film the way it should be made? In movies, that’s the inner voice of the authentic hero.” It was one of her most deeply felt pieces of the period, and it elicited a note of praise from Penelope Gilliatt, who called it “a magnificent piece.”
It was Francis Ford Coppola’s year: He had released another, almost equally remarkable film a few months earlier—The Conversation, a harrowingly intimate story of a professional electronics surveillance expert whose life’s work has created a sick obsession with his own privacy. With its minimal dialogue and music, The Conversation had much in common with Blow-Up, but it was a far more vital and less pretentious film. Because it was released in the summer of 1974, Pauline missed reviewing it for The New Yorker, but she did manage to get comments on it into a special essay she wrote for the magazine in August, “On the Future of Movies.”
That The Conversation had not done well in general release, she wrote, was classic proof of the corruption of the studio heads, who couldn’t accept that Coppola was “in a position (after directing The Godfather) to do what he wanted to do; they’re hurt that he flouts their authority, working out of San Francisco instead of Los Angeles. And they don’t really have any respect for The Conversation, because it’s an idea film.” Paramount, she claimed “didn’t plan on The Conversation being a success, and nothing now is going to make them help it become one.” Pauline identified what she saw as a steadily encroaching trend: Young audiences were no longer quite so willing to take a chance on an unusual, quiet, complicated picture as they might have been a few years ago. She was right that the atmosphere was changing—possibly because the spirit of organized protest had seriously faded and the disillusionment in the wake of Watergate was having a numbing effect on so much of American social and cultural life. It was becoming apparent that “audiences like movies that do all the work for them.... They don’t mind being banged over the head—the louder the better.” While she didn’t state it explicitly, “On the Future of Movies” clearly conveyed her concern that the Altmans and Scorseses and Coppolas were going to face difficulties in the years to come. Cutesy comedies like The Sting and slam-bang thrillers like The Exorcist were what audiences seemed to crave, and they were benefiting from all of the studios’ backing, while smaller films like Thieves Like Us and The Conversation vanished. She overstated her case, however, when she claimed, “The movie companies used to give all their pictures a chance, but now they’ll put two or three million, or even five, into selling something they consider surefire, and a token—a pittance—into the others.” Although blockbuster marketing was steadily on the rise, and the audience numbers were giving it validation, she neglected to mention that old Hollywood had frequently trashed some of its finest work by not releasing it properly—Fred Zinnemann’s The Member of the Wedding, Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter, and Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil being but three examples from the 1950s.
Near the end of “On the Future of Movies,” she made another pitch for the artist in Hollywood:Perhaps no work of art is possible without belief in the audience—the kind of belief that has nothing to do with facts and figures about what people actually buy or enjoy but comes out of the individual artist’s absolute conviction that only the best he can do is fit to be offered to others.... An artist’s sense of honor is founded on the honor due others. Honor in the arts—and in show business, too—is giving of one’s utmost, even if the audience does not appear to know the difference, even if the audience shows every sign of preferring something easy, cheap, and synthetic. The audience one must believe in is the great audience: the audience one was part of as a child, when one first began to respond to great work—the audience one is still part of.
It was a compelling argument, but Fred Goldberg, vice president of United Artists, wrote Pauline a sharp letter objecting to her claim that Paramount hadn’t properly supported The Conversation. Goldberg claimed that the studio had spent $95,000 on advertising for the film’s pre-opening and first week, including two full-page ads in The New York Times, one of them quoting the film’s many laudatory reviews. Goldberg pointed out that $95,000 was an impressive budget for a theater