Non-Demand Movies

Imagine you’re watching Double Indemnity.  Betty Davis appears at the top of the stairs, dressed in her bathrobe, and slowly descends, the camera lovingly focused on the glittering ankle bracelet.  Just as Fred McMurray is about to comment on it …

… the movie breaks for a commercial for Ivory Soap (99 and 44/100ths percent pure.)

Now, to get the full effect, imagine that the stunning, high-contrast black-and-white photography is speckled with electronic “snow”.  And, to make matters worse, the image keeps scrolling upward or distorting like hallucinations on an acid trip.

When they return, and McMurray and Davis begin their delicious, seductive banter (“What’s the speed limit?”  “Forty-five.”  “How fast was I going, Officer?”  “Oh, I’d say about 90”) the dialogue sounds like it’s being transmitted between two tin cans connected with a length of string.  Instead of seeing the two side-by-side, the camera focuses on whomever is speaking, one at a time (an editing technique called “pan and scan.”)

Despite all that, this was increasingly how we watched movies for the first few decades of television.  Fuzzy picture and all, we managed to panic and radically transform an entrenched, monolithic industry, all because it was far more convenient to stay home with a lousy image than to go out for a good one.

It happened so suddenly.  In 1943, Americans spent over a quarter of their entertainment budgets on movies; going to a theater was something you did just about every week.  Yet by 1960, we were spending only 5% of that budget on theaters.  Movie revenues dropped by a third in the 50s.  The hegemony of the Studio system collapsed, and despite desperate innovations like Cinerama, epic stories and even 3-D, the little box with the fuzzy picture took over.

The studios knew what was happening, and they did their best to boycott TV by refusing to release any but pre-1948 films to television distributors.  So my formative years, the years when I became a film lover, focused on gangster films, westerns, war movies, screwball comedies, horror films, and even musicals made decades before I was able to watch them.  They were butchered by local editors, cut into segments for the insertion of commercials with little regard for narrative logic.  Often they were introduced by local celebrities, sometimes dressed in bizarre costumes (remember Elvira, Mistress of the Dark?).  

And yet, somehow the magic remained.  Maybe there were even some advantages.  For one thing, they were free, so we could watch even more of them than our parents had in the theaters.  They were there when we were sick at home from school, or in the evening when we were supposed to be going to sleep.  They were easy to watch, “B” formula movies that were often predictable and reliable entertainment.  And, given the technological barriers, they demanded attention to watch, giving the lie to the prevailing argument that television was a passive medium.  Tough men and tough women, the protagonists of the Depression era, were our first role models.  

The boycott broke down gradually, but finally the studios had to give in. In 1961, NBC premiered Saturday Night at the Movies; for the first time, we could watch prime-time movies, increasingly in color, that were only about a year old.  And you know what?  As I grew into my teen years, I started going back to the theaters.  I was now a cinephile—and I wanted to see movies without commercials intruding into them!

The other night, I watched The Bourne Legacy on On Demand.  Fast Forward, Pause, and Rewind were disabled, and, although the commercials that had been inserted during its television broadcast had been removed, the breaks for them were still there.  It was annoying, but it was also strangely nostalgic.

This was how we learned to love film.