Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song opened on twelve screens in Atlanta, New York, California and Detroit on a Wednesday, and by Friday morning the lines wrapped around the block.
By the following Monday, Melvin Van Peebles's film had grossed more per screen than any independent film at the moment.
Duke Hauser heard about it the way he heard about most thing, through three sources simultaneously.
The first was the Variety report on his desk, which used the word "unprecedented" twice in the opening paragraph.
The second was a breathless phone call from Gordon Parks, who was in post-production on Shaft at Paramount's lot and had gone to see Sweetback on opening night.
The third source was Duke's own eyes.
He'd driven to the Baldwin Theater in Baldwin Hills on Saturday afternoon, not in the studio car, not with Jaffe or Kurtz or any of the Paramount apparatus, but alone, with security of course.
The theater was full, every seat taken, people standing along the walls. The audience was almost entirely Black, which wasn't surprising.
The film had been marketed specifically to Black communities through barbershops, radio stations, and a grassroots campaign.
He drove home that night with the windows down and the radio off, thinking.
Melvin Van Peebles had made the film for $150,000, most of it funded by Duke.
He'd shot it guerrilla-style on the streets of Los Angeles with a non-union crew, a cast of unknowns, and a soundtrack by Earth, Wind & Fire that he'd paid for with a personal check that bounced.
The film was rough. The editing was jagged, the sound mix was uneven, the narrative was more fever dream than story.
It broke every rule in the book, and the audience didn't care, because the movie, despite it's low quality, it was made for them.
Now, sitting in his office on Monday morning with the Variety numbers spread across his desk like a battle map, Duke picked up the phone and called Albert S. Ruddy, who was overseeing the Shaft post-production.
"Albert. You seeing these Sweetback numbers?"
"Yeah, every theater owner in New York is calling me asking when Shaft is ready."
"Good. Because here's what's going to happen in the next year. The studios are going to scramble to find an 'urban' script. They're going to flood the market with cheap imitations, and most of them are going to be garbage."
"And Shaft?"
"Shaft is a good quality film, but can we push the agenda? I also want some more black movies."
"You want me to push the release date?"
"Yeah, but making sure to keep good quality."
"Copy that."
Duke hung up and leaned back in his chair. Through the window, the Paramount lot shimmered in the mid-morning heat.
---
The intercom on Duke's desk buzzed at exactly ten o'clock.
"Mr. Hauser? Your ten o'clock is here. Mr. Craven and Mr. Cunningham."
"Send them in."
The door opened, and Wes Craven walked in.
Sean Cunningham followed a half-step behind. He carried a manila folder under one arm and moved with easy, grounded confidence.
"Gentlemen," Duke said, rising and extending his hand. "Glad you could make it."
"Are you kidding?" Craven shook his hand with a grip that was noticeably steadier than it had been four nights ago. "We've been sitting in the parking lot since eight-thirty."
"Nine-o'clock actually," Cunningham corrected, shaking Duke's hand in turn. "Wes wanted to come at eight, but I convinced him that camping outside a studio executive's office might send the wrong message."
Duke laughed. "Have a seat. Coffee? Water?"
"Coffee would be great," Craven said, settling into one of the leather chairs opposite Duke's desk. "Black, please."
"Same," Cunningham said.
Duke buzzed for coffee and sat back down.
Stanley Jaffe entered a moment later, carrying his own coffee and a legal pad. He settled into the chair beside Duke's desk, not behind it, which was deliberate.
Jaffe's position in this meeting was clear, he was the practical counterweight, the man who would ask the questions that needed asking, but Duke was the decision-maker.
"Alright," Duke said. "Tell me about The Last House on the Left."
Craven took a breath. A deep one. Then he opened his satchel and pulled out a bound script, not professionally printed, but typed on a manual typewriter, the pages slightly uneven, a coffee ring on the cover page that he'd tried and failed to blot out. He set it on the desk between them.
"The story is based on Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring," Craven began. "Swedish film, 1960. It's about a father who discovers that his daughter has been murdered by travelers, and he takes revenge. We adapted it to America."
He spoke for ten minutes without interruption.
"Two girls from a middle-class suburb go to the city for a rock concert. They try to score some weed from a group of men they meet on the street. The men are escaped convicts. They abduct the girls. They take them into the woods. And what follows is..." Craven paused.
"It's not entertainment, Mr. Hauser. I want to be very clear about that. But the violence is real. It's ugly. It's the kind of violence that actually happens in the world, and the audience is forced to sit with it."
"And the revenge?" Duke asked.
"The killers, by a twist of fate, end up seeking shelter at the home of one of the girls' parents. The parents discover what these men have done. And they retaliate. But here's the key, the parents become as savage as the killers."
The room was quiet. Jaffe was making notes on his legal pad, his pen moving in quick strokes.
"Budget," Jaffe said, without looking up.
Cunningham opened his manila folder. "Ninety thousand dollars."
Jaffe's pen stopped moving. He looked up. "Ninety thousand."
"That's the number. We've got it broken down here." Cunningham slid a single sheet of paper across the desk, a budget summary, typed with the same manual typewriter, organized with surprising rigor.
"Locations are scouted and secured, we're shooting in Westport, Connecticut, and the surrounding woods. My family owns property out there. Crew is non-union, minimal we're talking a skeleton team. Cast is unknowns. Equipment is rented. Post-production is bare-bones."
Jaffe studied the budget. "Film stock?"
"Sixteen millimeter. We can blow up to thirty-five for theatrical if we need to."
"Insurance?"
"Covered. My brother-in-law is an insurance broker."
Jaffe looked at Duke and nodded
Duke turned back to Craven. "Wes, I'm going to ask you a question, and I want you to answer it honestly."
"Of course."
"Why should Paramount invest in a ninety-thousand-dollar horror film about rape and murder in the Connecticut suburbs?"
Craven didn't flinch. He met Duke's eyes and held them. "Because horror it's the only genre that tells the truth about what people are afraid of. Right now, in 1971, America is afraid of everything, Vietnam, race, the counterculture, the collapse of the suburban dream. And no one is making films that address those fears directly. The dramas dance around it.'"
Duke was quiet for a moment. He looked at the script on his desk.
"Here's what we're going to do," Duke said. "Paramount will provide the financing. Ninety thousand. The film will be released under a subsidiary label, not the Paramount banner directly, but a distribution deal that gives you access to our theater network and our marketing infrastructure."
Craven's mouth opened. No sound came out.
"Stanley will draw up the contract. You'll retain creative control over the cut, with one condition, we aprove the final product before it goes to theaters."
"That's- Mr. Hauser-" Craven stammered.
"What he's trying to say," Cunningham said, with a grin, "is yes. Absolutely yes. Thank you."
Craven collected himself. "Mr. Hauser, I won't let you down. This film is going to be good. I promise you that."
"I believe you, Wes." Duke stood and extended his hand. "Now go make your movie."
They shook hand, all three of them, and Craven and Cunningham walked out of Paramount Studios that Monday morning as filmmakers with a studio behind them.
Then he turned to Jaffe and said, "Draw up the contract. Keep it clean and sign Craven for a 7 movie contract."
Jaffe made a note. "You know this film is going to be controversial."
"Stanley, everything is controversial. We shouldn't care about such matters."
---
A memo arrived at three-fifteen on a Tuesday afternoon, delivered by courier from Paramount's intelligence office, a euphemism for the two-person team Duke maintained to monitor competitor activity.
It was a single page, typed on plain white paper, with no letterhead and no signature. Just the facts.
Duke read it standing up, which was how he read things that required his full attention.
Chicago, IL- Kinney National Services, through its Warner Communications subsidiary, has completed the acquisition of Midway Manufacturing Company for an undisclosed sum estimated at $10–16 million. Midway, founded in 1958, is a manufacturer of amusement equipment including coin-operated games, pinball machines, and novelty items. The company operates a 140,000-square-foot manufacturing facility on the West Side of Chicago with capacity for high-volume production.
Industry sources indicate that Warner intends to convert a significant portion of Midway's production capacity to video game cabinet manufacturing, leveraging the arcade patent license secured earlier this year.
Duke set the memo down on his desk and stared at it for exactly twelve seconds. Then he picked up the phone and called Gary Kurtz.
"Gary. Have you seen the Midway memo?"
"I'm reading it right now. Ross bought himself a factory."
"He bought himself a very good factory. Midway's production line is one of the best in the Midwest. They know how to build things at scale, pinball machines, jukeboxes, coin-op equipment. Converting that line to video game cabinets is a six-month project, maybe less."
A pause on the line. "Should we be worried?"
Duke leaned back in his chair and looked out the window.
"No," Duke said. "We should be good."
"Grateful?"
"Think about what this says to the banking community, Steve Ross , one of the biggest businessman in American business, just spent somewhere between ten to sixteen million dollars to acquire a manufacturing facility specifically to produce video game cabinets."
"He didn't buy Midway to make pinball machines. He bought it because he looked at Atari's numbers, he looked at the growth trajectory, and he concluded that this market is so valuable it's worth building a factory to compete in it."
"And that helps us how?"
"It helps us because every bank in New York is going to read this and think the same. And they're going to draw the same conclusion Ross drew, video games are not a passing trend. They're an industry."
"And the company that owns the dominant brand, the company that controls almost a hundred percent of the market and controls the core patents is not a risky bet."
Kurtz was quiet for a moment, processing. Duke could almost hear the gears turning. "So when we go to refinance-"
"When we go to refinance, we don't just show them our revenue numbers. And then we ask for better terms."
"You're turning their move into our leverage."
"I'm turning their move into everyone's leverage. Ross gets his factory. We get our financing. The market grows. Everybody eats." Duke allowed himself a small grin.
___
On the Atari research and development facility on a nondescript industrial building in El Gato, California.
Inside, the facility was a controlled chaos of workbenches, oscilloscopes, soldering stations, and prototype circuit boards in various states of assembly.
The air smelled like hot solder and burnt coffee, and the ambient soundtrack was a mix of electronic hums, mechanical clicks, and the occasional burst of profanity from an engineer.
Nolan Bushnell was waiting in the main lab, standing over a production schematic that was spread across a drafting table the size of a dining room.
He was wearing his usual uniform, Hawaiian shirt, khakis, sandals and his beard had achieved a level of bushiness that made him look homeless.
'Lets hope by the time I can affect politics, I can make California less of a hellhole'
((I went to Cali with a friend once and somebody stole his laptop from the car and i kid you not, the police told him that the guy probably needed it more than him))
"Duke!" Bushnell's voice boomed across the lab. "Come look at this."
Duke crossed the lab, weaving between workbenches and stepping over cable bundles, and joined Bushnell at the drafting table.
The schematic showed the layout of Atari's production line, a sequence of stations where raw components were assembled, tested, and packaged into the distinctive wooden cabinets that had become recognizable across American bars.
"Current capacity," Bushnell said, tapping the schematic. "We're producing two hundred and forty units per week. Which sounds like a lot until you look at the order backlog."
He pulled a printed sheet from under the schematic. "As of this morning, we have standing orders for six thousand eight hundred machines that we cannot fullfill."
"Six thousand eight hundred."
"And that number goes up every week. We're getting orders from places I've never heard of. Bowling alleys in Montana. Pizza joints in Florida. A bar in Anchorage, Alaska, ordered twelve units last month. We also have interest for machines in Canada and Mexico."
Duke studied the production numbers. "At current capacity, how many machines will we have deployed by year-end?"
Bushnell did the math in his head, which, Duke had learned, was how Bushnell did all math. "If we maintain this pace and account for the seasonal bump we're seeing in the restaurant sector, we'll hit twenty thousand units in the field by December thirty-first."
"Twenty thousand."
"Give or take a few hundred. And that's with our current production constraints. If we could expand the line, add a second shift, bring in more assembly staff, maybe lease additional floor space, we could push that to twenty-five, maybe twenty-eight thousand by mid-'72."
Duke nodded slowly. This was the conversation he'd come to have, and Bushnell had walked right into it.
"Nolan, I want to talk about the future of this company."
Bushnell's expression shifted from enthusiastic to attentive.
"Atari needs to become the Electronics Division of Paramount," Duke said. "Not in name only, in structure, in resources. I want Atari to be a division with dedicated manufacturing infrastructure, a formal R&D budget, and a global distribution network."
Bushnell leaned against the drafting table and crossed his arms. "That's a big step."
"It's the next step. You've seen the Midway memo?"
"I've seen it. Ross bought himself a toy factory." Bushnell's tone was dismissive. "Let me tell you something about Midway, Duke. They make pinball machines. Good ones. But a pinball machine is a mechanical device, springs, bumpers, flippers."
"A video game cabinet is an electronic device, circuit boards, transistors. Converting a pinball factory to a video game factory isn't like switching from making trucks to making cars. It's like switching from making trucks to making televisions. Different tools, different skills, different supply chain."
"How long before they're competitive?"
"Twelve to eighteen months, minimum. And that's if they hire the right engineers, which they probably won't, because the right engineers like Baer are already working here." Bushnell grinned. "By the time Ross has his first Midway cabinet rolling off the line, we'll be way ahead of him."
"Good. Also I don't want to just stay ahead domestically. I want to go global."
Bushnell's eyebrows rose. "Global as in...?"
"Japan."
The word landed with weight. Bushnell unfolded his arms and straightened up.
"I want to set up co-owned manufacturing entities in Japan," Duke continued. "Joint ventures with Japanese electronics firms. The Japanese manufacturing sector is the most efficient in the world right now. Maybe use their cheapness to build a pipeline to export Atari products to Latin America, Southeast Asia, Europe, but that's for the future."
"A global product," Bushnell said quietly, and Duke could see the idea taking root behind those bright eyes.
"Exactly. We manufacture in Japan, ship to regional hubs, and distribute. This is a long term goal."
"There'll be political blowback," Bushnell said. "Manufacturing overseas, especially in Japan. Some congressmen are going to lose their minds cause of jobs."
"Some congressmen are always losing their minds. We're not moving American jobs overseas. We would be adding Japanese capacity to supplement our domestic production, which will continue to grow."
"Every unit we manufacture in Japan is a unit we couldn't have made at all, because our domestic lines are already at capacity. We're not replacing American workers. We're serving markets that American workers can't reach."
Bushnell nodded, "What about the gambling arcades?"
"They stay separate. Completely separate. Different branding, different distribution, different books even. Paramount is a family entertainment company at the end of the day."
Bushnell's expression turned serious. "Understood. The shell company is airtight. Different serial numbers, different cabinet designs, different everything."
"Good. Keep it that way."
"Twenty thousand machines by year-end," Duke said. "And that's just the beginning."
"Just the beginning," Bushnell agreed.
They talked for a while more about the Home Pong prototype, the retail price point, the Sears catalog placement. Technical details. Production timelines.
And then, as the conversation wound down and the lab grew quiet around them, Duke said something that came up on his mind.
"Nolan, what do you know about magnetic tape?"
Bushnell looked up from his schematic. "Magnetic tape? Like reel-to-reel? Audio recording?"
"Like audio recording. But not audio. Video."
Bushnell expression shifted from casual to curious.
"You're talking about recording video signals onto magnetic tape," Bushnell said slowly.
"I'm talking about a device that sits in your living room, next to your television, and does two things. One it records television broadcasts onto a magnetic tape cassette, so you can watch them later. Two it plays pre-recorded tapes movies, concerts, educational programs that you buy or rent, the same way you buy a record album."
"Movies you can own," Bushnell murmured.
"Movies you can own. Think about that for a second. Right now, if you want to see Hacksaw Ridge, you go to a theater. You buy a ticket. You sit in a dark room with three hundred strangers. You see the film once, and then it's gone, unless you go back and buy another ticket."
"But what if you could buy it on a tape cassette and watch it in your living room, anytime you want, as many times as you want?"
Bushnell was quiet for a long moment. Finally, he spoke.
"The technology exists. Sort of."
"Tell me."
"There's a company called Ampex. Up in Redwood City, not far from here, actually. They're the kings of magnetic tape recording. Basically invented the modern tape recorder."
"After the war, there was a singer, Bing Crosby who wanted to pre-record his radio shows so he didn't have to do them live. He contacted a small company to develop a high-quality tape recording system, and that company was Ampex."
"What did Ampex do with it?"
"They dominated the professional market. Every broadcast network in the country uses Ampex tape machines. CBS, NBC, ABC, when you see the evening news, the tape it's recorded on was almost certainly manufactured by Ampex, and the machine playing it was almost certainly built by Ampex. They're the standard."
"And video? Not just audio?"
Bushnell leaned forward, warming to the subject. "That's the interesting part. In 1956, Ampex introduced something called the Mark IV. It was the first practical videotape recorder."
"It could record a television broadcast onto a two-inch magnetic tape and play it back with broadcast quality. It was a miracle of engineering. And it was enormous. The size of a refrigerator. Cost fifty thousand dollars. Strictly a professional tool for broadcast studios, production houses, that kind of thing."
"But the principle works."
"The principle absolutely works. You can record and play back video on magnetic tape. The problem is miniaturization. Making the machine small enough and cheap enough for a consumer product."
"Ampex tried, they developed some prototypes in the mid-'60s, but they couldn't get the cost below several thousand dollars, and the quality wasn't great. They shelved the consumer program and went back to focusing on the professional market."
Duke was very still.
"So... Ampex has the tape technology," Duke said. "The recording heads, the magnetic formulations, the transport mechanisms. All the hard science."
"They have all of it. Decades of it."
"And Atari has the consumer electronics logic. We know how to build things that regular people use in their homes. We know how to design for the mass market. We know how to hit a price point."
Bushnell's eyes widened.
"You want to combine them," Bushnell said.
"I would like to explore the concept of combining them. Ampex's tape patents and manufacturing expertise, alongside to Atari's consumer electronics design and Paramount's content library."
"Duke, that's..." Bushnell ran his hand through his beard. "That's a ten-year project."
"Maybe. Maybe less, if we start now. I'm not saying we build the thing tomorrow. I'm saying we start the conversation. We can try to reach out to Ampex. Quietly. Find out what their current thinking is on the consumer video market. Find out what their patent portfolio looks like. Find out if they're open to a partnership, licensing, joint development, something."
"And if they are?"
"Then we start building the future of home entertainment. We need to think big."
Bushnell was quiet for a long time. He picked up his Coca-Cola, found it empty, and set it down again. He looked at the circuit board on the workbench, then at the Home Pong prototype on the shelf above it, then at Duke.
"Bushnell nodded. "I'll call Ampex tomorrow. I know a guy in their R&D division, we were at Utah together. He'll talk to me."
Duke shook his hand. "Thank you, Nolan."
"Don't thank me yet. I can't promise anything."
"Deal."