Television

The experience of seeing movies is likely to conjure thoughts of going to a movie theater: the smell of popcorn at the concession stand, the friendly bustle of fellow moviegoers in the lobby, the collective anticipation as the auditorium lights dim, and the sensation of being enveloped by a world that exists, temporarily, in the theater's darkness. Anyone who enjoys movies has vivid memories of going out to see movies; the romance of the movie theater is crucial to the appeal of cinema. But what about all of the movies we experience by staying in? The truth is that most of us born since 1950 have watched many more movies at home, on the glowing cathode-ray tube of a television set, than on the silver screen of a movie theater.

It is not often recognized, but the family home has been the most common site of movie exhibition for more than half of the cinema's first century. In the United States this pattern began with the appearance of commercial broadcast television, starting with the debut of regular prime-time programming in 1948, and has grown with each new video technology capable of delivering entertainment to the home—cable, videocassette recorders (VCRs), direct broadcast satellites (DBS), DVD (digital video disc) players, and video-on-demand (VOD). Over much of this period, watching movies on TV represented a calculated tradeoff for consumers: television offered a cheap and convenient alternative to the movie theater at the cost of a diminished experience of the movie itself. With the introduction of high-definition (HDTV) television sets and high-fidelity audio in the 1990s, however, the humble TV set has grown to be the centerpiece of a new "home theater," which can offer a viewing experience superior in most ways to that of a typical suburban multiplex. In fact, with theaters desperate for additional income, going out to the movies now often involves sitting through a barrage of noisy, forgettable commercials for products aimed mostly at teenagers. In an odd twist, the only hope for avoiding commercials has become to stay in and watch movies on television.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FILM
AND TELEVISION

We tend to think of film and television as rival media, but their histories are so deeply intertwined that thinking of them separately is often a hindrance to understanding how the film and television industries operate or how people experience these media in their everyday lives. Starting in the late 1950s, Hollywood studios began to produce substantially more hours of film for television (in the form of TV series) than for movie theaters, and that pattern holds to this day. Since the early 1960s, it has been apparent that feature films are merely passing through movie theaters en route to their ultimate destination on home television screens. As physical artifacts, films may reside in studio vaults, but they remain alive in the culture due almost entirely to the existence of television. Whether films survive on cable channels or on DVD, they rarely appear on any screens other than television screens once they have completed their initial theatrical release. Given the importance of television in the film industry and in film culture, why do we think of film and television separately?

First, when television appeared on the scene, there was already a tradition of defining the cinema in contrast with other media and art forms. Much classic film theory and criticism, for instance, sought to define film as an autonomous medium by comparing it with precedents in theater, painting, and fiction. In each case, the goal was to acknowledge continuities while highlighting the differences that made film unique. Within this framework, it seemed natural to look for the differences between film and television, even as the boundaries between the media blurred and television became the predominant site of exhibition for films produced in Hollywood.

Second, there is an inherent ambiguity in the way that the term "television" functions in common usage, and this complicates efforts to delineate the relationship between film and television. Depending upon the context of usage, the word "television" serves as convenient shorthand for speaking about at least four different aspects of the medium:

1. Technology: "Television" is used to identify the complex system of analog and digital video technology used to transmit and receive electronic images and sounds. While electronic signals are transmitted and received virtually simultaneously, the images and sounds encoded in those signals may be live or recorded. In other words, the "liveness" of television—a characteristic often used to distinguish television and film—is inherent in the acts of transmission and reception, but not necessarily in the content that appears on TV screens.
2. Consumer Electronics: "Television" also refers to the television set, an electronic consumer good that is integrated into the spaces and temporal rhythms of everyday life. While the movie theater offers a sanctuary, set aside from ordinary life, the TV set is embedded in life. Initially, the TV set was an object found mainly in the family home; increasingly, television screens of all sizes have been dispersed throughout society and can be found in countless informal social settings. As a consumer good, the HDTV set is also becoming a fetish object for connoisseurs of cutting-edge technology—independent of the particular content viewed on the screen.
3. Industry: "Television" refers also to the particular structure of commercial television, a government-regulated industry dominated by powerful networks that broadcast programs to attract viewers and then charge advertisers for the privilege of addressing those viewers with commercials. Using the airwaves to distribute content, the television industry initially had no choice but to rely on advertising revenue, which led to the peculiar flow of commercial television—the alternation of segmented programs punctuated regularly by commercials—as well as the reliance on series formats to deliver consistent audiences to advertisers.
4. Content: "Television" serves as a general term for the content of commercial television, particularly when comparing film and television. Considering the vast range of content available on television, this usage often leads to facile generalizations, suggesting that there is an inherent uniformity or underlying logic to the programs produced for television.

As a result of the ambiguity involved in the usage of the term "television," there is no sensible or consistent framework for thinking about the relationship of film and television. Instead, a single characteristic often serves as the basis for drawing a distinction between the two forms, even though it may obscure more significant similarities. For example, the common assumption that television is a medium directed at the home, while film is a medium directed at theaters, overlooks the importance of the TV set as a technology for film exhibition. Similarly, the emphasis on television's capacity for live transmission obscures the fact that most TV programs are recorded on film or videotape and that feature films make up a large percentage of TV programming.

Third, film has enjoyed a prestige that only recently has been accorded to television, and this status marker has encouraged people to view film and television separately. Every culture creates hierarchies of taste and prestige, and whether explicitly stated or implicitly assumed, film has had a higher cultural status than television. It has been a sign of success, for example, when an actor or a director moves out of television into movies. Similarly, film critics have enjoyed much greater prestige than any critic who has written about television. The scholarly field of film studies, and universities in general, were slow to welcome the study of television. All of this suggests that there has been an unrecognized, but nevertheless real, investment in a cultural hierarchy that treats film as a more serious and respectable pursuit than television, and this hierarchy supported the assumption that film and television are separate media. Of course, any hierarchy of cultural values is subject to change over time. When a television series like The Sopranos (beginning 1999) achieves greater critical acclaim than virtually any movie of the past decade, it is a signal that values are shifting.

TELEVISION AND FILM BEFORE 1960

By the time the networks introduced regular prime-time programs in 1948, television's arrival as a popular medium had been anticipated for nearly two decades, during which the public had followed news reports of scientific breakthroughs, public demonstrations, and political debates. Electronics manufacturers spearheaded research into the technology of television broadcasting, which was envisioned by them as an extension of the existing system of radio broadcasting in which stations linked to powerful networks broadcast programs to home receivers. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which operated the NBC radio network, dominated the electronics industry and lobbied heavily to see its technology adapted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as the industry standard.

SIDNEY LUMET
b. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 25 March 1924

Sidney Lumet's career began at an extraordinary and unique moment in the history of American television. For a few years during the first decade of television, the TV networks broadcast live theatrical performances from studios in New York and Los Angeles to a vast audience nationwide. These ephemeral productions—as immediate and fleeting as any witnessed in the amphitheaters of ancient Greece, yet staged in the blinding glare of commercial television—served as the training ground for a generation of American film directors, which also included Franklin Schaffner, George Roy Hill, Martin Ritt, Arthur Penn, and John Frankenheimer.

Before beginning a fifty-year movie career, Lumet worked at CBS, where he directed hundreds of hours of live television for such series as Danger (1950–1955), You Are There (1953–1957), Climax! (1954–1958), and Studio One (1948–1958). The craft of directing live television, invented through trial and error by pioneers like Lumet, required economy, speed, and precision: concentrated rehearsals with an ensemble of actors, brief blocking of the camera setups, followed by intense concentration on the moment of performance because retakes were out of the question.

Lumet's approach to filmmaking bears traces of this formative experience. Unlike many directors, Lumet begins each film with several weeks of rehearsal in which he and his actors come to a shared understanding of each scene, to ensure that the actual production runs like clockwork. On the set, Lumet works quickly, seldom shooting more than four takes of any shot. He often completes a shooting schedule in thirty days or less, and brings productions in under budget. In an age of superstar directors who may spend years on a single film, Lumet has worked steadily, building a career, scene by scene, film by film, through classics (Dog Day Afternoon, 1975) and clunkers (A Stranger Among Us, 1992).

Lumet's best films—Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon, Running on Empty (1988), and Prince of the City (1981)—are blunt and immediate. What they lack in formal precision, they make up for in the vitality of the performances and the conviction of the storytelling. Lumet can be a superb visual stylist when orchestrating confrontations between actors in confined spaces, but he is generally indifferent to the visual potential of his material and has never seemed concerned with creating a signature style. His approach to filmmaking, with its emphasis on preparation, ensemble acting, and an unobtrusive camera that captures the spontaneity of performance, translates the values of live television into the medium of film.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Twelve Angry Men (1957), Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962), Fail-Safe (1964), The Pawnbroker (1964), The Hill (1965), Serpico (1973), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976), Prince of the City (1981), The Verdict (1982), Running on Empty (1988), Q&A (1990)

FURTHER READING

Bogdanovich, Peter. Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors. New York: Ballantine,1998.

Cunningham, Frank R. Sidney Lumet: Film and Literary Vision. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991.

Lumet, Sidney. Making Movies. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Christopher Anderson

The Hollywood studios were far from passive bystanders during this period. Having already invested in radio, but seen the radio industry controlled by those companies able to establish networks, the studios hoped to command the television industry as they had dominated the movie industry, by controlling networks that would serve as the key channels of distribution in television. The studios also envisioned alternative uses for television technology 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 movies screens, and subscription television, in which home viewers would pay directly for the opportunity to view exclusive programs.

The plans of studio executives were thwarted by the FCC, which stepped in following the Supreme Court's 1948 Paramount decision, to investigate whether the major studios, with their record of monopolistic practices in the movie industry, should be allowed to own television stations. While the studios awaited a decision, the established radio networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC—signed affiliate agreements with the most powerful TV stations in the largest cities, leaving the studios without viable options for forming competitive networks. Thwarted in their ambitions, the major studios withdrew from television until the mid-1950s. Theater television died in its infancy and subscription television would not become a major factor for years to come.

In the meantime, smaller studios and independent producers rushed to supply television with programming. The networks initially promoted the idea that television programs should be produced and broadcast live in order to take advantage of the medium's unique qualities. The networks supplied local affiliates with live programs for their evening schedules and a small portion of their daytime schedule, but each affiliate, along with the small group of independent stations that had chosen not to join a network, still needed to fill the long hours of a broadcast day—and there was not yet a backlog of television programs available. Television stations looked to feature films as the only ready source of programming, and the only features available to them came from outside the major Hollywood studios: British companies and such Poverty Row studios as Monogram Pictures and Republic Pictures Corporation. The theatrical market for B movies had begun to dry up after World War II, and these companies eagerly courted this new market for low-budget films, licensing hundreds of titles for broadcast. It has been estimated that 5,000 feature film titles were available to television by 1950.

Responding to the same demand for programs, small-scale independent producers in Hollywood also began to produce filmed series for television. The most visible early producers in the low-budget "telefilm" business (as it came to be known) were the aging cowboy stars William "Hopalong Cassidy" Boyd (1895–1972), Gene Autry (1907–1998), and Roy Rogers (1911–1998), but they were soon joined by veteran film producers like Hal Roach (1892–1992), radio producers like Frederick W. Ziv (1905–2001), and entrepreneurial performers like Bing Crosby (1903–1977) as well as Lucille Ball (1911–1989) and Desi Arnaz (1917–1986), whose Desilu Studio grew to become one of the most successful television studios of the 1950s.

By mid-decade, as the television audience grew and the demand for programming drove prices higher, the major Hollywood studios discovered their own financial incentives for licensing feature films to television and for entering the field of television production. RKO opened the market for the major studios in 1954 when its owner, Howard Hughes, sold the studio's pre-1948 features to General Teleradio, the broadcasting subsidiary of General Tire and Rubber Company that operated independent station WOR in New York. Warner Bros. followed in 1956 by selling its library of 750 pre-1948 features for $21 million. After this financial windfall was earned from titles locked away in studio vaults, the floodgates opened at all of the studios. Soon the television listings were filled with movies scheduled morning, noon, and night. The most famous of these movie programs was New York station WOR's Million Dollar Movie, which broadcast the same movie five evenings in a row. New York-bred filmmakers like Martin Scorsese have spoken fondly of discovering classic Hollywood movies for the first time while watching the Million Dollar Movie. In a very real sense, television served as the first widely available archive

of American movies, sparking an awareness of film history and creating a new generation of movie fans.

As the Hollywood studios began to release their films to television, they also began to produce filmed television series. Walt Disney (1901–1966) led the way in 1954 with the debut of Disneyland (1954–1990), the series designed to launch his new theme park. Warner Bros., Twentieth Century Fox, and MGM joined prime time the following year. By the end of the 1950s, Hollywood studios were the predominant suppliers of prime time programs for the networks. The transformation was most obvious at Warner Bros., which at one point in 1959 had eight television series in production and not a single feature film. In order to meet the demand for television programs, Warner Bros. geared up to produce the equivalent of a feature film each working day.

While the studios specialized in high volume "telefilm" productions made with the efficiency of an assembly line, the most acclaimed television programs of the decade were anthology drama series that offered a new, original play performed and broadcast live each week. In the intensely creative environment required to produce a live production witnessed by millions of viewers, programs such as Studio One (1948–1958) and Playhouse 90 (1956–1961) served as the training ground for a new generation of writers (Paddy Chayefsky, Reginald Rose, Rod Serling), directors (Arthur Penn, Sidney Lumet, John Frankenheimer, Franklin Shaffner, George Roy Hill) and actors (Paul Newman, Rod Steiger, James Dean, Piper Laurie, Kim Hunter, Geraldine Page and many more) who became the first in a long line of television-trained artists to make the transition into movies.

FILM ON NETWORK TELEVISION
FROM 1960–1980

Diversifying into television may have seemed risky for a studio in the early 1950s, but within a decade television had become firmly entrenched in Hollywood, where the studios had come to depend for their very existence on the income provided by television. Networks and local stations leaned almost exclusively on Hollywood to satisfy their endless need for programming. By the end of the 1950s, 80 percent of network prime-time programming was produced in Hollywood; it had become nearly impossible to turn on a TV set without encountering a film made in Hollywood, whether a television series or a feature film.

The most significant development for the movie studios occurred in 1960, when they came to an agreement with the Screen Actors Guild that allowed them to sell the television rights to films made after 1948. NBC, the network most committed to color television, introduced Hollywood feature films to prime time in September 1961 with the premiere of the series NBC Saturday Night Movie (1961–1977). ABC added movies to its prime time schedule in 1962. As the perennial first place network with the strongest schedule of regular series, CBS did not feel a need to add movies until 1965. Still, the networks embraced feature films so fervently that by 1968 they programmed seven movies a week in prime time, and four of these finished among the season's highest rated programs.

As recent Hollywood releases became an increasingly important component of prime time schedules, the competition for titles quickly drove up the prices. In 1965 the average price for network rights to a feature film was $400,000, but that figure doubled in just three years. The networks publicized the broadcast premiere of recent studio releases as major events. A milestone of the period occurred in 1966, when ABC paid Columbia $2 million for the rights to the studio's blockbuster hit, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). Sponsored solely by Ford Motor Company to promote its new product line, the movie drew an audience of 60 million viewers.

As television became a crucial secondary market for the movie industry, movies needed to be produced with the conditions of commercial television in mind. Many of these concessions to the television industry of the 1960s and 1970s contributed to the impression of the cinema's superiority. In an era when a new generation of filmmakers and critics were promoting the idea that film was an art form, television stations and networks chopped movies to fit into 90- or 120-minute time slots and interrupted them every 12 or 13 minutes for commercials. Because of the moral standards imposed on commercial television by advertisers and the FCC, studios soon required directors to shoot "tame" alternate versions of violent or sexually explicit scenes for the inevitable television version. Studios began to balk when directors used wide-screen compositions in which key action occurred at the edges of the frame—outside the narrower dimensions of the television screen. As a reminder, camera viewfinders were etched with the dimensions of the TV frame. Studios also began to use optical printers to create "pan-and-scan" versions of widescreen films. Using this technique, scenes shot in a single take often were cut into a series of alternating closeups, or reframed during the printing process by panning across the image, so that key action or dialogue occurred within the TV frame.

As the cost of television rights for feature films climbed during the 1960s, each of the networks began to develop movies made expressly for television. NBC partnered with MCA Universal to create a regular series of "world premiere" movies, beginning with Fame is the Name of the Game in 1966. As the network with the lowest-rated regular series, ABC showed the greatest interest in movies made for television. The ninety-minute ABC Movie of the Week premiered in 1968. As executive in charge of the movies, Barry Diller (b. 1942) essentially ran a miniature movie studio at ABC. He supervised the production of 26 movies per year, each made for less than $350,000. Among the many memorable ABC movies during this period were Brian's Song (1971), a tearjerker about a football player's terminal illness starring Billie Dee Williams and James Caan that became the year's fifth highest-rated broadcast, and That Certain Summer (1972), a TV milestone in which Hal Holbrook and Martin Sheen played a gay couple. By 1973 ABC scheduled a Movie of the Week three nights per week. Director Steven Spielberg, whose suspenseful 1971 film Duel managed to sustain excruciating tension even with the commercial breaks of network television, has become the most celebrated graduate of the made-for-TV movie.

As a market for filmed series, theatrical features, and original movies, television contributed substantially to the economic viability of the movie studios during the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, the television market inspired the first round of consolidation in the movie industry, as the rising value of film libraries made the studios appealing targets for conglomerates looking to diversify their investments. As a subsidiary of the conglomerate Gulf + Western, Paramount became the model for the full integration of the movie and TV industries in the late 1970s, when Barry Diller moved from ABC to Paramount, accompanied by his protégé, Michael Eisner (b. 1942). Paramount produced many of the television series that led ABC to the top of the ratings in the 1970s (Happy Days [1974–1984], Laverne and Shirley [1976–1983], Mork and Mindy [1978–1982], and Taxi [1978–1983]), but also learned how to leverage the familiarity of TV stars and TV properties to create cross-media cultural phenomena. The signal event in this process was Paramount's successful transformation of John Travolta from a supporting player in the TV series Welcome Back, Kotter (1975–1979), into the star of the blockbuster hits

Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Grease (1978). The Diller regime also decided to transform the long-cancelled, cult-hit TV series Star Trek (1966–1969), into a movie franchise with Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), which revived the commercial prospects for a dormant studio property. The Paramount model spread throughout the industry in the 1980s, as Diller became the chairman of Twentieth Century Fox and Eisner became chairman of Walt Disney Studios.

THE IMPACT OF CABLE AND
HOME VIDEO FROM 1980–2000

The first three decades of network television in America represent a period of remarkable stability for the television industry. Once the basic structure of the television industry had been established, the television seasons rolled past with comforting familiarity. However, the rapid growth of cable television and home video in the 1980s, followed by a new round of consolidation in the media industries, disrupted the balance of power in the television industry and led to the complete integration of television networks and Hollywood studios.

Cable television began in the 1940s and 1950s as community antenna television (CATV), a solution to reception problems in geographically isolated towns where people had trouble receiving television signals with a home antenna. The turning point for cable television came during the 1970s, when several corporations began to distribute program services by satellite, making it possible to reach audiences on a national—and eventually international—scale without the need for local affiliate stations. Time, Inc. was the first company to launch a satellite-based service when it premiered Home Box Office (HBO) in 1975. The service began on a small scale, with only a few hundred viewers for its initial broadcast, but it demonstrated that a subscription service for movies and special events could be a viable economic alternative to commercial broadcasting. By the end of the decade, other subscription-based movie channels, including Showtime, the Movie Channel, and HBO's own spinoff network, Cinemax, had followed suit. With these movie channels, and many other new cable channels, cable service expanded rapidly. In 1978, only 17 percent of American households had cable; by 1989, cable penetration had reached 57 percent. This new market was a boon for the studios, which benefited from the increased prices that accompanied the competition for television rights to recently released films, and also for viewers, who were finally able to see complete, unedited feature films in their homes.

Videocassette recorders (VCRs) became a common feature in American homes during the 1980s. Videotape was introduced in 1956, but it was initially used only within the television industry. Its widespread use by television viewers awaited the development of the videocassette by Sony during the 1970s. The consumer market for home VCRs developed slowly at first because Sony and its rival Matsushita developed incompatible systems (Betamax and VHS, respectively). The market also stalled because of a lawsuit filed in 1976 by Disney and Universal against Sony, charging that home videotaping represented a violation of copyright laws. The issue was settled in Sony's favor by a 1984 Supreme Court decision, and the consumer market for VCRs exploded. Although in 1982, 4 percent of American households owned a VCR, by 1988, the figure had reached 60 percent.

As a result of the rise of cable and home video, the motion picture industry developed new release patterns that channeled movies from their debut in theaters to their eventual appearance on television through a carefully managed series of exclusive distribution "windows" designed to squeeze the maximum value from each stage of a movie's lifespan in the video age: theatrical release, home video, pay-per-view, pay cable, basic cable, and broadcast television. By the time a movie has made its way down the chain to broadcast TV, and is available for free to television viewers, it has received so much exposure that it is no longer a form of showcase programming.

As these technological developments shook the familiar patterns of the television and movie industries, a series of regulatory changes governing the television industry and relaxed enforcement of antitrust laws by the Reagan-era Justice Department heated up the media industries, subjecting them to a general trend of mergers and acquisitions that swept through corporate America in the 1980s. This climate gave rise to the series of mergers and acquisitions that saw the Big Three networks change hands in 1985 and 1986, which will be discussed in greater detail below. Regulatory changes also produced a sharp increase in the number of television stations, as corporations invested in chains of stations. In 1970, of the 862 stations in the country, only 82 operated independently of the three networks. The number of independent stations doubled in the 1980s. By 1995 there were 1,532 stations, of which 450 were independent of the three major networks. As the number of stations increased, it became possible to create new television networks.

In 1985, the media conglomerate News Corporation, owned by media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, purchased Twentieth Century Fox Studios. Then in 1986, Murdoch purchased six television stations which served as the foundation for launching the Fox Network, led by former Paramount chairman Barry Diller. Because Fox began by programming just a few nights each week, it technically did not meet the FCC definition of a full-fledged network, and therefore was not constrained by FCC rules that prohibited a network from producing its own programs. As a result, Fox served as the paradigm for a new era in the media industries, with a television network stocked with series produced by its corporate sibling, Twentieth Century Fox Television. Programs like The Simpsons (beginning 1989) and The X-Files (1993–2002) grew into network hits and lucrative commercial franchises within a perfect, closed loop of corporate synergy in which all profits remained within the parent company, News Corporation.

Pointing to the loophole that Fox had squeezed through in order to produce its own programs, the networks lobbied for an end to the FCC rules that had kept them from producing programs or sharing in the lucrative syndication market (where programs are sold to local stations and international markets) since the early 1970s. These Financial Interest and Syndication Rules were gradually repealed between 1991 and 1995. The policy change not only gave networks the opportunity to produce their own programs, but it also eliminated the last remaining barriers separating the movie and television industries. Studios quickly formed new television networks or merged with existing networks. Time Warner's WB Network and Viacom's United Paramount Network (UPN) debuted in 1995 (the two were merged into the CW in 2006). ABC came under the control of the Walt Disney Company in August 1995 when Disney acquired the network's parent company, Capital Cities/ABC Television Network for $19 billion. Viacom purchased CBS in 1999, and NBC acquired Vivendi Universal in 2005. In this stage of consolidation, the boundaries between film and television are certainly not perceived as barriers; rather, they represent opportunities for diversifying a media conglomerate's product lines.

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY AND THE FUTURE
OF FILM AND TELEVISION

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the boundaries between the media blurred, thanks to the convergence of digital technologies and consolidation in the media industries. Many filmmakers use digital video in place of film throughout the entire filmmaking process, and it is only a matter of time before movies are distributed and projected in theaters using digital technology. The vast libraries of film and television titles that give the conglomerates much of their economic value are being digitized and stored on computer servers. The latest round of mergers in the media industries has created conglomerates that actively promote cross-media synergy. The enticement of extraordinary riches for anyone fortunate enough to be involved in the creation of a hit TV series means that talent no longer flows from TV to movies; many producers, directors, writers, and performers move eagerly between film and television.

MICHAEL MANN
b. Chicago, Illinois, 5 February 1943

Michael Mann is roughly the same age as Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, George Lucas, and the other directors of the film-school generation who revived American filmmaking in the 1970s, but he is seldom thought of as a member of that generation, despite the fact he too attended film school in the 1960s. Like the romantic loners who inhabit his films, Mann followed his own route to the film industry. He attended film school in London, instead of New York or Los Angeles, and while his peers traveled directly from film school to the movie industry, Mann detoured through television, where he learned his craft by writing for the police series Police Story (1973–1977) and Starsky and Hutch (1975–1979) and then by creating the series Vega$ (1978–1981).

Mann understood the potential for rich storytelling inherent in the series format and appreciated the creative authority of the writer-producer in television. In 1981 he directed his first feature film, the accomplished existential thriller Thief, yet returned to television to produce Miami Vice (1984–1989) and Crime Story (1986–1988), two of the most innovative series in television history. In the tradition of the great auteur directors of the studio era, Mann burrowed deeply into an exhausted genre; beneath the familiar façade of the police series, he discovered the darkest impulses of his age and his own voice as an artist. Returning to film, Mann hit his stride at the turn of the millennium, and directing at least two classics (The Last of the Mohicans [1992], Heat [1995]) and a number of other films (The Insider [1999], Ali [2001], and Collateral [2004]) that express his enduring theme—the challenges faced by a man (it is always a man) who attempts to live by a personal moral code in a capricious, corrupting world.

Mann spent his formative years in television drama during the 1970s, when one police series looked exactly like every other. Yet to accompany his narrative voice, he developed a powerful personal style that is as evident in his television series as in his films. When he returned to television with the unfortunately short-lived Robbery Homicide Division (2002–2003), he shot the entire series on digital video (DV). Other television producers and filmmakers have used DV because it is less expensive than film, or because it is easier to manipulate for post-production effects, but Mann discovered the expressive qualities of the medium's hyperrealism. The television series turned out to be a trial run for Collateral, which used DV to transform nighttime Los Angeles into a throbbing, spectral world. Thanks to a visual aesthetic first worked out in television, Mann was able to create one of the most visually striking movies of the time.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Films: Thief (1981), Manhunter (1986), The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Heat (1995), The Insider (1999), Ali (2001), Collateral (2004); Television Series: Miami Vice (1984–1989), Crime Story (1986–1988), Robbery Homicide Division (2002–2003); Other: AFI—The Director—Michael Mann (2002)

FURTHER READING

Fuller, Graham. "Making Some Light: An Interview with Michael Mann." In Projections 1, edited by John Boorman and Walter Donahue, 262–278. London: Faber & Faber,1992.

James, Nick. Heat. London: British Film Institute, 2002.

Christopher Anderson

The two-way migration of talent between movies and television first took off in the 1980s, the decade when the director of a few stylish four-minute music videos on MTV could find him or herself with a contract to direct a feature film. Advances in television set technology and the reduced cost of larger screens made it possible for viewers to appreciate differences in visual styles on television. For the first time in the history of

television, competition gave producers and networks an incentive to create distinctive styles. The proliferation of cable channels and the habits of viewers armed with remote controls made a distinctive visual style as important as character and setting in creating an identity for a television series.

When critics praised the groundbreaking crime series Hill Street Blues (1981–1987) and Miami Vice (1984–1989) in the 1980s, they spoke not only about the stories but also about stylistic innovations: the documentary techniques of Hill Street Blues, the adaptation of a music video aesthetic in Miami Vice, a series created and produced by Michael Mann (b. 1943), who moved easily between TV and movies. David Lynch made a big splash with Twin Peaks (1990–1991) a series that brought Lynch's unique vision to television before losing focus in its second season.

Since then directors, writers, and producers have continued to alternate between movies and television. Some directors, such as Oliver Stone (with the mini-series Wild Palms [1993]) and John Sayles (with the series Shannon's Deal [1990–1991]) have made token appearances in television. Others have served as executive producers, including Steven Spielberg (with the miniseries Taken, 2002) and George Lucas (with the series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, 1992–1993). Several screenwriters have shifted into television because of the storytelling potential of the series format and the creative control of the writer-producer in television. These include Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 1997–2003), Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, 1999–2006), and Alan Ball (Six Feet Under, 2001–2005). There are several writer-directors who move consistently between film and television, depending on the nature of the project, including Michael Mann, Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, and Barry Levinson. The most successful producer in Hollywood during this era may be Jerry Bruckheimer, who continues to produce blockbuster hits like Armageddon (1998) and Pirates of the Caribbean (2003), while his company produces the three CSI: Crime Scene Investigation television series for CBS.

In order to attract the young adult viewers most desired by advertisers, television networks must attempt to create programs that attract and reward a discriminating audience. In the past, this audience may have been dissatisfied with commercial networks for interrupting or otherwise interfering with a drama or a movie, but they could only dream of an alternative. Today a flick of the remote control takes them directly to movies and uninterrupted drama series available on HBO and Showtime, collected in DVD box sets, and soon via video-on demand—all experienced in theater-quality, high-definition and Surround Sound. Discerning viewers are still drawn to television, but they have acquired a taste for a viewing experience that is increasingly cinematic. In one portent of the future, the commercial networks have switched to widescreen framing for quality drama series like ER (beginning 1994) and The West Wing.

The experience of watching television at home is becoming more like the experience of watching movies on a big screen. The convergence of digital technologies is gradually eliminating the material distinction between film and video. Media corporations would like to move to a model of video-on-demand in which viewers select individual titles from the studio's library. With these changes on the horizon, it is possible to imagine a time in the not-too-distant future when the differences between film and television will be no more than a topic of historical interest.

SEE ALSO Studio System;Technology

FURTHER READING

Anderson, Christopher. Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

Balio, Tino, ed. Hollywood in the Age of Television. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990.

Caldwell, John Thornton. Televisuality: Style, Crisis, andAuthority in American Television. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995.

Hilmes, Michele. Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

Monaco, Paul. The Sixties: 1960–1969. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Mullen, Megan Gwynne. The Rise of Cable Programming in the United States: Revolution or Evolution? Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.

Prince, Stephen. A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood Under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980–1989. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Wasko, Janet. Hollywood in the Information Age: Beyond the Silver Screen. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.

Wasser, Frederick. Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002.

Christopher Anderson