Here Comes Hollywood

The CBS Ford Star Jubilee showing last week of MGM's 1939 musiclassic The Wizard of Oz--which hauled down a spectacular 29.4 Trendex rating--forced a couple of stark truths on TVmen. Hollywood, with about 200 of its best old movies headed straight for TV this year, will have a hard time competing with itself. Further, the whole system of network programming may soon have to be revamped.

The first uncut feature film ever seen on TV, Oz brought the fairy-tale wanderings of a wide-eyed, 16-year-old Judy Garland into U.S. homes for the first time. The E. Y. Harburg-Harold Arlen score (Over the Rainbow, We're Off to See the Wizard) sounded as fresh and enchanting as ever. To kick off the movie, Buffoon Bert Lahr, who played the craven lion in the film, reminisced to Judy's ten-year-old daughter, Liza Minnelli, about the good old days at MGM. If the movie suffered in its new setting, it was mainly because less than 1% of the U.S.'s 37 million TV sets are equipped for color. Otherwise, Oz was clearly as good as anything around the best neighborhood theaters--and far better than most live TV spectaculars.

But in speeding the success of good old movies on TV, CBS may be setting a dangerous precedent. Topflight movies are now available to all of the 430 TV stations in the U.S.; within the past year all but two major studios (Paramount and Universal-International) have sold old films to TV. Last week 20th Century-Fox leased to National Telefilm Associates, which has tie-ins with some no stations throughout the U.S., a $30 million backlog of 390 feature films. If Oz had been presented locally in only a handful of cities across the nation, it would have clobbered such a top-rated TV show as CBS's $64,000 Question. For more than half the total TV audience (an estimated 119 million) in the U.S. and more than three-fourths of all TV profits are hitched to only eleven urban areas, each of which has at least one independent TV station.

When Los Angeles' local station KTTV recently ran the 1944 movie Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, it captured twice the audience of the three major networks and more viewers than all six competing stations combined. Currently, Los Angeles alone is putting some 17 hours of movies on TV every day. When other independent stations begin to bilk the major webs of their regular audience, the whole of TV will be due for a serious overhaul.

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