Television. Movies. Movies on television. Movies as television. Their association goes back to the early years of commercial TV, when talking pictures were but two decades old, and though the terms of the relationship have changed over time, they remain tightly bound. Most everyone will have seen more movies on TV than in a theater; it’s where they live, and live on.
Nothing has demonstrated this more clearly than the recent alarm — the shock, the horror, the outrage — over firings at the top at Turner Classic Movies, another fine example of an out-of-touch executive riding in on a merger and breaking what doesn’t need to be fixed. The cries of the devoted citizenry were joined notably by Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Paul Thomas Anderson, leading not only to the rehiring of Programming Vice President Charles Tabesh but also to the directors coming on board as volunteer curators. Alone among broadcasters, cable networks, premium cable networks and streamers, TCM remains dedicated, in an intelligent, curated manner, to the deep history of film.
Motion picture studios were interested in the TV business as it made its debut at the turn of the midcentury, but for a variety of historical, legal and technical reasons, the medium became an extension of radio instead, setting up a rivalry expressed on the big and little screen alike. Movies mocked TV; TV parodied the movies.
As to airing films on television, Jack Warner’s announcement that “the only screens which will carry Warner Bros. products will be the screens of motion picture theaters the world over” reflected the industry’s early sentiment — and going to war against the small screen, the big screen got even bigger, the pictures more colorful, their length longer, their soundtracks louder, their staging more epic.