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4 Hollywood premiere, with searchlights,
marked Screen Directors Playhouse bow.
begun to climb, its top show proving to be “Cheyenne,” a Western of the old school. But the show’s latest overall rating average of 25.1 is still a far far cry from Milton Berle’s competing 40.5. Warners, like 20th Century-Fox, is learning it takes more than a $100,000 budget and a studio name to score on TV.
Fox, too, is presenting an hourlong show, alternating every other week with the U.S. Steel Hour on CBS. Like the Warners show, The 20th Century-Fox Hour is divided into 45 minutes of dramatic fare and nine minutes of behind-the-scenes movie activity. Its rating also has hovered around the 25 mark, as against an average of 33 for This Is Your Life
and 29 for the Wednesday night fights.
It, too, has shuffled its executive staff, not once but several times. And, partic
Director and technicians watch as Raymond Massey and Joanne Woodward enact a scene for 20th Century-Fox Hour’s ‘The Late George Apley.’
ularly with its remakes of “The Ox Bow Incident” and “The Late George Apley,” the program has begun to show marked improvement. Its sponsor is still concerned, however, by the fact that U.S. Steel Hour, budgeted at $50,000 as against the Fox show’s $100,000, is running ahead of the Fox entry.
Fox also is learning about half-hour TV shows the hard way. Its first such attempt, My Friend Flicka, was a long time being sold by CBS. But it has finally landed a sponsor, and Fox is planning to start work on three new series next month.
M-G-M soon ran into trouble when viewers complained the studio seemed to expend more effort in plugging its movies than in providing entertainment on its M-G-M Parade, budgeted at $40,000 a week. Changes were not slow coming. ABC reported the studio soon decided to reduce the number of references to M-G-M on the show and to eliminate some of the superlatives describing forthcoming films.
Still later, with M-G-M Parade averaging a 15 in the Nielsen competition on ABC, against 26 for Arthur Godfrey and His Friends and 23 for Father Knows Best, the agency fired another salvo. “We have taken a dim view of the show so far,’ a top agency executive stated, “and have had talks with M-G-M on improving the quality. We’d like to pitch in with our own people who know television.”
Even the most enthusiastic movie man admits that neither the three new major studio shows nor two other new movie-influenced entries, Screen Directors Playhouse and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, have come anywhere near setting the TV audience on its ear.
“The plain fact of the matter,” a Vine St. regular remarked recently, “is that, for all the money and prestige the movie people brought to TV, they are still continued
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