The New Yorker:

How a fiftysomething A-lister joined forces with a twenty-two-year-old Candice Bergen to rescue the Academy Awards from obsolescence.

By Michael Schulman 

On April 14, 1969, Gregory Peck strode across a deserted hall of Los Angeles’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion like a weary cowboy crossing a prairie. He had become the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences two years earlier, and his job was to introduce the Forty-first Academy Awards. On camera, Peck descended a mirrored staircase in the atrium, looked around, with his thick eyebrows furrowed, and announced in his deep voice, “It’s kind of lonesome out here. The audience is already on the inside.”

The most nominated films that year were the splashy studio musicals “Oliver!” and “Funny Girl,” whose twenty-six-year-old star, Barbra Streisand, showed up to the ceremony in a see-through pants suit. In an effort to make the Oscar broadcast less lugubrious, Peck had hired the stage director Gower Champion. In place of Bob Hope, hosting duties were shared by “Oscar’s best friends,” among them Ingrid Bergman, Sidney Poitier, Burt Lancaster, and, for the youth market, Jane Fonda, her short hair waved for her role in “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”

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