A Fight for Survival

• Author: Ronald K. Fierstein
• Profession: Lawyer on the team of litigators from the prestigious patent law firm of Fish & Neave
• Pages: 197-217

197

CHAPTER 10

A FIGHT FOR SURVIVAL

With the Berkey Photo lawsuit filed, and the campaign to defend its turf

begun, Polaroid had other news to feel good about as 1975 progressed.

Second-quarter earnings looked as if they were going to be almost dou-

ble what analysts had predicted.1 This meant that some rehiring would

be possible, reinstating about one-third of the employees who had been

laid off during the difficult economic days of 1974. By the end of the

year, Polaroid was finally able to announce the news that many had been

waiting for: in early 1976 it would introduce a non-folding instant cam-

era with a molded plastic body designed to use SX-70 film.2 The camera,

dubbed Pronto, had a suggested retail price of sixty-six dollars but was

widely discounted by retailers to forty-nine dollars, just a few dollars over

its wholesale cost.3 It was a much more affordable model than the original

SX-70, which bore a list price of $180.

Although Polaroid had released two somewhat lower-priced versions

of the SX-70 in 1974, neither was as economical as the Pronto, and so

neither had its potential to increase sales of instant film.4 As Time pointed

out: “Almost from the time George Eastman fathered the snapshot, the

biggest profits in the photography business have come from selling not

cameras but film.”5 Polaroid had been slow to take advantage of this tru-

ism, a fact not lost on analysts, some of whom “chided Polaroid for wast-

ing time in descending from the unnecessarily complex SX-70 original

to the simpler Pronto.”6 Now, at last, the company was finally poised to

release the mass-market camera for which many both inside and outside

Polaroid had long been clamoring.

Polaroid staged an “upbeat, lavish affair” on January 13, 1976, to

introduce Pronto.7 Never enthusiastic about the concept of a low-price

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A Triumph of Genius

198

camera, Land was conspicuously absent from the champagne gala held at

New York’s Plaza Hotel. Instead, Bill McCune made his first high-profile

public appearance since ascending to the presidency the previous year.8 A

$4 million advertising campaign was announced featuring Alan Alda, star

of the then popular TV series M*A*S*H, and the actress Candace Ber-

gen. The campaign was planned to debut on Oscar night in a few weeks’

time.9 McCune was able to announce very favorable financial news about

the company to the 450 industry analysts and reporters who attended the

event. SX-70 film sales were up forty percent in 1975, a year that had

seen another one million cameras sold. Earnings for the first nine months

of 1975 would be reported at $1.15 per share, compared with fifty-eight

cents in 1974. Eventually, it turned out that Polaroid’s profits for 1975

would jump 166 percent from the previous year, aided by fourth-quarter

sales nearly triple the level achieved in the same quarter a year before.10

Despite this good news, the imminent threat of Kodak’s entry into

the instant photography field hovered like a dark storm forming over the

distant horizon. In October 1975, Walter Fallon had announced at a meet-

ing of industry analysts in Atlanta that Kodak’s program to develop and

market its own instant film and camera was “moving ahead on schedule

and [it was] encouraged by the prospects.”11 He had noted that a specific

target date had been selected for the introduction of the products, but he

declined to disclose it. And he had made it clear that unlike the Berkey

camera, Kodak’s cameras were not going to use Polaroid film. The two

systems were going to be completely incompatible. In January 1976, at

the same time that Polaroid was heralding its new camera model, reports

were circulating that a crew from the major advertising firm of J. Wal-

ter Thompson was already in California shooting commercials in great

secrecy for Kodak’s entry into instant photography.12

The concerns at Polaroid over what was coming through the Kodak

pipeline persisted given the lack of hard information available. The pos-

sibility remained that Kodak might surpass Polaroid’s technology, given

the massive research and development efforts that had been under way

for seven years, just a few months short of the time it had taken America

to land a man on the moon. Some analysts had already concluded that,

based on what they had seen and heard, Kodak’s “instant photo system

may well be technically superior to Polaroid’s.”13 The photography giant

had already made the claim that its film “would be [of] characteristic

Kodak quality.”14An analyst for L.F. Rothschild offered his “best guess”

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