Budgets?

?The budgets of the series or B-Western had to be kept low, since returns were limited. But there could be considerable variation, all the same. The major studios generally spent more than the independents. In The Filming of the West Jon Tuska gives several examples of such budgets. In the 1920s Paramount were spending on average $ 110,000 each on their series Westerns.

Tom Mix's budgets when he moved to Universal in the 1930s were of a similar order. Ken Maynard's budgets for his series with First National starting in 1926 were $75,000 per picture. Somewhat lower down the scale came Buck Jones, who in the 1930s was having to make do on budgets of $25,000 per picture at Columbia (admittedly the poorest of the majors at that time); this financed a shooting schedule of between two and three weeks. The Buck Jones films might average 10,000 play-offs at a flat rate of $25, and so gross $250,000. Out of this sum had to come many overheads in addition to direct production costs, but quite a bit must have been left over for profit. Tim McCoy's budgets at the same studio in the early 30s were slimmer at around $15-20,000. Even this was relative luxury compared with the series of Lone Star Westerns John Wayne made for Monogram in the mid-30s. Budgets were around $5,000 for a shooting schedule of three days-. As an example of how these low budgets were spent, Tuska cites Prairie Rustlers, a prc release of 1945 starring Buster Crabbe. The budget was set at $22,500 and the picture finally came in at $23,304.12 for six days shooting. Buster Crabbe himself got $3,000, his sidekick in the film, Al St John, got $1,000 and the rest of the cast divided just $827 dollars between them. Fred Myton received $1,000 for the screenplay, director Sam Newfield was paid $1,250 and producer Sig Neufeld got $1,200. The sets cost $1,442.50. (To relate 1945 costs to today's prices we should multiply by about seven.) Republic's total budget for the 1943-4 season gives an idea of how the biggest of the independents carefully graded its budgets to specific types of film. (The break-down demonstrates that production at this level did not start with an idea which was then costed at an appropriate level. Instead, the budget came first and the story and everything else were designed to fit it.) The total production budget was $16 million. Out of this there were to be 32 regular features (not all Westerns) at an average cost of $304,687 each, totalling $9.75 million. Then there was $2.8 million for eight Roy Rogers musical extravaganzas, average cost $350,000. There was a further $2 million for a programme of 24 miscellaneous Westerns starring such as Allan Lane, Bill Elliott and Sunset Carson. The average cost of these would be $83,33 3. Finally there would be four serials at an average cost of $362,500, $1.45 million in all. In 1950 Republic financed John Ford's Rio Grande. This was one of Republic's rare 'Premiere' category pictures, and for a thirty-two day shooting schedule the total budget was $1,214,899 (production costs rose 60% between 1940 and 1949). In their book Kings o) the Bs Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn break ? this down as shown in the table. How do these figures compare with the budgets for major studio A'feature Westerns? Direct comparisons between films made in different years are difficult because of inflation. But by any account one of the most expensive Westerns ever made was Duel in the Sun (1946), which cost $6 million. At first sight this would appear to be dwarfed by the $35 million reputed to have been spent on Heaven's Gate (1980), yet if we muliply by seven to allow for inflation between 1946 and 1980, then the later film does not seem so outrageously expensive after all. Taking a film of undoubted 'A' quality but more modestly budgeted, we can cite Red River (1947), which cost just over $3 million. Of this, $1 million was spent on the two months of location work near the town of Elgin, Arizona. Specialized locations for Westerns existed. In 1940 Columbia had built Old Tucson, twelve miles from the modern Tucson, for its epic Arizona. Since then dozens of films and tv shows have been filmed there, including Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo and El Dorado, though the site is now mainly a tourist attraction. But for Red River Hawks preferred a fresh location capable of accommodating the 9,000 head of cattle used in the cattle drive. Even so, several outdoors scenes were shot back in Hollywood, on a huge set 110 x 120 feet. Twenty tons of sand and rocks were imported from Arizona to recreate a desert exterior, at a cost of $20,000 (very nearly as much as the entire budget for prc's Prairie Rustlers). At $150,000 the costumes alone for Red River would have paid for a couple of Republic's Sunset Carson Westerns. The contrast between the resources available to the major studios for their A-features and the meagre outlay possible on Poverty Row suggests that the two worlds were far distant from each other. Many critics of the Western treat them as such, as do aficionados of the B-Western, who regard it as the only pure form of the genre. In their view, stars of A-Westerns such as Gary Cooper should not really be counted as true Western stars because they appeared in other kinds of films as well, thereby diluting the purity of their generic commitment. Nor, it is claimed, did people move from A-Westerns to B-Westerns or back again. John Wayne is cited as the unique example of a star who worked extensively at both the top and bottom ends of the ladder. Everyone else, it is claimed, was rigorously specialized. But Red River, though costing perhaps a hundred times as much as many series Westerns, is evidence that the gulf was never as wide as all that. Besides John Wayne, Montgomery Clift and Walter Brennan the cast includes several actors identified with the series Western: Harry Carey and his son Harry Carey Jr., Noah Beery Jr., Hal Taliaferro (also known as Wally Wales). John Ford too, who had begun by directing Harry Carey at Universal, frequently employed veterans who had once had their own Western series: Tom Tyler in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Hoot Gibson in The Horse Soldiers, Buddy Roosevelt in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, George O'Brien in Cheyenne Autumn. And yet in many respects the B-Western was a world within a world, industrially speaking. Experts on the B-Western (and to be an expert you must have seen literally hundreds of such films) insist that the B-Western took nothing from its supposed superiors. Logic argues that this may well be the case, if only because the B-Western, having a secure market, could afford to remain largely autonomous and self-perpetuating. The A-Western on the other hand was always more of a risk financially; production was more erratic since each film had to sell itself on its merits. For this reason the A-Western was more susceptible to changes of fashion, more influenced by developments in other kinds of films and in Hollywood generally.