Roadshow! The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s
Oxford University Press, 2013

What happened to film musicals? In Roadshow! The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s, film historian Matthew Kennedy explores the steep decline of a beloved genre in an era fated to reinvent American art and culture. Roadshow! is the story of deeply talented but often misguided men and women who went in search of “the next Sound of Music” and glutted the American film market with a spate of appallingly expensive and financially ruinous musicals between 1967 and 1972: Camelot, Doctor Dolittle, Half a Sixpence, The Happiest Millionaire, Finian's Rainbow, Star!, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Sweet Charity, Paint Your Wagon, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Hello, Dolly!, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Darling Lili, Song of Norway, The Great Waltz, and Man of La Mancha. The successes, including Oliver!, Funny Girl, Fiddler on the Roof, and Cabaret, could not mitigate the disaster. “It would be difficult not to come to the conclusion that the American film industry is coming apart,” wrote Vincent Canby in The New York Times by way of noting the musicals’ contribution to the Hollywood recession beginning in 1969. But Roadshow! is not another book making easy mock of movie flops. It rather offers an alternative view of a time too often reduced to love beads and sit-ins. Though routinely overlooked by cultural and film historians, these films matter in the story of America in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Told in swift chronology with interweaving narratives, Roadshow! tells of the studios' death grip on the film business, done in largely by expensive reserve-seat tickets to these ill timed, overproduced après garde musicals.

Roadshow! features an extraordinary cast, with many making their singular venture into musical territory: Richard Harris, Clint Eastwood, Peter O'Toole, Mary Tyler Moore, Rock Hudson, Shirley MacLaine, Vanessa Redgrave, Liza Minnelli, Fred Astaire, Greer Garson, Edward G. Robinson, Petula Clark, Geraldine Page, Barbra Streisand, Sidney Poitier, Julie Andrews, Sophia Loren, Walter Matthau, Carol Channing, Fred MacMurray, Omar Sharif, and Lee Marvin. Behind the camera were such notables as brash public relations man Arthur Jacobs, “The Smiling Cobra” and MGM corporate executioner James Aubrey, ambitious young production executive Robert Evans, and the father-son team of Darryl F. and Richard Zanuck. Directors included everyone from Golden Age names Gene Kelly and Vincente Minnelli, to non-musical veterans William Wyler and Carol Reed, to untried newcomers Francis Ford Coppola and Bob Fosse.

Roadshow! takes a sweeping view of a specific period in time, focusing on the day-to-day decisions of casting, production, marketing, and distribution. Of course musicals alone did not bankrupt Hollywood or lead to a wholesale change in what was made in the 1970s, but they conspicuously dominate the downward spiral. The very movies intended to save Hollywood nearly destroyed it. For that reason, Roadshow! corrects the shorthand that equates “American films of the late 1960s” with The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, and Easy Rider. It creates a new dialogue for a vital but troubled era in our culture. Equal parts “making of” film history, character studies, and critical analysis, Roadshow! is a cautionary tale of blind faith, artistic misjudgments, the cruelties of bad timing, changing tastes, and the occasional ray of sunlight in an industry where creativity and commerce live in uneasy harmony.