ABSTRACT
By the early 1960s the ‘package’ was central to the Hollywood production system; producers or talent agencies were able to draw on the whole industry—rather than one studio—in arranging particular deals for each film. The total number of films produced in the United States had fallen, from 391 in 1951 to 131 in 1961. The mass audience had gone by the later 1950s, and the object was increasingly to differentiate each film and to appeal to a particular section of the audience. An early example of such targeting had been the low budget films made for the teenage audience of the drive-in theatres that opened in great numbers in the 1950s. Michael Wood sees Cleopatra (1963) as the film which showed that the myths and assumptions of studio era filmmaking were out of touch with a new audience. 1
