Hollywood Romance

The marriage of the movies and TV, confidently forecast by many a show-business oracle, is still to come. But last week the courtship was going swimmingly. In the role of Cupid was none other than the A.F.L.'s imperious James Caesar Petrillo, who watches over his American Federation of Musicians with all the protective zeal of an ambitious mother with a marriageable daughter. Sitting down with the representatives of Republic and Monogram studios, he quickly cleared away one obstacle that has prevented film companies from supplying television with movies made since 1946. Petrillo agreed to raise no objections to televising films, provided the studios 1) rescored them (i.e., started all over again with union musicians), and 2) paid 5% of TV profits into the union's trust funds.

The arrangement was similar to one Petrillo had already reached with Independent Producer Robert Lippert, who last week became the first U.S. moviemaker to start displaying his product on the TV market on a mass scale. Lippert re-edited 26 of his films down to 54 minutes each (allowing six minutes for promotion and commercials during an hour's TV program), leased them to TV stations in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. Price tag: about $70,000 for the package.

So far, no big studio had made a similar bid for TV's hand. But there could be no doubt that Hollywood and TV were cuddling up a little closer all along the line. NBC admitted that its negotiations for a 49-acre site in Burbank, Calif, were not aimed merely at long-term "insurance," as it had long insisted, but to clear the way for the building of a huge TV center right on the moviemakers' home grounds. And when NBC also hired Henry Ginsberg, Paramount's former production boss, as a "general consultant," Hollywood had a hunch that NBC's projected Burbank TV center would be a movie factory, with Ginsberg sparking its output.

Even the theater owners, who have most to lose from Hollywood's romance with TV, were wooing the medium in their own way. When the television networks refused to pay $100,000 for the rights to this week's Louis-Savold fight, the Paramount, Loew's RKO and Fabian theater chains grabbed at the chance to pipe the heavyweight battle to their theater screens. Only stipulation: to safeguard the gate, the fight will not be shown in any New York theaters.

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