Hollywood, after years of profitably cranking out fodder to feed TV’s terrible tapeworm, has almost relegated the theatrical film— once its 18-carat bread and butter—to the limbo of relics along with the two-reel comedy and the Mighty Wurlitzer. Last week filmdom’s labor leaders, in an effort to lock the studio door after the horse opera had gone, enlisted the aid of the House Subcommittee on the Impact of Imports and Exports on American Employment to do something about the problem of “runaways”—films made overseas by U.S. companies. The hard fact: of the 38 American films currently shooting, 20 will be made wholly or in part away from Hollywood.
U.S. companies have been making pictures abroad in increasing numbers for a variety of reasons. Among them: they cost less, foreign governments subsidize them lavishly, and authentic locales have become important for audiences conditioned to television’s you-are-there immediacy. U.S. extras get about $25 a day for doing what an Italian extra would do for $5.
Star witness for the defense of runaways was Actor Charlton Heston, who flew in from Hollywood to testify as vice president of the Screen Actors Guild. Heston insisted that, personally, he much preferred working in the comfortable U.S. to “climbing Mount Sinai barefoot” or “riding hour after hour in a chariot in the vicinity of Rome.” But many of the films cited by the complaining unions “couldn’t have been made at all if they had not been made abroad.” In fact, the runaways were helping Hollywood stay in business. Ben-Hur, he argued, saved M-G-M from bankruptcy. But if it had been made in Hollywood, it would have cost prohibitively more than the $14.5 million it cost to make in Rome.
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