Elliott Gould as “The Entrepreneur”

The movie business these days depends on “the package,” and an actor makes it when he is “eminently packageable.” But even for the big new star of 1970 the money is still “on the come.”

By Martin Mayer

During the production of the musical film Funny Girl in 1967, two rather marginal members of the group in daily attendance formed first a friendship and then a business partnership. One of them was Elliott Gould, a promising but far from established (indeed, mostly unemployed) young Broadway actor, who was present on the set as husband and quondam business adviser to the star of the film, Barbra Streisand. The other was Jack Brodsky, an experienced movie public-relations man who had once significantly exceeded his function and enraged his studio by publishing as a book (The Cleopatra Papers) the letters he and another flack had exchanged during the hair-raising events of the making of the Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor Cleopatra.

Gould and Brodsky were brought together by a common loyalty to the old Brooklyn Dodgers, the New York Mets, and the New York Knicks, and by a shared interest in the novels of Bernard Malamud. Like many p.r. men who have lived close to movie producers, Brodsky was convinced he could produce pictures better than most of those who in fact attempt it. Like many actors disappointed in Broadway, Gould was hoping to find work in movies, and hoping also that when the work came it would be in parts that would have some meaning for him. Between them, they rustled up the $30,000 necessary to buy an option on the movie rights to The Assistant, probably Malamud’s best novel, and formed Brodsky-Gould Productions, Inc., to be ready to produce it.

Early in 1971—probably in February—the first Brodsky-Gould movie will open in New York. It will not be The Assistant, which still hangs fire, but Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders, with Gould himself in the role he created three years ago in a Broadway production that closed like a door after only one week. This picture was financed and will be distributed by Twentieth Century-Fox. By the time it emerges, Brodsky-Gould will almost certainly have finished its second picture, A Glimpse of Tiger, an original screenplay that the partnership owns, and that has already been “green-lighted,” as Brodsky puts it, by Warner Brothers. Not long thereafter, the partnership will proceed to film a screenplay on Malamud’s A New Life (for Warner) or Bruce Jay Friedman’s The Dick (for Fox) or something based on Dr. David Rubin’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (for Paramount). Though Gould and Miss Streisand are now separated, Brodsky-Gould will also produce a new picture for our most popular chanteuse, an original screenplay interestingly entitled Breaking Up. In addition to all these properties, for which the partnership already has the key commitments, there are a number of projects in earlier phases of development. “We have more balls in the air than a battalion of paratroops,” Brodsky says. “But I don’t want to talk about them. My training as a press agent was that if a producer read a book and said, ‘I’m interested in that,’ I was supposed to turn it into a page one story for the Hollywood Reporter. I’m sick of that.”

The changed status of Brodsky-Gould was brought about, of course, by the emergence of Gould as one of the movie industry’s most salable stars. Even in the Funny Girl days, he had been a known quantity to some theatre professionals—indeed, he had met Miss Streisand when they both appeared in a Broadway show, I Can Get It for You Wholesale, in which Gould had the top billing. In those days he was a hoofer (he sang and danced on television opposite Carol Burnett in a special of Once Upon a Mattress and toured opposite Liza Minelli in the road show of The Fantasticks). But he was not what you might call a committed hoofer: “I considered myself promising and driven and nervous.”

Help from the family agent

Gould had aimed himself at show business from a very early age: he spent his youthful summers semipro on the borscht circuit, and three of his four years in high school were at the Professional Children’s School (the other, his junior year, was in West Orange, New Jersey, to which his family had moved on departing Brooklyn). Broadway’s view seems to have been that he was talented but maybe not very talented, and by the mid-1960’s he had taken on the look of a used male ingenue. He was devoting most of his time to supervising Miss Streisand’s affairs—“I had the responsibility for a family, and it was crucial that I know what the intentions of the people advising us were because my mate didn’t”—and to developing television ideas, none of which ever produced a program, for their jointly owned Elbar Productions.

The man who insisted on Gould’s potential as an actor in serious, nonmusical films was David Begelman of Creative Management Associates, Miss Streisand’s agent; and Begelman, a very persuasive, deliberate businessman in a gray flannel suit (who carries a classic black lunch box to work in C.M.A.’s large and elegant Madison Avenue offices), got Gould a small part in the film The Night They Raided Minsky’s. This led to Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a movie about adultery and wife swapping in the moneyed suburbs of San Francisco, in which Gould played the square husband. The next stop was M*A*S*H, the Joe College romp in a Korean war surgical tent, which won first prize at Cannes. More recent pictures have included Getting Straight and Move (the latter Gould’s first flop), and some time next month Universal will release I Love My Wife.

With exceptions: these movies have made their primary appeal to what is called the “youth market”—the nearly 26 million Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five who aren’t afraid to go out at night and whose relatively limited financial obligations leave them the disposable income to buy first-run movie tickets at $3 a whack. Gould himself is thirty-two, and not automatically identifiable as part of a youth movement. More than six feet tall, with rich black curly hair and an optional thick mustache (or even beard), he does not fit the mold of slight, whining figures that has recently been considered the correct self-image for the nation’s male young. But the appeal is definitely there, as anyone who cares to stand around the box office at a Gould movie can see at a glance, and it is obviously worth money. “You have to understand,” Gould said, reflecting on the exponential growth of his production company, “Brodsky-Gould never expected Gould to be as packageable as I’ve become.”

One executive wears socks

Legally, Brodsky-Gould is a joint venture of two other corporations, Elliott Gould Productions and Woodbury Productions, and it does not in any way control Gould’s services as an actor, which are separately sold by a company called Melloroll, Inc., formed in June, 1969, with Gould as sole stockholder. Until August of this year, Brodsky-Gould functioned out of a tiny one-room office (“like Sam Spade’s office,” Gould recalls affectionately) in a slummy block on Manhattan’s West Fifty-eighth Street. Now the producing company is housed in a duplex on much more fashionable East Sixty-first Street; as summer ended, the furniture was beginning to arrive, and the company had acquired its first permanent nonclerical employee—Daniel Broun, a novelist a few years older than Gould, who was the stage manager on one of Gould’s first Broadway appearances. (“They hired me,” Broun says, gesturing at Brodsky’s sneakers, “because they needed somebody who wears socks.”) Gould himself will come to Sixty-first Street rarely if ever: he has installed a secretary on the colonnaded parlor floor of his Greenwich Village home. Checks are signed by the company’s (and Gould’s) accountants, Michael and Donald Hecht, in offices at the Paramount Building on Broadway; formal negotiating is done mostly by Gerald Lipsky, a Los Angeles lawyer “who once,” Brodsky says with appropriate awe, “represented Howard Hughes”; and the tie line from Creative Management, which represents Brodsky-Gould as well as Gould the actor, runs to Brodsky alone. But Brodsky is on the phone with Gould “six or seven times a day,” talking about deals. “Nobody,” Gould says, “can make decisions for anybody. In everything involving me, the ultimate decision has to be mine.”

The total investment in this company, which may spend as much as $10 million to produce films next year, has been $100,000, and the partners have no intention of increasing that figure. Studios have covered the “front money” for every production for which Brodsky-Gould has made significant commitments (even the $30,000 for The Assistant has been reimbursed by Universal, though no film is in sight). In negotiating for properties like The Dick, which cost $125,000 cash on the barrelhead, Begelman and Brodsky showed such fast footwork that the company’s commitments to the author were covered by the studios before the money had to be paid.

Right now, beyond question, almost anything to which “Gould is willing to commit” can be financed, through a studio or by independent lenders, even though it means that this inexperienced duo will be carrying all the responsibilities of production—casting, hiring technical staff, scheduling, supervising the cut. “The studio executives now know,” Begelman says drily, “that they can’t make actors like Paul Newman or Robert Redford or Elliott Gould cross-collateralize their judgment with that of businessmen whose track record is less good than theirs.” The other side of the coin is that Gould’s success is still far from making him rich: most of the income he could have expected to earn in this annus mirabilis of 1970 is still, in the idiom of the business, “on the come.”

“I’II tell you about losses”

As recently as a decade ago, much of this story would have been in varying degrees implausible. Financial, technological, and social changes within the movie business have destroyed forever the predominance of the seven giant studios. Today, movies get their start not in executive offices but in the reveries and conversations of directors, actors, writers, and agents. “Ideas germinate here,” says Richard Shepherd of Creative Management’s Beverly Hills office; “not generate, but germinate.” Whether the industry can make money under these conditions is still uncertain, and depends to a large extent on the performance of operations like Brodsky-Gould.

What has happened to the movies, briefly, is that someone took away the floor. Before the late 1940’s, when the studios were forced to divest themselves of their theatre ownership, any film could be guaranteed a minimum number of bookings by its makers; and as the bottom half of a double feature it could grow respectable income figures even if nobody liked it. Even where theatre ownership was independent, tie-in sales could be manipulated because exhibitors were in competition for headline productions. A large chunk of the movie audience went to the show as a matter of routine, and it would put up with a lot. Today the number of outlets is down; the double feature is nearly dead; the audience has learned to stay away; the exhibitors are truly independent and often choosy. Nobody except a star attraction (and sometimes not even a star) can guarantee any income for a film. “You name me a studio,” says Richard Shepherd, who was a producer (Breakfast at Tiffany’s) before he was an agent, “and I’ll tell you about a $10-million loss. There are pictures today that don’t get back the cost of the prints.”

To make technically professional films as recently as ten years ago required elaborate studio installations. Each scene had to be “set up” with strong lights perfectly placed before sets built and painted to exacting specifications. “Today with the fast films,” says Jack Lemmon, who has reactivated his Jalem producing company, “you can shoot color in your house in a dark room by candle-light-and fill a big screen with the results.” Unless the picture needs period sets (like Hello, Dolly, which left $1,600,000 of wood and plaster and paint as decor on what remains of the Twentieth Century-Fox lot behind the glamorous real-estate development at Century City), producers now find it much cheaper to do all their work, indoors and out, on the site. Thus John Lindsay has been able to sell the idea of filming in New York, where an apartment in a building the city is about to tear down can be made available for $50 a month and looks just like a New York City apartment. Shooting on a studio lot has become unfashionable, except for television things, which are supposed to be unfashionable, anyway.

Movies have always been made with borrowed money. The studios could offer lenders the security of the revenues from all their pictures, hits as well as misses, even if the specific loan had financed a flop—and studio revenues were and are much larger than those available to mere producers, because the studios have large incomes from distributing the films to the theatres. Nevertheless, despite an increasing number of hits, studio incomes were not great enough to support the multimillion-dollar losses on pictures like Star, The Greatest Story Ever Told, or Sweet Charity, plus the run-of-the-mill losses on run-of-the-mill pictures, plus, finally, the waste of money on projects that never got to the screen at all.

The existence of these disasters was hidden from stockholders by accounting practices that permitted studios to consider everything an assetat cost until a film was actually released. Thus the worst mistakes, which would never be released at all, could appear on the books in black ink for years. “It’s like your wife tucks dirt under the rug for four years,” says Shepherd of Creative Management, “then comes in one day and says, ‘Look at all that dust—there must have been a sandstorm.’ ” Not long after Kinney bought Warner Brothers-Seven Arts the parent wrote down some $27 million, explaining lamely that “we didn’t buy the studio for its assets.”

Buying by the package

To maintain their reputation at the banks—in some instances, their solvency—the studios have had to sell off important assets. Real estate, foreign theatres, television rights to the whole library of older films—all have been fed into the apparently insatiable maw of working capital. In the old days the bankers who put up the money to finance moviemaking were a small group in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles, and they were willing to rely on the pledge of future revenues—sweetened, of course, by the glamour of the stars. Today’s bankers (a greatly expanded, worldwide list: United Artists alone has loans outstanding from more than fifty banks on three continents) have become concerned about the specific “package” their money will be used to produce. Elliott Gould became a businessman, as he himself points out, because he was “packageable”; the adjective used for the same deal at a studio probably would be “bankable.”

The package, which is the seed of the picture, normally consists of a literary property, a treatment for screen purposes or even a first-draft script, plus the commitment of one or two major actors or actresses and a director. The cost of putting together the package is the “front money” that a producer must invest before he can get backing to make a picture. In general, producers try to keep the front money small by means of “step” deals, in which the author, screenwriters, director, and such receive a fraction of their total price to do preliminary work, an additional fraction for developing the project to the point of casting and costing, and the largest fraction only when the film actually goes into production.

If a picture is to be financed outside the context of a studio organization, the package must be wrapped pretty tight, and the front money required may go well into six figures. If a picture is to be made on a studio’s credit (as most are), the studio may step in quite early in the development of the package and put up the front money itself. “Usually,” says Richard Zanuck, president of Twentieth Century-Fox, “somebody comes in here with what he calls a package, and it turns out that the extent of his investment was buying a book at Martindale’s bookstore.”

Whether the deal is made independently or with a studio, the producer gets his front money back immediately—“just the length of time it takes the machine to kick out a check,” says Michael Hecht, Gould’s accountant, “plus the mails from California.” He will have no further out-of-pocket expenses in connection with the picture. In addition to his fee as producer, which may run as high as $250,000, he will receive in the standard studio deal 50 percent of the profits on the picture. These profits, however, are hard to come by. They do not appear until the studio has recovered not only the “negative cost” (i.e., the cost of making the film itself) but all the other costs that can be allocated to this production. “It’s amazing how they add up,” says Jack Lemmon—“prints and advertising and interest rates...”

On its side, the studio receives the other 50 percent of admitted profits, an override of up to 25 percent on the budgeted cost of the film to cover studio overhead (some of it probably fictional when the picture is made, as most are, away from the studio lot), plus the right to distribute the film at a fee of 30 percent or even 35 percent of what are probably best described as gross wholesale revenues (i.e., the box-office receipts less the theatre owner’s share), plus 40 percent or even 45 percent of foreign revenues. The distribution fees support each major studio’s network of a hundred or more sales offices around the world, but there is unquestionably something left over. Against the fact that only one picture out of four shows a profit to the producer must be set the fact that many, maybe most, show a profit to the distributor.

For a long time it has seemed to the actors and writers and directors that the studios were taking an extraordinary cut out of the revenues in return for their services as middlemen. Way back in the days of the silent screen, Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford attempted to keep this money for themselves by setting up their own studio, but such ventures collapsed one way or another, in the depression if not sooner. When the idea of actor-controlled producing companies was revived in the early 1940’s it was mostly as a response to the escalation of the income tax. Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant, among others, formed production companies that were essentially means of selling their own services on a capital-gains basis, and of giving their lawyers an extra tool for digging money out of the studios. Probably the first modern in-business producing company controlled by an actor was John Wayne’s, in 1947. Of the twenty-one pictures produced by Wayne’s company, now called Batjac, only eight have starred the Duke himself.

Permanent floating profit mill

Batjac, currently operating out of the C.B.S. studios on the old Republic lot in North Hollywood, is a specialty operation. Michael Wayne, the actor’s thirty-four-year-old son and president of Batjac, says, “Outdoor adventure is our bag, to use language I don’t ordinarily use. We buy and develop literary material, take it to the screenplay stage, then package it. Then we take a look at all the financing and distributing operations and try to figure out which studio is looking for our type of product.” Batjac has about fifteen permanent employees on an annual payroll of about $200,000, and its field office is peripatetic, moving to whatever studio is engaged in financing a Batjac production. (But Batjac’s computer, the only instrument of its kind operated by an actor-controlled producing company, is permanently housed on the Paramount lot. It issues the company’s checks and a running budget report during productions, so expenses can be compared to forecasts, accurately, every week.) On an average day, Batjac will have about $200,000 of its own money at risk in developing properties for which no studio has yet committed.

Wayne and Batjac are the only actor and producer who have been able to retain the very favorable terms on which many studios signed contracts in the mid-1960’s: Batjac pictures with Wayne as their star usually make a potful of money. (“It’s an industrial product,” says Ted Ashley of Warner Brothers, which financed and distributes Chisum; the picture cost about $4,500,000, and seems certain to bring more than $20 million to the box office worldwide.) As a result, Wayne can demand an acting fee of $1 million per picture against 10 percent of the studio’s wholesale gross; and Batjac, on pictures starring Wayne, can demand a contract that returns a share of “profits” to the producer not when the studio says there are profits but when gross receipts pass a certain pre-negotiated multiple of the negative cost.

Among Batjac’s most cherished employees is a man in New York who keeps an eye on box-office receipts, worldwide, to make sure that none of the distributors succumbs to the temptation to skim some profits off the top. “You never know what figures people throw around,” says Michael Wayne. “That’s the advantage of experience. It doesn’t make you any smarter, but it makes it harder for people to snow you.” Others do not have Wayne’s guaranteed pull at the box office, and cannot make such deals. Kirk Douglas, for example, has decided to take his Bryna Productions out of the studio nexus and into separate financing. His current picture, Jules Verne’s A Light at the Edge of the World, was financed by Spanish banks; the one just finished, A Gunfight (co-starring Johnny Cash), was financed by the Jicarilla Apache tribe of New Mexico, strictly as an investment. (“It’s not made on their reservation,” Douglas says, “and there aren’t any Indians in the picture—except Charlie Vigil, president of the council of the tribe, whom we worked into a scene walking down a street. I called him Chief, and he said he wasn’t a chief, he was a president of the council; I told him I’d seen too many bad movies.”)

One group of Creative Management’s stars (Miss Streisand, Paul Newman, and Sidney Poitier) plan to go directly to the stock-buying public to raise capital for their First Artists Production Corp., which has as its only assets an option on the services of the principals for three pictures each—plus a reduced-price distribution deal with the National General theatre chain because, says Begelman, “these will be easy pictures to book—you can do it on the telephone.”

Actors are being driven out of the usual studio deals by the failure of the studios to deliver profits to be split, a failure that the actors and their agents have not been able to fathom. All participation contracts, of course, give the participators the right to audit the books, and every picture does get audited, but it doesn’t always help. “I worked my head off on Spartacus,” Douglas recalls, “went to London, got Laurence Olivier, Jean Simmons, Charles Laughton—put everything together, made a deal with Universal. The picture cost $10 million, of which $2,500,000 was overhead, though at that time the rental of the whole studio property was only about a million a year. The picture’s grossed $28 million, and I haven’t been paid a nickel. I call up, they say, ‘It’s not quite at breakeven yet—but it’s close...’ ”

The Hungarian partners principle

This experience has been disturbing but scarcely damaging to Douglas, who was paid both an actor’s and a producer’s fee for his work on Spartacus. (“As you see, I live pretty comfortably,” he said, waving his hand to encompass the Picasso over the mantel at his Beverly Hills home, the swimming pool in the garden, the tennis court behind the swimming pool. “I’ve done all right.”) But the new deals, while potentially more profitable than the Spartacus arrangement, are also much riskier for the actors. Neither Douglas nor Cash was paid anything above Screen Actors Guild minimum for his work on A Gunfight; neither Miss Streisand, Newman, nor Poitier will take acting fees for First Artists productions. Warren Beatty is doing a film for Warner Brothers: “For practical purposes,” says Warner’s Ted Ashley, who used to be an agent, “his fee is zero—but his profit participation comes, naturally, much earlier than it would if he were get ting paid.”

Assigning actors a share of profits but no fee is an attractive idea to the studios and bankers as well. The pressure to keep investment below $2 million—or at the outside $3 million—is so great that the studios say actors should risk the payment for their time as the moneymen are risking the return of their capital. “These people have made major concessions,” Shepherd says, speaking for Creative Management clients as a group, “on the principle that Hungarian partners should laugh and cry together. If at the end only one guy is laughing, then watch out.”

A stable of stars for $40,000

It is onto this scene that the doors open, stage left, to admit Elliott Gould and Brodsky-Gould and Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders.

The play, a “black comedy” about a timid photographer who is forever getting beat up in New York, had not been regarded by the studios as natural movie material, but Gould always had seen it as a film.” When he became strong enough, to use the delicate phrasing of Robert Lantz, Feiffer’s agent, he bought the picture rights. Gould, though an actor, accepts the French theory of the director as auteur (“It’s the director,” he says, “who accomplishes the vision”), and he sent the script of Feiffer’s play to Jean-Luc Godard, the talky French Maoist with a painter’s eye.

“I didn’t hear from Godard for a while,” Gould recalls, “and then he sent me a great letter, he loved the idea. We met for the first time in San Francisco, while I was doing Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, and he got involved.” Godard’s fee to become involved—to think about the project—was a $15,000 advance, which Brodsky-Gould paid. Godard wanted to work with Robert Benton and David Newman, the partnership that had written Bonnie and Clyde, and they wanted to work with him. Their fee as screenwriters had gone to $150,000 a picture with the success of Bonnie and Clyde, but they agreed to do Little Murders, to Godard’s specifications, for $50,000, which would have to be paid, however, in advance.

Brodsky-Gould now had a package, and took it to David Picker, president of United Artists. U.A. was willing to commit to the idea provided the budget was in line. “Then Benton and Newman made the success possible,” Gould says earnestly, “by deciding not to write the script.” (This gratitude is a recent development, and incomplete: Brodsky-Gould has a lawsuit pending to force Benton and Newman to return the $50,000. Brodsky says they have agreed to do so when they get some money.) Another writer took over and made a plausible screenplay in four weeks, but now Brodsky-Gould couldn’t find the right director. At this point Alan Arkin, who had directed a successful off-Broadway production of the play, indicated an interest in the film if author Feiffer would revise the script himself, and United Artists okayed everything.

Now there arose the question of production money. U. A was cutting costs, and the studio was interested in Little Murders partly because, in Picker’s words, “it was very short cash.” The literary property and screenplay (including the money for false starts) came to about $140,000. Brodsky-Gould was happy to take a producer’s fee of $100,000. Arkin had never directed a picture before, and was willing to accept $75,000, throwing in his services as an actor in the small part of an insane detective. (Brodsky-Gould is also giving him, from its share, a participation of 7½ percent in the profits.)

Another friend of Gould’s, Donald Sutherland (who had been the central figure in M*A*S*H), was prepared to play a bit part for almost nothing. And Gould himself was willing to defer his fee entirely, taking in return the first $200,000 earned after the picture broke even. As a result, the projected expenditure for acting talent was only $40,000. To budget the costs “below the line,” Brodsky hired Burtt Harris, a splendidly theatrical young ex-actor (and ex-steelworker) in flowered shirt and pageboy haircut, who had been John Schlesinger’s assistant director on Midnight Cowboy. Harris and his partner Fred Caruso, in consultation with Arkin, developed a nine-week shooting schedule and a total budget of about $1,350,000 for “the negative”—and United Artists said, “No.”

“It can lose what it cost”

“With a first-time director,” U.A.’s David Picker says, “you have to expect a film will come in 10, 20 percent over budget. We were willing to risk a million one, a million two—but not a million six or seven. There’s no particular secret about the fact that Midnight Cowboy ran a million dollars over budget. The only thing I ever know for sure about a picture is how much it can lose: it can lose what it cost.” Brodsky, Gould, and Arkin agonized over U.A.’s demand for a lower budget and decided the picture couldn’t be done for a million dollars; and they didn’t want to start their careers as producers and director with a fraudulent document. Creative Management took the original budget to Twentieth Century-Fox, and forty-eight hours later the production had changed studios (Fox, of course, reimbursing U.A. for all expenses). From Gould’s point of view, the change was highly desirable. When he signed for Move! he had given Fox an option for three more pictures (at straight fees totaling $500,000, without participation in profits), and Little Murders would absorb one of the options.

Shooting began in New York last April 13. Rather to the surprise of Fox’s auditor on the spot, Arkin pulled ahead of schedule in the first week and stayed there. Everybody seems to have had a wonderful time except Brodsky, who found that Gould identified entirely with the director and cast. “I improvise a lot,” Gould recalls, “and Alan’s whole background is improvisation. It’s like faking a pass: instead of throwing it, as the script said, we ran sixty yards and scored. Jack would worry. I’d tell him, ‘You’ll see it in the rushes.’ ”

Brodsky’s worst moment came when Arkin decided he could not carry the burden of even a small role while directing. Brodsky rushed over to the shooting scene to expostulate, to point out that part of the deal with Fox was Arkin’s involvement as an actor, that he simply couldn’t—legally, morally, otherwise—back out now. Gould went over to Arkin and put his hand on Arkin’s arm and said earnestly, “Don’t let him talk you into it, Alan.” Brodsky said, near tears, “Elliott—remember me? I’m your partner.” Harris, as associate producer, worked out the problem by rescheduling the picture so Arkin would make his appearance before the camera only after he had completed nearly all his directorial labors, and the deal with Fox was maintained.

More than maintained: the picture came in about $80,000 under budget. (“The unions,” Harris says, “were terrifically cooperative. They don’t kill you any more. The younger generation is there now—the sons. They’re not electricians, they’re film makers.”) Richard Zanuck looked at the rushes in Los Angeles, made occasional telephonic suggestions, and in mid-August, on a trip to New York, approved Arkin’s rough cut of the picture. All pictures are triumphs before they are shown to the public, of course, as all weanling thoroughbreds are candidates for the Derby, but an air somewhat more convincing than the customary euphoria hangs about the professionals’ reactions to the rough cut of Little Murders. “Brodsky and Gould,” says Gould, “may get wealthy.”

“A pure profit deal”

And indeed they may. If Little Murders is a big hit like M*A*S*H, with box-office receipts of perhaps $25 million—or even half that—Brodsky-Gould will be sloshing about in money. But if the picture is merely successful—like, say, Paul Newman’s Winning—Gould might find himself with little but an improved business education to show for his experience. On the continuum of contracts that shows John Wayne at the bright end—his fee as an actor paid in advance, his participation as actor and producer calculated as a share of the picture’s gross rather than of its admitted profits—Gould stands at the dark end. The studio will determine, subject to audit and possible argument, when Little Murders has passed its breakeven point and Gould has become entitled to a share of future receipts. “This is,” says Richard Zanuck, refreshing his memory with a document, “a pure profit deal.” The advertised rule of thumb in the movie business is that a film shows a profit when the distributor’s wholesale gross is two and a half times the negative cost of the production. But it is understood that cheaper movies break even only at a higher multiple: Zanuck thinks three times will be closer than two and a half times in the case of Little Murders. The three times, moreover, must be applied not to the negative cost on Harris’ budget, but to that budget plus the Fox overhead charge. As Brodsky-Gould did not use any Fox equipment or space, the overhead charge contractually is only 10 percent—but on Fox’s own books the overhead charged is 25 percent. “That’s for our purposes,” Zanuck says rather airily. But Fox’s cost sheet is what the bankers have seen and backed. At best, Little Murders is carrying the interest costs for an extra $200,000 that Fox can use elsewhere.

A reasonable guess would be that Little Murders must draw about $9 million to the box office—$4,500,000 gross to Fox as distributor—before Gould sees the $200,000 promised him off the top of the profits in return for his agreement to waive his actor’s fee. By then, counting the overhead charge and the profits from the distribution division, Fox will be more than half a million dollars ahead. After that, Brodsky-Gould gets a cut—45 percent rather than 50 percent, because its bargaining position was weak. It should be mentioned in passing, for the benefit of those still unconvinced by Hamlet’s warning to Horatio about the things undreamed of in his philosophy, that the contract between Brodsky-Gould and Twentieth Century-Fox has not yet actually been signed, though the bills have been paid and the picture has been produced.

What Gould would do with all that money if it came in is something that intrigues Gould’s friends and Gould himself. “I used to be motivated a great deal by money,” he says thoughtfully. “And I was a compulsive gambler, on my opinions about the outcomes of ball games. I used to look at the stock market every day, just like the baseball scores, but my lot change just as the market started to decline, so I haven’t gone in.” His accountants say that he does have a small portfolio, “in the low five figures; used to be in the higher five figures, but you know what’s happened.”

Gould does not live austerely: his “flat in Greenwich Village” is in fact a duplex garden apartment of great elegance and charm, now being made even more charming and elegant by flocks of workmen (with whom he is on first-name terms); and for the month of August he rented one of the best houses in the fashionable Long Island resort of East Hampton. More than that Gould simply would not want. Though Elizabeth Taylor has been trying hard to revive them, the days of conspicuous consumption in the movie industry—“the era when they had to have the shinbone of St. Sebastian for a clutch lever,” as Irvin Cobb once put it—have long since departed. Younger movie people especially no longer look to the trappings of big money to prove the reality of their films; instead, they look to their films to prove their own reality as actors.

His own best patron

Like most Hollywood and Broadway actors, Gould’s political affiliations are with the left side of the Democratic party (“Paul O’Dwyer is a great man”). He gives some money to political causes, and if he had more he probably would—like, say, Jack Lemmon or Paul Newman or Kirk Douglas—give more. Most of all, he would like to be a patron of his own theatrical arts. “I get so excited when something turns me on. There’s a songwriter who came here the other day, nobody ever heard of him. I can sing; I’d like to do an album of his songs for a new company.”

For Gould, the real luxury of success and money is freedom to work—“I love to work”—at things he wants to do. As this is published, he will be in Sweden to make a movie, The Touch, for Ingmar Bergman; the project didn’t come up until July, but Gould could juggle his schedule when, in the words of Begelman, “he and Bergman fell in love with each other over the telephone.” When he returns from Sweden, he says, he plans to call and offer Sesame Street a month of his time, at union scale, on a basis of “what would you like me to do?” He sees Brodsky-Gould making a number of pictures, “all triple-A material, with terrific independent technicians.” If necessary and possible, he might even be willing to finance some of them himself.

What may count most heavily on Gould’s side over the long run—apart from his talent—is a factor unfashionable to mention in these days of systems and analysis: Gould is liked—even, in the full Willy Loman sense, well liked. He is a thorough professional on camera, and in his businessman role he falls easily into relationships like those with Burtt Harris and Fred Caruso, to whom Brodsky-Gould advanced $22,000—no interest, no firm repayment date, not even a signed instrument proving the loan—to help them get started in their own company. Harris says he can get together at any time, at three weeks’ notice, the entire crew that worked on Little Murders, to work for Gould again. “Everybody was very happy in that production,” says Robert Lantz, Feiffer’s agent. “Isn’t it terrible—that it’s so unusual? No hostilities.”

And probably there will be a lot of money, too. Brodsky and Gould expect so; Creative Management, which waits for its 10 percent, devoutly hopes so; even the studios, in their own way, would like to see Elliott Gould get very rich. But—even though he may be the brightest star on the silver screen—it hasn’t happened yet. “I have a great deal of promising equity in the films I’ve done,” says Gould. “My net worth is nothing.”