Number One On Bob Hope Road: Fill & Download for Free

According to Davidson Kahn, distinguished University Professor and Professor of Law at Florida International University in an article published in 2015 by Huffington Post:Crosby had 43 number-one hits — more than the Beatles and Elvis put together. His career total of record sales tops one billion albums sold, making him the most popular singer ever. “White Christmas” alone has sold more than one-hundred million copies and is the all-time best-selling single.In movie ticket sales he ranks just below Clark Gable and John Wayne. For 15 years he was on the list of top ten box office draws. For five of those years he was number one. He won an Academy Award for Best Actor (Going My Way). The “Road” movies he made with Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour were wildly popular over a period of 22 years. He entertained the U.S. soldiers tirelessly during World War II, and the GIs voted him the person who had done the most for their morale. Life magazine declared in 1945 that, “America’s number one star, Bing Crosby, has won more fans, made more money than any entertainer in history....[He] is a national institution.”

I don’t think anyone yet has mentioned four from the forties and fifties, when everything was so controlled that nothing was ever allowed to go wrong…. normally. But, in “Road to Morocco”, when the camel placed behind Bing Crosby and Bob Hope as they swapped insults suddenly turned and spat straight into the eye of Bob Hope, Bing’s reaction was one of the funniest things in the movie, so the whole incident stayed in.Talking of reactions (but probably not noticeable on a small TV screen), the big scene in “The Towering Inferno” was when a huge cascade of stored water from above was released to “drown” the burning building, and the stars were strapped into the set that was about to be destroyed around them. It must have been because they found it was too expensive to rehearse it, or maybe it just happened before Fred Astaire was ready, but at the first explosion of entering water, the poor man (used to daring feats while dancing, but not while strapped in) nearly jumps out of his skin! No one acts THAT well!One of the better-known accidents that was left in a movie was in “On the Waterfront”, when, walking with the star (Marlon Brando) through a park in a location scene, Eva Marie Saint drops her glove. Without missing a beat, Brando, staying in character, picks it up, teases her with it, pulling away just as she reaches out for it, playfully puts the tiny thing on his own hand, and, for the next few minutes, makes it a feature of the whole scene. Director Elia Kazan decided that it deserved to stay in the finished movie; Brando subsequently won the Academy Award for the role. In his acceptance speech, he did not acknowledge the glove.Finally, poor Jane Russell in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”. When I first saw the movie, I assumed that her tumble into the water in the last few seconds of her musical number, “Ain’t there Anyone Here for Love”, was all part of the staging. However IMDb assures us that it was an accident: one of the dancing divers supposed to sail over her miscalculated, and poor Jane was knocked, very heavily, straight into the pool and, for a few seconds, quite disappeared under the water. Apparently, director Howard Hawks thought that kind of visual “gag” was just what the movie needed, so he used that “take”, simply adding a tag later, with Jane in the pool singing the final couple of bars.

I think the premise is myopic. Remakes, reboots, and sequels have ALWAYS been a major part of popular American cinema and part of storytelling in general. Heck, the primary format of television and radio storytelling has always been “if you liked this story, come back next week for more of the same.” At the beginning of American popular cinema, the dominant format was the serial. People had to go to the cinema sixteen times to get all of the chapters of The Perils of Pauline. Olympic swimmer Buster Crabbe became a movie star by playing Flash Gordon thirteen times in 1936.In 1926, the New York Times included a film called Don Q, Son of Zorro (1925) in their ten best films of the year list. That film, starring Douglas Fairbanks was a sequel to The Mark of Zorro (1920). It was here that our “modern” trend of superhero sequels began. (As a neat bit of connective tissue, it was The Mark of Zorro that young Bruce Wayne and his parents saw, the night of his parents’ murder.) The Mark of Zorro was, itself, remade in 1940. There have, to date, been eleven Zorro films. There have been more Zorro films than there have been Batman films.A lot of the films in the 1930s were sound remakes of silent films from the previous decade. Here, studios were taking proven properties and regenerating them for the newer medium. There’s nothing new about remakes. The giant epic classic Charlton Heston films The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben-Hur (1959) were both, guess what… remakes.Long before the Marvel Cinematic Universe or the DC Extended Universe film franchises, there was the Universal monster movie franchise. From the 1920s to the 1950s, they made dozens of films using characters like Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Wolf Man, and the Invisible Man. They made sequels, they made teamups, and they made remakes. For example, House of Dracula (1945) was a sequel to House of Frankenstein (1944), which was a sequel to both Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) and Son of Dracula (1943). Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man was a sequel to Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) and to The Wolf Man (1941). The Ghost of Frankenstein was a sequel to Son of Frankenstein (1939), which was a sequel to Bride of Frankenstein (1935), which was a sequel to Frankenstein (1931). Son of Dracula was a sequel to Dracula’s Daughter (1936), which was a sequel to Dracula (1931), which was an adaptation of a Broadway show which was an adaptation of a book. A lot of movie film there and none of it an original idea.No-one in the 1930s-1960s saw a series of films as an unusual thing. Here’s a few examples:Between 1932 and 1948, Johnny Weissmuller starred in 12 Tarzan films. After that, Weissmuller played Jungle Jim 16 times, between 1948-1956.Between 1934 and 1947, Myrna Loy and William Powell starred in 6 Thin Man filmsBetween 1937 and 1941 there were three Topper filmsBetween 1939 and 1946, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce starred in 14 Sherlock Holmes filmsBetween 1958 and 1976, Christopher Lee played Dracula in 10 filmsBetween 1937 and 1958, Mickey Rooney starred in 16 Andy Hardy filmsBetween 1938 and 1950, Arthur Lake and Penny Singleton starred in 28 Dagwood and Blondie filmsBetween 1968 and 1973, five Planet of the Apes films were released.Between 1943 and 1951, a collie named Lassie had 7 theatrical films.If there was a decline in such film series in the 1960s-1970s, it was largely because the format shifted to television. Zorro, Lassie, and the Planet of the Apes, for example, all got television series.The number one box office draw in 1942 was the comedic duo Abbott and Costello. Between 1940 and 1965, those two guys made 34 theatrical length movies together, essentially playing themselves. During that same period, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis made seventeen films together and Bob Hope and Bing Crosby made seven “Road to…” movies, together. Other prolific comedic team-ups include Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges. When an audience likes something, it is a fairly safe bet that they will like more of the same. There have been 31 Godzilla films, for goodness sake.However, what has changed is how well the love of sequels shows up at the very top of the box office. Here’s a graph showing the comparison between new properties and sequel/franchise properties within the top 20 performing (at the box office) films for each decade of the last 80 years. There is a non-debatable transition from about 10% of those 20 films being sequels to 90% of those films being sequels.Since the media tends to focus on what is popular, it stands to reason that these are the films that get the most media attention, and therefore it is understandable that a skewed perspective can be formed that there has been a seismic shift in film production. But, let’s expand the field a bit and look at the Top 100 films from each of the last several years. Here’s a graph of the number of sequels in those 100 films for each year.So far, in this decade – the decade that *appears* to be all sequels – the average number of films in the Top 100 that have been sequels is 21.3. Roughly 1 in 5 of the most successful films is a sequel. That’s hardly an abundance. Expand that list out to the Top 200 and the percentage goes down farther, as we account for more of the experimental (and less commercial films).That’s a key point that has to be covered in a discussion on this topic – The films that make it to the multiplex do not so much reflect the creativity limits of the film makers, they reflect the creativity tolerance of the audience. It is expensive to go to the cinema and there are many competing forms of entertainment. When people make the decision to go or not to go, whether or not they can trust a film to suit their tastes often depends on their comfort level with the material. To get audiences to show up, filmmakers find themselves repeating the same mantra of television “if you liked this story, come back next summer for more of the same.”There is no dearth of creativity in Hollywood. There is a plenitude of writers with original ideas. The problem is, that the numbers say that being original is not a safe investment. We can see that by looking at the box office performance of the five films nominated for Best Original Screenplay at this year’s Oscars. The best performer was Get Out (2017). That film was a cultural phenomenon. It said something that caught the zeitgeist and that put it in 15th place for the year. It’s opening weekend was about 100 times larger than that of the other four nominees. The other four films came in between 46th place and 65th place in the annual box office. These are the five original scripts that the writers in the academy thought were the best, and in a culture where the average person sees less than ten films a year (at the cinema), weren’t anywhere near that Top 10 list. The performances they ended up with are also significantly augmented by the attention they got by being nominated.The more original a movie idea is, the less data there is that investing in it will return a profit. That means that the more original a movie idea is, the less a studio will likely spend on it. That creates a clash with why people choose to see a film in the theater versus at home on their television. The cost and competition for the cinema experience means that a film presented in the cinema needs to offer something that waiting to see it at home does not. Sometimes that is simply timeliness – people wanted to be involved in the discussion about Get Out (2017), so they went to the cinema, even though it wasn’t a film that benefited from the facility. But often it means a sensory experience: giant IMAX screens, 3D images, a dozen speakers putting out thousands of watts of sound, seats that react to the sound, and sometimes even released mist. Watching Avengers: Infinity War (2018) on the big screen is different from watching it at home. Watching The Big Sick (2017) on the big screen is not really different from watching it at home. That means that more and more film producers are taking advantage of alternative distribution methods to make the investment in original content profitable. Many small indie films are available for home rental at the same time as they are available to theaters.There is no end to the “golden age of American cinema” there is just a change in where focus is drawn and a change in how film is experienced. Many excellent and original films still get made, every year.