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.
Upper right, a studio shot of an experimental demonstration; center, the image two seconds later as it appeared on the television receiver. Above, the author and Dr. Peter Goldmark, television engineer, inspect new equipment
BY GILBERT SELDES
Director of Television Programs Columbia Broadcasting System
WHENEVER people ask me whether television will take the place of the movies, I blush, pant rapidly, stammer, and finally manage to ask them whether they think the automobile will ever take the place of the horse. To which they reply (if they bother to reply at all, and some of them do not) that the motor car has already taken the place of the horse, which is exactly what I want them to say. Because, if you examine that statement carefully, it turns out to be one of the silliest on record. For certain common purposes, the car has displaced the horse; but even that was
HOLLYWOOD'S GREATEST ENIGMA—
TELEVISION
How will this great unknown entertainment affect our movie going? An authority answers all your questions
a long and tedious process. There were as many horses between the shafts in 1912 as there were before Ford ever tinkered or Selden took out a patent. What's more: if the motor car had merely taken the place of the horse, it would be comparatively unimportant today. Actually, millions of people own cars who never owned — because they couldn't afford to own — horses.
Later, people said that the movies never would take the place of the horse — I mean, of the theater. And there, too, the facts are illuminating. To be sure there used to be eighty legitimate theaters in New York City and now there are less; there used to be shows with living actors in hundreds of small towns, and now there are not, unless the Federal Theater comes around. But, again, if the movies had merely taken the place of some other form of entertainment, they wouldn't be important, Hollywood would lack dazzle, and you would not be reading a magazine devoted to the pictures. The movies are important, not for what they displaced, but for the new things they did; for the new art they created; above all, for the new millions to whom they brought entertainment —
millions who didn't know the theater at all.
The above ought to make clear my slant in this matter. Actually, I refuse to make shortrange prophecies; for long-range, anything is possible in fifty or a hundred years. We have speeded up invention so much in the past two generations that in a century all our present forms of entertainment may be outmoded and forgotten.
We have also speeded up economic confusion and military preparation so much in the past ten years that within fifty years the world may not have time or capacity for entertainment — by which I mean that too many of us may be dead. Anything is possible in a world so inventive, imaginative, enterprising, and stupid as ours.
But, for the immediate future, I do not think that television is going to take the place of the movies (or of the radio) and I have no concern in seeing that it does. Quite the contrary, I hope to enjoy all three. If I saw no future for television except as a replacer, I would have little interest in it. Like radio and the movies, television will have to create something of its own if it wants to become interesting and sig(Continued on page 94)
36