It was a quiet weekend in theatres the first weekend of August in 1982. Let’s see what was new in theatres…
On this date in 80s movie history, two new moderate to wide releases would join two New York City exclusive openings and three other regional exclusives in theatres:
After the unexpected success of Bruce Beresford’s 1981 Australian war drama Gallipoli in American theatres, American distributors left and right rushed to the land down under to make deals with with their Australian counterparts in order to try and duplicate Gallipoli’s success in America with other Beresford movies. Tiny independent distributor Stage Fright would pick up one of Beresford’s lesser known titles, the satirical comedy The Club.
The movie follows the ups and downs of an Australian rules football club over the course of a season, from a coach worried about losing his job when the owner’s pricey Tasmanian import doesn’t meet expectations, and the club president being forced to resign after assaulting a taxi dancer. Stage Fright would make the unusual move of opening the film first not in Los Angeles or New York City but at the Egyptian Theatre in Seattle. This seemed like a good idea, as it would gross a very strong $20k in its first three days, but then… the film didn’t really go anywhere after that. In a 1983 New York Times article about Beresford and his then-new movie Tender Mercies, the newspaper noted this film would only have a couple of playdates on the West Coast, and I cannot find any of them.
One of the many films I had never heard of before I started this project, from a distributor I had never heard of, with three actors I very much enjoy watching. This Canadian movie featured Annie Potts as Bonnie, a young housewife on a bus to Toronto to get an abortion. Her husband Stanley (Robert Carradine), unaware the baby is not his, is excited to become a father, nor is he unaware his wife has left to get the procedure. On the bus, Bonnie meets Rita (Margot Kidder), a free-spirited woman who is looking for work in the big city. By the time they reach Toronto, Bonnie decides to keep the child, and gets an apartment with Rita. They both find work at a local mattress factory, and help each other work through their new circumstances.
The film would first open at the Gateway Theatres in San Francisco, where it would open to $13k in its first three days. After three weeks in San Francisco, the film would have grossed an impressive $70k. But then it wouldn’t open in any other theatres in November 19th, when it opened in three theatres in New York City and four other theatres in three other markets, but the film would only manage a meager $44,200 in ticket sales from those seven theatres, and it would continue to have trouble attracting ticket buyers for the remainder of its run, due to its subject matter and the sheer number of movies playing in theatres at the time. Christmas 1982 was amongst the busiest winter seasons of all time, and Heartaches would get buried in the avalanche of product, finishing its theatrical run with only $247k.
United Artists Classics had already scheduled the release of the latest Rainer Werner Fassbinder film, Lola, when the filmmaker died of an overdose of cocaine and barbituates in a Munich apartment two months earlier. (He would have completed two other films, Veronika Voss and Querelle, before his death, which would be released in October 1982 and April 1983, respectively.) Lola tells the story of an upright, new building commissioner who arrives in a small town and in love with a famed prostitute and the mistress of an unscrupulous developer, two facts he is blissfully unaware of. Unable to reconcile his idealistic image of the young woman with the reality of her sitation, the commissioner spirals into the very corruption he had sought to fight out. Featuring Fassbinder regulars Barbara Sukowa and Armin Mueller-Stahl, Lola would open at the Lincoln Plaza in New York City to thunderous reviews and exceptional box office, $39K in three days from the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas. After 19 weeks in theatres, the film would sell $903,243 in tickets, partially hampered by the fact that the same distributor would try to lean in on the passing of the director by scheduling his next film, Veronika Voss, to be released just nine weeks after Lola.
One of my favorite movies of all time, based on one of my favorite albums of all time, from one of my favorite bands of all time. And of course, I’ve been listening to both The Wall and its follow-up, The Final Cut, while I’ve been writing this article.
The idea for the film was born from the mind of Pink Floyd bassist, lead singer, and main songwriter Roger Waters, who after the massive success of the band’s landmark album Dark Side of the Wall, was becoming increasingly isolated from the audiences. Venues were getting larger, the separation between band and fans was growing, and bands were increasingly pressured by their record companies to keep churning out new music. Waters would write an outline for a live show to accompany their tour supporting their 1979 album The Wall which would have been one of the first concept concerts, telling a story as the band played, which would include set dressings that would be built during the show (a literal wall, made of large cardboard bricks, would completely separate audience and band) to aid in the telling of that story. Waters would also “play” the lead character, Pink, during the concert, while he also played bass and sang. As the show continued, and the brick wall became bigger and bigger, animation by British artist Gerald Scarfe would be projected onto the wall that would help tell the story while the band continued to play behind the wall.
The production for the show tour was so massive, it would only ever staged in five cities across two continents, a total of 31 times between February 1980 and June 1981. But it was also Waters’ intent to film the concerts and have it edited into a feature film. And that’s exactly what happened. Except the footage wasn’t up to Waters’ standards, and the record distributor, EMI, agreed the footage was not worth the investment in time and money to complete.
Celebrated British film director Alan Parker (Bugsy Malone, Fame, Shoot the Moon), a big fan of Pink Floyd and the album, had heard about the trouble with the concert movie, and approached Roger Waters about possibly trying to make a dramatic narrative out of the story. It was already a full and complete story as it was, so it would more be an attempt to marry film images to the storyline.
Waters, with the help of several screenwriting How To books, would work on a screenplay, and a $12m budget for the film drawn up. But since the hero of the story, Pink, is meant to be in his late 20s, and Waters was approaching his forties, it was decided instead to cast a singer in that age range with some screen presence to play Pink. Parker’s first choice was Bob Geldof, the lead singer of The Boomtown Rats, who had just become semi-famous for their song I Don’t Like Mondays. It would take some convincing, but Geldof would eventually sign on to play the alienated rock star.
Filming would run from October to December 1981, and the film would be ready to make its world premiere at the May 1982 Cannes Film Festival, since most of Scarfe’s animation used in the movie came directly from the footage drawn up for the concerts. Opening at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York City, the film would gross a mind-blowing $120k in its first three days, thanks to the film’s shorter running time (95mins) and the theatre’s ability to get seven shows of the film in each day. When it opened at the Village Theatre in Westwood the following weekend, it would gross $93k, while the second-week numbers at the Ziegfeld would hold steady at $80k. As the movie opened in exclusive playdates in cities like San Francisco and Chicago and Seattle, the film continued to do well. When it was finally given a national release on September 17th in 653 theatres, it would be the third busiest film in the nation, with $2.71m worth of tickets sold. It would remain in the top ten for another seven weeks, but even after that, the film would just keep hanging on and on and on. By mid-November, the film was earning just under $200k per week on fewer than 500 screens, and had earned $14.2m. But when MGM finally stopped reporting grosses on the film the following spring, it had earned $22.24m in ticket sales, a remarkable level of longevity.
But here’s another amazing statistic about the film: when the film was released, The Wall album had sold about 1.5m copies. Based on the box office of the film ($22.24m) and the average ticket price in the US in 1982 ($2.94), about 7.5m people saw The Wall in movie theatres. For every one person who had bought the album, five people saw the film.
You know how, every so often, there seems to be two movies with similar ideas that come out around the same time. Like how there were two volcano movies, Dante’s Peak and Volcano, released within weeks of each other back in early 1997. Or two asteroids hitting the Earth movies, Deep Impact and Armageddon, in the summer of 1998. Or how there were two movies about 19th Century magicians in the fall of 2006, when The Illusionist and The Prestige arrived in theatres just weeks apart.
In 1982, the dueling films weren’t just similar, they were different versions of the same 1879 opera, The Pirates of Penzance by W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. While the other movie, delayed until 1983, would star actors like Kevin Kline and, in her first movie, Linda Ronstadt, who were reprising their roles from a successful 1980 Broadway adaptation of the show, along with Angela Lansbury. This movie would be a new musical with new songs, using the same basic storyline and characters, but starring actors like Kristy MacNichol and Christopher Atkins.
So which one would do better?
Despite some truly horrific reviews overflowing with vitriol for a couple of little known songwriters daring to rewrite Gilbert and Sullivan’s most beloved show, The Pirate Movie would open to an okay $2.53m from 757 theatres, on its way to a $9m gross about ten weeks in theatres. The Pirates of Penzance, though, would only gross $255,496 from 91 theatres in its first weekend in February 1983, in large part because most theatre operators boycotted the film when Universal Pictures decided to simultaneously release the film into theaters and on subscription television services ONTV and SelectTV. And despite some amazing reviews, this Pirates movie would be out of theatres after just three weeks and $694,497 in ticket sales.
Tex would not only be the first of three adaptations of an S.E. Hinton novel to be adapted into movies, it would be the first of three adaptations of an S.E. Hinton novel to be adapted into movies starring Matt Dillon in a fourteen-month period. Dillon plays the title character, a fifteen-year-old who gets into constant trouble with his seventeen-year-old brother Mason after their mother dies and their father leaves for the rodeo circuit, unable to deal with the boys and their collective loss. Tex would be amongst the first movies the Walt Disney Company would make that fell outside of its usual staple of animated films and goofy live-action family comedies, and its PG rating would confuse and anger some parents, who had become accustomed to just accepting any Disney movie would be family-friendly.
Opening on five screens in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the story was set, Tex would gross a decent but unspectacular $20k in its first three days. Tex would finally start to get a traditional release in late September, when it would gross a spectacular $36,800 in its first weekend at the Cinema I. That weekend, September 26th-28th, the film would outgross Paul Bartel’s Eating Raoul ($36,500), which had just played at the New York Film Festival to incredible reviews, and on a per screen average, would do better than My Favorite Year ($36k per screen), which would open on three screens that weekend. But despite a slew of very positive reviews, Tex would struggle with being a Disney movie but unlike any Disney movie ever made, and it would putter out with barely $7m in ticket sales after four months in theatres.
The fourth movie featuring America’s favorite stoner comedy duo, and the beginning of the downfall that would split the team up just three years later. In the film, Cheech and Chong play… I guess, versions of themselves if they never became famous… two wannabe musicians in Chicago who work at a car wash operated by two shady Arabs, also played by Cheech and Chong, who hire the other Cheech and Chong to drive them in a limo from Chicago to Las Vegas, unaware that the Arabs have stashed five million dollars of dirty money throughout the car.
Hilarity most certainly does not ensue as a series of dumb adventures that culminate with the duo becoming porn stars in order to help the Arabs launder the dirty money.
It’s sad to see the quality of their output fall so dramatically after three mostly funny films, especially just after Nice Dreams, their single best film. And while the film would open as well as one would expect from a Cheech and Chong movie, $5.9m in its first three days from 1516 theatres, the audience drop off due to poor word of mouth would be quick and painful. After just five weeks, the film would see its playdates down to only 500 mostly dollar house theatres, having grossed only $19.8m, and they would only manage to get that final total to $21.1m over the next fourteen weeks.
As for the national top ten, here’s what topped the list:
1) E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (Universal)
$9,438,813 from 1514 theatres.
$187.66m after nine weeks.
2) The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (Universal)
$6,292,139 from 1420 theatres.
$40.1m after three weeks.
3) Things Are Tough All Over (Columbia)
$5,906,708 from 1516 theatres.
$6.53m after five days.
4) An Officer and a Gentleman (Paramount)
$3,329,896 from 346 theatres.
$9.84m after two weeks.
5) The Pirate Movie (Fox)
$2,528,133 from 757 theatres.
$2.53m after three days.
6) Rocky III (United Artists)
$2,409,498 from 1024 theatres.
$100.48m after eleven weeks.
7) Night Shift (Warners)
$2,281,104 from 667 theatres.
$6.43m after two weeks.
8) Young Doctors in Love (Fox)
$2,062,100 from 728 theatres.
$17.79m after four weeks.
9) Poltergeist (MGM)
$1,903,479 from 805 theatres.
$58.14m after ten weeks.
10) The World According to Garp (Warners)
$1,766,274 from 368 theatres.
$10.36m after three weeks.