Frank Price, a peripatetic Hollywood studio executive who over three decades greenlit or oversaw production of many hit films, including “Tootsie” and “Out of Africa,” and a few flops, like the superhero comedy “Howard the Duck,” died on Monday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 95.
His son David confirmed the death.
Mr. Price occupied executive suites at Universal Pictures, where at different times he ran the television and movie businesses, and at Columbia Pictures, which he ran twice. In his first tenure at Columbia, in the 1980s, he became known as “the $10 Million Man” for the four-year contract he signed as chairman and president.
At Universal Television, where he rose to president in 1973 after 14 years in various positions, Mr. Price had great power as a supplier of programing to all three broadcast networks. Universal produced numerous series, including “Columbo,” “Ironside,” “Kojak” and “Quincy,” and the socially aware TV movies “That Certain Summer” (1972), about a gay relationship between characters played by Hal Holbrook and Martin Sheen, and “A Case of Rape” (1974), starring Elizabeth Montgomery as a victim of sexual assault.
Mr. Price left the grind of TV production in 1978 to become president of Columbia Pictures. That position was similar to the one vacated by David Begelman, who had resigned several months earlier in a check-forging scandal that roiled Hollywood.
During Mr. Price’s five years there, Columbia released hits like the comedies “Stir Crazy” (1980), starring Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor; “Tootsie” (1982), with Dustin Hoffman as an out-of-work actor who finds success only by impersonating a woman; and “Ghostbusters” (1984), with Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd. Another major film under his watch was “Gandhi” (1982), with Ben Kingsley as the Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi; it won eight Oscars, including for best picture and best actor.
But Mr. Price was said to have refused to make “E.T. the Extraterrestrial,” Steven Spielberg’s science fiction story about a fragile alien lost on Earth, because of studio research saying that it would appeal only to children. The decision proved to be one of the biggest blunders in Hollywood history: “E.T.” went on to break box-office records.
Mr. Price left Columbia in 1983 after clashing over financial issues with Francis T. Vincent Jr., known as Fay, the president of Columbia Pictures Industries and a future baseball commissioner. (Mr. Vincent died in February.)
“It’s hard for someone like Price to confront the fact that ‘Tootsie’ doesn’t make up for six bad films,” Mr. Vincent told Kim Masters and Nancy Griffin for their 1996 book, “Hit and Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood.”
David Price said in an interview that his father was frustrated with the way officials of Coca-Cola, which had acquired Columbia in 1982 for $750 million, were changing the way the studio marketed its films.
“And,” he added, “they were against moving forward with ‘Ghostbusters.’”
Wiliam Francis Price Jr. was born on May 17, 1930, in Decatur, Ill. His father was an electrician whose jobs took him to stops around the country, including Oak Ridge, Tenn., where he worked on the Manhattan Project; Los Angeles, from 1937 to 1942; and Flint, Mich.
His mother, Winifred (Moran) Price, was a waitress at the commissary on the Warner Bros. studio lot in Burbank, where she asked stars like Humphrey Bogart to sign photographs of themselves with the salutation “To Frankie.”
Mr. Price recalled being on a Warner soundstage and watching as Edward G. Robinson was hosed down with water during the filming of “The Sea Wolf” (1941).
“But in actuality, if anything, the whole experience of being around Warner Bros. drove me away from it, because it loomed too large,” he said in a podcast interview with the National Endowment for the Arts in 2013. “That was unreal.”
He was drawn more to the stage, and he acted in high school in Flint and at Michigan State University. He worked as a copy boy at The Flint Journal before he moved to New York, where he looked for a job in journalism, without success.
Instead, he began a career in television. He was hired as a clerk in CBS’s story department at 19 and later graduated to script reader. While at the network, he sold a script to the series “Casey, Crime Photographer,” starring Darrin McGavin.
He then became a story editor for Screen Gems, Columbia’s TV subsidiary, and for “Matinee Theater,” a dramatic anthology series broadcast on weekday afternoons on NBC from 1955 to 1958. After that, for Universal, he developed “The Virginian,” a 90-minute western series that ran on NBC from 1962 to 1971, and was one of its executive producers.
At Universal, Mr. Price was the executive producer of “Ironside,” “It Takes a Thief” and other series, He rose from vice president in 1964 to executive vice president in the early 1970s before taking over as president.
He returned to Universal in 1983 as chairman of the studio’s movie division.
Mr. Price was welcomed back by Sidney Sheinberg, the president of MCA, Universal’s parent company. “Now that’s he completed his on-the-job training at Columbia,” Mr. Sheinberg said, “he’s back where he belongs.”
But despite a roster of successes like “Back to the Future” and “Out of Africa,” Mr. Price did not get along with Mr. Sheinberg or with Mr. Spielberg, a key figure at Universal, who, The New York Times reported, resented Mr. Price’s decision not to make “E.T.” at Columbia. Mr. Price resigned after the failure of “Howard the Duck,” which was produced by George Lucas. Variety’s article about his departure bore the headline “Duck Cooks Price’s Goose.”
Mr. Price said in an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 1982 that he believed that Mr. Spielberg had been contractually committed to making his next film for Universal and wanted it to be “E.T.”
Mr. Price spent a few years as an independent producer, then returned to Columbia as chairman of its film studio after the Sony Corporation acquired it. Lasting just 18 months there before he was replaced by Mark Canton, he had a major success in 1991 with “Boyz n the Hood,” for which he took a chance by letting the 24-year-old John Singleton direct his own screenplay. But he flopped that same year with “Return to the Blue Lagoon,” a period drama about two teenagers marooned on a tropical island.
Mr. Price left with a buyout worth an estimated $15 million to $20 million and returned to producing films, including “A Bronx Tale” and “Shadowlands,” in 1993, and “The Tuskegee Airmen,” for HBO, in 1995.
“I am a hired manager,” he told The Times in 1984. Referring to past studio chiefs like Louis B. Mayer, of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and the Warner brothers, he added: “The Mayers and the Warners could have good years and bad years and it didn’t matter. They were the owners of the companies, including the theaters.”
In addition to his son David, from his marriage to Phyllis Hull, which ended in divorce, he is survived by his wife, Katherine (Huggins) Price, who acted under the name Katherine Crawford; their sons, Roy, a former head of Amazon Studios, and William III; and 14 grandchildren.
Two other sons died last year: Stephen, from Mr. Price’s marriage to Ms. Hull, and Mike Damitz. Mr. Price and his first wife, Barbara Christensen, who married as teenagers (a union that was annulled), surrendered their son, Mr. Damitz, for adoption; he and Mr. Price met seven years ago and developed a good relationship.
Despite the instability of the Hollywood C-suite, Mr. Price loved being a studio chief.
“I’d like to know what the drawbacks are,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1994. “Anyone who complains about the stresses is a fool. The pay and the perks are good. You have fun lunches with Streisand and Redford.
“And,” he added, “it’s sort of like being head of small country.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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