A forgotten episode in the history of Hollywood cinema, television and seriality: the case of the Mirisch Company

The Mirisch Company is a missing link in Hollywood history. It helped re-popularize cinematic sequels – with their three follow-ups to The Magnificent Seven, two to The Pink Panther, and another two to In the Heat of the Night – seven sequels in all, across three film series – a strategy initiated over a decade before Jaws, The Godfather, and Star Wars made film franchises a familiar aspect of Hollywood’s blockbuster business. It was a strategy born of Mirisch’s desire to square the circle between the one-off independent production characteristic of Hollywood, after the end of vertical integration, and the impetus for continual production necessitated by their multiple picture deal with United Artists and eased by the efficiencies and cost-effectiveness inherent in such series production. Mirisch also demonstrated how this can provide synergies between film and television, with Pink Panther and, post-Mirisch, Magnificent Seven and In the Heat of the Night TV series too. The company even produced a TV pilot, spun off from its cinematic hit Some Like It Hot, which began with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis having face transplants to escape the mob and being replaced by new actors, when the bandages came off.

Copyright Year 2021: © 2021 Taylor & Francis
This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Exploring Seriality on Screen: Audiovisual Narratives in Film and Television on October 26, 2020, available online: http://www.routledge.com/9780367491482 or http://www.crcpress.com/9780367491482