Movies for TV - Early Television Foundation

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THE PROGRAM ANGLE
is quite naturally a little flustered, and it is usually at times like
this that mechanical contraptions decide to play up. The poor
man finds everything going wrong and the demonstration winds
up a complete flop. The sponsor is mad and probably takes his
show off the station, the manager is mad and perhaps fires the
unlucky announcer or director, and the agency thinks, "Ugh!
That station is not too well organized. Let's put our next cam-
paign on XXXX-TV."
There is a school of thought which maintains a strong argu-
ment that the immediacy of television demands that all action
and programs be live. The answer to this is long and many-fold.
News events are, perhaps, the subjects most reasonably likely to
be transmitted live. After all, man has always wanted to see things
from across the world as they happened. News and sports events
are things which the fan or eager news follower wants to see at
once. But so often these things happen at hours when the maximum
number of viewers are at work or otherwise unable to see
them. So what happens? They are filmed and shown later in the
evening when people are not at work. In most cases, the quality
of entertainment is improved by the editing it gets. Of course, for
sports fans who want to see every movement of the ball and players,
editing is a pain in the neck and for that reason is seldom
done to any great extent. We hear complaints from people that
are cheated when
they don't like to see films on television and they
these are shown. Yet other people say, "That was a good program;
the quality and production were excellent; it was just like a
movie." Now, that latter remark is the greatest compliment that
can be made to a producer or station about a production, for if
it is like a film, then it is approaching the standards we have all
seen from Hollywood. We all know, too,
that there are some ab-
solutely awful films from there, but when a remark like the one
above is made we know that although comparisons are supposed
to be odious, in this case nothing "stinks!"
One of the things that still has to be learned by both producers
of shows and sponsors as well as agencies is an awareness
of the mood of the program that is in juxtaposition to the com-