Pacific Stars And Stripes
Celebrity Clips
October 26, 1991
While business at America’s box offices has been slumbering through August, September and early October, never fear: Hollywood already has visions of sugarplums for the holiday weeks from Thanksgiving Day to New Year’s Day.
A dozen or so major titles will be competing for your dollars, so the race is on – although the public isn’t yet aware of it – to start the promotion bandwagons. You’ll soon be catching wind of such movies as: “Hook,” starring Robin Williams and Dustin Hoffman; Disney’s animated musical “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Addams Family,” based on the
popular TV sitcom.
So far, the biggest splashes have been made for two films starring two of the industry’s biggest female stars – Bette Midler in “For the Boys” and Barbra Streisand in her much anticipated first movie in four years, “The Prince of Tides,” a psychodrama based on the popular book by Pat Conroy, which Streisand also directed.
Streisand has raised her usually reticent profile with a recent Vanity Fair cover story, the release last month of her multi-disc “career” album, an upcoming “60 Minutes” segment and a carefully orchestrated program of preview screenings
designed to get word-of-mouth moving.
Meanwhile, at 20th Century Fox, the thinking is to create a special image for “For the Boys,” a movie about two show-biz troupers (Midler and James Caan) who entertain the troops from World War II through Vietnam.
“There’s a lot of movies coming out at the holidays. So when you have the goods, you need to get that message across,” says Tom Sherak, Fox executive vice president.
