Film in the Television Age
Film in the Television Age
Television first arrived in American homes just as the Hollywood studio system was collapsing. As the new medium took hold, so did a new era of motion picture entertainment. Top directors, actors, and film scholars trace the influence of each medium on the other, from the live and fresh dramas of the Golden Age of Television and the growth of Hollywood spectacles to the entertainment industry of today.
In the Cold War era of communist witch hunts, and blacklisting, Hollywood executives had even more pressing worries: the imminent death of the studio system and the meteoric rise of television, which subsequently led to a drastic decline in ticket sales. To combat the drop in profits, the studios quickly sought to attract moviegoers—particularly families—from the living room by enhancing and exploiting their medium's technological advantages, namely its relatively large image size and its color format. Not coincidentally, the 1950s were the first decade of drive-in movie theaters, stereo sound, wide-screen formats, and epics shot in glossy color, and a full gamut of movie such as 3-D film technology.
Beginning in 1952, Hollywood began to make the conversion to color production. As with other sectors of the movie industry, the government deemed Technicolor (and particularly its three-strip technology) a monopoly in 1950. That same year Eastman color, a single-strip format based on Germany's Agfa color, emerged as a legitimate and cheaper means of shooting in color. Unlike the earlier three-strip processes, Eastman color fused the three emulsion strips into a single roll, soon eclipsing the competition and replacing Technicolor as the most widely used color process in the industry.
To complement the great rise in color production, and to increase its drawing power as spectacle entertainment on a grander scale than television, Hollywood sought to widen the aspect ratio of the motion picture image. Up until the early 1950s, the standard
Television first arrived in American homes just as the Hollywood studio system was collapsing. As the new medium took hold, so did a new era of motion picture entertainment. Top directors, actors, and film scholars trace the influence of each medium on the other, from the live and fresh dramas of the Golden Age of Television and the growth of Hollywood spectacles to the entertainment industry of today.
In the Cold War era of communist witch hunts, and blacklisting, Hollywood executives had even more pressing worries: the imminent death of the studio system and the meteoric rise of television, which subsequently led to a drastic decline in ticket sales. To combat the drop in profits, the studios quickly sought to attract moviegoers—particularly families—from the living room by enhancing and exploiting their medium's technological advantages, namely its relatively large image size and its color format. Not coincidentally, the 1950s were the first decade of drive-in movie theaters, stereo sound, wide-screen formats, and epics shot in glossy color, and a full gamut of movie such as 3-D film technology.
Beginning in 1952, Hollywood began to make the conversion to color production. As with other sectors of the movie industry, the government deemed Technicolor (and particularly its three-strip technology) a monopoly in 1950. That same year Eastman color, a single-strip format based on Germany's Agfa color, emerged as a legitimate and cheaper means of shooting in color. Unlike the earlier three-strip processes, Eastman color fused the three emulsion strips into a single roll, soon eclipsing the competition and replacing Technicolor as the most widely used color process in the industry.
To complement the great rise in color production, and to increase its drawing power as spectacle entertainment on a grander scale than television, Hollywood sought to widen the aspect ratio of the motion picture image. Up until the early 1950s, the standard