MYTH #1: DOLLY SUNK FOX STUDIOS

Hello, Dolly! is often maligned as the big-budget musical flop that sunk 20th Century-Fox studios. Almost any book or web page that discusses Dolly regurgitates this story, taking glee that Dolly was such a “turkey” of a flop. The truth is that even though Dolly was probably the straw that broke Fox’s back, Fox’s troubles accumulated toward bankruptcy. 

Richard Zanuck, president of Fox until late-1970, admitted the fault was his in 1973. “We put out Sound of Music [1965] which just hit the roof, and everything worked out great.  We put out Butch Cassidy, Patton and The French Connection … Seven good years were behind us, then we hit two unprofitable ones. At the time the whole industry was in hurricane state, but we were hit particularly hard. It was our own doing. We came out with a couple of films which tried to recapture the magic of Sound of Music, which had made everything well in the first place, and it was those films that murdered us – Star! and Doctor Doolittle and Hello, Dolly!, too.  Hello, Dolly! was one of my greatest disappointments because I thought that with everything it had going for it, it was going to save us. But we painted ourselves into a corner with it, spent too much to ever make back.”

The Sound of Music earned the studio over $78 million dollars by 1967.  Like Zanuck said, its other productions were costly: Star! ($13 million budget); Doctor Doolittle ($17 million budget); dramatic event films like Tora, Tora, Tora ($25 million budget); and Patton ($12 million).  At the same time, other movie studios may have milked the musical genre for all it was worth, fatiguing audiences.  Paramount spent $24 million on Paint Your Wagon (1969). There was Camelot (1967) ($15 million) at Warner Brothers; Oliver! (1968) ($10 million) at Columbia; and Sweet Charity (1969) ($8 million) at Universal. 

Wikipedia sums up the box office numbers game best: Dolly! grossed $33.2 million at the box office in the United States, earning a theatrical rental (the distributor's share of the box office after deducting the exhibitor's cut) of $15.2 million, ranking it in the top five highest-grossing films of the 1969–1970 season. In total, it earned $26 million in theatrical rentals for Fox, against its $25.335 million production budget. Despite performing well at the box office, it still lost its backers an estimated $10 million. 

[Note:  Dolly’s budget in today’s dollars would be near to $200 million! Also, a group called the Twentieth Century-Fox Stockholders Protective Committee circulated a brochure in 1971 identifying Dolly’s loss to the studio as $13.7 million.]

Cumulatively, however, one has to wonder if Fox has made its money back since 1969. Hello, Dolly! was sold to network television – it first aired on CBS in 1974.  Also, in 1977 Fox was earning $100,000 a year by renting out the New York street set to other movies and television shows like S.W.A.T. Hello, Dolly! was one of the first films Fox licensed for videocassette in 1978. And Dolly has been released in almost every home video format over the years (DVD, Blu-ray, streaming, cable television, etc.). Even the enormous success of Disney/Pixar’s 2008 hit Wall-E brought renewed attention to Dolly.  

MYTH #2: WALTER MATTHAU AND BARBRA STREISAND HATED EACH OTHER

Walter Matthau and Barbra Streisand fought one hot day, June 6, 1968, on the Garrison, N.Y. set. Matthau confessed (embellished?), “I told her to stop directing the fucking picture, which she took exception to, and there was a blow-up in which I also told her she was a pip-squeak who didn’t have the talent of a butterfly’s fart.” (The story continues with a funny punchline. Supposedly, when Matthau complained to Richard Zanuck, the studio chief replied, “I'd like to help you out, but the film is not called Hello, Walter.”)

Gene Kelly was more diplomatic with columnist Earl Wilson. “They really got angry,” he said. “They quarreled in front of everybody. I said, ‘Cut the lights,’ stopped everything. We went into a little store and straightened it out. Then we did the scene. This happens to everybody in every picture and isn't serious.”

When Earl Wilson pressed Kelly for more information about the incident, including the rumor that Streisand yelled at him, Kelly responded: “Absurd. I wish every actor would be like her. I came onto this picture with my dukes up because I heard she might be uncooperative. but she's the most cooperative girl I ever worked with. She'll try anything to be good. There has never been any friction between us, and I predict there never will be.”

“It was a hot day on location,” Matthau confessed to another writer. “Bobby Kennedy had just been shot, and I was in a mean, foul mood—so I took it all out on Barbra, poor girl.”

Barbra explained her version of the story in 1983: “One day I had an idea about something I thought would be funny involving a scene in a wagon. I said, ‘What do you think of this?’ and people started to laugh. But all of a sudden Walter Matthau closed his eyes and started screaming: ‘Who does she think she is’? I’ve been in 30 movies and this is only her second, the first one hasn't even come out yet, and she thinks she's directing? Who the hell does she think she is?’ I couldn't believe it. I had no defense. I stood there and I was so humiliated I started to cry, and then l ran away. And what came out in the papers was Walter Matthau complaining about Barbra Streisand."

The notion that Matthau and Streisand hated each other until his death in 2000 is ridiculous! His wife, Carol Matthau, was friends with Barbra for decades.  The couple can be spotted in the audience at Barbra’s One Voice concert in 1986.  

It was also Carol who wrote a scathing letter to the N.Y. Times after Isaac Singer expressed his dissatisfaction with Yentl. She said that Singer was “a mean-spirited, ungenerous and cranky man,” and asked the obvious question, “Why did you sell [Yentl] to the movies?”

MYTH #3: GENE KELLY & BARBRA DIDN'T GET ALONG

The relationship between a director and an actor can be harmonious or combative depending on the day, the scene, and the circumstances.

Despite oft-repeated rumors that Kelly and Streisand hated each other on the Dolly set, the evidence simply does not support it.  Reportedly, Streisand came onto the picture not wanting to play Dolly, so Kelly must have been challenged to inspire his lead actress.

Kelly’s widow, Patricia Ward Kelly, clarified his feelings. “Gene loved Barbra Streisand,” she said. “And he felt that she was a tremendous asset and a great actor. He went to his buddy Willie Wyler (director of Funny Girl) and asked, ‘What’s she like?’ And Wyler said, ‘She’s great but she just knows what she wants.’ And that worked for Gene, because that was Gene. He had great respect for her, and he said she had this innate curiosity – that she not only was interested in her performance, but why things worked and how the camera worked and why something worked on stage but wouldn’t work on film … She would ask all the questions, but she would learn, and she would remember.”