At the start of the 1960s, the studios were providing lucrative prime-time television pro- gramming, but theatrical moviemaking was not a great business to be in. Attendance was falling sharply. Road show pictures like The Sound of Mu- sic (1965), playing a single screen for months on end,were for a while bright spots on the ledger, but the cycle of epic road show productions, already over- stretched with the failure of Cleopatra (1963) and Mutiny on the Bounty (1965), crashed at the end of the decade. Soon studios faced huge losses and were taken over by conglomerates bearing mysterious names like Gulf + Western (which bought Paramount in 1966).
