Television’s no better off. The surge of talent there was mostly in writers and directors—Rod Serling, Delbert Mann, and others—who subsequently migrated to Hollywood. But the surge is about over. The TV networks pretend to foster young talents. But do they?
They got going on their own account when Hollywood turned them down as partners, then was compelled to sell its old movies to them to raise cash to keep the studios open. The young, untried talents who came out of the war swarmed like flies into TV. They couldn’t find a place in the movie industry or in the Broadway theater. Early television was like early movie making all over again, a great adventure filled with fun but not much money; a wonderful place for experiment and experience, because everybody could afford to make mistakes.
The networks needed that mysterious thing called programming, meaning a dependable timetable of big hits and steady features, spectaculars blended with Lassie. Without programming, they couldn’t get TV sets sold, and a network like NBC, owned by RCA, was primarily in business not to entertain its audiences but to sell sets.
NBC programming was in the hands of Pat Weaver, a farsighted pioneer at his business with a special, rare ability to spend other people’s money without being frightened by the cost. Before he departed network headquarters in Rockefeller Center, he had brought in “Wide, Wide World,” Groucho Marx, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar.
CBS had an executive, too, in Hubbell Robinson, who also ran a good store. ABC had its problems as the little brother fighting to break into a situation where its rivals divided most of the country between themselves. But along came men like Bob Kintner, Oliver Treyze, Tom Moore, and Dan Melnick. They took a backward look at what Warner Brothers had done when they had to crack open a similar situation in the movies and the big studios closed ranks against them.
Jack and Harry Warner, with stars like Bogart and Cagney on the payroll, broke in with action pictures, with gang bullets flying and fists swinging in every reel. ABC copied a leaf from that book. Never had such a volley of blank bullets resounded over the land before. Critics threw up their hands in horror, but ABC arrived with a bang and stayed there.
It’s a tragedy of the entertainment industry that the networks were as blind to the future needs of their business as the movie makers had been to theirs. Like Pharaoh, the television tycoons let the people go; the big talents left when the money wasn’t put up to keep them together. The tycoons thought they made television, not the writers, directors, and producers. They wouldn’t dream of setting up a studio system, a great pool of brains that could have made NBC or CBS or ABC the biggest creator there ever was of entertainment and the lively arts. They put no funds aside for research, as General Motors, Westinghouse, Du Pont and the others do.
Now TV by and large has become a dime-store business so far as creativity and talent are concerned. The half-hour and sixty-minute series rattle off the production lines like cans of beans, with an occasional dab of ham inside. If the finished film doesn’t make sense, no matter. If the kid with the six-shooter can’t act to save his mother’s life, who cares?
The idea is that if enough people are watching, some of the advertisers’ message will rub off on them to make the series worth while. But if enough people stop watching the stuff that’s put on their screens, then commercial television faces a similar fate to the movies, in spite of color sets or tomorrow’s gimmicks such as giant screens to hang on your living-room wall.
I believe the only possible solution for television and movies alike is a recognition of the eternal values of real talent, excitement, and glamour. Audiences are starved for all three. Entertainment must be a satisfying emotional experience, a stirring of the heart. We need all kinds of young men and women. Those people with an artist’s eye and an executive’s brain that we term directors. Those wrestlers with their souls and typewriters known as authors. The beggars on horseback called actors and actresses.