Pandora's Box

Hollywood's Nassour Studios, site of many an independent film production, fell a casualty last week in show business' battle of the century: the movies v. television. Los Angeles' TV station KTTV bought the studios for $2,250,000, planned to use them for producing TV film shorts for 25 stations as far away as Manhattan. For Hollywood it was only a minor setback. But it gave the nervous movie industry fresh cause to wonder, worry and scheme over the troubles still to fly from the Pandora's box in U.S. living rooms.

Surveys among the nation's 5,863,000 TV set owners show that their moviegoing has fallen off by 20 to 72%--even though TV entertainment is still largely an affront to the eye. What will happen to the theaters as the owners multiply and TV shows improve? The thought has driven groups of movie exhibitors into a frenzy of forced optimism and "showmanship,"* and their leaders have felt called upon to urge them not to sell their theaters.

Hollywood, still run by the theater interests that spawned it, is helping to fight the threat. The studios are keeping their films off TV, standing guard over their vast wealth of story properties, forbidding their stars to appear in the new medium and buying up the most promising talent on TV. Cagily, they have begun to use TV to plug their pictures. The cinemoguls insist that the gregarious instinct will keep people herding together in theaters, regardless of the lure in the living room. They also point out that the cinema can offer Technicolor and airconditioning, and they are pushing work on another come-on: three-dimensional movies.

Answer in Kind. But the theaters' most touted rebuttal to TV, apart from movies that are "better than ever," is TV itself--large-screen theater television. The leading booster of theater TV is 20th Century-Fox President Spyros Skouras, who has large theatrical interests. Skouras argues that networks of movie houses with their own TV channels or circuits can outbid TV stations and advertisers for rights to sports events, operas, Broadway shows. Such programs, replacing second features on the double bill, would be good enough, says Skouras, to woo the customers from their free home sets.

If a demonstration of large-screen TV proves satisfactory in Manhattan next month, Skouras promises that it will be working in a circuit of 20 Los Angeles theaters by January--and eventually in four or five networks around the U.S., each serving 500 to 1,000 movie houses. The hurdles are formidable: many technical problems are still to be solved, permission must be wrung from the Federal Communications Commission if air channels are to be used, shows must be found or devised that can outdraw free (and improving) TV day in & day out.

This month a survey of 3,000 Los Angeles TV set owners turned up only 32% who would be willing to pay the average box-office price to see TV on a theater screen. But of the same group, 59% were willing to pay $1 to see a first-run movie on their home sets. And, carrying the threat that theater owners fear most, Zenith Radio's President Eugene F. McDonald Jr. is plugging away to make that possible.

McDonald has FCC permission to make a three-month test in Chicago this fall of Phonevision (TIME, May 1). His gadget, inexpensively hooked onto a TV set, would enable the home viewer to order movies by telephone, at $1 each, for his living-room screen. The fee, charged on the monthly phone bill, would be split among the movie producer, the TV station and the phone company.

Shape of the Future. Phonevision would not only serve the convenience of the home-loving movie fan--who could save money by letting his family and friends in on the show for $1--but it is the only scheme yet devised to make it profitable for Hollywood to turn out quality feature-length films for TV. Potentially, it would yield far bigger profits than the country's 20,000 theaters.

Trying to get first-rate films for his three-month test, McDonald has run into a virtual boycott by the Hollywood studios. Among his other obstacles: the studios are committed by contract to the American Federation of Musicians to keep musical sound tracks off TV.

The shape of things to come is fuzzier than a static-fogged TV screen. Jittery as they are, the moviemakers know that a rapidly expanding TV needs their talents and their products. TV men concede that more than 50% and possibly as much as 90% of future TV entertainment will have to be on film. Smalltime independent film producers are already busily grinding out TV shorts. Even Skouras guardedly admitted last week to 20th Century-Fox stockholders that part of the company's studio would be devoted to making films for TV in the home. Going much further, veteran Producer Cecil B. DeMille sees Phonevision, or something like it, as a major future outlet for the movies.

Both McDonald's idea and the production of films for free TV may make more headway as the Government continues to split movie studios from theater control. Even when the moviemakers are legally divorced from the theater owners, and probably for a long time thereafter, Hollywood is likely to favor the exhibitors as its best customers. But eventually, though many of the theaters will undoubtedly survive, the stormiest upheaval in entertainment history seems destined to bring the moviemakers to a prosperous peace with the enemy.

* Film Daily reported last week that theaters in the Midwest were staging a large-scale revival of giveaway shows, with prizes that included groceries, furniture--and even TV sets.

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