When was very young and my brother and I shared our 10 inch Black and White Dumont TV. We saw cut up and edited old movies on local stations. NBC ran “Saturday Night at the Movies” and presented, very cut up two- or three-year-old movies.
At the movies we saw mostly double features, with a newsreel, cartoon and often some 20-minute filler. The Kennedy assassination changed that. TV news became prominent and the theatre newsreel faded away, taking with them the cartoons and shorts.
The Supreme court broke up the movie studios in the 1950s and second features, which were common, began to disappear.From 1950 to 1960 movie attendance was cut in half, due to television. So by the end of the 1960s, your time at the theatre was more than cut in half. Movies then often played for months in a theatre and you would go back to see one you liked again because you would never be able to see it uncut and big screen again. And the movies would “travel” from theatre to smaller theatres.
My brother and I, having a 8mm projector, bought “Castle Films.” These were five or ten minute version of movies, silent with captions. The first one we got was “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.”
In 1915 the Supreme Court ruled that movies WERE NOT protected under the first amendment because they were products,, so many states set up their own censorship boards. This was expensive for the studios, cutting films for each state, so the instituted what was called, “The Hayes Office.” Its real goal was not to “clean up” movies but to save the industry money but not doing so much editing. In 1955 the court reversed itself and said that movies were entitled to free speech protection and that, with Hays’ passing, slowly changed movies.
That lead to the release of such movies as the “Pawnbroker” and “Whose Afraid of Virgina Wolf.” (Perhaps PG by today’s standards. Movies, in the 1960s, were mostly in color, widescreen and longer….to give you something you could not get on your black and white TV.
TV’s grew to 25 inches and most people, but not all, had color by the end of the 1960s. The local movie theatres, fearing the future, often had petitions in their hallways, “STOP PAY TV.” They feared cable. They would list the shows as ALL “Pay for view” so it looked like you’d be paying $25 a NIGHT for a normal night of viewing.
The 1970s brought huge changes. First a new movie rating system went into effect, the G, M, R and X. Movies were able to go places they could not before but without cartoons and newsreels!
The MAJOR movie studios had all but boycotted TV. But now they were supplying movies and making TV shows. TV movies were so popular that the networks started making their own. These were usually cheap forgettable features, but were 2 hours long. I remember, fondly, “Brian’s Song” and “Miss Jean Brody.” When they became popular, the Networks starting adapting books into mini-series, such as “Rich Man, Poor Man,” “The Winds of War” and the biggest of them all, “Roots.”
In the late 1970s I got my first VCR, a Sony Betamax which was NOT too popular until two Supreme Court decisions. First, Disney sued to ban the machines because they record. Second. The studios did not want tapes to be allowed to be rented, just bought. Sony’s competitors created the VHS system. It was not a good, picture wise, but gave up to six hours of recording time.
Here, though, was the first opportunity to see a variety of movies, most often uncut, but still pan and scan, 3 by 4 for a then modern TV. At first you had to buy the movies… up to $80 dollars, but soon you could rent them. I did get, “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.” People now had movie nights at home and that did hurt the theatres, but not the movie companies. Until about the year 2005 the companies made fortunes off home video.
In the early 1980s I got a Laser Disc player, which gave a superior picture and better, often stereo sound. Discs and tapes of new movies usually took a year to get to the stores. And the tapes came out before the discs! Laser Discs began giving letterbox presentations, which were unique for the time on our 3 by 4 TVs. And, Lasers were the first to have commentaries on a second audio track. And we did get a disc of “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.”
Then, in the late 1980s came cable, with a growing number of movie stations such as HBO and Showtime. Cable reception was never that great, but it was a financial windfall for the movie studios. TV, in the mid 80s, was now producing stereo broadcasting and the beginning of “surround sound” at home. Originally, surround was embedded into two channels and a decoder separated it into four channels. (I had a Shure 5200.) Then THX came out and it was decoded into five channels and a sub-woofer.
This was a time when the number of movie theatres in our neighborhood began to shrink. Families and older people were staying home watching tapes and cable and not going to the movie theater. Young couples, dating, still found their way into the theatre.
In the late 1990s when DVDs came out. They were MUCH cheaper than tapes and were available everywhere! And letterboxing was getting more common as well as a growing number of cable movie stations. Video stores started to close down at the beginning of the millennium. We did get the DVD of “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.”
In the late 1990s Surround was now becoming five channels and using a sub-woofer. TVs were growing bigger. Rear projection TVs, very big boxes, were then available. But these big boxes would distort stereo (musical sound from my phono and CD) so I got my first of my front projector, Marantz VP 12S3. My music room also became a home theatre. When surround gave us five separate channels and Bass I installed the Proceed PAV/PDSD.
The 1960s through the 1990s were the boom years for broadcast TV. Owning aa station was like printing money. Cable, which began in the mid-1960s, grew to its peak in the early 2000s with 100 million subscribers. People were talking about cable shows, such as the Sopranos, over lunch like they used to talk about Dallas.
The first decade of the 2000s gave us not just Bu-Ray discs but HD Broadcasting and cable. I got my first JVC projector then! And, of course, “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” on Blu-ray.
In 2001 I read in the New York Times business section that 2006-2008 would be the height of home viewing. That the industry new the DVD sales would go down at that point and so would cable viewing. I was puzzled how businessmen could predict this but they were right. And in the last decades TV viewing has radically changed.
Yes, DVD sales are now down and only 70 million people have cable. This means, of course, that stations, studios and networks are in a financial riddle.
The Golden Ages of Television production are over.
4K TVs have taken over, but not 4k broadcasting or cable. It is available on Discs and streaming. But streaming is not the broadcast giant they hoped it would be. I believe only Netflix is making a profit now. Streaming shows are generally 10 episodes, down from the 24 or so from broadcast TV. With the cutback in cable and broadcast viewing many TV shows have a shorter and cheaper afterlife. That is, less residuals for everyone, producers and performers. That hurts the actors and writers as well as the viewers. It is hurting movie theatres; people are waiting for streaming rather than going to the theatres. Part of this was caused by the studios, during the pandemic, putting movies meant for theatres on streaming.
Broadcast TV, which commonly had 30-50 million people watch a prime time show now have 7 to 12 million people. Networks are producing far fewer scripted shows, with many more commercials and reruns. An hour show is nearly ten minutes less than it was in the 1970s. And we don’t get theme music!!!! There are more (cheap) game and reality shows. And the shows produced have less episodes and often less performers.
The industry has lost studios: Fox, United Artists, MGM and an independent Warner Brothers among others.
I still go to the movies, but less often because there is simply less than I want to see. Also, my local theatre runs 30 minutes of coming attractions and commercials before the movie. So a 3 hour Martin Scorsese is a 3 ½ hour experience with no bathroom break!
So I sit with my JVC 4100 projector and 110 inch screen, not missing movie theatres but missing new and good movies. And I am waiting for the 4K of “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.”
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