Frank Price, a writer-producer who made the rare leap to studio executive and became the head of Universal and Columbia Pictures, has died at the age of 95, according to his son and former Amazon Studios head Roy Price.
Price’s four-decade rise from CBS story editor to the head of Universal Television and later Columbia has left an immeasurable impact on Hollywood, from helping to pioneer formats like miniseries and made-for-TV movies to overseeing the release of Best Picture Oscar winners like “Out of Africa” and “Gandhi” and some of the biggest zeitgeist-defining films of the 80s like “Ghostbusters” and “The Karate Kid.
“My father, Frank Price, passed away peacefully in his sleep this morning at 95. He lived a full life and we will miss him deeply,” Roy Price wrote.
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Born in Illinois, Price got his first taste of Hollywood hanging around the Warner Bros. lot as a kid while his mother worked in the studio commissary. There, he met the likes of Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney and Olivia de Havilland.
In 1951 at the age of 21, he got his start as a story editor for CBS before moving to Columbia Pictures two years later. After bouncing around writers’ rooms through the 1950s, his career reached the next level when he joined Universal Television in 1959 and was taken under the wing of the studio’s two legendary leaders, Lew Wasserman and Sidney Sheinberg.
Under their mentorship, Price made the jump from writer to exec in 1961 as vice president of Universal TV. While there, he learned much of the business side of Hollywood by serving as an executive producer on “The Virginian,” the first 90-minute TV western, which ran from 1962 to 1970.
Along with working on “The Virginian,” Price helped pioneer the made-for-TV movie with “The Doomsday Flight” in 1966, written by “The Twilight Zone” creator Rod Serling. The film, starring Jack Lord, centers around a commercial airplane held hostage by a mysterious figure who demands a ransom after he plants a bomb on the plane that will detonate if the plane flies below 4,000 feet.
Price’s work led him to be promoted to the head of Universal Television in 1971, where he remained until he made the flip to film by moving to Columbia Pictures in 1978. His TV career ended with a wide array of hit series under his belt, including “Kojak,” “Columbo” and the original “Battlestar Galactica.”
During his first tenure at Columbia from 1978 to 1983, Price oversaw the release of the Best Picture Oscar winner “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “Gandhi,” as well as the nominated “Tootsie.”
But one of Price’s biggest moves as an executive came in the final months of his tenure: taking a risk on Ivan Reitman’s “Ghostbusters.” At the time, comedies were seen as struggling at the box office, and a supernatural comedy that would require at least $25 million to produce — around $81 million in today’s money — was seen as a huge risk.
Against the wishes of Columbia CEO Fay Vincent, Price greenlit “Ghostbusters.” After a power struggle with Vincent over the future of Columbia, Price left the studio in October 1983, just weeks before “Ghostbusters” started shooting. Eight months later, the film was released and became the second highest grossing film of 1984 with $295 million grossed, equivalent to $916 million today.
On the flipside, there was another classic film that Price let get away: Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.” After the success of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” Spielberg developed another alien film called “Night Skies” around a film in which an alien befriends an autistic child.
While Columbia put $1 million into the development of “Night Skies,” Price, at the advice of his subordinates, decided that the film would not appeal to a wide audience and put the project in turnaround. Spielberg then brought it to Price’s former mentor, Sid Sheinberg, who had become the president of Universal’s parent company MCA, and convinced him to buy the “E.T.” script from Columbia. Universal greenlit the film, and “E.T.” became the highest grossing film of all time, holding the record until another Spielberg hit, “Jurassic Park,” took it in 1993.
After leaving Columbia in 1983, Price served for four years as the chairman of MCA. There, Price oversaw the development of his third Best Picture winner “Out of Africa” in 1985 as well as the smash hit “Back to the Future,” whose script had been rejected repeatedly by other studios and execs.
But Price’s time there came to an abrupt end after the infamous box office bomb “Howard the Duck,” based on the satirical Marvel character. Three years later, Columbia Pictures, now under the ownership of Sony, invited Price to come back, where he greenlit “Boyz ‘n the Hood,” which led to director John Singleton to become the first Black filmmaker to be nominated for the Best Director Oscar and the youngest ever to do so.
In a 1994 interview with the Los Angeles Times as the head of his own independent production company Price Entertainment, Price said that being a studio executive was the best job in the world.
“Anyone who complains about the stresses is a fool. The pay and the perks are good. You have fun lunches with [Barbra] Streisand and [Robert] Redford. And it’s sort of like being head of a small country. Though I rarely used the plane, I was met at the airport and commanded a certain amount of deference. Things go your way–period,” he said.
“Though there was certainly some ego-stroking, the best part of the job was the ability to buy the best–directors, scripts, talent,” he added. “The worst was spending your day saying ‘no’–telling people you don’t share their dreams. You’re making subjective decisions in a very amorphous realm . . . and have to wait 18 to 24 months before you know if you guessed right.”
Price is survived by his sons, Roy, David and Will, and 14 grandchildren.