Halloween Harvest 2015 --- Part Two

The Biggest Audiences Hammer Ever Had

When did a largest-ever viewership sit down to Hammer films? By available evidence, it looks to have been during the 1967-68 broadcast season, when networks premiered Evil of Frankenstein(1-2-68), Hammer's Phantom of the Opera (1-30-68, repeated 6-29-68), and Kiss of the Vampire, as retitled Kiss of Evil (12-19-67), these shown on NBC. Then there was Die! Die! My Darling on CBS (1-27-67, repeated 7-13-67) and The Nanny (also CBS: 10-31-68, repeated 8-28-69). Ratings and audience share aren't there for every title, but it would appear that The Nanny was the best crowd getter of the primetime lot. A number of Hammer films would show up later on the CBS Late Movie, a 70's showcase where most monster boomers saw these films for the first time. Quick poll: How many caught The Nanny, or any of these Hammers, in a theatre as opposed to television? I'll bet statistics would go ten to one in TV, or cassette/DVD, favor. For vast viewing majority, the tube was primary source for not just Hammer movies, but all movies.

Veteran producer Edward Small pointed up the disparity to Variety on 11-17-65: "Most "A" pictures, with few exceptions, play to 5,000,000 people domestically (in theatres) over a period of five years. On TV, they are seen by twenty million in one night." Broadcasting magazine would estimate audience mass in a 4-27-70 survey, to wit "186 million men, women, and children in this nation's 58.5 million television homes today." Competition for high-end theatrical movies for network broadcast was ferocious, prices through the 60's on the up ... and up. Genres were rated by Broadcasting according to viewer appeal, "Science-Fiction" lying at flat bottom. It was OK for late shows and fallow daytime, but a primetime audience resisted far-out content, at least for the 60's period under consideration.

Movies were sold to networks, for a most part, on same package basis as syndication; " ... to acquire the blockbusters from a major studio, it is also necessary to buy the studio's dogs," said The New York Times in a 1-7-68 overview titled "The Silver Screen Is A Goldmine." Of course, there were minimal standards. Some of merchandise was unacceptable on its face, "of non-network quality and many produced in Europe and other parts of the world." These went to so-called "first-run" syndication, and would include most of Hammer films. Fox and Columbia, however, was able to salt CBS packages with The Nanny and Die! Die! My Darling, respectively, these more palatable for being "suspense thrillers" as opposed to monster label hung on most Hammers, and they featured meaningful 60's names (Bette Davis, Stephanie "Girl From U.N.C.L.E." Powers). The mid-60's had seen prices climb to an average of $300,000 for a feature on network primetime. That figure would be bumped by a historic deal inked between NBC and Universal in October, 1965, "About sixty U pix for network telecasting at an approximate price of $500,000 per pic," as reported by Variety on 10-27-65. There would also be "freshly produced features for TV, at a minimum budget of $500,000 per pic," said the announcement. The combination of first-run theatricals and made-for-TV's would run on NBC beginning with the 1966-67 season and thereafter.

The goodies included That Touch of Mink, The Birds, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Charade. Then there were the "World Premieres," shabby as most were (Ed Small referred to them as "garbage"), though ratings were often a wow. What smelled were small change Universals that should have gone straight to TV in the first place, or theatrical flops that NBC had to take in order to snare the good ones. $500K was tag hung on each of the feature lot, thus checks writ for The Brass Bottle, a McHale's Navy feature, and the three Hammers, Phantom of the Opera, Evil of Frankenstein, and Kiss of Evil. Added headaches from the horrors was necessity to shoot footage to take place of stuff nixed by network standards, or padding to fill a two-hour time slot. Maybe "Vampire" in a title was onerous to affiliates or family viewing, thus Kiss of Evil as amended moniker to enhance confusion and mislead those (very) few of us who'd bought tickets for Kiss of the Vampire back in 1963 and looked forward to seeing it again (not here as it turned out, NBC's version a historic shambles).

Further stain upon Hammers was fact none of the NBC three had done much good in theatres, Phantom declared a letdown in 1962, while Kiss of the Vampire of following year took piddling $357K in domestic rentals, followed by Evil of Frankenstein in 1964 earning $567K. Double these figures and you'll have something near the domestic gross, giving Evil of Frankenstein, for instance, $1.134 million. Let's say everyone got in for fifty cents, a low number for 1964 admissions (average ticket price that year more like ninety-three cents). That would put 2,268,000 people in seats for Evil of Frankenstein in theatres. For its TV premiere on Tuesday, January 2, 1968, the film had an 18.8 rating and a 30.8 audience share. The 1967-68 season saw 56,670,000 US households with television sets. 18.8% of that number is 10,653,960, latter being percentage of households with a TV, in use or not. The audience share (30.8) was estimated percentage of television sets actually turned on and viewing Evil of Frankenstein during the 9-11 PM broadcast hours on 2-2-68. With at least two viewers to a household, Universal could claim, for later syndication promotion, that Evil of Frankenstein pulled minimum of twenty million watchers on 2-2-68 (same figure cited by Edward Small to represent typical viewership for a network movie at the time). NBC would have its smash run of The Birds on 1-6-68, four days after Evil of Frankenstein, and nab a 38.9 rating, this conferring bragging right to 47,700,000 tuned in for the Hitchcock thriller. There was argument as to accuracy of such grandiose figures, so much that trade advertising often ran small print disclaimer: Rating and Audience Information Are Estimates Only, Subject To The Limitations Of Source Materials and Methods (another way of saying that audience research was never anything but an educated guess).

Syndication Ad Slick Sent To Buyer TV Stations

The half million paid by NBC to MCA-Universal for the latter's three Hammer films was far from an end to revenue these chillers would generate. Universal owned the negatives, along with other Hammers, and TV was where they'd realize a largest return. A group of 40 Universals for "first-run telecasting" was sold in 1965 at "about $100,000 per title" (Variety) to five US stations owned and operated by NBC. Included in the lot was Brides of Dracula, which played several of the O&O's in 1966 primetime before it went into wider syndication in 4-67, the point at which all of U's Hammers, including off-network Evil/Kiss/Phantom, as well as Curse of the Werewolf, Night Creatures, Nightmare, and Paranoiac, were sold to local channels for broadcast dates beginning in fall 1968. As to price, Variety on 2-15-67 reported that "MCA expects to gross about $400,000 per title in domestic syndication." This was money to make the films' theatrical revenue look puny by comparison. Forget Kiss of the Vampire and $357K from 1963 dates --- now it was Kiss of Evil with tens of millions more watching (and seeing it for a first time in truncated form), $900,000 rolled up from television sales by the late 60's, with promise of more as Kiss and other Hammers were re-packaged and resold. Theatrical had been the shallowest of revenue streams. Universal realized from a first subcontract with Hammer that television would be the ultimate site of pay off, and point at which all this horror group would go into profit.