Touchstone Plus-Or-Minus: Down And Out In Beverly Hills
It’s difficult to say exactly when The Touchstone Era ended. While Disney officially retired the label in 2016, that was more or less a formality. Touchstone had already ceased to be a priority at the studio years earlier. But we can say with certainty that The Touchstone Era began on January 31, 1986, with the release of Down And Out In Beverly Hills, Disney’s first R-rated film.
While Touchstone had already been around for a couple years by then, their earliest releases from Splash to My Science Project had all been holdovers from Ron Miller’s tenure as president. Even though Touchstone had been Miller’s idea in the first place, it’s fair to say he didn’t have a particularly clear vision of what he wanted to do with it. Miller had taken some risks and some of those resulted in good movies. But he didn’t have any experience in the movie industry outside of the Disney bubble. And even if he had, Disney’s precarious financial standing meant he was never in a position to have more than a handful of projects in production at any given moment.
Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, on the other hand, knew the movie business and knew exactly what they wanted to do with Touchstone. Despite their successes and name recognition, Disney had never been considered one of the major studios like Paramount or Warner Bros. Disney made children’s films. As long as that continued to be the industry’s perception, they simply couldn’t compete with the other studios. In a way, they weren’t even playing the same game.
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