Random film of the day — "On Golden Pond" (1981): Katharine Hepburn, Henry Fonda, Jane Fonda, 109 minutes, rating 7.27. On the surface — an intimate drama about an elderly couple who come to the lake every summer and talk about old age. The "movie they put on TV when there's nothing else on" category.
But at first glance at the numbers, the hook stops being boring: on a budget of around $7.5 million, the film grossed $119,285,432 in North American release — the second-best result of 1981, right after "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and above "Superman II". A drama about an eighty-year-old professor beat blockbusters with car chases and special effects.
And then a detail emerged that made me want to dig: the film was released by AFD — the distribution arm of Lew Grade's empire, which had been nearly buried a year earlier by the disaster of "Raise the Titanic". A dying studio released a film about dying people, and that film became the biggest hit in its history. A coincidence so symmetrical that in novels it would be rejected as implausible.
It all started with a play. Ernest Thompson wrote it based on memories of summers spent at Great Pond in Maine; in 1982, when the film was raking in its unprecedented box office, the author was only thirty-two. In fall 1978 the play opened off-Broadway, in February 1979 it moved to Broadway — and flopped: 126 performances, a summer break, a second run of another 256. When both runs ended, the total loss was around $290 thousand. For comparison: the future film based on the same characters grossed four hundred times more.
Producer Arthur Cantor later formulated the diagnosis precisely: "It's a charming play of the heartland. West of Westchester, apparently it can't miss." New York turned out to be the only place where the story about old age couldn't find an audience. In regional and summer theaters, it was loved: the initial investment was recouped by August 1981, and royalties of $25 thousand a month flowed to the author from around the world. Cantor predicted at least ten thousand amateur productions before "that deep pond dries up."
The film industry reasoned the same way as Broadway. Everyone passed on the screenplay — and everyone declined: both leads were over seventy, Fonda's health was rapidly deteriorating, Hepburn's palsy was progressing. Nobody wanted to risk $7 million on a film about people who might not live to see the premiere. Eventually the screenplay was brought to Fonda's daughter — Jane, who by that time had two Oscars and her own production company, IPC Films. She found the money quickly.
The picture was financed by British media mogul Lew Grade and his ITC Entertainment — and for Grade this was essentially the last big money. A year earlier, in August 1980, ITC released "Raise the Titanic" — an expensive adventure based on Clive Cussler's bestseller that returned only a small fraction of expenses. Grade was so devastated that he stepped away from film production with a phrase that entered all the textbooks on failed marketing: it would have been cheaper to "lower the Atlantic." Cussler himself reviewed the film even more harshly: "The film is so bad it's mind-boggling."
Before that was "Can't Stop the Music" with Village People: $20 million budget, $2 million gross, and disco as a genre died before the film reached theaters. On these two blows the ITC and EMI alliance known as AFD — Associated Film Distribution — collapsed, and it was sold along with its library to Universal. But films stuck in post-production were still released by AFD itself: "The Legend of the Lone Ranger," "Sophie's Choice," "The Dark Crystal," "The Great Muppet Caper" — and "On Golden Pond."
It turned into a grimace of cinema history. A failing distributor on its last breath released five pictures; four of them recouped weakly or didn't recoup at all, but the fifth — a modest $7.5 million drama — gave AFD the biggest box office in its short and unhappy life. The gross of "Golden Pond" probably didn't save Grade's empire: in that same 1981 he lost ATV's broadcasting license too. But symbolically — it helped. A dying company exited the game with the biggest hit in its portfolio.
Jane Fonda didn't buy the rights to the play for box office. In the biography "Citizen Jane" she recalled her first reaction to the screenplay: "I could hear these words being said by my father." The Fondas' relationship had always been strained — Henry had a reputation as a cold and distant man, Jane had lived her whole life in rebellion against him. And the onscreen conflict between Norman and Chelsea Thayer almost verbatim repeated their own. Jane saw a rare chance in the project: to work with her father while he was still alive — and pull out that Oscar that his career, absurd as it sounds, had never given him.
The father resisted: the daughter's role was "too small" for an actress of her caliber. Jane insisted — and turned out to be right on both bets at once. The most dramatic backstage story happened during the reconciliation scene by the water. Jane rehearsed restraint for months: not to touch her father's hand until his close-up, to "catch him off guard." And she did — on camera Henry's eyes filled with tears and he turned away. But on her own close-up, an actor's catastrophe happened: she "dried up," emotions ran out, panic. And then from the bushes off-camera materialized Hepburn — who wasn't even supposed to be on set that day. She knelt down, locked eyes with Jane, and slowly raised clenched fists: do it, you can. "She literally gave me that scene — with her fists, her eyes, and her generosity," Jane wrote later.
That evening Jane came to her father for dinner and asked if he'd ever "dried up." "Nope," Fonda answered. In his entire career — never. "My heart sank," she admits in her autobiography. That answer contained their whole history: he was a great actor with a block of ice inside, and she'd known it since childhood. Five months after the ceremony Henry Fonda died. Jane calls the night of the award "the happiest moment of my life" — she managed to tell him what she couldn't say for forty years.
By the way, the introduction of the main stars was no less theatrical. Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn — two pillars of Hollywood with half-century careers — had never met before this film. On the first day of shooting, Hepburn gave Fonda the "lucky" hat of her longtime companion Spencer Tracy — he wears it in all scenes. With Jane, the first conversation started with a scandal: she skipped the meeting, being on a road trip with Dolly Parton (researching material for "Nine to Five"), Hepburn took it as an insult and stated bluntly: "I don't like you!" They made peace, characteristically, through a shared stunt: Hepburn shamed Jane for wanting to give the backflip into the water to a double — and she trained for weeks until she jumped herself. "In the film the backflip was proof to my father. In life I proved it to Hepburn."
The film's economics broke all the marketing models of the era. 1981 — the year ruled by "Raiders," "Superman II," "Escape from New York." And here in the middle of this menu — a drama without a single chase, where the most intense action is a boat crashing into rocks. Forecasts were modest even among insiders: Jane Fonda's co-producer admitted she expected "a worthy film, but not a big commercial success."
Reality turned out different. By April 1982 the film had collected $80–85 million with a forecast "up to $150 million" and was playing in 1200 theaters simultaneously. A theater owner in Concord, New Hampshire, came up with a distribution label that was quoted across the country: "the Geritol generation's answer to 'Star Wars'" (Geritol — a vitamin tonic for the elderly). In New Hampshire the film's run was second only to "Star Wars." The theater owner told of a grown man coming for his fourth viewing — "the kind of thing usually attributed to teenagers." About full Sunday matinees in a town "where there's never been a matinee crowd." About groups from the veterans' home who were shy at the box office because they hadn't bought tickets in so long.
This is where the main surprise of the investigation is hidden: the film is credited with a purely elderly audience, but the author himself insists on the opposite. "The reason for success is that kids are coming — Thompson said in 1982. — I looked into the theater last week and it was all eleven-year-olds. Why? Who knows?" Director Mark Rydell formulated the same thing more broadly: "It baffles all the cynics. The audience is asking for good material." The film's demographic legend — "old people came to the movies" — is only half true: everyone came. It's just that for elderly people who hadn't gone to theaters in years, the film became an event worth returning to the darkness for, and for eleven-year-olds — an unexpectedly relatable story about grandpa. A universality that no producer who rejected the project could calculate.
The side effect turned out to be geographical. Squam Lake in New Hampshire — the real lake where they filmed (the play lived on Great Pond in Maine, but shooting moved) — was flooded with tourists: "Does Golden Pond actually exist?" they asked from all over the country, at tourist exhibitions in Ohio and Pennsylvania they looked specifically for it. Locals answered with Yankee imperturbability: "There's no such lake, but all our lakes are better." This was the first major film shot in the state, and it embedded Squam Lake into tourist routes for decades.
At the 54th ceremony the film received ten nominations — with a year-record twelve for Warren Beatty's "Reds." It took three: best adapted screenplay (Thompson), best actor (Fonda), best actress (Hepburn). For the main prize it lost to "Chariots of Fire," and this, in retrospect, is the only logical loss: everything else — solid records.
Henry Fonda at 76 years and 317 days became the oldest winner of the award for best actor in history — and held the bar for 39 years, until in 2021 he was overtaken by 83-year-old Anthony Hopkins. Hepburn received her fourth Oscar — to this day no one has more than three in acting categories — and between the first award (34th ceremony for "Morning Glory," shot in 1933) and the last passed 48 years, also a record. The award presentation scene worked best without words: Hepburn, certain of losing, turned off her phone and slept through the ceremony, touring with Thompson's new play. And Fonda was so ill that Jane accepted the statuette for him — and an hour later brought it to his bedside. His reaction: "It was in the air." His wife Shirley later admitted that all year she'd been treating him with talk of the Oscar: "Talking about the award was another way to keep him from fading."
But not everything was honey, and in fairness it's worth acknowledging: part of the criticism never forgave the film.
Vincent Canby in the New York Times called the Broadway play "processed American cheese" — smooth, spreadable, and bland — and mercifully upgraded the film to "cheddar" only through the efforts of the old stars. David Kehr of the Chicago Reader was merciless: "the cinematic equivalent of shrinkwrap, where all ideas, feelings, and images are hermetically sealed to prevent spoilage... a very cowardly piece of ersatz-art." Time Out: sticky dessert instead of swan song.
What to do with this — honest answer: I don't know. Both sides are right in their own way. The sentimentality in the film exists, and its mechanism works almost mechanically. But Roger Ebert, who knew how to distinguish manipulation from feeling, wrote the opposite: "I could believe it." The split ran exactly along the line of "I believe — I don't believe," and this line passed not through the quality of the film, but through the viewer's age at the moment of viewing. Anyone who'd had a fight with their father cried; those who watched from the sidelines — saw cheese. The only thing that can be stated firmly: more than forty years later the film hasn't aged, but its critics — have become dated.