13
Television and Hollywood in the 1940s

Christopher Anderson

Television enchanted Hollywood in 1940, but in that regard Hollywood was no different from the rest of the country. Heralded by stories of scientific breakthroughs and by occasional demonstrations of the technology, television's arrival as a popular medium had been anticipated for more than a decade by 1940. As early as 1928, the chairman of RCA, David Sarnoff, had predicted that within five years television would become "as much a part of our life" as radio. Executives in the movie industry may have questioned Sarnoff's time frame, but few ignored his prediction, since press reports throughout the 1930s assumed that television loomed just over the technological horizon. The motion picture trade press certainly fueled speculation, as when the Hollywood Reporter announced in November 1934 that commercial TV sets would hit the market by January of the following year. "Television Is Ready," the headline brashly—and prematurely—reported. Los Angeles was also the site of one of the country's most active experimental television stations, Don Lee's W6XAO, which conducted numerous demonstrations over the course of the decade. By the time Business Week assured executives that 1939, at last, would be the breakthrough "Television Year," the climate of prophecy had nurtured an intense public fascination with television—in Hollywood as in the rest of the country.¹

American television made its long-awaited public debut in April 1939, when NBC launched regular service with its coverage of the opening ceremonies of the New York Worlds Fair. Subsequent broadcasts by NBC and CBS were conducted only on an experimental basis, beamed to a few thousand receivers in the New York area, and yet public awareness of television continued to grow during 1939, fueled by clever publicity campaigns that featured exhibitions of the technology at trade shows and in department stores.² Valuable publicity came also from televised events, which had few viewers but captured public attention through accounts in newspapers and magazines.

The motion picture industry participated in one of these televised events when NBC broadcast the Atlanta premiere of Gone With the Wind in December 1939. Perhaps more than any single event, that premiere marked the pinnacle of the movie industry's influence in American culture. With the attention of the national press focused on Atlanta, NBC seized the opportunity for self-promotion, stationing four video cameras near the theater marquee and using them to transmit the first televised movie premiere to its small audience in New York.³ It was a technical feat that served both the movie industry and the nascent TV business, and the experimental broadcast gained stature by paying homage to the country's preeminent form of popular culture.

This early broadcast offered Hollywood a tantalizing glimpse of the future. Though staged mainly for publicity, it appeared at the time to presage an almost certain bond between the movie and television industries. From the earliest days of commercial radio, the studios had explored the field of broadcasting; many had made unsuccessful bids to form their own radio networks. Now as the new decade dawned, it seemed logical, if not inevitable, that Hollywood would play a key role in shaping American television. Even the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the government agency responsible for regulating the country's airwaves, hoped that Hollywood studios would apply their particular acumen to the challenge of forming a viable television industry. In August 1940, the FCC chairman, James L. Fly, paid a diplomatic visit to Hollywood, touring the production facilities at Warner Bros., Paramount, and RKO. Before leaving, he invited the major studios to seek licenses for television stations and to stake their claim as television producers.⁴

Studio executives, however, were not satisfied merely to experiment in a medium controlled by the existing radio networks; they wanted to command the television industry just as they dominated the movie industry, by controlling the channels of distribution. Consequently, Hollywood approached broadcasting with two goals. First, studios or their parent companies invested directly in stations, networks, and electronics manufacturers as part of their general strategies for corporate diversification. Second, the studios sought to influence the development of television technology, which they anticipated would become a revolutionary new mode of distribution and exhibition for motion pictures.

The networks had developed a particular model of broadcasting based on transmitting commercially sponsored programs to home receivers. The studios, on the other hand, envisioned alternative uses for the technology, uses that would conform more closely to the economic exchange of the theatrical box office. These included theater television, in which programs would be transmitted to theaters and shown on movie screens, and subscription television, in which home viewers would pay directly for the opportunity to view exclusive, commercial-free programming. By recognizing these ambitions, the historian Michele Hilmes argues, "a new picture emerges of Hollywood as an active experimenter with the new technology, presenting a serious challenge to the established broadcasting interests."⁵

Entering the 1940s, the Hollywood studios were eager to explore television, and the federal government endorsed their ambitions. Yet the radio networks, which quickly adapted radio's economic practices and program forms, exerted a far greater influence over television's development as a national medium. Given Hollywood's expressed interests, why didn't the movie industry play a larger role in the development of television during the 1940s? Why did the television industry come to be controlled by the radio networks instead of the studios? And why have so many subsequent stories testified to the hostility of studio executives, who were often said to have despised television during its early years?

This chapter explores the history of television in Hollywood during the 1940s in order to understand how the conditions and events of that decade combined to thwart the ambitions of the major studios. Because American television was suspended during the war and did not really develop as a popular medium until the networks introduced regular prime-time programming in 1948, television during much of this decade existed in an inchoate form, more a projection of social and commercial fantasies than a public institution. Television gradually achieved definition during this period of anticipation and experimentation, publicity and policy making, demonstration and debate. Under these circumstances, Hollywood tried to ensure that television would never be strictly defined as a domestic medium aimed at individual homes, nor as the logical domain of the radio networks, but that it would be equally viable as an extension of the studio system, perhaps even as a public medium based in movie theaters.

Launching Television, 1939-1942

From the time of NBC's inaugural telecast in 1939 until World War II forced the suspension of consumer electronics manufacturing in 1942, Americans witnessed a flurry of activity surrounding television, including a series of debates over proposed technical standards, the beginning of commercial broadcasts, and the first demonstrations of theater television. The period was dominated by RCA, which pushed hard to see its technology adopted as the technical standard for the entire industry. For RCA, according to the historian J. Fred MacDonald,

the launching of television in 1939 was a double-edged business enterprise intended to sell TV sets to the public and impose RCA technical standards on the industry. If RCA/NBC could develop, produce, and market receivers as well as programs, the corporation could establish itself as the technological, manufacturing, commercial, and programming giant of television. With such an advantage it could monopolize the emerging industry from the outset. (J. Fred MacDonald, One Nation Under Television: The Rise and Decline of Network TV [New York: Pantheon, 1990], p. 14)

The motion picture industry, however, did not concede control of television to RCA. For years the Hollywood community had monitored technological developments in the field described initially by the trade journals as "visual broadcasting."⁶ Because the major studios had extensive experience in radio, they eagerly awaited the moment when it would be feasible to diversify into television. The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), the industry trade organization, prepared several studies of television for the studios during the 1920s and 1930s.⁷

Individual studios and independent producers sought their own advantage in television during the 1930s. Warner Bros. carefully monitored television patents filed by Theodor Nakken, Ludwig Silberstein, and others. Rumors in the trade press even claimed that Warner Bros. attempted to lure the television research pioneer Vladimir Zworykin away from RCA during this period.⁸ Contracts negotiated by studios and independent producers began to contain clauses governing television rights. Indeed, television played a central role in Walt Disney's decision in 1936 not to renew his distribution contract with United Artists. When United Artists refused to grant Disney the television rights to his feature films, he abandoned the company and signed with RKO—a decision that paid huge dividends for the producer in years to come.⁹ Hollywood's fascination with television in the years leading up to its commercial introduction can be seen in a remark by the producer David O. Selznick after he had attended a demonstration of the technology in the laboratory of the inventor Philo T. Farnsworth in 1937. "I do not believe that television can be stopped," he reported to his board of directors. "Some day, it will undoubtedly have a future so stupendous that we cannot even foresee its possibilities."¹⁰

The first major studio to move beyond enthusiastic endorsements and actually invest in television was Paramount, which had forged an initial alliance with the broadcasting industry by purchasing a substantial interest in the CBS radio network during the late 1920s. Although Paramount liquidated its CBS investment by 1932, the studio continued to seek opportunities in broadcasting once it had begun to recover from the effects of the Depression.¹¹ In July 1938, Paramount paid $164,000 for a 25 percent interest in DuMont Laboratories, a television manufacturing firm founded by the inventor Allen B. DuMont. According to Paul Raibourn, the studio executive in charge of television, Paramount made the investment to ensure that the movie industry would not be squeezed out of TV by the radio networks and to direct DuMont research toward theater television.¹² For the second time in less than a decade, Paramount asserted its leadership in broadcasting, setting a precedent that was recognized immediately in the movie industry.

The MPPDA's 1939 study of television, the latest in a series of reports by the industry's trade organization, expressed the belief that television could be shaped to the major studios' advantage, particularly if the studios committed themselves to developing theater television. Courtland Smith, the report's author, advised the studios to follow Paramount's lead and seek greater influence in the medium—by participating in experimental broadcasts and by lobbying the FCC as it considered technical standards. The timing would never be better for the movie industry to control distribution by establishing their own networks. "Television needs us, and very badly," he reported. "Most television people hope to relegate film to a minor position and bring the direct pick-up [live broadcast] into all programs. In fact, if networks were now possible they might adopt the policy of excluding film…. There being no networks, film will start unopposed and as an essential factor."¹³

Though Smith encouraged the studios to participate in the market that would develop around home TV receivers, he argued that Hollywood's success in television would rest ultimately on its ability to foster the growth of theater TV, since video projection technology promised benefits for both the studios and theater owners. In part, this meant fighting a rhetorical battle against established radio interests in an effort to influence the FCC, which already seemed predisposed to view television as primarily a domestic medium like radio. "We never should let the idea become generally accepted that television means pictures in the home instead of pictures in the theater," Smith argued. "It would seem to be wise to combat the idea at once. It seems obvious now that television, as it affects the motion picture industry, is not only a matter of film production for the home but also of a new type of show for the motion picture theaters. It may well be at the box office of the motion picture theater that television will make its first profit."¹⁴

The historian Michele Hilmes has noted that the movie industry, by conceiving of theater television as a viable alternative to home receivers, proposed not only to develop a mode of reception for television that differed from radio but also to create an alternative to the economics of commercial broadcasting, one that substituted the direct revenue from theater attendance for the indirect revenue of advertising.¹⁵ Instead of waiting for advertisers to shift to television only after the medium had attracted a critical mass of viewers, the movie industry could hasten the adoption of television by using box-office admissions as the medium's economic foundation. Theater TV, speculated one industry reporter, offered an obvious solution to the cost of TV production: "Many television programs will probably be so expensive to produce that they will not be sent over the air free to anyone who has a receiver in his home but to theaters by special wires or on a separate wavelength which cannot be received on home sets."¹⁶

Private demonstrations of television projection systems had been conducted in research laboratories since 1930, but the technology was not presented to the public until 1939, when the British companies Baird Television and Scophony Ltd. equipped several London theaters, making it possible for movie patrons to view live broadcasts of prizefights and horse races. The first public demonstrations in the United States took place at the New York World's Fair, where Baird and RCA introduced their systems. RCA quickly became the leader in theater TV research, developing an electronic system that used a cathode-ray tube similar to that in home TV sets in order to project a video image directly onto a theater screen. RCA staged private demonstrations for FCC commissioners in February 1940 and for stockholders in April.¹⁷

The first full-scale public screening took place at the New Yorker Theater in New York City during January 1941. This initial telecast, presented to representatives of the FCC, advertising agencies, and the movie industry, consisted of a one-act play and performances of ballet, opera, and vaudeville. In May, RCA arranged a second demonstration specifically for movie industry distributors and exhibitors, who would be the target audience for the company's imminent marketing campaign. Executives from the studios' New York offices joined a standing-room-only crowd of 1,500 people to view a live program transmitted from the NBC studios. The program featured a variety of live events, including a news report by NBC's Lowell Thomas, a roundtable discussion concerning the potential for covering sporting events via theater TV, a prizefight taking place in Madison Square Garden, and a dramatic sketch staged in the NBC studios. Able to project an image of 15 × 20 feet at a cost of $30,000 per unit, the RCA system offered adequate sound and visual quality but did not measure up to the standards of a Hollywood feature. The critic Terry Ramsaye, who attended the event as a reporter for the Motion Picture Herald, was generally unimpressed by the technical quality. "If theatre television proves to be an art," he reported shortly afterwards, "it was the first art to be born in the doghouse."¹⁸

According to Ralph Beal, the head of television research at RCA, the electronics manufacturer assumed that American television ultimately would consist of two separate services, one directed at home receivers and the other at movie theaters. As a manufacturer of radio and TV receivers, and as the parent company of NBC, RCA believed that television should be targeted primarily at audiences in the home. Television, according to its chairman David Sarnoff, was destined to be a "vital element" in a culture increasingly centered on the family home.¹⁹ On the other hand, RCA was also the leader in developing the technology for theater television, for which it made equally definitive claims. "Theater television has great promise," stated one RCA brochure. "It heralds the linking of playhouses in the nation into television networks that can transform every village theater into a Madison Square Garden or a Metropolitan Opera House."²⁰

These types of statements began to define a potential relationship between home and theater television: theater TV would serve as a forum for public events and performances, while home television would incorporate the programming strategies of radio, relying on advertiser-sponsored series. RCA concentrated on the market for home receivers but also envisioned theater TV as the "public" form of television, the ideal technology for screens located in hotels, cafés, small newsreel theaters, and regular movie theaters. The movie industry also encouraged the notion that theater television would provide moviegoers with privileged access to public events. For instance, a 1940 Paramount short subject, "Ted Husing's Television Revue," introduced theater patrons to the notion of theater TV and extolled the virtue of witnessing live events, suggesting that theater TV would connect the movie theater to the public sphere. "No longer will you have to stay at home from the movies just to hear what's going on in the world," the narrator explained. "Come to the movies to see and hear."²¹ Paramount's president, Barney Balaban, used a similar rationale in explaining his company's investment in theater TV. "Instead of being competition, television may be an asset to the theater business," Balaban said. "On nights when a big fight is being held, or perhaps the President is making an important address, imagine how much more business could be obtained by televising the event. Instead of a patron sitting at home and hearing an audible broadcast, he will be able to come to our theaters and not only hear the broadcast but see the entire show on the television screen."²²

As these comments indicate, RCA and the movie industry shared complementary visions of a dual television system able to serve both home and theater with separate types of programming. Since RCA needed to market its video projection technology to theaters, many of which were controlled by the studios, it initially had a strong incentive to ally itself with the movie industry in calling for the development of theater TV. But once the studios began venturing further into television, conflicts arose between RCA and Hollywood, primarily because RCA opposed any form of competition that threatened its dominance over the television industry or its hopes for seeing its own technology adopted as the industrywide standard.

Paramount's investment in DuMont created tensions between the movie and broadcasting industries because Paramount immediately emerged as a rival to RCA, just as it had during its brief partnership with CBS in the early 1930s. The tone of this renewed rivalry was set during the FCC's 1940 hearings over television's technical standards when DuMont, along with other electronics manufacturers, challenged RCA's proposed standards. DuMont asked the FCC to support competition and not to freeze technological development by accepting RCA's proposals. The FCC, according to MacDonald, "wavered between reluctant support for the bullying enterprise of Sarnoff and RCA, the desire to keep the new industry open to competition, and the desire to protect consumers from buying TV sets that would become obsolete quickly."²³

In February 1940, the FCC announced that commercial broadcasting would begin in September, although the commission had not yet established technical standards. Following the announcement, RCA launched an energetic marketing campaign in order to flood the market with its own receivers and perhaps establish the de facto industry standard. To prevent consumers from purchasing sets that might soon be obsolete, the FCC reacted by postponing the introduction of commercial broadcasts and calling for new hearings in April 1940.²⁴

At these hearings, RCA went on the offensive against its competitors, explicitly accusing Paramount of inhibiting the development of television through its investment in DuMont. In a brief filed with the FCC, RCA claimed, "The motion picture interests which are financing DuMont Laboratories have a much greater financial stake in the movie industry than they have in television. Their recent interest in television is primarily for the purpose of 'protecting' their larger interest in the movie and theater industry and not to develop the new art of television. Therefore, they desire the adoption of systems and methods that would make television inferior rather than superior to motion pictures."²⁵ By leveling such charges against Paramount, RCA introduced two ideas that would come to influence the governments response to the movie industry's increased presence in television. First, RCA implied that the movie industry would exploit television solely for commercial gain, whereas the experienced radio networks recognized the responsibility of broadcasters to serve the "public interest," as policy mandated. Second, it suggested that the movie studios were masking their true motives, which were not to promote television but to slow its growth in order to protect their theaters.²⁶

On the contrary, Paramount had moved aggressively into television following its 1938 investment in DuMont. In July 1939, the studio formed a television subsidiary, Television Productions, Inc. And in spite of RCA's aspersions, the FCC granted Paramount and its related companies four experimental television permits, while giving RCA only three. Paramount capitalized on this opportunity by announcing that it had purchased a vehicle for use as a mobile television unit capable of feeding live remote telecasts to DuMont and its experimental stations. Paramount also began using television as a lure for its movie theaters, installing DuMont TV sets in the lobbies of its Chicago-based Balaban & Katz theaters, with the sets tuned to the theater circuit's own experimental TV station, W9XBK.²⁷

RCA's accusations about Paramount had little immediate influence on the FCC; in fact, it was shortly after the hearings that FCC Chairman Fly visited Hollywood with an invitation for the studios to participate more actively in developing television. But over the next few years—as the studios faced new charges of antitrust violations—the FCC began to have its own doubts about allowing the Hollywood studios to play a major role in the television industry.

The War Years, 1942-1945

The FCC approved technical standards for television in April 1941 and authorized commercial broadcasts beginning in July 1941. With manufacturers prepared to market TV receivers, American television appeared to be on the verge of fulfilling the predictions of the previous decade. But World War II intervened, and television's development came to a halt by mid-1942 as manufacturers ceased producing consumer electronics and turned instead to making equipment for the military. Ten commercial stations were broadcasting in mid-1942, and six remained on the air throughout the war. As advertisers drifted away, these stations reduced their schedules to a token four hours per week, transmitting to the roughly ten thousand TV sets in the United States mainly concentrated in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

Commercial television was suspended for the duration of the war, but the federal government was eager to pave the way for a quick launch once the war ended. "During the postwar period," FCC Chairman Fly predicted, "television will be one of the first industries arising to serve as a cushion against unemployment and depression."²⁸ During 1944-1945, the FCC conducted hearings to establish spectrum allocation for television, and many historians believe that these hearings were the single most important event in determining the eventual structure of American television. The critical issue at these hearings was whether television broadcasting should remain in the VHF band of the electromagnetic spectrum (as advocated by RCA), thus restricting its channel capacity, or whether it should be moved to the UHF band, which had a much greater capacity. These hearings were a turning point because they offered the last opportunity to shift U.S. broadcasting to the UHF band without severely disrupting manufacturers and consumers.²⁹

In May 1945, however, the FCC approved a system of thirteen-channel VHF broadcasting and encouraged the use of UHF solely for experimental broadcasts. By restricting the number of available channels, the FCC created an artificial scarcity that guaranteed fierce competition in the television industry. As J. Fred MacDonald has written, "To make channels so scarce effectively guaranteed that U.S. television would be broadcast TV, dominated by those few corporations able to afford stations in the largest cities, provide attractive programs, attract national advertisers, and quickly build a chain of affiliates eager to appeal to the mass audience."³⁰ In other words, the high demand for a limited number of channels meant that radio's mode of commercial network broadcasting was likely to dominate television as well; there would be no opportunity to explore alternative forms of television. As a result of the FCC's decision, small networks and independent stations—like those envisioned by the studios—were placed at a competitive disadvantage in relation to NBC and CBS, which were prepared to sign affiliates as soon as commercial broadcasting resumed after the war.

During the war, the major studios still assumed that they would be competitive in the television industry. As the movie industry prospered, the major studios jockeyed for position in television because they recognized that commercial television would be launched almost immediately after the war ended. At the same time, however, the studios were aware that conditions in the movie industry—a new round of antitrust litigation, an uncertain international market, and a rise in independent production—would necessitate changes in the studio system. Eager to stake out the future of distribution and exhibition through television, each of the studios made substantial investments in station ownership and theater TV. The studios were not alone in pursuing these investments: a 1945 survey reported that 50 percent of exhibitors intended to operate TV stations, while nearly 60 percent planned to install theater TV systems.³¹

In late 1943 the studios began applying for station licenses and developing plans for production. MGM in December 1943 assigned Nat Wolf to form a television department, and Wolf subsequently hired the radio writers George Wells and Norman Corwin, assigning them to write screenplays until they could be used in actual television production. MGM's parent company, Loew's, subsequently applied for permits to construct stations in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.³² RKO hired Ralph Austrian from NBC, giving him responsibility for exploring all phases of television. In June 1944, Austrian helped form RKO Television Corporation, a subsidiary that would produce TV news and entertainment. RKO became the first major studio to produce for television with the telecast of "Talk Fast, Mister," a one-hour drama filmed at RKO-Pathé studios in New York and broadcast by DuMont's New York station in December 1944. Later RKO created a series of ten-minute short subjects for TV by recycling stock footage to create a quiz show titled Do You Know? and a nostalgia series titled Ten Years Ago Today.³³ Warner Bros. in 1944 filed an application for a Hollywood television station to be operated by its radio station, KFWB, and purchased seventeen acres on Mulholland Drive to be used for constructing the station. Twentieth Century-Fox, through its theater circuits, filed applications in Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Seattle, Kansas City, and St. Louis. Even the independent producer Walt Disney anticipated the future growth of television by applying for a permit to construct a station at the Disney studio.³⁴

Paramount continued to set the pace for the integration of television into the movie industry. Its subsidiary Television Productions, Inc., launched a Los Angeles experimental station, W6XYZ, in February 1943. The Balaban & Katz station in Chicago, WBKB, became a commercial station in October 1943. Many of the studio's theater circuits prepared station applications across the country, in New England, Michigan, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Florida. Paramount also kept pace with RCA by joining with British Scophony and General Precision Equipment (the single largest shareholder of 20th Century-Fox) in 1943 to form the Scophony Corporation of America, a U.S. subsidiary of Britain's leader in theater TV research.³⁵

Of course, technological innovation alone could not ensure the success of theater TV; studios also had to devise a system for producing and distributing the necessary programming. The studios stressed the need to create networks of theaters in order to cover the expense of production. "All that theatre television needs to become a reality," claimed RKO's Ralph B. Austrian, "is a means of interconnecting a chain of theatres…. It is not beyond the bounds of possibilities to visualize a nationwide chain of theatres reaching out for home television personalities as fast as they are developed, and paying them enough to make it worth their while to perform for theatres only, rather than for the home audience." Variety reported that some in the movie industry even wanted to create streamlined theaters devoted exclusively to television, relying on programming transmitted from a central network source. In 1944, Paramount asked the FCC to approve two microwave relay networks that would connect the studio's stations and theaters in just such a network. Indeed, frequency allocation would prove to be a crucial factor in determining the eventual success or failure of theater TV. In 1945, the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (SMPE) testified before the FCC that theater TV would not be able to exist without the allocation of special frequencies reserved exclusively for the studios to transmit programming to theaters. In response, the FCC agreed to set aside several frequencies for experimental applications of theater TV but chose not to allocate channels for its commercial development.³⁶

As this decision suggests, during the war years the federal government became increasingly skeptical of the movie industry's role in television and seldom encouraged further expansion by the studios. Although the FCC welcomed the studios in 1940, the atmosphere in Washington had changed dramatically by 1945, when FCC Chairman Paul A. Porter addressed a meeting of industry leaders in Hollywood and warned them that the movie industry should not expect a significant role in television after the war; his agency would see to it that television would not become a "Hollywood bauble."³⁷

This surprising shift occurred because Washington had become increasingly concerned about the threat of monopolies forming in the television industry. The FCC's 1938 hearings on network monopoly in radio broadcasting had led to its 1941 Report onChain Broadcasting. The FCC concluded that NBC and CBS had restricted competition in radio by exercising inordinate control over affiliated stations and that NBC should be forced to divest one of its two radio networks in order to foster competition. In October 1943, after the courts had upheld the FCC's findings, NBC sold its Blue network to Edward H. Noble, who later changed the name to the American Broadcasting Company.

The major studios increasingly fell under a cloud of suspicion as they once again faced antitrust allegations in charges filed by the Justice Department in August 1944. While these antitrust proceedings moved through the courts, Washington scrutinized the movie industry more carefully. In December 1945, for instance, the Justice Department filed suit against American Scophony, charging that Paramount and its associates had monopolistic control over theater TV patents and had delayed the technology's development for fear that theater TV would undermine the movie business.³⁸ These charges, which obviously echoed RCA's previous allegations about Paramount, signaled a dramatic change in the relationship between Washington and Hollywood. The FCC's commitment to VHF virtually guaranteed that a precious few networks would exert enormous influence over television. It was becoming apparent that these networks were likely to be formed by the radio networks and not by the studios.

Thwarted Ambitions of the Major Studios, 1946-1950

In spite of the intense expectations that surrounded television by the end of World War II, commercial television was slow to develop after the war. The FCC had received 116 license applications from 50 cities by the end of 1945, but two years later there were still only 16 stations on the air and fewer than 200,000 TV sets in the country. Of course, television was solely a metropolitan phenomenon, with stations and viewers concentrated mainly along the East Coast and in Chicago and Los Angeles. The electronics industry needed time to retool for consumer markets, but lingering uncertainty over technical standards also made manufacturers and consumers wary about moving forward. Those interested in television awaited a definitive ruling about which of the competing color standards—a mechanical system developed by CBS or an electronic system advocated by RCA—would receive the FCC's approval. In March 1947, the FCC rejected the CBS color system, which was incompatible with existing technology, and this decision launched the expansion of American television because it established that, for the foreseeable future, television would be broadcast in black-and-white.³⁹

Following the war, the major studios continued to lay the groundwork for the eventual role of television in the studio system. Faced with a pending antitrust ruling that threatened to disrupt the movie industry, the studios had an unusually strong incentive for exploring opportunities for diversification. Warner Bros. and Paramount were the most aggressive studios attempting to diversify into television.

To compete with Paramount, Warner Bros. in 1947 joined 20th Century-Fox and RCA in a project to develop and market RCA's technology for theater TV. This collaborative research led to a public screening of the Joe Louis-Jersey Joe Walcott heavyweight prize-fight at the Fox-Philadelphia Theater in June 1948 and to demonstrations on the studio's Burbank lot in late 1948 and early 1949.⁴⁰ In April 1948, Warner Bros. also filed an application for a Chicago TV station and prepared applications in five other cities. Two months later, Warner Bros. asked the FCC to allow the studio to purchase two radio stations and Los Angeles TV station KLAC from Dorothy Thackery, former publisher of the New York Post.⁴¹ For Warner Bros., these investments represented the first steps in organizing a broadcast network that would support an expansion into television.

It is no coincidence that Warner Bros. stepped up its TV-related activities in 1948, a year in which studio executives faced the worst destabilization of the studio system since the Depression. After the industry's peak year of 1946, nationwide box-office attendance had declined steadily, while foreign revenue also diminished as a result of protectionist legislation enacted by European countries.⁴² The Paramount decision threatened to curtail another source of revenue by eliminating the steady profits delivered by studio-controlled theaters once the studios divested themselves of their theater circuits. Under these conditions, Warner Bros. virtually ceased studio operations from November 1948 to February 1949. When the trade press interpreted the shutdown as a distress signal, Jack Warner denied the rumors; the studio's temporary inactivity was not a shutdown per se, he claimed, but an opportunity for "appraisal, analysis, and planning for the future."⁴³

As a result of this reflection, Warner Bros. executives devised a new production strategy that promised to salvage aspects of the studio system by integrating film and television production. Harry Warner declared in January 1949 that Warner Bros. would introduce television production at its Burbank studios as soon as the FCC approved the purchase of the Thackery stations. Planning to use owned-and-operated stations as the cornerstone for expansion into further station ownership or the development of a network, the company would produce programming both for broadcast television and for theater TV. Jack Warner would continue to supervise the production of theatrical features, while Harry would assume responsibility for the television division.⁴⁴ This decision marked the origins at Warner Bros. of the policy that ultimately would lead the studio system into the television age. Increasingly, theatrical features would be produced individually by independent units, while the studio's traditional mode of production would be dedicated to serving the television market. The studio would balance the shift toward unique, expensive films with a standardized product that served the same function as had its more routine features during much of the studio era.

Paramount continued to pursue an even wider range of interests in television. Its experimental Los Angeles station began commercial broadcasts in 1947 as KTLA, the first commercial station west of the Mississippi. In 1948, Television Productions, Inc., formed the Paramount Television Network to distribute filmed programs produced at KTLA. This was not a true broadcast network but an alternative source of programming using film distribution instead of live broadcasts to supply local stations. Through American Scophony, Paramount also began to explore the potential for subscription TV, an early precursor of pay cable that used wired transmissions to bypass broadcasters altogether. This technology was being developed in the late 1940s but was not tested in actual markets until the 1950s. In general, however, Paramount's interest in American Scophony diminished following the antitrust suit filed by the Justice Department in 1945. Paramount and General Precision eventually signed a consent decree in January 1949, agreeing to divest all stock interest in Scophony, but Paramount already had begun to develop its own version of theater television even before leaving Scophony.⁴⁵

Unlike the electronic systems developed by RCA and Scophony, which projected a video image directly onto a movie screen, Paramount's theater TV employed an "inter-mediate film system": in the theater, a video image was filmed from a TV monitor, the footage developed immediately, and the film projected through a normal projector; the entire process took about one minute. Paramount's intermediate film system made its public debut in April 1948 by presenting live coverage of a boxing match to three thousand people in New York's Paramount Theater. The studio assumed that its TV stations, WBKB in Chicago and KTLA in Los Angeles, would function as centers for networks of TV-equipped theaters. By February 1949, the equipment had been installed in theaters in both cities; in June, Paramount launched theater TV telecasts at the Balaban & Katz flagship Chicago Theater. Subsequent telecasts at the Chicago Theater and at other Balaban & Katz theaters in the Chicago area continued to use theater TV for covering special live events, especially sports (boxing matches, Big Ten football, the 1949 World Series) and occasional news events (such as speeches by Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur).⁴⁶

All plans for expanding into station ownership and theater television were dashed, however, when the FCC stepped in following the Paramount ruling to investigate whether the major studios legitimately had the right to own television stations. Senator Edwin C. Johnson, chairman of the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee, which monitored the broadcasting industries, decried the fact that "interests who have accepted consent decrees stand defiantly at the counter demanding the right to get into television." The Communications Act of 1934 had authorized the FCC to refuse station licenses to any individual or organization convicted of monopolistic practices, and the commission was now prepared to decide whether this provision should be applied to the movie studios whose collusion had precipitated the Paramount decision. FCC Chairman Wayne Coy even asked the Justice Department to determine whether the studios' activities in television constituted further violations of antitrust laws.⁴⁷

The FCC never actually delivered a ruling on this question because the station application process was abruptly suspended in September 1948 when the commission declared a freeze on the licensing of TV stations, postponing decisions on all pending applications until solutions had been found for various technical problems that still plagued television, including lingering questions about spectrum allocation, signal interference, and color standards. The station application freeze began as a six-month moratorium to allow the FCC to reevaluate television policy, but the issues involved were too complicated to untangle in such a short period; the freeze ultimately lasted four years, until the commission delivered its Sixth Report and Order in May 1952.

Still, American television was hardly frozen during this four-year period. As stations approved before the freeze went on the air, advertisers and the public were drawn to the new medium. The number of stations rose from 50 in 1948 to 108 in 1952, and the number of sets in U.S. homes increased from 1.2 million to 15 million. Historians have argued that because of this growth the freeze actually gave NBC and CBS an insurmountable advantage in the television industry, enabling them to solidify their positions in local markets during a period of limited competition.⁴⁸ With the tacit support of the FCC, the radio networks extended their power into the TV industry by establishing owned-and-operated stations in major cities and by signing affiliate contracts with the vast majority of these early stations—which were owned primarily by radio broadcasters who were accustomed to the network structure. Allen B. DuMont, who had launched his own ill-fated network, complained that "the freeze reserved to two networks the almost exclusive right to broadcast in all but 12 of the 63 markets which had television service. It meant that [DuMont and ABC] did not have … an opportunity to get programs into the markets so necessary … to attract advertisers."⁴⁹

The government's role in excluding the major studios from owning television stations during this period was critical in determining the eventual structure of the television industry. As Douglas Gomery has noted, the Paramount decision not only broke up the studio system but "guaranteed that the majors would not secure a significant place in the ownership of U.S. television networks and stations. The radio industry was able to secure a hold which continues to the present day."⁵⁰ Hollywood's major studios watched helplessly during the freeze as their plans for television disintegrated. Hoping to force a decision by the FCC, a frustrated 20th Century-Fox petitioned the Justice Department in March 1949 for a ruling on whether the studios should be eligible for broadcast licenses. Meanwhile, Warner Bros. dismissed its Chicago station application in May 1949, after a studio survey concluded that the first year of operation in Chicago—if that year ever came—would cost nearly $800,000. Ultimately, the Thackery TV interests grew tired of waiting for the FCC to approve Warner Bros.' purchase of their Los Angeles stations and pulled out of the deal.⁵¹ With all licensing decisions delayed indefinitely by the freeze, the other studios dismissed their remaining applications as well.

Even as the Paramount decision was used by the government to thwart the studios' plans to establish their own stations and networks, the FCC's reluctance to support alternative technologies by allocating frequencies for their use also made theater TV financially untenable. As Michele Hilmes explains, "Through a tendency to protect established interests against innovative competition … and [in] what is surely one of the worst examples of regulatory foot-dragging in history, the FCC managed to delay, avert, and handicap testing and operation of these systems to the point that the companies involved could no longer support their efforts."⁵²

Although Warner Bros. had planned an initial network of twenty-five theaters equipped with video projection, it would install television systems in only thirteen of its theaters in the coming years.⁵³ Paramount was also unable to make a profit on theater television and withdrew the systems from its Chicago theaters in 1951. Theater television expanded briefly in the early 1950s, though it never achieved any sort of widespread acceptance. In 1950, ten theaters in the United States were equipped for video projection, and the number peaked in 1952 with seventy-five theaters in thirty-seven cities.⁵⁴

As many in the industry had predicted, theater television failed in part because the FCC would not assign broadcast frequencies exclusively for theater use. Because the studios were unable to acquire stations, they also found it impossible to form a network capable of linking theaters across the country; consequently, the cost of theater TV broadcasts fell on individual theaters and could not be subsidized by a network structure. By the early 1950s, television had become overwhelmingly oriented toward the family home. Not even a single theater added video projection in 1953, and the system slowly disappeared, replaced in theaters by new exhibition technologies like CinemaScope and 3-D.

In spite of their clear designs on the television business, most of the major studios found themselves in the late 1940s with no substantial connections to the new medium and no incentive to forge ahead (the exception being Paramount, which still owned Los Angeles TV station KTLA and an interest in DuMont). Because the major studios had been thwarted from gaining control of distribution, the integration of television in Hollywood occurred through television production, which originated as the domain of independent producers with razor-thin profit margins and little stake in the studio system.

Television Production in Hollywood, 1946-1950

The major studios clearly saw promise in television during the 1940s, but they were not blinded by ambition; they proceeded cautiously by the end of the decade because they were reluctant to take any action that would leave them subservient to the existing radio networks. Yet even though the major studios withdrew from television, Hollywood's engagement with the medium continued apace, fueled by independent producers who rushed forward to supply the new medium's demand for programming.

As small-scale entrepreneurs, Hollywood's first television producers experienced few of the reservations that deterred the movie industry's major powers. They had grown accustomed to squeezing themselves into the cracks and crevices of the studio system—operating on tiny budgets, surviving on minimal profits, designing products that earned money in the neglected areas of a market defined by larger companies. Independent producers and small studios, like Monogram and Republic, typically filled the exhibitors' need for such products as B features, short subjects, serials, and travelogues, the less prestigious and profitable entertainment that completed a theater's daily program, but that the major companies produced with less frequency after the early 1940s. Adaptability was the key to survival in a market that discriminated against any small producer. By necessity, then, independent producers worked with a much broader definition of filmed entertainment, considering many formats that strayed from the major studios' dominant feature-length narratives. Unburdened by commitment to any particular system of distribution or exhibition, to a certain conception of the producer's autonomy and authority, or to any particular definition of the cinematic text, these producers were less devoted to a single medium than to exploiting the potential of any market and any product that promised a return on their investment.

The television industry during the late 1940s and early 1950s was not an ideal alternative to the studio system, since the networks were beginning to monopolize the nation's TV stations as effectively as the studios had controlled theaters. By comparison, however, the market for TV programming was relatively open. Though the majority of network programs were produced for live broadcast by such New York-based advertising agencies as J. Walter Thompson and Young and Rubicam, Hollywood producers discovered a welcome market; the successful ones, like William "Hopalong Cassidy" Boyd or Hal Roach, were able to license filmed programming to networks and local stations or to national, regional, and local sponsors who would then purchase broadcast time. Early television offered meager financial rewards, but it opened new channels of distribution outside the influence of the major studios, providing refuge to producers whose movies traditionally had languished in tiny neighborhood or rural theaters.

An entrepreneur like Jerry Fairbanks epitomized the spirit of the early telefilm pioneers. A producer of short subjects at Paramount for many years, Fairbanks chased the lure of television riches in 1946 when he opened his own telefilm production company in a small studio at the heart of Sunset Boulevard's Poverty Row studios. Inspired by the general corporate culture at Paramount, the studio most committed to television, and by the ingenuity of the studio's short-subject division, Fairbanks envisioned TV production as his opportunity to surpass the studio system. Although there were only a dozen TV stations broadcasting at the time, Fairbanks believed the most optimistic forecasts that more than a thousand stations would bombard the nation's airwaves by 1953. While many of these thousand stations would be network affiliates broadcasting live programs from New York, Fairbanks and others speculated that they would have an insatiable appetite for filmed programming because they would quickly exhaust the network's ability to supply new programs. Although TV production did not promise to be immediately profitable, Fairbanks imagined this imminent demand and saw no ceiling on the potential value of filmed TV programs, which could be circulated indefinitely among the country's new TV stations.

Fairbanks was a tinkerer and a cut-rate visionary; he relished the challenge of adapting studio system production techniques to the demanding economies of television during an era when a half-hour television program, like his 1948 series Public Prosecutor, could not count on more than a $20,000 budget. During the late 1940s, in the trade journals and popular press, Fairbanks touted his "Multicam" production system, which adapted live TV's three-camera shooting technique for film production. While there were precedents for multi-camera shooting in the film industry, Fairbanks used 16mm Mitchell cameras mounted on tripod dollies to approximate video's capacity for quick, continuous shooting while creating a product—a motion picture print—that was durable, reproducible, and transportable; moreover, its visual quality surpassed that of live TV's kinescopes, which were filmed off the screen of TV monitors airing the live production.

Because of his limited budget, Fairbanks could not afford to duplicate video's practice of running all three cameras simultaneously. To economize on film stock, much of the editing was completed "in-camera," with only one designated camera running at any given moment. This technique necessitated rigorous preproduction planning in which lighting, camera angles, editing decisions, and the movement of cameras and performers had to be orchestrated precisely before the cameras rolled. Cables and banks of 300-watt reflector lights were suspended from the ceiling so that they would not impede the movement of actors or cameras. Newly developed zoom lenses were fitted onto the cameras to facilitate rapid shifts in focus or changes in composition. Fairbanks registered a number of patents related to this process, including the tripod dollies, an electronic method for marking synchronization among all three cameras and the sound recorder, and a device for following focus on the Mitchell camera's parallax viewer. At a time when other filmed half-hour episodes had production schedules of two or three days, Fairbanks could shoot an episode in a matter of hours. Production costs were kept so low that the single most expensive item in the budget was the film stock and processing, which accounted for only 3 percent of a feature film budget but was 25 to 30 percent of the budget for any Fairbanks program.⁵⁵

In 1948, NBC contracted Fairbanks to produce the first filmed series for network TV, Public Prosecutor, starring John Howard. The program looks primitive by the standards of contemporary feature film production. Narrated by Howard, who addresses the camera throughout much of the story, the bare-bones mystery plots are condensed to fit into fifteen-minute segments modeled after the format of radio episodes. The verbal exposition is so insistent that the images begin to seem redundant; the episodes truly resemble radio with pictures. Sets are often undecorated. Actors appear distracted, if not anguished, as they try to hit their marks consistently in the first take. In spite of the opportunities for shot selection offered by the Multicam system, the camera work consists mainly of single-take medium shots or simple over-the-shoulder dialogue sequences. In promoting his Multicam system, Fairbanks claimed that his minimum length per take was five minutes, with the average take lasting between seven and eight minutes. Although this may be true of other Fairbanks programs, an episode of Public Prosecutor contains frequent, seemingly unnecessary editing within any given sequence. The network-financed budget for the series was $8,800 per episode. Still, the network could not find sponsors—even after reducing the asking price to $5,000 per episode. With each episode's production costs exceeding $10,000, Fairbanks discontinued production before completing a seasons worth of episodes.⁵⁶ Fairbanks's company survived the setback, going on to produce series such as Silver Theater (1950) and Front Page Detective (1951-1953), but it certainly was not an impressive debut for filmed programming on the networks.

Many other independent producers joined Fairbanks in this first speculative period of telefilm production, which extended from 1946 through the 1951-1952 TV season. "Everybody who could buy or borrow a little drugstore movie camera announced him-self as a TV-film producer," Fairbanks claimed in describing these early days.⁵⁷ News accounts during this period estimated that over eight hundred producers sought telefilm riches in the years prior to 1952. As a result, over two thousand unsold pilots languished on storage shelves or rotted in trash bins, having failed to attract a sponsor for network broadcast or syndication. Neglected studios, empty warehouses, supermarkets, and family garages were transformed into temporary soundstages; 16mm cameras disappeared from stores; personal savings accounts were drained—all in the frantic gold rush years of the early telefilm industry.

The most visible producers to emerge in telefilm production during the late 1940s were the B-movie cowboys, who quickly became icons of the early video age: William "Hopalong Cassidy" Boyd, Gene Autry, and Roy Rogers. Boyd provided the telefilm industry's first unabashed success story, fueling every independent producer's wildest fantasies about deliverance from the studio system. During the 1940s, he had shrewdly invested $350,000 to acquire the television rights to the series of Hopalong Cassidy feature films in which he had starred since 1935; in addition, he acquired the rights to use the Hopalong Cassidy character in other media, including television, and in character merchandising. After marketing the features to local stations during the late 1940s, Boyd produced a Hopalong Cassidy TV series for NBC beginning in 1949.

By tapping into the growing postwar youth market and by taking advantage of television's emergent position at the center of an expanding popular culture marketplace, Boyd founded a Hopalong Cassidy industry that within only a few years included a radio series, a comic strip, comic books, a popular fan club, and a dazzling array of licensed merchandise—with an estimated total value of $200 million.⁵⁸ Spurred by Boyd's canny reincarnation, Autry and Rogers also revived moribund careers and earned fantastic wealth, beginning in the late 1940s, by producing television Westerns on the same dusty backlots that once had provided the settings for their B Westerns.

From the pack of fly-by-night producers that surrounded these cowboy heroes in the early telefilm business, five significant production companies emerged: Fairbanks, the Hal Roach Studios, Bing Crosby Enterprises, Ziv Television Programs, Inc., and Louis Snader Productions. The varied backgrounds of these producers give some sense of the many career routes that delivered early entrepreneurs to the telefilm industry.⁵⁹

The Hal Roach Studios arrived in television as an established Poverty Row movie studio. After years at the margins of the movie industry, the Roach studio was familiar with the many low-budget alternatives to standard narrative features. The studio itself was virtually dormant in 1949 when Hal Roach Jr., after years of kicking around the industry, joined the company and convinced his father to rent space to telefilm producers and to form their own TV production unit. Roach produced situation comedies such as The Stu Erwin Show (1950-1955) and My Little Margie (1952-1955), and crime dramas like Racket Squad (1950-1953). As the studio increased its output, Hal Jr. became one of the early influential figures in the telefilm business, helping to found both the Television Film Producers' Association and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Bing Crosby was a performer and shrewd businessman, who always had moved easily between movies, radio, recordings, and live performances. Under the guidance of Basil Grillo and Crosby's brother Everett, Bing Crosby Enterprises during the 1940s had diversified into a number of unrelated businesses, producing orange juice, ice cream, sport shirts, and a wide variety of endorsed merchandise. An early proponent of the shift from live radio broadcast to transcribed performances, Crosby also was a chief investor in Ampex's development of videotape. As a result of these investments, Crosby was probably the most reputable and highly capitalized of the early telefilm producers. Crosbys company during its early years focused primarily on anthology series like Fireside Theater (1950-1958) and Rebound (1952).

Frederick Ziv, a syndicator of radio transcriptions to local stations, viewed telefilm production as an obvious extension of his existing business—an alternative to live broadcasting that provided local radio stations with some autonomy from the networks. Ziv Television Programs, Inc., packaged fifteen-minute sports and news programs for TV

beginning in 1948. In 1949, his company began production on The Cisco Kid (1950-1956), its first dramatic TV series. By shooting the series in color when all other producers were using black-and-white film, Ziv ensured the residual value of the series for decades. Ziv's subsequent work consisted primarily of action series with male heroes, such as Boston Blackie (1951-1953) and Dangerous Assignment (1951-1952).

Louis Snader, an ex-musician and real estate tycoon, was probably the least likely member of this group, and his success was the shortest-lived. Louis Snader Productions produced the television version of Dick Tracy in 1950, but Snader hoped to make his real mark through his introduction in 1949 of "Telescriptions," three-minute filmed musical performances featuring stars like Peggy Lee, Mel Torme, and the Jordanaires. Producing twelve per day at a cost of $2,500 each, Snader imagined that his short films could be programmed flexibly into the daily schedule of local stations. Snader anticipated that Telescriptions would be hosted by TV jockeys who would become as influential as radios newly celebrated disk jockeys.⁶⁰ Snader's peculiar contribution to the early telefilm—imagining TV mimicking radios new recorded-music format and unwittingly anticipating the form of music videos—gives some idea of the flexibility of these producers, of their willingness to explore the options made possible by TV.

Only two of Hollywood's major studios attempted to move into television production during the late 1940s, and these were two of the least profitable studios in the studio system: Universal-International and Columbia. At first glance, it seems ironic that Universal and Columbia were the first studio system pioneers in TV production since they traditionally had demonstrated the least interest in broadcasting. But in fact Universal and Columbia were best equipped to adapt to the programming demands and economic relations of television. While the five largest studios jockeyed for position—buying radio stations, investing in television research, applying for TV station licenses—Universal and Columbia never had the investment capital to diversify into broadcasting. Along with United Artists, Universal and Columbia did not own the revenue-generating theater chains that provided the major studios with the financial security to consider diversification. Universal and Columbia saw their relationship to the TV industry as an extension of their subordinate status in the studio system: they were prepared to supply product to a market beyond their control.

Universal first began television production in 1947 as one measure in a desperate attempt to put the brakes on runaway financial losses that had piled up following the box-office failure of a number of prestige independent productions financed and distributed by the studio starting in 1946.⁶¹ Universal turned to the production of TV commercials as a side venture of its New York-based subsidiary United World Films, the worlds largest distributor of 8mm and 16mm film. The company immediately established itself by producing for clients such as Levers Lux Soap, General Electric, and Gulf Oil. By 1949, the company had moved its TV operations to Los Angeles in hopes of expanding into the production of documentaries and other types of programming. Since the TV division's net profits for the first year were less than $40,000, the studio probably did not intend for TV production to boost its profits so much as to buy time by paying for facilities and labor at a time when lack of funds even forced the studio temporarily to shut its doors.⁶² Universal staked its eventual movie comeback on a series of low-budget, proto-situation comedies featuring Ma and Pa Kettle and Francis the Talking Mule, but it never sold a television series and consequently remained in TV solely as a producer of commercials.

Although Columbia initially entered television under much the same circumstances as Universal, its rapid diversification beyond commercials made it more successful. In the spring of 1949, Columbia's president, Harry Cohn, hired his nephew Ralph, the son of the studio cofounder Jack Cohn, to conduct a preliminary study of Columbia's immediate and long-range prospects in the field of television. For the previous two years, Ralph Cohn had acquired a firsthand knowledge of television while running a two-man organization, Pioneer Television, which produced TV commercials in New York. Cohn presented a fifty-page analysis in which he advised that Columbia immediately assemble an organization to produce TV commercials and, ultimately, filmed programs for both network and local broadcast.⁶³

In June 1949, Columbia formed a television production subsidiary through Screen Gems, the former animation company that had produced the studio's short subjects since the Cohns purchased it from Charles Mintz in 1934. During its first two years, Screen Gems produced only commercials, delivering more than two hundred for such clients as American Tobacco, Hamilton Watch, and BVD.⁶⁴ Soon thereafter, Screen Gems began producing television series, and within a few years its success with series like Father Knows Best (1954-1960) would elevate it into the ranks of Hollywood's major powers.

Created under severe economic constraints, Hollywood's earliest filmed television programs scarcely affected the movie industry's major studios. During the first stage of television production in Hollywood, roughly 1946 until 1951, telefilm production took place on the distant fringes of the studio system. The province of Hollywood outsiders and castoffs, telefilm's underfinanced, uncoordinated early ventures merited little attention from industry leaders. Gradually, however, the market for telefilm production solidified as sponsors and the networks looked to Hollywood for programming and as more established independent producers turned to television in hopes of reaping profits through syndication and merchandising. As early as 1951, these producers began to leave their mark on the medium. During the fall of that year, Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball premiered I Love Lucy (1951-1957), the first filmed situation comedy to have a national impact. Jack Webb followed later that season with Dragnet (1952-1959), the first successful crime series shot on film. Within a year, I Love Lucy and Dragnet, two filmed series produced in Hollywood, stood atop the network ratings as the most popular series on TV.

Conclusion

Jack Warner's legendary antagonism toward television was not evident until the end of the 1940s. Considering his studio's long-term commitment to television, it was a significant departure from Warner Bros. tradition when he announced in early 1950 that "the only screens which will carry Warner Bros. products will be the screens of motion picture theaters the world over."⁶⁵ Warner's hostility to television has sometimes seemed like the natural result of competition between the movie industry and an upstart rival; in fact, it might never have existed were it not for FCC actions that prevented the studio from forming its own network or seeing its investment in theater TV pan out. Judging by the plans that Warner Bros. unveiled in 1949, the studio executives conceived of television as a central component of the postwar studio system, a new source of income in an unpredictable economic environment.

For much of the 1940s, it was possible for Hollywood's major studios to imagine that they would play a significant role in shaping American television, that television under their influence might not simply duplicate the model of broadcasting established during the radio era. They envisioned two complementary forms of television which would feature different types of programming, one designed for home audiences and the other for theaters. By the dawn of national television service in the late 1940s, however, it was already clear from the FCC's actions that American television would follow the radio model: television would be an advertiser-supported medium dominated by the established broadcast networks, with programming transmitted almost solely to home receivers.

The FCC's growing distrust of the studios may have seemed gratuitous, perhaps even willfully biased in favor of the radio networks, but the antitrust charges of the 1940s cast grave doubts on the worthiness of the studios to hold broadcast licenses. Michele Hilmes has shown that the FCC's suspicion echoed more general public criticism of the movie industry following the Paramount decision. An article in the February 1949 Consumer Reports, for instance, forecast dire problems for the future of television should the studios, with their acknowledged record of monopolistic practices, find a foothold in the medium. Given power in both the movie and television industries, these oppressors of independent theater owners might be tempted to commit any number of abuses; most important, as RCA warned in 1940, they could slow the development of television to protect the movie business or erode broadcasting's public service standards in their quest for profits.⁶⁶

According to Hilmes, the Paramount decision helped to foster the contrasting images that justified the FCC's discrimination between the movie and broadcast industries: Hollywood appeared to be a potential public menace, while the radio networks—which had themselves engaged in a host of monopolistic practices—posed as beneficent public servants. Supported by public sentiment, the FCC's inquiries into Hollywood antitrust violations and general reluctance to support technological or economic alternatives to the broadcast networks blocked virtually every plan for television that originated in Hollywood.

During the 1940s, even Paramount, the studio that diversified most aggressively into television, could not succeed beyond its interest in DuMont and its ownership of local stations in Los Angeles and Chicago. Blocked from owning individual stations, building networks, or developing theater TV, Hollywood's leaders recognized at the end of the decade that they had lost the opportunity to compete with the broadcast networks, which became firmly entrenched during the freeze. Producing for television without controlling distribution was an unthinkable compromise for the studios. Doubtless the studio system would have to adapt in order to survive the postwar era, but the studios were not yet prepared to create a product that they would neither distribute nor exhibit; distribution was still the key to a studios power and self-determination. Therefore, while the major studios other than Paramount retreated from television at the end of the 1940s, independent film producers began to integrate television into the movie industry. The history of television in the studio era is a chronicle of thwarted ambitions. The full-scale integration of television in Hollywood would not occur until the 1950s, when the major studios themselves would begin to produce for television.