The Biggest News at ShoWest: The No Shows : Movies: Most studios cut costs at the major show for theater owners and operators. Hospitality suites replaced lavish dinners. Film exhibitors were not amused.

What if they gave a movie convention and there were no movies?

Things weren’t quite that bad at this week’s ShoWest, but measured against the expectations of the 4,000 American theater owners and operators in attendance, it was a pretty lame convention.

Normally, Hollywood’s major studios host lavish luncheons and dinners, show off clips from their upcoming movies and trot out their hottest stars to give their customers a taste of the glamour they sell all year. Like gatherings in any industry, ShoWest is a place where supplier meets buyer, supplier woos buyer, and, if it’s a hit, they live happily ever after--or until the next failure do them part.

But this year, the studios’ free-spending habits on ShoWest were reined in by the new attitude of cost containment. Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. sharply cut back their participation. Only Orion Pictures, New Line Cinema and 20th Century Fox sponsored lunches, and no studio sponsored a dinner. MGM, Columbia Pictures, Universal Pictures and Tri-Star, and a few independent companies, chose to do their business in hospitality suites many floors above the convention floor of Bally’s Grand Hotel.

“Everyone’s on an austerity program,” said Fred Mound, Universal’s domestic distribution president, in the Universal hospitality suite, where exhibitors could pop in to see the studio’s product reel on a TV screen. “We find this very effective,” he said.

The video product reels, also shown in hotel rooms by MGM, Columbia and Tri-Star, were a letdown to many theater people who had traveled across country to see them. And coming after the industry’s second-highest grossing year ever, the cutbacks struck some as unwarranted.

“This show is going to die of benign neglect,” said Joseph Hupfer, an exhibitor from Mt. Gilead, Ohio, who with his wife, Mary, have made the trip to Las Vegas for several years. “There’s no reason for the studios to participate any more. In today’s Hollywood, you have the studios not only making the movies, they are also buying up the movie chains. The little theater owner becomes insignificant.”

Half the nation’s 22,000 theaters are estimated to be in the hands of 10 large theater chains, and the rest are split among smaller chains and independent operators of one or two screens. With that type of ownership concentration, many theater owners think the studios believe they can afford to ignore ShoWest.

One owner of a mid-sized chain, speaking anonymously so as not to offend his suppliers, said the cutbacks struck him as a way for the studios to save money. “Right now, it’s a supplier’s market, and the studios can ask for terms favorable to them,” the exhibitor said. “But come summer when there will be about 60 films flooding the market, it will be a buyer’s market again.”

Some exhibitors said they felt they could have saved money themselves--by not coming to the convention.

“It used to be we could come here and make a list of the films we wanted to book for the year,” said Mary Hupfer. “But this year, we can’t even make a list.”

Theater owner Robert Heyl, of Torrington, Wyo., complained that “only one feature film (Warner Bros.’ “Guilty by Suspicion,” starring Robert De Niro and Annette Bening) was shown to exhibitors over the four days.”

He called a slide presentation from Orion Pictures at Tuesday’s lunch “ridiculous. We didn’t see (a) film. My goodness, this is what the film business is all about.”

But while most of the studios were tightening their belts, there was no holding back the promotional train rolling in from Fox. The studio’s staggering “Home Alone” hit is not only pouring needed millions into Fox’s bank account, but it has made the studio a hero with its exhibitor partners.

Fox took the opportunity to show the exhibitors 35 minutes of footage of films on the studio’s 1991 and ’92 schedule.

“When you’re hot, you’re hot,” gloated Fox Executive Vice President Tom Sherak as he introduced the previews of features like “Aliens 3” and the Bette Midler-James Caan “For the Boys.” Sherak also plugged his company’s strong showing at the box office in 1990--a year that included the popular “Die Hard 2.”

Fox’s on-hand executive team included not only studio boss Joe Roth and Fox Chairman Barry Diller, but Rupert Murdoch himself, whose News Corp. Ltd. owns the whole works.

Comedian-actor Billy Crystal also got the theater owners buzzing when he made an appearance to claim the “Comedian of the Decade Award” from ShoWest and the co-sponsoring National Assn. of Theater Owners. In conjunction with the presentation, the audience got to see a 20-minute clip from Crystal’s upcoming “City Slickers,” which will be released by Columbia Pictures later this year.

Among other familiar faces: Rob Reiner, whose Castle Rock is producing “City Slickers”; John Candy, helping MGM promote “Delirious”; Julia Roberts and Andy Garcia, recipients of ShoWest’s star of the year awards, and producer-writer-director John Hughes, whose populist touch with films like “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” and “Home Alone” has helped pay the mortgage on many of these exhibitors’ theaters.