Today, we are going back 39 years, to look at the movies released into theatres on July 29th, 1983, and how the box office top ten looked that week.
On this date in 80s movie history, three new moderate to wide releases would join three New York City exclusive openings in theatres.
I spoke about this movie on our recent episode Baseball Movies of the 1980s, and as I said then, I had never heard of this movie until I came across it while I was researching that episode. The fairly progressive movie features Robyn Barto (in her one and only credited acting role) as a baseball-loving softball player who talks her way into a tryout for a minor-league baseball team. And while it’s refreshing that the film makes no attempt to pair her up romantically with the team’s owner (Harry Hamlin), it’s also an extremely inept film from start to finish.
The only reason to even attempt to find this movie, which is not available to stream anywhere and has not been available on home video since its last VHS release in 1992, is to see Andy Garcia in his very first film role. Opening on 15 screens in New York City, the film would gross only $10k, which was worse than the film’s test run in Denver and Miami back in April, when it had grossed $60k from 17 theatres between the two cities. It would not be given another chance in theatres, although it would enjoy a brief second life on cable towards the start of the 1984 baseball season.
Krull. To be completely honest, I’ve never seen it, and I’ve never had the desire to see it. As much as I love movies, and as much as I appreciate many of the movies Peter Yates made over the course of his career, from Bullitt and The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Mother Juggs & Speed and The Deep, Breaking Away and Eyewitness, to The Dresser and Suspect, I just have never been able to connect with this sci-fi fantasy story about a guy with a magic blade who needs to save the universe and a pretty space princess from an intergalactic bad guy who is literally called The Beast. The film, which had a very long and constantly evolving development period followed by a rushed production and post-production schedule in order to get the movie into theatres before the end of the summer, would get slammed by critics, and from 1281 theatres in its opening week, Krull could only conjure up $5.47m worth of ticket sales, before exiting theatres shortly after the end of summer with $16.9m in the till.
At one time in my youth, I loved National Lampoon’s Vacation. My excuse is that I was 15 and didn’t know better. Based on a story written by John Hughes in the pages of National Lampoon, Vacation updates the setting of Hughes’ original story from 1958 to the modern day, and thanks to an uncredited rewrite by Harold Ramis and Chevy Chase, the main focus would be from father Clark’s point of view instead of son Rusty’s. The successful release of the film ($8.3m opening weekend gross, $61.4m lifetime) would temporarily return Chevy Chase to the front lines of stardom, help elevate Christie Brinkley into something more than just a swimsuit model, and give the world its first serious glimpse of Anthony Michael Hall. Followed by a series of sequels of questionable quality, the best being 1989’s Christmas Vacation.
We’ve spoken about the movies of French director Éric Rohmer on the podcast a number of times. Although he had been directing movies since the early 1960s, the 1980s would prove to be his most prolific decade as a filmmaker, with no less than nine films during that ten year period. And Pauline at the Beach, the third in his “Comedies and Proverbs” series of films during the decade, would be amongst his most successful films in the United States.
Then 15-year-old Amanda Langlet played the title character, a French teenager who finds her first experiences with love and lust during a summer at a beach town in Northwest France. If you look at the poster above, you’ll see Langlet in the background on the left, sitting on the beach with one of the boys she meets that summer. But distributor Orion Classics knew that as good as Langlet is in the film, the true star of the film was the devastatingly gorgeous Arielle Dombasle, whose shapely back side would be placed front and off-center on the film’s American key art. It was more than enough to bring audiences in. In its first three days at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, Pauline at the Beach would bring in $43,436 in ticket sales. In its second week, The Lincoln Plaza would put Pauline on its second screen for five days, where the combined gross would be $55,500. The film would continue to make its way through the American arthouse circuit throughout the remainder of the year, and would end its five-month run with a final total just over $1.5m.
After a three-week test engagement at thirty-four theatres in Chicago in late April, Private School get a major national release on July 29th. Born out of the success of the 1981 teen sex comedy Private Lessons, starring Sylvia Kristel, Private School wouldn’t be a direct successor, although it would share the same producer, writer and Ms. Kristel in a small role playing a different character from the previous film. Best described as Porky’s meets Some Like It Hot, Private School follows the escapades of three young men from a private school for boys, including Matthew Modine, dress up in drag to spend more time with three young girls from a private school for girls, including Phoebe Cates. Wackiness, or at least what the film purports to be wackiness, ensues, as things get more and more complicated for all parties involved, who just want to have some fun (nudge nudge, wink wink).
It’s a mostly forgettable film, neither different enough from or nor raunchy enough to stand out from all the other teen sex films of the era. Opening on 1024 screens, Private School would open to sixth place with $4.41m in ticket sales, on its way to a final gross of $14.05m after twenty-two weeks. There would be a third movie in the unconnected Private movie universe, 1985’s Private Resorts, but thankfully, the threatened fourth movie, Private House Sitter, never materialized.
Side Note: If you regularly listened to Drew McWeeny and Scott Weinberg’s 80s All Over podcast, or listened to Drew during Joe Scott’s exceptional podcast Downlowd: The Rise and Fall of Harry Knowles and Ain’t It Cool News, you know how Drew felt about “marketing research expert” Joe Farrell. There is an excellent article about the making of Private School in the July 24th, 1983 issue of the Los Angeles Times, which describes in great detail how much Private School was literally the first film to completely be made based on market research, including major changes to the storyline at the screenplay level, the casting of the lead actors, to how the film was edited and re-edited based on test screening audience comments. It’s such a damning article, Private School producer Ben Efraim threatened to sue the Times a few days after the article ran, claiming a number of inaccuracies and misquotes in the article as being detrimental to his reputation, although I cannot find any actual suit ever being filed. It’s a fascinating read if you have access through your local library to the LA Times archives.
Once upon a time, Krzysztof Zanussi was one of the holy trinity of contemporary Polish filmmakers alongside his friends Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kieślowski. Sadly, Zanussi has mostly fallen into global obscurity, never having broken through the American cinema market the way Kieślowski and Wajda did. But in the early 1980s, Zanussi was a big enough draw in world cinema that one of his movies for Polish television could make its way onto American movie screens.
In Ways of the Night, a group of German officers are stationed in a country manor during World War II. One of the officers finds himself fascinated by the owner of the property, but his feeling remains unrequited from the woman. Despite great reviews from the likes of Vincent Canby of the New York Times, J. Hoberman of the Village Voice, and Stanley Kaufman of The New Republic, Ways in the Night would gross a decent $16k in its first weekend, but it would be overshadowed by a wealth of foreign language films hitting theatres in the late summer and early fall, rarely landing more than a one-week playdate in a single theatre in whichever major market it landed in. After three months, the film would barely make $100k in ticket sales.
As for the national top ten that weekend:
1) National Lampoon’s Vacation (Warners)
$8,333,358 from 1175 theatres.
$8.33m after three days.
2) Jaws 3-D (Universal)
$7,258,336 from 1311 theatres.
$27.52m after two weeks.
3) Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (Fox)
$5,659,948 from 1729 theatres.
$201.41m after ten weeks.
4) Krull (Columbia)
$5,469,415 from 1281 theatres.
$5.47m after three days.
5) Staying Alive (Paramount)
$5,276,994 from 1630 theatres.
$38.59m after three weeks.
6) Private School (Universal)
$4,411,961 from 1024 theatres.
$5.00m after three days, plus a three-week Chicago test run from April and May.
7) Trading Places (Paramount)
$3,043,667 from 1040 theatres.
$64.27m after eight weeks.
8) Class (Orion)
$2,965,138 from 844 theatres.
$10.17m after two weeks.
9) Snow White and the Seven Dwarves [reissue] (Disney)
$2,189,908 from 1061 theatres.
$20.05m after three weeks.
10) WarGames (United Artists)
$2,097,748 from 843 theatres.
$55.09m after nine weeks.