them? Who’s in sight to give Hollywood the color and excitement that
it needs to live? Where are the newcomers to be discovered and how can
they be trained? The answers, so far as the eye can see, are Nobody and
Nowhere. Opera has been stirred by new names in the past decade--Joan
Sutherland, Birgit Nilsson, Maria Callas. The concert stage has its
Van Cliburns. Politics has its Kennedys and Nixons. The movies have
virtually nothing at the top except the same names that were shining in
lights ten years ago--Bob Hope, Burt Lancaster, Cary Grant, John Wayne,
Jimmy Stewart and the rest politely called “middle-aged.”
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.
* * * * *
Hollywood is my home, and most of my friends live there. I like to
travel sometimes, but I find scenery as a diet doesn’t nourish me. So I
intend to stick around and watch what happens, remembering a few more
words from the plaque that stands on my desk:
I do the very best I know how--the very best I can; and I mean
to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all
right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the
end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would
make no difference.
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Obvious typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
All of the photographs are in one section, as they were in the original
book. Originally, the section followed the first page of Chapter Ten,
but to avoid disrupting the flow of reading, in this eBook, that
section has been moved to precede Chapter Ten.
In the original book, there usually were 2-4 photographs per page,
with descriptions for all of them in the middle of the page. Here,
the photographs are separate and contiguous with their descriptions.
References such as left/right/above/below have been removed from those
descriptions, as they are not needed here.
The original book has no Table of Contents. The Transcriber added one
to the HTML version of this eBook.