Frank Price, Studio Chief at Columbia (Twice) and Universal, Dies at 95

He first made his mark as a producer on NBC's 'The Virginian' and greenlighted films including 'Gandhi,' 'Tootsie,' 'Back to the Future' and 'Boyz n the Hood.'

He was not on the list.

Frank Price, the writer-producer who emerged from the world of TV Westerns to preside over the television and movie divisions at Universal and serve two terms as the head of Columbia Pictures, died Monday. He was 95.

Price died in his sleep of natural causes at his home in Santa Monica, his son Roy Price, the former president of Amazon Studios, told The Hollywood Reporter.

As a movie boss, Frank Price had a hand in such critical successes as the Oscar best picture winners Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Gandhi (1982) and Out of Africa (1985) and huge money-makers including Tootsie (1982), Ghostbusters (1984), The Karate Kid (1984), Back to the Future (1985), Boyz n the Hood (1991) and A League of Their Own (1992).

Earlier, Price had spent nearly two decades as a writer, producer and then head of Universal Television. His idea put The Virginian — one of TV’s longest-running Westerns — in motion, and he executive produced Ironside and It Takes a Thief. He also greenlighted Kojak, The Six Million Dollar Man and Battlestar Galactica and helped develop provocative made-for-TV movies and miniseries like That Certain Summer and Rich Man, Poor Man, respectively.

Price spent a formative TV season learning from Roy Huggins — the creator of such series as Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip, The Fugitive and The Rockford Files — while working alongside him on The Virginian. Price then married Huggins’ daughter, actress Katherine Crawford, in 1965. She also survives him.

Price, in fact, was one of the few top Hollywood executives to come from a writing background. His philosophy was to pay top talent big bucks to ensure box-office success, a philosophy that confounded many of his peers.

In the early 1980s, Price realized that making a three-hour period piece about Mahatma Gandhi would be a risky proposition. “Nobody under 40 would know who he was, which was true,” he told Josephine Reed in a 2013 interview for the National Endowment for the Arts podcast Art Works. “And I was given the other line, which was, ‘Nobody’s going to care about a little brown man wandering around in a diaper.’ But we did undertake it.”

Price held up the release of Gandhi to build interest in its subject — he noted that Columbia got “six major articles out of [The New York Times] over the next year on various aspects of India, Gandhi and so on.” The film, produced and directed by Richard Attenborough and starring Ben Kingsley, went on to capture eight Oscars.

Ghostbusters, meanwhile, cost $25 million to make and raked in $295.2 worldwide ($917.8 million today). “I’d had hits before, but [with] Ghostbusters, I was reminded of the movie Boom Town when they hit the gusher,” Price told Vanity Fair in 2014. “Oil is just raining down: they’re rolling in it. That’s what it felt like with Ghostbusters.”

Not every decision worked out, of course; Price infamously put Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) in turnaround at Columbia because he thought the $10 million budget was too pricy.

Born on May 17, 1930, in Decatur, Illinois, Price spent some of his early years on the Warner Bros. lot, where his mother was a waitress in the commissary. When he was a teenager, he and his family moved to Flint, Michigan, and he was editor of the Central High School newspaper and president of the drama club. He also served as a copy boy at The Flint Journal.

After a year in the U.S. Navy, Price attended Michigan State and then moved to New York — not back to Los Angeles — to continue his studies at Columbia University.

“The whole experience of being around Warner Bros. drove me away from it, because it loomed too large. That was unreal,” he said. “The people on the screen were, you know, 30 feet high or whatever. I understood actors on a stage; that made sense to me.”

Price searched for a newspaper job but couldn’t land one, but he did get hired as a clerk in the story department at CBS Television — because he was an excellent typist — in 1951.

“One of the key things that was done in that department was reading, looking for story material,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Well, I can do that.’ So I moved from clerk/typist/receptionist to reader. And that was very good, because I started writing out of that.”

Price sold a story for an early live TV show, Casey, Crime Photographer, then wrote and produced for NBC’s Matinee Theatre, a whirlwind 60-minute live drama that aired five days a week out of Burbank, starting in 1955.

After working as a story editor and analyst for Columbia’s TV subsidiary, Screen Gems, Price moved to MCA’s Universal Television in 1959 as a writer and producer. He worked on several Westerns, including Overland Trail, starring William Bendix, and The Tall Man, featuring tales of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

When NBC lost the popular Wagon Train to ABC in 1962, MCA sought to create another Western that the network could run. Price recommended that Owen Wister’s 1902 novel The Virginian — which was in the public domain — serve as the basis for the series. (The book also had been adapted for a 1929 movie starring Gary Cooper.)

NBC wanted a name producer for the show and brought in Huggins, who was working on his doctorate in political science at UCLA after creating Maverick and 77 Sunset Strip for Warner Bros. Television.

“Roy was offered the role of executive producer on it and said he would take it if I worked with him,” Price said in the Art Works interview. “So what happened was he went to school all day, and I would run the show. Roy would come in about 5 o’clock and I would then work until about 2 o’clock in the morning with him. So we had a long day.”

Set in the late 1890s in Medicine Bow, Wyoming, The Virginian starred James Drury and Doug McClure and was television’s first 90-minute Western.

“I felt that I was a ranch owner in Wyoming because I immersed myself in it and I loved telling the stories,” he said. “It was a wonderful form.”

In that first season, Price cast Bette Davis in an episode shortly after she had taken out an ad in The Hollywood Reporter as an actress seeking work. “In subsequent interviews, she referred to it as shit, as I recall,” Price said in the 2006 book, A History of Television’s The Virginian, 1962-1971. “No good deed ever goes unpunished.”

Price took over for Huggins as exec producer starting with The Virginian‘s second season and stayed with the series through 1967. It ran nine seasons, until March 1971.

At his father-in-law’s eulogy in 2002, Price said his time with Huggins on The Virginian proved invaluable. “Those few months turned out to be incredibly important to me,” he said. “He made it clear that his goal was to please the top 10 percent of the audience — the thinking, critical 10 percent.”

In 1973, Price was named head of Universal Television and soon was pushing the envelope with such telefilms as That Certain Summer, with Hal Holbrook and Martin Sheen playing a gay couple, and A Case of Rape, starring Elizabeth Montgomery. He also supervised the start of NBC’s 12-episode, 26-hour Centennial, based on the James Michener novel.

“I was running the biggest, most successful television operation that had ever existed,” he said. “I built it to where we had one-third of all network programming, back when there were just the three networks. But then HBO suddenly came into being. I looked at that and said, ‘Whoops, television is going to change radically, that’s going to start taking away the audience.’ Where should I be? Because I don’t want to ride this down.”

So Price resigned and joined Columbia in June 1978, stepping in for the scandal-plagued David Begelman. He became president of the motion picture division in March 1979 and subsequently was named chairman and CEO. He was known around town as “The $10 Million Man” for his contract.

“The idea that I had Harry Cohn’s job was a real kick,” Price, talking about the legendary Columbia mogul, told the Los Angeles Times in 1994. “Though there was certainly some ego-stroking, the best part of the job was the ability to buy the best — directors, scripts, talent. 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.”

During his first stint atop Columbia, he oversaw Brooke Shields’ The Blue Lagoon (1980), made for just $4 million; Stir Crazy (1980), starring Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor; Ivan Reitman’s Stripes (1981), starring Bill Murray; and the Dustin Hoffman-starrer Tootsie, which grossed $177.2 million ($593.2 million in today’s dollars).

After Columbia was purchased by Coca-Cola in January 1982 for $750 million, Price got mired in a power struggle with Fay Vincent, chairman of Columbia Pictures Industries (and future commissioner of Major League Baseball), and resigned in October 1983.

“It’s hard for someone like Price to confront the fact that Tootsie doesn’t make up for six bad films,” Vincent said in Hit and Run, the 1996 book written by Nancy Griffin and THR‘s Kim Masters.

A month later, Price was back at MCA as chairman of Universal’s motion picture group. He went on to greenlight, in addition to Back to the Future and seven-time Oscar winner Out of Africa, such films as Fletch and John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club, both released in 1985.

In September 1986, a few weeks after Universal released the legendary misfire Howard the Duck, Price exited again. Three years later, Sony acquired Columbia for $3.4 billion, and newly installed film executives Jon Peters and Peter Guber named Price to replace Dawn Steel to head Columbia in 1990.

One of his biggest triumphs this time around was giving the go-ahead to Boyz in the Hood and allowing John Singleton to direct the movie from his own screenplay. At age 24, Singleton became the first African-American — and the youngest person — to be nominated for best director.

“I decided that even though he was inexperienced, a thing I’ve always believed with writers is, they’ve already directed it once,” Price explained. “If you’ve written the script, you have directed it.”

In October 1991, Mark Canton was brought in to replace Price, who left with a production deal and 25 projects that he had in development at Columbia. He then launched Price Entertainment, the company behind Shadowlands (1993), A Bronx Tale (1993), Circle of Friends (1995), Paul Mazursky‘s troubled Faithful (1996) and HBO’s The Tuskegee Airmen (1995).

Price served as chairman of the board of councilors at the USC School of Cinematic Arts from its inception in 1992 until 2021. And after being nominated by President George W. Bush, he was a member of the National Council on the Arts from 2007-13.

Survivors include his sons David and Will and 14 grandchildren. Two other sons, Michael and Stephen, predeceased him.

Writer

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1962–1971

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1960

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The Rough Riders (1958)

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1958

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1995

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2019

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1997

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1995

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1995

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1971

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1971

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1971

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1970

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1970

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1968

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1967

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1963–1967

102 episodes

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1966

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1965

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1960

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Editor

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Editor

1957–1958

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Production Manager

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