What was the atmosphere like in the late 1960s and early 1970s?
… It was a cottage industry, it really was. When I came to Columbia [in 1968], Warner Bros. was a 400 million dollar company. That was the cost of “Titanic,” with prints and advertising worldwide. The whole company was 400 million dollars. And films were the business of the business. … There was nowhere else that the features went after their theatrical run. A little bit with network television and some syndication packages. And international was called foreign then. It was foreign to most of the people in this business — it was that place across the ocean where the films played after nobody here was really interested in them. … It seems like so many great pictures came out of that time. And from the studios. Why do you think that was? Well, in the early ’70s the whole revolution was that there were new conversations and new voices that were being listened to in these companies. … They were trying out new people. People that came from commercials. People that came from all wal
