Movies Are Your Best Background Noise

Multi-Task While You Watch

Imagine cold-calling a random number from the phone book, and on live television. In this era of incessant robo dials, who would answer? Dick Bennick, Jo Nelson, and later Jerry Merritt, did it weekdays for Channel 8 (High Point, NC), the idea to lock in viewers for their otherwise unremarkable afternoon movies. Be home, tuned in, and you could win $100, maybe more! Jo/Jerry would try a residence, try again if the line was busy, wait endless minutes, as did we, for lines to clear, all so dream of windfalls could be met. “Dialing for Dollars” ate ten-fifteen minutes of most two-hour slots, that in addition to sponsor ads, the movie a least priority. Stations needed DFD and devices like it to take onus off films that viewership cared less to see, the calls a sort of bribe for our leisure time. Chances are we wouldn’t be there for whole of the program, as there’d be chores about the house, kids to pick up from Scouts, any of myriad daily duties. At most you had snatches of movie and peeps now and then when hosts tried another phone contact. Televisions ran no matter where you were in the house. Was this any way to enjoy Classic Era movies? No, but it was a near-only way they’d be consumed for many benighted years. You could wonder that any of us care to revisit old Hollywood now.

Dialing for Dollars was quaint, amusing in hindsight, more talk show than film presentation, especially where a guest from the Chamber Of Commerce would show up midway and discuss for eight-at-least minutes a next day’s Blood Drive. That meant more lopped off The Bad and The Beautiful, or whatever, but who kept score? There weren’t books to list running times until a first Maltin Reviews in 1969, and maybe we were better off ignorant for trauma those numbers induced. Average folk didn’t mind … they probably tuned in a half-hour late anyway, and besides, anyone could catch up with a story within a minute or two, being trained at it by formula TV. Drop the needle on any scene and get the whole set-up, same really as soap operas, which could be skipped six months, then caught up easily by a next-seen episode. Broadcasting movies was a same as hanging wallpaper. Anyone with objection was a crank or outlier, not typical of viewing majority. Nascent cable days saw stations at odds over content beamed from one also leased by another. Channel 8 did a burn in 1978  when Superstation 17 out of Atlanta ran Dodge City for our cable delectation, their complaint to the service provider resulting in a block on 17’s signal and a two-hour screen message to effect that 8’s lease of the film made it “unfair” for a remote station to offer Dodge City as well. Difference was that 17’s Dodge City was more-less complete, while 8’s was chopped a couple reels, and in black-and-white. My rage was towering, letters impotent, new-acquired VCR dormant. How could I collect off the air in the face of such corruption, what with favorites abused and no one to defend them? Someone should have put me straight to reality that No One Else Cared.

It Begins: Bringing Housework To The Drive-In

Two-hour slots were a luxury. Most local stations held daytime movies to ninety minutes for knowing that was all of patience watchers had. Consider a study done in 1955 by Editor and Publisher: “Two-thirds of those with a television on during the day (are) doing something else simultaneously, most times housework. During the evening, (6-10 P.M.) half were doing something else as well.” The Surgeon General in 1970 listed collateral activities going on against a TV backdrop: “homework, reading, sorting wash, preparing meals, setting the table, dressing and undressing, exercising, playing cards and board games, and conversing.” That wouldn’t leave a lot of time for The Caine Mutiny, which I recall tuning in on Greensboro’s Channel 2 that year, two-hours, and in color. Toward getting straighter to narrative point, WFMY opened with Bogart’s first scene at the lectern, a couple reels into a 124 minute show, but again, who noticed, let alone worried about it? Inattention was a shroud that hung over televised movies. Anything about the house merited closer engagement. Cary Grant hanging off Mount Rushmore was second to everything from feeding Fido to chasing flies about the den with a swatter. You knew he’d come out OK, and there was no admission paid to North By Northwest as was case when it was new at theatres in 1959. Movies, no matter how fine, were casually, passively, consumed, as was most all television. This was not new, as radio dealt from a same cold deck, listeners even less focused on media they heard, but could not look at. Drive-ins would form a bridge from sit-down cinemas to couch-centered viewing. They would anticipate, then reflect, a coming home entertainment experience, at least from standpoint of letting any-all distractions have their way.

Titles that once topped glittering marquees were now mute accompany to vacuum cleaners pushed round a twenty-two inch box. Charlotte’s Channel 9 bought “Pre-48 Greats” from MGM and gave them a not-great berth on noon weekdays, ninety minutes to get stories told amidst commercial intrusion. A for-instance on January 2, 1962: Cass Timberlane, a highest-profile adapt, back in 1947, of a popular novel by Sinclair Lewis, 119 minutes claiming undivided attention in plush theatres seating thousands, Spencer Tracy and Lana Turner its leads. I got out the Warner Archive DVD and by way of experiment watched … well, sort of watched, as a series of “something elses” got done, as much outside the room as in. Even in front of the screen, I made sure to occupy my hands, or hold a book for looking down at, or up from. The only thing lacking was a pot of beans to snap. Against firewalls I constructed, Cass Timberlane still made narrative sense, ten minutes here, five there, enough to fully know what was happening to the lead characters. My simulation of the 1962 broadcast had an advantage Channel 9’s did not, being a complete version thanks to the DVD, not interrupted except by my wanderings, and clearer by far on a flat screen the size of which ’62 viewers dared not dream. Cass Timberlane being an “average” movie, it mattered less that I saw it truncated while pursuing activities in opposition to it. That was, after all, how a typical watcher-after-a-fashion would have responded over years Cass Timberlane played syndicated TV.

Going out to the movies was no longer an essential. Thanks to network primetime, the movies came to you. Admission to theatres dropped from highs in the mid-40’s to abysmal lows by the early 60’s. 4.1 billion tickets sold in 1946, down to 2.8 by 1951, 1.9 in 1956, 1.1 in 1962 and again in 1963 (“United States Theatrical Film Admissions,” Variety, 6-24-81). Windows between theatrical and TV were thrown open. It seemed no wait at all before you could see a film at home. Tube-premieres commanded greater focus, “events” like The Robe and Bridge On The River Kwai making movie nights on television an appointment you’d keep. Color broadcasts, in strong demand by the mid-60’s because so many more viewers had sets to receive them, increased cache of televised movies. There seemed less reason than ever to attend theatres. I recall this period as one where few people, at least of my acquaintance, bothered going out for movies. A sample incident from 1967: In The Heat of the Night showed up at the Liberty,  three-days that drew seemingly no one for the weekday matinees other than myself (afternoons generally vacant unless it was Disney, or talked-about like Bonnie and Clyde). Who at school or among adults heard of, or bothered about, In The Heat of the Night? Some months later it won the Academy Award for Best Picture, though none expressed regret for missing out at the Liberty. It would be on television within a few months, after all --- untrue, but a notion that would not be disabused (In The Heat Of The Night was 1973 before reaching the tube, via NBC).

Charlotte’s Channel 3 had its “Best of Hollywood” in lieu of Monday evening CBS feed, and such was its following that they took a poll in 1972 for the movie most viewers wanted to see from a ballot made up of titles Channel 3 had on lease. Magnificent Obsession being the winner made it a local must-see, chances greater that a household would suspend other activities to sit down and really watch. Older films got marginally more respect as a 70’s nostalgia wave put more of them on station schedules. Cable and satellite were stair-steps to real deal that was TCM, its precursors first TBS, aforementioned “SuperStation,” then TNT, where precodes were popularized --- both services ad-littered. Truest revolution was the old AMC, American Movie Classics, a first instance of non-interrupted oldies other than Public Broadcasting’s occasional forays. Key to enjoyment of films on TV was getting rid of the breaks, means by which TCM seized advantage, even as AMC turned tail with contemporary titles served in chunks. TCM made history by pioneer gathering respect for movies on television as something other than filler between ads.