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Show BROADWAY AND MAIN STREET Merge Television and Movies In a Marriage of Convenience By BILLY ROSE ' You might not think it to look at them, but the two big branches of show business are in heavy trouble movies and television broadcasting. The movies, a business with plenty of product, is up against a rapid ly shrinking audience, and though some of the companies are still in the black, It's a cinch they won't be when there are 10 million TV sets in 10 million parlors. Judging by the financial pages, the people who own the companies agree with me because most of the movie stocks are selling for less than half of their 1946 quotations. Tha television business, on the other hand, has a rapidly expand lng audience but ,m darned little prod- y""""" upt worth looking T at. And, as I see f s j it, it isn't the I v I fault of the TV S? -'I tycoons there t , P Just isn't enough 2 ZJA theatrical talent T ' 1 around to provide . jg: . j good live enter- i fcJ tainment for tha Billy Rose 300 half .hour shows which the networks must present each week. In other words, unless something U done about it and pronto, one business will grow more Insolvent and the other more Insipid. Is there a solution? Of course, and like all good solutions it's a simple one: Television must marry mar-ry the movies, or vice versa and if there are laws on the books which get in the way of these nuptials, then in the public interest the laws will have to be changed. The advantage of this alliance art many and obvious. First, through tht sale or rental to tele-casters tele-casters of film expressly made for the foot-square TV screen, the movies can start recouping some of the money that the home sets are siphoning out of their box offices. Second, on a give-and-take basis, the film companies will be able to run off their trailers in millions of living rooms, and the few tests of this type of advertising ad-vertising indicate that it's plenty potent. Third, the midget screens can be used to develop new picture pic-ture personalities, and this, as movie men will tell yon, is the real life blood of their silly business. busi-ness. What can Hollywood do for Television? Tele-vision? Plenty. A sufficient amount of the right kind of film will solve better than half of its programming program-ming problems and I'm, of course, not referring to the grade-Z vintage stuff which certain stations now run as a last and ludicrous resort. I'm talking about pictures ex- pertly tailored for the small screen, skillfully staged and lighted, and which, among other things, will steer clear of the long shots which look like so much oscillating mush. Hollywood eventually can produce darn near every type of TV program pro-gram from the travelogue to the three-act dramatic play, but for openers It might do well to concentrate con-centrate on the popular classics that people never seem to get tired of. For Instance, the best of the short stories of De Maupassant, O. Henry. Ben Hecht, Damon Run-yon Run-yon and Somerset Maugham; ditto, dit-to, a series of symphonic stand-bys stand-bys with Toscaninl and Stokowski conducting; double ditto, the Inspired In-spired antics of Jimmy Durante, Maurice Chevalier and a hundred others in the rhinestoned hodgepodge hodge-podge that makes up show business. Access to such a stock pile of film classics would, among other things, take the bone-crushing pressure pres-sure off the TV programmers and allow them to concentrate on a few really good live ghows. And before long, if they use the sense that Cod gave geese, the blending of the reel and the real would add up to entertainment entertain-ment which one could watch without rushing for the rail. The overall consequence would be that two businesses which give employment to tens of thousands would once and for all climb out of the red and into the pink. Paramount Pictures, which paid $560,000 for an interest in DuMont some years ago, is angling to sell its holdings for $12,000,000. That would be a nice capital gain, of course, but I wonder if it wouldn't be smarter for Paramount to hold on to this stock and invest a few extra bucks in a film library to make DuMont the first TV network worth a second look. Who knows it might be a handy hedge against the time when there are 20 million television sets, and DuMont is considering the purchase of Paramount for $560,000. |
