Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [102]
This was not the Steve McQueen audiences wanted to see. Although the film went on to gross a healthy $20 million in its initial domestic release, McQueen fans who had lined up to revisit Frank Bullitt were disappointed by Steve’s performance. Overseas, the film’s Americana was completely lost on audiences, and it did nothing.
Nonetheless, the domestic take was good enough that Cinema Center agreed to partner with Solar to go ahead and make Le Mans, with a $6 million advance to seal the deal. It was the biggest advance budget for any Steve McQueen film.
AS 1969 came to a close, Steve was hit with some bad financial news. At a Christmas week meeting, Steve’s auditor sat him down and gave him the hard news that he was personally bankrupt and that Solar was the culprit. He had personally guaranteed all the company’s operating expenses and because studios did what they always do, configured the books so that there was never anything that came close to a net return. The corporate bottom line was that Steve was tapped out. He was facing 1970 the same way he had faced 1960: broke.
The only difference was, he was a big star now, but a forty-year-old one, up there with Clint Eastwood (also forty), Paul Newman (forty-five), and Brando (forty-six), all of them surrounded by a gang of hot new and younger leading men who had either made their big breakthrough or were about to and would become the major American movie stars of the 1970s. The list included Jack Nicholson (thirty-three), Robert De Niro (twenty-seven), Dustin Hoffman (twenty-six), Al Pacino (thirty), Richard Dreyfuss (twenty-three), James Caan (thirty), Ryan O’Neal (twenty-nine), and Harvey Keitel (thirty-one), all of them at home in the new era of independent films. Each was working or about to work with a new and exciting crop of directors that included Mike Nichols, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Milos Forman, William Friedkin, Hal Ashby, Warren Beatty (as director), and others who, for the most part, were not hampered by the usual conventions of mainstream studio moviemaking.
A February 1970 survey by Reuters, the international news bureau, conducted in forty-one countries in conjunction with that season’s upcoming Golden Globe Awards, ranked Steve as the number one box office star in the world (based mostly on the spectacular success of Bullitt), with Barbra Streisand his female counterpart. But, like most acknowledgments and awards, the Reuters survey was based on the past. The future of Hollywood lay with the new kids in town. Steve would make only ten more movies, just three of which would find sufficient room alongside the avalanche of product coming out of the new Hollywood.
AFTER A series of discussions and consultations, it was decided, at Cinema Center’s urging, that the only way Steve could save Solar was to cut staff, reduce the size of its office space, and go public. Steve agreed to all of it, realizing it was the only way he could keep his company alive and not go even deeper into personal debt.
About four hundred thousand shares of common stock were offered at $9 a share. Out of it, Steve received about $1.5 million, in addition to his ongoing $500,000-a-year salary and his $1 million guarantee for each film he starred in, money that could not be cross-collateralized. He remained the sole owner of the company and its principal stockholder. The remaining profits from the offering were put into reserve for future film budgets. There was also a $5 million insurance policy taken out on Steve’s life, paid by Solar, to cover injuries he might receive that would shut down production on any film he was starring in for the company.1
And what film did Steve want to do first under the banner of the revamped Solar? Still Le Mans. Cinema Center urged him instead to do something closer to Bullitt, even a sequel, if possible. They wanted to turn the film into a franchise (as Clint Eastwood would do a few years later with Dirty Harry, a role that Steve had originally