ONCE IN A ‘LIFETIME’ FOR YORKIN

On the whole, Bud Yorkin would as soon let his experience on “Twice in a Lifetime” remain a once-in-a-lifetime thrill. But he proved to his own satisfaction that you can buck the big-numbers game and the Hollywood system, although it requires luck and three hard years of your life.

Yorkin--madly, in the view of sensible friends--decided to finance and distribute his film himself. Although it was to co-star Gene Hackman and Ann-Margret as the middle-aged steelworker and the younger woman for whom he leaves his wife, “Twice in a Lifetime” did not excite the majors.

So Yorkin became his own studio. Now the not-quite-final tally on “Twice in a Lifetime” is in and, Yorkin said over breakfast a few days ago, “It’s not going to return a fortune, but it’s not a blood bath, either.”

The film’s box-office gross at last count was about $14.5 million. This seems ludicrously small in a day when the average production cost of a movie from one of the major Hollywood studios is more than $16 million, before the costs of advertising and distribution. The cheering news, for those who believe that film dynamite can come in small packages, is that there is profit to be made on small budgets and modest grosses.

The net rentals back to Yorkin (after the theaters took their share, that is) have been a little more than $7.5 million. If he had gone with a major distribution company, about a third of that $7.5 million would have gone as the distribution fee.

But Yorkin set up his own distribution organization under Norman Levy, with four other staffers. And although there were as many as 600 prints of “Twice in a Lifetime” in the field, he says his distribution cost was only 16% to 18% and the saving was his difference between profit and loss.

“Distribution didn’t cost me nearly that 35%, and that’s the only reason I was able to come in.”

Yorkin had leased commercial television rights to NBC as part of his pre-production financing. He made a cable-television deal with Showtime and has sold the videocassette rights to Vestron. The film has thus far returned about $2 million from abroad, having done well in Spain, Scandinavia (where Ann-Margret has a large and loyal following) and South America; less well in France, despite good reviews.

“I wouldn’t do it again,” Yorkin said. “Why put yourself under that enormous pressure for all that time? But it was a wonderful learning experience. Nobody will ever snow me again about distribution and advertising. There’s a lot of money wasted in distribution, advertising and publicity and marketing.

“It’s all very formularized. What we had to do was sit every week and plan the next. What did Denver do? Do you do a little more advertising, or pull back slowly? How do you sell it? Do you change the campaign? Spain sold it as a love story and it did very well.”

The big studio distribution operations, Yorkin concluded, “don’t have time for the $3-million picture. They’re always reaching for the brass ring. They don’t really know what to do with a ‘Tender Mercies,’ for example, which almost had to make it on its own. You befuddle them if you take them a film without Paul Newman.”

Yet marketing experts more and more determine what films will be made, Yorkin thinks--marketing in the larger sense, embracing not only the theatrical audience, but also the ancillary sales, which more frequently means the videocassette sale.

“The videocassettes are increasingly going to determine what films are made. The new ideal is to have as little money in the picture as possible. The dream is to have no money at all. You get your distribution fee, and that’s fine.” It is fine, Yorkin concluded from his experience on “Twice in a Lifetime,” because there is so much hype and air in the distribution operations.

But, after the three-year hitch with “Lifetime,” he’s now ready to let others worry about the post-production side of a film’s life. He is writing and will produce and direct for United Artists, a film called “Karp,” based on a book by Robert Tanenbaum, who was an assistant district attorney under Frank Hogan in New York.