Classic movie site with rare images, original ads, and behind-the-scenes photos, with informative and insightful commentary. We like to have fun with movies!
Archive and Links
grbrpix@aol.com
Search Index Here




Monday, February 05, 2024

1951's Stab In the Back

 


LIFE Versus the Movies


August 13, 1951, was Detonation Day, not when a cold war turned hot, but where the Number One family weekly aimed laser at an industry they said was in throes of decline, an industry too late to save. Hollywood saw LIFE’s gesture as one to live ever after in infamy, a sneak attack wholly unjustified. How could amusement for masses occasion such hostility? Everyone read LIFE magazine. A household to afford but one magazine subscription would subscribe to LIFE. Whatever it printed, people talked about. Size mattered, as issues were big as a Declaration of Independence delivered each week to your door. To be on the cover could make a career. “But I thought we were friends,” the movies said as LIFE spoke otherwise, and this after years of paid advertising to enrich Luce coffers (him the editor-in-chief and chief turncoat). And what of a double truck full-color ad for Flying Leathernecks on pages 54 and 55 in selfsame issue that sunk the knife, plus David and Bathsheba on page 37, paid promotion all? The scourge of it … the betrayal. LIFE wrote plain that theatres were finished. Banner across their obit groaned with half-dozen images of closed houses, 3,000 they said and counting, marquees emptied, and dig prose from bylined bombardier Robert Coughlan … “Like the fluttering of doves at the wheeling of a hawk, like the stirring of the seal herd when the hunters come ashore, like the watchful waiting of the villagers at the rumbling of the mountain,” these analogy to Hollywood cowered in shadow that was doom. Citing data opponents said were nursed, Coughlan spoke what many would figure for truth. Why would LIFE lie? And yet regard profile title: "Now It Is Trouble That Is Supercolossal in Hollywood," jibe upon hyperbole long laughed at and now shorthand for bitterest irony.

It was known that television was giving movies a black eye. In fact, mainstream mags including LIFE had taken a few on the chin. Why read when you could watch, and for free! Literacy took a tumble for sure. Everyone kidded the “idiot box,” none more than ones enjoying it most. We all knew or thought Hollywood was forever. How could people who made Samson and Delilah go broke? LIFE knew it needed hard facts to make a case, and so went out and got them, interpretation of same where imagination kicked in. “What dread shape has awakened the dreamer?” asked Coughlan, his answer the boxoffice, down as in way down, result theatres boarded up or turned into furniture outlets. Television was a culprit sure, but mainly it was viewership “arrived at maturity” and rejecting “simple-minded” stories told by Hollywood. Such thus dictated entertainment choice for young postwar families. Go out to a movie, why not? Here’s why not: baby-sitter, parking fees, gas and oil … let’s call the whole thing off. So they did, said Coughlan, shuttered venues the result. LIFE reviewed history re court obliged divorcement of exhibition from production, foreign tariffs blocking income from overseas, myriad of business woes like any industry had, but this being movies, we all had a stake, or at least an opinion. LIFE found a sore and so cut deeper. Not that they were necessarily wrong. Estimates of TV growth were in fact low, for the medium would not merely expand … it would explode. Five years later, after television penetrated all regions of the US, such an article as LIFE’s would seem a soft pat.


Imagine a mirror piece written today, or rather don’t imagine, see for yourself online, hundreds per 2024 proclaiming end to movies, not as forthcoming, but now. Don’t forget those who said talkies would wash up Hollywood, artistically if not economically. Transition awakens grim sleepers. LIFE joked that there were still a few guys getting rich off sale of horse collars, so hope for movies was perhaps not altogether lost. Then as now, the concept of “movie stars” was written off. In a good picture they might get by, but let product be poor and even biggest names would drag it down further. Average cost of films after the war had risen 300%, most barely earning back negative costs in US home market. TV saturated areas had seen theatre receipts drop twenty to forty percent, said surveys LIFE cited but did not conduct themselves. Bad news was cherry-picked from like-mind sources, positive feedback ignored, said Arthur Mayer for the defense, him picked as rebuttal spokesman for the industry. Mayer’s thoughtful essay was whittled from a ball bat to a toothpick by LIFE editors (they printed but 275 words of his response), support letters also minimized in aftermath of 8/13/51. What a time to be attacked what with Movietime USA just launched, nationwide ad sweep a cooperative effort by the industry to bring us back to paying screens. Movietime USA swore that films had never been better. Just linger upon list of ones current and outstanding: The Great Caruso, Born Yesterday, Strangers on a Train, That’s My Boy, The Thing, Showboat. If these weren’t good as anything from record year 1946, then maybe it was time to plain give up.


So above titles were industry’s idea of its best? That alone could be basis for LIFE’s claim, loudest touted of group The Great Caruso, which played six smash weeks in Chicago, a record, and shouldn't that alone confer greatness? There were meantime 107 television stations operating, thirteen million sets in household use. Well sure, said Mayer, but “Just as (people) fitted the automobile, the radio, and other pastimes into their purses and leisure, they are giving a place in their lives to both TV and movies.” No one wanted to sit at home all the time, argued producer and industry booster Jerry Wald, who with partner Norman Krasna borrowed millions to launch an independent venture. It was inconceivable to think that people would abandon movies after fifty years attending them. Yet those who stood beside the industry were “whistling in the graveyard,” according to LIFE. Retaliatory argument pointed to revenue LIFE was losing, and why was Henry Luce attacking movies if not for grudge a result of his March of Time series plus other efforts to break into films not bearing fruit he expected? Continual was claim that nothing was wrong with business that good pictures could not fix, as though doldrums were simple as that, but rundown of releases from early fifties to rescue by Cinemascope show much that was worthy failing right alongside product called “bad” or ordinary. Example at random: Angels in the Outfield, which was much enjoyed, well-liked in hindsight, and lost money, despite being made relatively cheap. Truth was that even quality may not be enough, and that worried Hollywood profoundly.


Punch and then counterpunch … television would wash up movies? No! Hollywood would absorb TV, making of it a supplicant if not slave. Yes, much of production was East Coast-based, but this could change. Whatever video makers do, Hollywood would do better. In the meantime, scurrilous attacks from brother media helped nobody. In fact, there were right-motivated magazines poised to rescue movies from sully LIFE applied, Coronet, Collier’s and LOOK ready to lend supportive hand, if by gestures sudden and some said insincere. Samuel Goldwyn wrote the Collier’s piece, a fix obviously in, while LOOK titled its six pages “Who Says Hollywood is Dying?” These were hurried effort to assist a wounded giant, and to large extent worked. “There still seems to be no end in sight for the veritable avalanche of constructive magazine attentions to the industry following the one adverse blast by LIFE,” said Motion Picture Herald (9/22/51), while oracle Adolph Zukor pledged “that when the industry is through with its efforts, the recent article in LIFE magazine will just be a humorous incident.” In short, shoo fly shoo … we fought worse ogres than this. Imaginative heads sought ways to use television toward their own boxoffice ends. Why not combine television with moviegoing? Simple, said Fox chief Spyros Skouras … Install the enlarged box and give viewers a best of both worlds, a prizefight beamed live to theatres, or a performance of South Pacific from Broadway to home stage, plus “a wonderful movie like The Frogmen.” Giddy by this point, Skouras declared “at a dollar a ticket, I take in a million dollars in one night!”


There was also Telemeter and other devices to supply living rooms with Hollywood entertainment. Insert to a coin box gave access to brand new movies, a single “admission” the whole family could share. Exhibitors raised holy hell at sites where Telemeter was experimented, plus image transmission made features look lousy as TV was accused of being. Theatre television meanwhile died for equipment too expensive and again, an image impossible to watch, let alone enjoy. For sure The Frogmen looked wonderful beside this. Hollywood need would not be answered by pipe-dreaming like this. Dore Schary of MGM admitted that studio overhead, grotesque as it was ingrained, would continue so long as the Lion could turn out uniquely spectacular shows like Quo Vadis and King Solomon’s Mines to let patrons know that there was nothing like mainstream Hollywood to give what television could not, and probably never would. Schary conceded that it was big ones that covered loss from little ones (like Angels in the Outfield), but that little ones were essential to absorb overhead that was unyielding. Weight of latter would shrink in-house production for many majors and oblige them to rent facilities to independent firms. Warners went this route after failure to hold spending at one million per feature or below. For outside bulk buyers, a best bargain Hollywood offered was old negatives to reprint and sell for insatiable appetite that was television. Such windfall was more than studios could resist. Maybe LIFE was right as to Hollywood whistling through graveyards, their own it seemed for finding highest profit through sale of precious libraries.

9 Comments:

Blogger Beowulf said...

Which lasted longer? LIFE magazine...or movies?

10:24 AM  
Blogger Reg Hartt said...

LIFE is gone as a weekly. Terry Ramsaye, in A MILLION AND ONE NIGHTS AT THE MOVIES (1925) wrote that the audience for movies was between 11 and 30, primarily between 14 and 24 and mostly female.That changed in the mid 1970s when Hollywood began making movies for 13 year old boys. That move cost them the girls, the women and any guy taking a girl on a date.

11:11 AM  
Blogger Reg Hartt said...

The studios seem to have had little regard for their libraries. So many of them went up in smoke (literally). Television was the start of a change in that attitude. Suddenly those cans covered in dust were worth money. The home market that emerged with digital has been the greatest blessing for the preservation and restoration of motion pictures. In a very real sense, TV saved the movies.

12:18 PM  
Blogger Filmfanman said...

Personally I liked how the Hollywood studios fought the VCR manufacturers all the way to the US Supreme Court in an attempt to have the machines banned. Shows how they think, how they wish to control their products and how they are used.
A friend pointed out to me that had the US Copyright law not been extended by Acts of Congress, first in the 1970s and again in the 1990s, that films made in 1958 would now be in the public domain.
Moreover, it seems from my browsing on Youtube that today is the "golden age" for seeing the movies made before 1928. Never so many, never in such high quality, were they available before; and, in ten years time, all movies to 1938 will be in the public domain.
Time itself will be eating old Hollywood, and maybe old film buffs will never have had it better once it does - thanks to the internet.

2:23 PM  
Blogger DBenson said...

Ted Turner scooped up old libraries to feed his cable channels, incidentally cultivating a new audience for once-ignored movies and cartoons. Eventually Time Warner -- a conglomerate that incidentally included Life among its holdings -- merged with Turner, and Warner had its old library back (along with a wealth of MGM and RKO titles, plus Hanna Barbera and access to DC Comics properties). Lesson learned, Warner has been vigorously exploiting this massive vault ever since.

A few decades ago there was a brief attempt to revive Life as a Sunday newspaper supplement, like Parade. It appeared in the San Jose Mercury News; I don't recall whether they dropped it before it ceased publication.

As a tail-end boomer, I remember when there were lots of magazines arriving in the mail. Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post, Time, TV Guide, and Newsweek were the main weeklies. A few New Yorkers were always around. There were monthlies, leaning towards women's and domestic interests, kid fare like Boy's Life, classy items like National Geographic and the hardbound American Heritage, and my dad's medical magazines. The overall lineup seemed to change a few times a year. A kid ritual was to go through every single magazine looking for gag cartoons.

To this day, nearly every thrift store one enters stocks a magazine holder or two, usually wooden with a Colonial American design. Once it was a living room necessity, unless you scattered them on the coffee table like a waiting room.

4:23 PM  
Blogger Scott MacGillivray said...

I wish the studios still consulted their libraries regularly, to sell their "vaulties" to new audiences -- syndicated TV in the 1950s, and then home video in the 1980s, then cable in the 1990s.

Fast-forward to the 2020s, when a sizable chunk of vault space is given over to merchandise that is now 80 to 100 years old. Much of it will probably never be consulted or revived again. (Paging NBC/Universal: You've got a mother lode of vintage Universal and Paramount features that some of us want to see.)

I'm afraid the market for the oldies is aging. It's like a public library for books: there's a ready market for current and recent bestsellers and evergreen reference works, but how many people are still borrowing 80- to 100-year-old books? If the library hasn't already disposed of them, that is.

5:06 PM  
Blogger Reg Hartt said...

"If the library hasn't already disposed of them, that is."

When libraries started disposing of books to become more user friendly they stopped being libraries as far as I'm concerned. Try to find a home for your books, cs, DVDS and Blu-rays after we move on so that they don't become landfill.

9:36 PM  
Blogger Filmfanman said...

Books are archival, that is to say, they retain their utility as stores of information for centuries with little or no maintenance; stone inscriptions work well too to retain info - but good luck finding a replacement VCR for your collection of 25-year-old VHS tapes!
35 mm film needs special care too, and we do not know how long it can or will last under standard conditions of care - 200 years? 300?
Libraries are about retaining information for the long term - centuries, in fact. Electronic media in any form just doesn't make the grade.
And written things ought to be retained even if they are consulted by somebody but once every 75 years.

10:32 AM  
Blogger John McElwee said...

Dan Mercer considers 50's moviegoing:


My Dad made a good salary as a manager at the new U.S. Steel Fairless Works in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, but living in a Levitt home, with a Magnavox console model television set in the living room and a Studebaker Golden Hawk under the carport, meant that hiring a babysitter for my sister and me was an extravagance, if he and my Mom wanted to go out to a movie. Which was why they took us along when they saw “Moby Dick,” “Bridge on the River Kwai,” “No Time for Sergeants,” and “Gunfight at the OK Corral.” With my attention span maxed out at half an hour, going to one of these shows was like being immersed in an alternate reality. I lived within sequences that might have passed quickly for my parents—the climatic OK Corral gunfight was just an endless war, not that I wanted it to end--the imagery vivid and my imagination set aflame. I’m sure that they couldn’t have imagined how wonderful these experiences were for me, when my presence was only a matter of convenience for them, to give them a night out, but they remain among my happiest childhood memories. Later, we all went to a drive-in to see “Seventh Voyage of Sinbad,” my sister and me in pajamas, in case we fell asleep—which we did—but though it was great, there was also the announcement of a “special attraction” as the big screen went dark for a minute or so, which proved to be a future showing of “Birth of a Baby.” We did not go back for that, however.

5:36 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home

grbrpix@aol.com
  • December 2005
  • January 2006
  • February 2006
  • March 2006
  • April 2006
  • May 2006
  • June 2006
  • July 2006
  • August 2006
  • September 2006
  • October 2006
  • November 2006
  • December 2006
  • January 2007
  • February 2007
  • March 2007
  • April 2007
  • May 2007
  • June 2007
  • July 2007
  • August 2007
  • September 2007
  • October 2007
  • November 2007
  • December 2007
  • January 2008
  • February 2008
  • March 2008
  • April 2008
  • May 2008
  • June 2008
  • July 2008
  • August 2008
  • September 2008
  • October 2008
  • November 2008
  • December 2008
  • January 2009
  • February 2009
  • March 2009
  • April 2009
  • May 2009
  • June 2009
  • July 2009
  • August 2009
  • September 2009
  • October 2009
  • November 2009
  • December 2009
  • January 2010
  • February 2010
  • March 2010
  • April 2010
  • May 2010
  • June 2010
  • July 2010
  • August 2010
  • September 2010
  • October 2010
  • November 2010
  • December 2010
  • January 2011
  • February 2011
  • March 2011
  • April 2011
  • May 2011
  • June 2011
  • July 2011
  • August 2011
  • September 2011
  • October 2011
  • November 2011
  • December 2011
  • January 2012
  • February 2012
  • March 2012
  • April 2012
  • May 2012
  • June 2012
  • July 2012
  • August 2012
  • September 2012
  • October 2012
  • November 2012
  • December 2012
  • January 2013
  • February 2013
  • March 2013
  • April 2013
  • May 2013
  • June 2013
  • July 2013
  • August 2013
  • September 2013
  • October 2013
  • November 2013
  • December 2013
  • January 2014
  • February 2014
  • March 2014
  • April 2014
  • May 2014
  • June 2014
  • July 2014
  • August 2014
  • September 2014
  • October 2014
  • November 2014
  • December 2014
  • January 2015
  • February 2015
  • March 2015
  • April 2015
  • May 2015
  • June 2015
  • July 2015
  • August 2015
  • September 2015
  • October 2015
  • November 2015
  • December 2015
  • January 2016
  • February 2016
  • March 2016
  • April 2016
  • May 2016
  • June 2016
  • July 2016
  • August 2016
  • September 2016
  • October 2016
  • November 2016
  • December 2016
  • January 2017
  • February 2017
  • March 2017
  • April 2017
  • May 2017
  • June 2017
  • July 2017
  • August 2017
  • September 2017
  • October 2017
  • November 2017
  • December 2017
  • January 2018
  • February 2018
  • March 2018
  • April 2018
  • May 2018
  • June 2018
  • July 2018
  • August 2018
  • September 2018
  • October 2018
  • November 2018
  • December 2018
  • January 2019
  • February 2019
  • March 2019
  • April 2019
  • May 2019
  • June 2019
  • July 2019
  • August 2019
  • September 2019
  • October 2019
  • November 2019
  • December 2019
  • January 2020
  • February 2020
  • March 2020
  • April 2020
  • May 2020
  • June 2020
  • July 2020
  • August 2020
  • September 2020
  • October 2020
  • November 2020
  • December 2020
  • January 2021
  • February 2021
  • March 2021
  • April 2021
  • May 2021
  • June 2021
  • July 2021
  • August 2021
  • September 2021
  • October 2021
  • November 2021
  • December 2021
  • January 2022
  • February 2022
  • March 2022
  • April 2022
  • May 2022
  • June 2022
  • July 2022
  • August 2022
  • September 2022
  • October 2022
  • November 2022
  • December 2022
  • January 2023
  • February 2023
  • March 2023
  • April 2023
  • May 2023
  • June 2023
  • July 2023
  • August 2023
  • September 2023
  • October 2023
  • November 2023
  • December 2023
  • January 2024
  • February 2024
  • March 2024
  • April 2024
  • May 2024
  • June 2024
  • July 2024
  • August 2024
  • September 2024