When television was making its first major impact upon American culture, the big movie studios feared that it would kill the film business altogether. Why go to the theater for a picture show when people could watch movies on television at home? the thinking went not only in major studio offices but in the many little offices of theaters across the country. And over the years, theater business was affected to increasing degrees by the rapid spread of television sets into nearly every home. Attendance did drop off and in many places so dramatically that moviehouses and drive-in theaters by the thousandfold closed their doors or gates forever. The whole moviegoing experience that had existed in America for nearly thirty years was changed beyond recognition as television took over more and more of the functions of the picture house —providing news and filling airtime with cartoons and short-subject films that it was no longer necessary to go to town to see them. The newsreel vanished from the scene in the middle of the 1960s, theatrical cartoon shorts by the middle of the next decade. Where movies had been the main if not the sole source for information and entertainment, and whole families went out for three or four hours on nights and weekends to catch the ‘flicks, now they were staying indoors, in the perfect and increasingly air-conditioned comfort of the home, with snacks, beer, Cokes and TV dinners handy. The movie culture was never the same afterward. But rather than being supplanted by the new medium, television and movies came together into an intimate relationship which grew from the necessity of filling airtime with programming of any and all kinds. Far from eliminating movies altogether, they became a necessary staple for television stations from coast to coast, and the old and new mediums reached an accommodation when it was seen that the demand for new big-screen movies was still going strong even with a television-watching public.
Movies of all kinds appeared on the small screen: old classics like Casablanca and Gone With The Wind, a plethora of Westerns to the extent that it became a cliche on a variety of television shows that whenever characters on those shows were watching TV, the channel was most often tuned to a Western. Every week, stations had at least three movie programs during the daytime or even primetime slots, the major networks had a major movie program one day a week, and weekends were a combination of sports, old reruns, and movie shows. And there were also late-night movie shows, often airing as the last program of the day before signoff at two in the morning. It was a time when television, restricted to only three major channels, a UHF independent channel or two, and a PBS channel, and a broadcast day that only lasted twenty hours at the longest, really was a cool, hip, cutting-edge, pleasant seat-of-the-pants, going-for-broke proposition which, for all its technological and scheduling limitations, presented an incredible smorgasbord of programing each and every week, with a greater variety and entertainment value than we get today with twenty-four hours programming and five hundred channels which have helped to turn television into nearly unwatchable shit. But I digress for the moment.
In this bygone era when television stations were actually locally owned, struggling for survival and throwing everything and anything on their airwaves, movies of all kinds aired, from the finest Hollywood gems to, at the opposite end of the scale, the silliest, cheesiest and even most rancid B-grade and Z-grade films ever made. Really cheap films that were, in many cases, rushed through production as quickly as possible to make a quick buck for whatever Poverty Row studio made them, and which were snapped up by television stations all over because they cost next to nothing to lease out and thus constituted a cheap and ready-made source of programing fodder. The sort of hokum which no self-respecting program director would ever dream of airing in prime-time but was just perfect to fill that late-night timeslot. Many of these were the science fiction and horror movies which were ultimately parodied in films like Kentucky Fried Movie, Amazon Women On The Moon, Matinee, and of course ended up being mercilessly skewered on Mystery Science Theater 3000: a show which itself was a parody of one of the staples of local television. In every major market, at least one area station had a dedicated science fiction/horror movie show which took on one of two distinct forms: the hosted program featuring a mad scientist or ghoul in his dungeon laboratory appearing in wraparound segments, or the more prosaic yet dedicated sci-fi/horror show most often airing late at night, or on weekend mornings or Saturday afternoons. Often, local stations had two such programs in their weekly lineups, especially the UHF stations, to fill up that precious airtime.
In my own hometown, New Orleans, we had Morgus the Magnificent, the Crescent City’s resident television mad scientist, who had his experiments first on WWL television from 1959 to around 1964, then after returning home from a stint in the Detroit market, found a home on WDSU for a couple of years. Morgus would end up returning yet a third time in the late 1980s when his regenerated movie experiments aired on WGNO TV-26, the main area UHF independent station which, in the days when it was still WWOM (Wonderful World Of Movies), had the horror show with host Guru S. Malady. Another station, WNOL TV-38, aired the nationally syndicated Elvira show for a couple of years as well. We also had, for many years, the program which many of my old cronies from New Orleans remember fondly as The Sunday Morning Movie which aired on WVUE.
The Sunday Morning Movie was mother’s milk for local sci-fi/horror fans, nurturing a love of the genre during our youth. You switched over just after the book closed on the sleeping faery on WDSU’s Let’s Tell A Story to Channel 12 (Channel 8 after 1971) and, before having to go to the noon mass on Sundays you could sit down and watch, for the tenth, twentieth, or hundredth time, some monster trash Japan or evil aliens with intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic but with the acting skills of gerbils coveting our world, or the standard group of nuclear war survivors —among whom were always at least two nubile 20-plus year old breedable females— being menaced by the rubber-suited mutant horror that had once been Tony. These were real turkeys to be sure. Yet, every few weeks, you would be lucky to tune in and find yourself being treated to a really good movie like the 1953 George Pal classic War Of The Worlds or The Last Man On Earth, with Vincent Price as the sole remaining human survivor of a global plague that killed off most of the Earth’s population and turned the survivors into corpselike mutants. Every once in a while, you would get a real classic like 1951’s The Day The Earth Stood Still. It was a very different television culture then, when you suffered only eight minutes of commercials in a program hour and you could watch a movie or a rerun largely uncut —although of course movies which were shot in the widescreen formats which became increasingly popular in the 1950s would be subjected to pan-and-scan re-edits to try to fit the action into the dimensions of the small screen, so young movie fans growing up would end up waiting decades before letterboxing of movies to restore the original proportions became common practice on cable television to finally see these movies in all their artistic glory. That is another issue for another blog entry, of course. In the era when TV was largely the only prospect for seeing many of these movies at all, you took what you got.
On the flipside, when it came to the prime movie show slots on local stations and the far richer networks, it was a bonanza of classic and modern A-grade cinema. For many of the readers of this and other movie blogs, the first experience of Citizen Kane, The Longest Day, The Defiant Ones, Lawrence Of Arabia, Jaws, The Bridge At Remagen, Dr. Zhivago, The Blue Max, and dozens and dozens of other titles I could reel off came from the small screen. Certain movies aired in their distinct seasons for them: Christmas always meant at least two showings of Frank Capra’s sentimental classic It’s A Wonderful Life. Easter brought The Wizard Of Oz and The Greatest Story Ever Told and, of course, Cecil B. DeMille’s larger-than-life biblical epic, The Ten Commandments. My whole early experience with the world of James Bond was brought to me courtesy of the ABC Sunday Night Movie, which ran at least three Bond pictures a year —edited for television for technical as well as broadcast decency reasons, of course. Arguments can and are made of how viewers mostly never saw the “true” movies until the advent of cable stations like HBO, Cinemax, and Turner Classic Movies, but for anyone growing up through the sixties, seventies, and the early eighties, television was as much about movies as it was about sitcoms, cop shows and adventure/drama shows, and it afforded a rich exposure to the cinematic arts throughout the year.
Much of that rich television culture is gone now. Swept away in the era of increasing ownership conglomeration and media-merger, of power-advertising and loosened broadcast standards and non-enforcement of regulations which now allow the networks to make you suffer fifteen minutes of the same banal commercials airing three times in each ad spot, and to squeeze the credits of your favorite shows and movies into tiny boxes on screen so you can be bombarded by truly obnoxious network promos as you wait for the next round of commercials interrupted by a few minutes of actual program. And in an era of continuous programming which has resulted in the same shows being aired in all-day marathons each and every week, which has really cut down on the variety that once existed in the medium. Movies are suffering in this new 24/7, five-hundred channel wasteland as much as the whole of television itself. Yes, there is Turner Classic Movies and Sundance and IFC, and HBO and Cinemax as well. But Bravo used to be one of the finest movie and cultural arts channels on the package and which now airs almost nothing but reality shows. Same with A&E. American Movie Channel not only no longer airs uncut classic movies but original drama programing that has very little to do with movies. And the few cable networks that still air uncut movies, most of them are airing the same three or five features multiple times during the same week and in some cases the same day. The result has been that much of that rich movie/television culture has been all but strangled to death as more and more cable/satellite channels are steadily becoming the same channel just with different identifying icons and all with the same programing practices which are making TV —which Newton Minnow condemned as a vast wasteland in the 1950s— into an infinite and ever-expanding, hellish realm of banality. A cursed Darkling Plain from which everything that once made TV so much a part of the cool American culture of a bygone era has all but vanished.
Channel-wise, in the era I and many of this blog’s readers grew up in, there may theoretically have been a lot less actual choice with only a thirteen-channel dial but, paradoxically, a far greater variety of available choices for viewers to select from, and much of them being movies. Lots and lots of movies of all kinds. In the time when TV was still watchable.
No comments:
Post a Comment