We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
Not so long ago television film jobs in the movie capital attracted only those motion picture people who were starving. Now it's different. Some of the biggest names in Hollywood are making films for tv, and they like it.
Tv Film Has Joined the Hollywood Elite
By Majorie Thomas
WITHIN the past three years Hollywood television film makers have risen from the social status of an impoverished typhus carrier to undeniable respectability, a word which in that community implies the possession of a kidney-shaped swimming pool and a view of Catalina Island on smogless days.
If the tv film industry is not Hollywood's new aristocracy, it at least is knocking at the door. Today the tv film producer, director, actor or writer is solicitously seated at the choicest tables of Romanoff's or Chasen's. It was only recently that if he admitted to a connection with television, he risked ejection from all but the meanest deadfalls of Gower Gulch.
Money is the reason for this breathless transformation; there is now more of it in television film and less in motion pictures.
Tv films are no longer the province of the speculator with an idea and little else who scraped together enough for a pilot film on the outside chance a sponsor would buy it and finance a series. Corporations have replaced the man with the office in his hat, and with their sounder financing can and do pay attractive salaries.
Coincident with the development of tv film has been a contraction of theatrical motion picture production. Actors, writers, technicians and production executives who might have permanently snubbed tv if the movie business had held up are now working— and admitting it — in television. What is more they have accepted limited budgets, relentless deadlines and other limitations as challenges to their creative ingenuity.
Consider statistics obtained in recent surveys by Hollywood unions and guilds:
Of the 140 active members in the Society of Motion Picture Art Directors, 40 are in video, according to executive secretary Norman Loewenstein.
Screen Writers Guild credits tv film with
employing more than 400 of its 800 active and 400 associate members. Of the working group, 125 are steadily employed or drawing the bulk of their earnings from tv alone.
American Cinema Editors reports 28% of its 173 members are working in tv, with the larger video companies employing from two to eight editors under a supervising editor. Open to not just anyone, A.C.E. stipulates that members must be employed in film editing for at least eight years and receive credit on at least 65 half-hour films, in addition to meeting the A.C.E. standards.
Still another survey shows that tv film is employing more than 50% of Hollywood's assistant directors; 40% of its directors; 40% of its film editors, cameramen and sound technicians; one-third of its established screen writers; more than 50% of its Class A actors; approximately 35% of the members of IATSE's 18 film locals.
Movie Curtailment
A motion picture production check on the curtailment of activity reveals 65 producers, 62 directors and 35 writers under contract this year, as opposed to .the 117 producers, 96 directors and 134 writers under contract last year.
To illustrate how television film has absorbed talent from the movies, B*T checked several important Hollywood tv production companies.
At Sovereign Productions, Stuart Reynolds, president, believes in a "star" policy, meaning he uses many an actor and actress whose name was built up in movies.
"Stars' names are sort of entertainment trademarks through which the public evaluates much of video's offering," Mr. Reynolds says.
As executive producer of CBS-TV General Electric Theatre, Your Jewelers Showcase
and some of the ABC-TV Cavalcade of America films, he adds, "Of course, the story is important. But, a starring name is a saleable commodity that means certain things to the potential viewer. For one thing, the customer assumes consciously or subconsciously that starring names of sufficient heft insure good stories."
With this in mind he is signing such prominent players as Ruth Hussey, Zasu Pitts, William Lundigan, Claire Trevor, Edward Arnold, Dennis Morgan and Peter Lawford.
Additionally believing that the forgotten men are the directors, he has combed the major studios to come up with Felix Feist, associated with recently released "Donovan's Brain"; Alfred E. Green, "Disraeli" and "Jolson Story" among his movies from 1912 on; Maxwell Shane, 20th Century-Fox.
Joseph Sistrom, veteran producer who last did "Botany Bay" for Paramount, is now serving the Sovereign banner.
Jack Gross and Phil Krasne, veteran motion picture producers unique in that they own their tv production company, distribution outfit and studios, have turned to the movie technicians who can adapt themselves to the video time element.
In differentiating between producing for the two media, Mr. Gross stresses the fact that tv films must be of "A" quality but done under conditions somewhat similar to those of the old "B" and "C" movies.
Many of their crew members are going to schools to learn the variations of tv techniques which, Mr. Gross believes, will make them so much more valuable to the motion picture industry, when it ultimately goes into tv film production.
In addition to CBS-TV Big Town, four CBS-TV Lux Video Theatre films and the newly-started Lone Wolf series, which brings actor Louis Hayward in on a movie-like
Page 84 • December 14, 1953
Broadcasting • Telecasting