In memoriam: Frank Price (Telegraph 28/08/25)

Frank Price, who has died aged 95, was a soft-spoken movie and TV executive whose career – including two separate spells as head of Columbia Pictures – benefitted from years of ground-level experience in writing and production; he was often credited as the man who launched the TV movie during his tenure at NBC-Universal, nurturing such ratings hits as the Rod Serling-penned The Doomsday Flight (1966) and Steven Spielberg’s debut Duel (1971).

Price broke through as a writer-producer in TV’s post-War golden age: his first credit arrived with “Out of the Frying Pan”, a 1957 episode of NBC’s Matinee Theater (1955-58). Yet he came to specialise in Westerns, apprenticing on The Rough Riders (1958-59), Shotgun Slade (1959-61) and Frontier Circus (1961). “I learned how to save money in production,” Price later reflected. “I also learned where it paid not to save money.”

After producing notable hits The Virginian (1962-71) and Ironside (1967-75), Price was appointed to head Universal’s television department in 1974, greenlighting such beloved shows as The Rockford Files (1974-1980), The Six Million Dollar Man (1974-78) and Battlestar Galactica (1978-79). By now, his track record and feel for what the audience wanted had become unignorable within the industry; in 1978, Columbia Pictures invited him to head their features division.

Price’s impact there was immediate; among the first titles he greenlit were Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and Gandhi (1982), popular hits that won thirteen Oscars between them. Ghostbusters (1984) became a blockbuster despite behind-the-scenes misgivings. After one mirthless in-house screening, Price remembered, “a studio executive came up and put his arm around me and said, ‘Don't worry: we all make mistakes.’ I was nauseous... [but] when the movie came out, it just exploded.”

By the time Ghostbusters opened, however, Price had resigned, the result of a dispute with Columbia’s parent company Coca-Cola over cable-TV strategy. He returned to Universal, heading the features division that gave multiplex-goers Back to the Future, The Breakfast Club and Out of Africa (all 1985), only to resign after Howard the Duck (1986), a high-profile misfire that reportedly brought Price to blows with his former mentor (and Universal’s president) Sid Sheinberg.

Unbowed, he launched his Price Entertainment production shingle in 1987 and enjoyed a second run as Columbia chief after Sony bought out Coca-Cola in 1990. Over the next eighteen months, Price took at least one triumphant gamble – backing the 23-year-old writer-director John Singleton’s landmark Boyz n the Hood (1991) – while also greenlighting Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and Harold Ramis’s enduring Groundhog Day (1993).

Running a movie studio, he maintained, was easier than the old TV day job that had once hospitalised him for exhaustion: “Whenever I felt overly stressed, I reminded myself that it’s easier than writing… I spent a lot of my time reading [scripts]. From what I understand, however, that’s the exception rather than the rule.”

Frank Price was born in Decatur, Illinois to William F. Price and his wife Winnifred (née Moran) on May 17, 1930, at the nadir of the Great Depression. His parents regularly moved to find work; Price lived in eight cities before turning eighteen. These included Flint, Michigan, where the young Price combined studies with working as a copy boy for the Flint Journal, and Glendale, California, where Winnifred waitressed at the Warner Bros. cafeteria, furnishing her boy with signed photos of Errol Flynn, James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart.

The Flint Journal eventually promoted Price to working the police beat, and he spent his national service editing the Navy’s newspaper. Upon his return, he studied journalism at Michigan State University; he moved to New York in 1951 to attend classes at Columbia University but dropped out after finding work as a script reader at CBS, later joining NBC’s story department.

After leaving Columbia Pictures, Price returned to independent production under the Price Entertainment banner, winning fond reviews for the Irish-set Circle of Friends (1995), adapted by Andrew Davies from the Maeve Binchy novel, and an Emmy nomination for The Tuskegee Airmen (1995), a TV movie starring Boyz n the Hood’s Laurence Fishburne as the head of the all-Black WW2 squadron.

Less feted was Texas Rangers (2001), which started life decades earlier as a potential Sam Peckinpah project, only to exhaust several writers (including John Milius, who felt his script was “mutilated”) and emerge as a flimsy teen Western. Price’s final production was Mariette in Ecstasy, a convent drama filmed in 1996, then shelved after the collapse of distributor Savoy Pictures; it received a belated premiere in 2019, by which point two of its actors, John Mahoney and Rutger Hauer, had died.

Between 1992 and 2021, Price chaired the illustrious board of the USC School of Cinematic Arts (“one of the most rewarding parts of my career”), which at various points numbered Spielberg, George Lucas and David Geffen among their cohort, and he tinkered with an unpublished showbiz novel that he compared to The Last Tycoon, insisting “I know that world better than F. Scott Fitzgerald”.

He retained good memories of his time in the boardroom, despite the ups and downs: “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 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 is survived by his actress wife Katherine Crawford, whom Price married in 1965, and by the couple’s four sons, including the former Amazon Studios head Roy Price and the director David Price.

Frank Price, born May 17, 1930, died August 25, 2025.