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Tele visionFilm Requirements
BY G. DAVID GUDEBROD
N. W. AYER AND SON, NEW YORK 20, NEW YORK
PRINTED MATERIAL describing this forum mentions industrial, _ educational, institutional, commercial, and promotional films as well as entertainment films. It implies that they are all frequently used for television programming. Actually, however, straight industrial or institutional films are so unadaptable and so specialized that in the author's opinion they can be safely ignored as a factor in television programming. In order to clarify and simplify things a little, the films covered in this paper are primarily entertainment films — the type of films sought when building a television program to sell goods for a sponsor.
Motion picture production requirements — so far as television is concerned — are almost like any other film requirements: first, the films must have box-office appeal; second (and this is a variation) r continuity; third, technical excellence; and fourth, the price must be right.
These four main qualifications must be examined from an advertiser's standpoint — an advertiser who is looking at television as a new medium of mass communication.
An advertiser is going to insist that his television films have boxoffice appeal for the very simple reason that he wants a big audience — the larger the better. No clients have ever complained about having too large an audience, but television must have a very special sort of box-office appeal. The film must be created to speak to three or four people in a living room. It must have a certain warmth and intimacy. Films for theatrical distribution depend to a great extent on awakening a crowd reaction. A television film plays to no crowd. It does not even have a studio audience to lean on. It must reach directly into the home and sing a song or spin a yarn to three or four people, not three or four thousand.
How can one tell whether a television film has this type of boxoffice appeal? Probably no one can do it consistently, but one must keep trying to capture it when possible.
* Presented April 4, 1949, at the SMPE Convention in New York.
AUGUST, 1949 JOURNAL OF THE SMPE VOLUME 53 117