Walter Reade

Reade was described by Joseph Strick, the director of that film, as "a big, bluff man who wore a fresh carnation every day".

[2] Reade declared "You can't take major awards to the bank" and began a program of more commercial releases such as a double feature of the British Hot Enough for June retitled Agent 8+3⁄4 to make it sound more like a James Bond spoof and the Japanese Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster in 1965.

[6] At its peak in the mid- to late-1960s, the Walter Reade Organization also operated two flagship foreign film movie theaters in Beverly Hills, California.

The Beverly Hills Music Hall on Wilshire Boulevard was the exclusive exhibitor in the region of the 1969 Russian production of War and Peace.

All the motion picture industry elites turned out for the several months of that engagement, including Katharine Hepburn, Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, Mike Nichols, Joanne Woodward, and scores of others.

Theater staffers were required to wear Russian tunics for this engagement, and the doormen wore full-length Cossack coats, fur hats and accessories.

Columbia Pictures purchased 81% of the organization in 1981, buying the company completely in 1985, but later sold it to the Cineplex Odeon Corporation on June 26, 1987.