1960 - 1973 The Revolution of Youth Jump to:
1960 - 1973 The Revolution of Youth Jump to:
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4 1960's Made-For-Tv Movies
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On September 23, 1961, NBC introduced its new series, "Saturday Night at the Movies," featuring Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable in "How to Marry a Millionaire." This broadcast was an astounding success and pointed to Hollywood's growing inclination to release its post-1948 movies to television. Seven more series representing all three networks and every night of the week appeared over the next five years. The culmination of this trend was an ABC Sunday telecast of "The Bridge on the River Kwai" in September 1966. "An estimated 60 million viewers in 25 million homes sat down to watch one movie" for which ABC had "paid Columbia Pictures $2,000,000." Even at the price, the American Broadcasting Network was understandably delighted, as the television viewing public clamored to consume big-budget, star-studded, color extravaganzas from Hollywood in the privacy of well over 95 percent of the homes in the United States.
By 1960 television had “liberated” cinema by taking over its function as mass entertainment. Without a clear idea of what its post-television role should be or how to satisfy its increasingly disparate audience, Hollywood was in limbo for much of the next decade. The old studio moguls were either dead, in retirement, or battling to maintain a tenuous control over their companies. With them had gone confidence about production.
The precise birth date of the telefilm is arguable, although only a handful of contenders exist prior to 1961. Claims range from Ron Amateau's 60-minute Western, "The Bushwackers, " which appeared on CBS in 1951, to Disney's "Davey Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier," which was broadcast as three separate segments during the 1954-55 debut season of "The Wonderful World of Disney." Also, it was not uncommon during the late 1950s for TV's dramatic anthologies to present some of their teleplays on either film or videotape. Three shows especially, "Desilu Playhouse," "Kraft Theatre," and "The Bob Hope Show," filmed a number of their one-hour offerings, while a few of these presentations were even expanded into a second hour airing the following week as a finale of a two-parter. Still, these haphazard examples have really more to do with trivia than historical precedent, as the man primarily responsible for pioneering the formal properties of the telefeature is Jennings Lang, a New York lawyer who became programming chief for MCA's Revue in the late 1950s.
The industry was lured by the prospect of such returns into ever greater recklessness, spending extravagantly on visible production values in the hope that the “Money on the screen” would draw in audiences. Sometimes it worked spectacularly well. Together with the re-release of Gone with the Wind, Doctor Zhivago (1965) kept MGM solvent for the second half of the decade. But in 1969 only one film in ten showed a profit. In the second half of the 1960s the studios resembled gambling addicts in the terminal stages of their illness, locked into a pattern of borrowing heavily from banks to finance another blockbuster that they hoped would defy the rules of movie profitability and solve the company's financial problems at a stroke. With the successive failures of lavish musicals such as Star!, Hello Dolly and Dr. Doolittle, Fox lost $78 million in 1970, and nearly bankrupted itself again.
Hollywood now derived more than half its income from abroad, with the European market supplying 80 percent of that total. Economically dependent on their international appeal, American films became more cosmopolitan, or mid-Atlantic, in their appearance. Thrillers developed convoluted plots that toured the landmarks of European capitals and pushed aging American male leads - Gregory Peck, Cary Grant - into affairs with younger European women such as Sophia Loren. “Runaway”productions made in Europe had the advantages of government subsidies and lower production costs. Epics such as David Lean's Lawrance of Arabia (1962) were given international casts to enhance their appeal to European distributors.
Actually, the very first made-for-TV movie, "See How They Run," premiered on October 17, 1964, a few months sooner than expected. This Universal production is a mediocre crime melodrama that was quickly followed six weeks later by the broadcast of Don Siegel's next excursion into the telefilm genre, "The Hanged Man." Like "The Killers" before it, Siegel's second assignment for NBC-MCA is another remake of a classic film noir, "Ride the Pink Horse." Without a doubt, this movie along with the only telefeature to appear during the 1965-66 season, a Western pilot for Dale Robertson entitled, "Scalplock," both point to the fact that the early TV movie was more derivative of Hollywood for source material than any other dramatic avenue. In fact, the telefilm had not yet produced its own crop of production talent. In the late 1960s, this genre harkened most to Hollywood's least "respectable" genres for story ideas and themes: the Western, the melodrama, the spy thriller, and the horror/supernatural tale. Therefore, in retrospect, it is obviously no surprise that the trade publications and movie critics alike were immediately inclined to christen this new form--the rebirth of Hollywood's B-movie; indeed, it would take the made-for-TV film genre a dozen more years to outgrow this benign, though ultimately disparaging label.
These meanderings were signs of Hollywood's uncertainty. The industry's lack of financial self confidence led to the studios being bought by major American conglomerates for well under their market value. Universal was bought by MCA, a former talent agency, Paramount by Gulf and Western (steel, mining, plastics), United Artists by Transamerica Inc. (insurance), Warners by the Kinney Corporation (car rentals, building maintenance, funeral parlors), and MGM by Kirk Kerkorian, a Las Vegas hotel magnate. Bought for their real estate and undervalued film libraries, and for the possibility of windfall profits in good years, the companies became small elements in much larger corporations. In 1974 Paramount's film rentals amounted to only 3.5 percent of Gulf and Western's revenues.
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