By Brian Hannan
With all the (deserved)
appreciation of Zulu, it’s hard to
imagine it was a massive flop in the US. Independent producer Joe Levine
planned a double whammy for summer 1963 – The
Carpetbaggers, an adaptation of the sizzling Harold Robbins bestseller, and
Zulu. He even arranged for Zulu to follow The Carpetbaggers into
the prestigious Palace first run cinema in New York. Spending big, Levine,
whipped up a huge marketing campaign for Zulu,
which had notched up record grosses in the UK.
But the two films could not
have been further apart. Where The
Carpetbaggers stormed to $862,000 from 25 theatres in the New York area, Zulu could only manage $190,000 from 30
in Los Angeles. Zulu scored well in
first run in Detroit (running four weeks) and Chicago, but was quickly (perhaps
too quickly) consigned to drive-ins. Failure to find a niche was not for want
of trying. In successive weeks in LA, it was supported by Nicholas Ray's epic 55 Days At Peking, comedy Ensign Pulver, and Viking adventure The Long Ships.
To salvage something, Levine send it out, within a couple of months
of initial release, as the support film to Italian-made Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow starring Italian sexpot Sophia Loren,
possibly one of the strangest movie programs of all time. In the annual box
office rankings, The Carpetbaggers
placed second. To get into the Variety
annual chart, you needed to make more than $1m in rentals (the amount the
studio received after the cinema had taken its cut). Seventy-eight movies
managed this. Zulu was not one of
them.
(Brian Hannan is the author
of the forthcoming The Reissue Bible.)