over-the-top theatricality and artifice inherent in these productions with the tumultuous societal and artistically discordant developments in the late Sixties EL some of the numerous stories, quotes, and anecdotes he excavates from production records and archives are priceless." -Library Journal
"It's compulsively readable candy for movie buffs...It is with considerable relish, flashes of dry wit, dead-on personal opinion, well-placed ironic asides, and impressively extensive research that Kennedy details the presumed aesthetic qualities and the production histories of all these movies." - John Karr, Bay Area Reporter
"It's a hilarious, gossipy, but ultimately serious look at how the humongously successful musicals of 1964-65 caused Hollywood to lose its mind." - Jim Farber, New York Daily News
"Roadshow! recalls an important but forgotten piece of movie history, and it is also packed with juicy gossip involving the personalities who worked on the mega-musicals...Kennedy mixes exhaustive research with sharp analytical skills for a very tasty read." - Joe Myers, Connecticut Media Group
"Much more than an entertaining foray into the rise and fall of a distinctly American art form, Roadshow! is an insightful and often discerning look at who we once were and how our values, priorities and tastes evolved during the turbulent decade of the 1960s. Indeed, social commentary is infused throughout the book in a way that brings the historical significance of musicals into sharp focus...Roadshow! provides a complete course in the cultural transformation that took place during this revolutionary period in our nation's history." - Aaron W. Hughey, Bowling Green Daily News
"Kennedy engages readers throughout with his charming storytelling." --The Gay and Lesbian Review
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Most helpful customer reviews
25 of 27 people found the following review helpful. A Little Discussed Trend of Hollywood History Makes a Fascinating New Read By James Robert Parish The phenomenon of gargantuan roadshow film musicals (with their high-priced reserved seat tickets, intermissions, souvenir booklets) engulfed Hollywood in the mid-1960s to the early 1970s. The huge commercial success of Twentieth Century-Fox’s 'The Sound of Music' (1964) seemed—at the time—to provide a heaven-sent salvation for Hollywood studios then buckling under the strain of diminished filmgoer attendance, changing tastes of moviegoers, and the downfall of the studio system. Using the philosophy that much bigger is always much better, Tinseltown studio honchos recklessly rushed to make mammoth song-and-dance screen projects such as 'Doctor Dolittle' (1967), 'Camelot' (1967), 'Star!' (1968), 'Hello, Dolly!' (1969), 'Paint Your Wagon' (1969), and 'Man of La Mancha' (1972). How these already gigantic financial investments skyrocketed into astounding fiscal irresponsibility and sank at the box office from lack of sufficient creative control is the meat of Matthew Kennedy’s fine new book 'Roadshow!: The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s'. Kennedy weaves an engrossing tapestry from an impressive array of facts as he relates how these overblown productions were born in haste, went awry in the craziest ways, and then floundered disastrously at the box office. What makes this excellent book so absorbing is the author’s colorful, highly readable chronicle. It smartly juggles the antics of dictatorial studio executives, often misguided creative talents, and desperate marketing gurus as they jumped blindly over the cliff of reason and entertainment value. What resulted from this chaos were colossal movie musicals misfires. Kennedy’s study of this little-explored area of Hollywood film history is an extremely satisfactory mix of detailed research, astute observations, and flavorful narrative. His chronicle is well-paced and grabs the reader’s attention from beginning to end as we relive the many wacky events that created these massive celluloid train wrecks. This is an excellent read!
19 of 20 people found the following review helpful. The Age of Exclamation Point Musicals By takingadayoff Oliver! Star! Hello, Dolly!A roadshow was a movie released by a major studio, in just a few theaters at first and with great fanfare, then weeks or months later, released slowly to other theaters throughout the country. Tickets were issued at higher than normal prices and with assigned seating. The idea seemed to be to make the movie experience more like a Broadway theater experience.I did not know about this phenomenon until I visited Graumann's Theater in Hollywood and saw a display of fancy tickets and programs from movies in the 1920s and 1930s. I didn't realize the practice continued into the early 1970s until I read this book.It all seems rather quaint now that the blockbuster movies are released on as many screens as possible all at once and if a new release doesn't impress on the first day, it disappears quickly. In the 60s even the worst flop would take months to fail.Matthew Kennedy begins with the most successful roadshow, The Sound of Music. This was the peak of the roadshow phenomenon and for movie musicals as well. For the next ten years, movie musicals got more expensive and overproduced and never achieved the success of Sound of Music. Movie studios went broke trying.Kennedy gets into the nuts and bolts of putting together a 60s musical and even into the finances. And then there's the gossip. The story of the making of Doctor Dolittle is my favorite of this bunch, with Rex Harrison insulting everyone, and his wife (who wasn't in the movie) creating a scene wherever she went. Of course the movies that were flops are the most fun to read about. Paint Your Wagon was doomed from the start, and Finian's Rainbow could have been halfway good, but boneheaded moves like filming Fred Astaire's dance scenes so that his feet weren't visible on screen kept it from having a chance.Roadshow! is a fun look at a slice of movie history.
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful. Well done By Irving Parke-Rhode I really enjoyed this book. Well researched and chock full of interesting tidbits about the series of big budget musicals from the mid to late 1960s that rolled off the Hollywood assembly line only to be greeted with apathy, indifference & sometimes hostility by the moviegoing public. I've long been fascinated by this period of Hollywood history and often wondered why no one had written a book about it, considering the huge sums of money lost. This book is the answer. Who knew that "Song of Norway" actually turned a profit? The end notes are worth looking at too for the occasional extra bit, for example, Fox abandoned the "Doctor Dolittle" Great Pink Sea Snail on the beach in St. Lucia. Whereabouts today unknown. The soundtrack of "Paint Your Wagon" was certified Gold, etc. Only complaint is a lack of pictures but university press books are often light in the photo department. If you're interested in this subject you need to buy this book.
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