Television

FILM ON NETWORK TELEVISIONFROM 1960–1980

Diversifying into television may have seemed risky for a studio in the early 1950s, but within a decade television had become firmly entrenched in Hollywood, where the studios had come to depend for their very existence on the income provided by television. Networks and local stations leaned almost exclusively on Hollywood to satisfy their endless need for programming. By the end of the 1950s, 80 percent of network prime-time programming was produced in Hollywood; it had become nearly impossible to turn on a TV set without encountering a film made in Hollywood, whether a television series or a feature film.

The most significant development for the movie studios occurred in 1960, when they came to an agreement with the Screen Actors Guild that allowed them to sell the television rights to films made after 1948. NBC, the network most committed to color television, introduced Hollywood feature films to prime time in September 1961 with the premiere of the series NBC Saturday Night Movie (1961–1977). ABC added movies to its prime time schedule in 1962. As the perennial first place network with the strongest schedule of regular series, CBS did not feel a need to add movies until 1965. Still, the networks embraced feature films so fervently that by 1968 they programmed seven movies a week in prime time, and four of these finished among the season's highest rated programs.

As recent Hollywood releases became an increasingly important component of prime time schedules, the competition for titles quickly drove up the prices. In 1965 the average price for network rights to a feature film was $400,000, but that figure doubled in just three years. The networks publicized the broadcast premiere of recent studio releases as major events. A milestone of the period occurred in 1966, when ABC paid Columbia $2 million for the rights to the studio's blockbuster hit, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). Sponsored solely by Ford Motor Company to promote its new product line, the movie drew an audience of 60 million viewers.

As television became a crucial secondary market for the movie industry, movies needed to be produced with the conditions of commercial television in mind. Many of these concessions to the television industry of the 1960s and 1970s contributed to the impression of the cinema's superiority. In an era when a new generation of filmmakers and critics were promoting the idea that film was an art form, television stations and networks chopped movies to fit into 90- or 120-minute time slots and interrupted them every 12 or 13 minutes for commercials. Because of the moral standards imposed on commercial television by advertisers and the FCC, studios soon required directors to shoot "tame" alternate versions of violent or sexually explicit scenes for the inevitable television version. Studios began to balk when directors used wide-screen compositions in which key action occurred at the edges of the frame—outside the narrower dimensions of the television screen. As a reminder, camera viewfinders were etched with the dimensions of the TV frame. Studios also began to use optical printers to create "pan-and-scan" versions of widescreen films. Using this technique, scenes shot in a single take often were cut into a series of alternating closeups, or reframed during the printing process by panning across the image, so that key action or dialogue occurred within the TV frame.

As the cost of television rights for feature films climbed during the 1960s, each of the networks began to develop movies made expressly for television. NBC partnered with MCA Universal to create a regular series of "world premiere" movies, beginning with Fame is the Name of the Game in 1966. As the network with the lowest-rated regular series, ABC showed the greatest interest in movies made for television. The ninety-minute ABC Movie of the Week premiered in 1968. As executive in charge of the movies, Barry Diller (b. 1942) essentially ran a miniature movie studio at ABC. He supervised the production of 26 movies per year, each made for less than $350,000. Among the many memorable ABC movies during this period were Brian's Song (1971), a tearjerker about a football player's terminal illness starring Billie Dee Williams and James Caan that became the year's fifth highest-rated broadcast, and That Certain Summer (1972), a TV milestone in which Hal Holbrook and Martin Sheen played a gay couple. By 1973 ABC scheduled a Movie of the Week three nights per week. Director Steven Spielberg, whose suspenseful 1971 film Duel managed to sustain excruciating tension even with the commercial breaks of network television, has become the most celebrated graduate of the made-for-TV movie.

As a market for filmed series, theatrical features, and original movies, television contributed substantially to the economic viability of the movie studios during the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, the television market inspired the first round of consolidation in the movie industry, as the rising value of film libraries made the studios appealing targets for conglomerates looking to diversify their investments. As a subsidiary of the conglomerate Gulf + Western, Paramount became the model for the full integration of the movie and TV industries in the late 1970s, when Barry Diller moved from ABC to Paramount, accompanied by his protégé, Michael Eisner (b. 1942). Paramount produced many of the television series that led ABC to the top of the ratings in the 1970s ( Happy Days [1974–1984], Laverne and Shirley [1976–1983], Mork and Mindy [1978–1982], and Taxi [1978–1983]), but also learned how to leverage the familiarity of TV stars and TV properties to create cross-media cultural phenomena. The signal event in this process was Paramount's successful transformation of John Travolta from a supporting player in the TV series Welcome Back, Kotter (1975–1979), into the star of the blockbuster hits

Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Grease (1978). The Diller regime also decided to transform the long-cancelled, cult-hit TV series Star Trek (1966–1969), into a movie franchise with Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), which revived the commercial prospects for a dormant studio property. The Paramount model spread throughout the industry in the 1980s, as Diller became the chairman of Twentieth Century Fox and Eisner became chairman of Walt Disney Studios.