Made-for-TV Movies Make the Small Screen Bigger

Two things happened when Ronald Reagan starred in the first made-for-television movie 25 years ago:

-- The movie never made it to television.

-- Reagan went into politics.

The movie was “The Killers,” a remake of a 1946 film with Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway. Co-starring Angie Dickinson, Lee Marvin and John Cassavetes, it featured Reagan as a brutal crime boss.

“The Killers” wouldn’t raise an eyebrow today, but in 1964 it was deemed too violent for television, and Universal released it to theaters instead. Now it makes excellent trivia with which to dazzle your friends.

When “The Killers” misfired, it fell to John Forsythe to star in the first television movie actually to get on the air when NBC broadcast “See How They Run” on Oct. 7, 1964. With Senta Berger, Leslie Nielsen, Jane Wyatt, George Kennedy and Franchot Tone, it was a chase drama about three orphans who don’t know they’re carrying crucial information about an international crime organization.

Yes, while we weren’t looking, the made-for-television movie had its 25th birthday.

The sheer numbers may surprise you. The networks--and lately, cable-television entities from Home Box Office to the USA Network--have combined to make more than 2,000 television movies.

If everyone who watched last season’s most popular television movie, “The Karen Carpenter Story,” paid $5 each to see it, the movie would have grossed $200 million, rarefied atmosphere known to only a handful of blockbusters.

True, anyone who pays five bucks to see a clunker like that is cuckoo. But was it any worse than, say, “Great Balls of Fire,” Dennis Quaid’s awful turn as Jerry Lee Lewis, the story of a Southern goof with the world’s worst dye job who plays the piano like he’s trying to tenderize a cheap steak?

As the numbers indicate, the reach of made-for-television movie is extraordinary, even if the quality sometimes isn’t. Watch the umpteenth Brady Bunch reunion or cavort with the aging residents of “Gilligan’s Island” in “The Mormon Tabernacle Choir on Gilligan’s Island” and you’ll wonder if 25 years of television movies isn’t 25 years too many.

Don’t be discouraged. Scattered among the flotsam, jetsam and general time filler over the years are movies that stand tall and look good by any standard.

“I think there’s wonderful work done in television movies,” said Allen Sabinson, who, as the man in charge of ABC’s television movies and miniseries, will make 24 of them this season, about twice the number of feature films most of the major film studios will make.

Was that a self-serving statement? You bet. But even Sabinson concedes that there are built-in problems: Artificial time constraints, censorship that limits language, violence and sex, plus commercial breaks that bring the movie to a screeching halt while somebody peddles denture cream.

There’s a huge difference in the money that goes into feature films and television movies. The average film costs $15 to $16 million, while the typical two-hour television movie starts at around $3 million and might go up to $5 million.

But the difference between what it actually costs to make the movies isn’t as great as it seems.

Take star salaries. If you spend $8 million to get Sylvester Stallone in your movie, all you’ve got is an $8-million presence and you haven’t shot a frame of film yet. Pair Robert Redford with Meryl Streep and you’ve already spent $10 million-plus and you don’t have a movie, a script, a set or a catering service.

And then there’s marketing, the act of promoting the movie. That can easily double the cost of a feature film. It costs money to buy those television commercials and take out those ads in newspapers, especially when the advertising campaign lasts for months. It is not unusual for half the budget of a $30-million movie to be spent on promotion. Add star salaries, and the cash that goes into actually making the movie isn’t as much as it looks.

By contrast, the networks typically promote a television movie for a maximum of two weeks and the air time costs nothing because ABC, NBC and CBS are promoting themselves on themselves.

“There are some other obvious other differences, too,” noted Sabinson. “There’s a distinct difference in the audiences. The feature-film audience is younger. The television audience is in the 20-to-45-year-old range, for the most part, and the core of the loyal television-movie audience tends to be women.”

The result is that “The Lady Forgets,” a hackneyed Donna Mills movie with amnesia plot number 547, trashes “The Final Days,” a terrific television movie based on the Bob Woodward-Carl Bernstein book about the last months of the Nixon Administration. Ratings have shown, time and time again, that this audience prefers the romance-novel equivalent of television movies. And Nixon blubbering doesn’t fit into this category.

The discouraging part of the equation is that it also explains why there’s so much sludge on the air like “The Lady Forgets.”

On the other hand, “I think the huge amounts of money involved in making feature films leads the studios to be very cautious in the kinds of projects they do,” said Sabinson. “We can do a variety of things. Most studios don’t have that freedom. If they don’t have a hit, then they’ve failed.”

Nobody is suggesting that the typical television movie should be framed and planted on a wall in the Louvre. The point is that many of them are better than they get credit for being.

There is some disagreement about exactly what a television movie is. The networks say a broadcast that runs four hours over two nights is a long movie, not a miniseries. Except that they sometimes revert to calling it a miniseries. It’s all arbitrary.

With the video revolution there can be so many versions of these movies--or short miniseries, if you prefer--that it becomes confusing. The original version of “The Executioner’s Song,” Norman Mailer’s story about Utah murderer Gary Gilmore, which made my best list, was broadcast in two-hour blocks over two nights. Without commercials, it was three hours and 20 minutes long.

A theatrical version was released in Europe that ran 97 minutes. Both versions can be seen in syndication and both are out on videotape. There’s even a third version, though it’s hard to find. It’s a mix of the two others that comes in at two hours.

Altogether, this isn’t “The Executioner’s Song,” it’s “The Executioner’s Chorus.”

Television movies were born out of necessity. It wasn’t until 1961 that the major studios released any of their post-1948 films to the networks. Until then, they saw television as a rival. After 1961, they saw it as a cash cow.

Once the dam was broken, movies were so popular that television did what television always does and beat a good thing to death. At one point, each network had three movie nights. At nine movies a week, the networks were using them faster than they could be acquired.

Even terrible films sold for ridiculous fees. The low end of the scale was $800,000 for two plays. At the high end, ABC paid $2 million for two showings of “The Bridge on the River Kwai” and NBC paid $5 million for one airing of “Gone With the Wind.”

The networks were using movies faster than they could get them and what they could get cost too much money anyway, so they decided to make their own.

NBC was first to go to multiple television movies in the 1966-67 season with eight of them under the “World Premiere” title, including “Fame Is the Name of the Game,” with Tony Franciosa, Jill St. John and Susan St. James, which later became the series “The Name of the Game.” In the same inventory was “The Doomsday Flight,” a Rod Serling story with Jack Lord; “Dragnet ‘66,” with Jack Webb back as Sgt. Joe Friday; and “Winchester ‘73,” a remake of a 1950 Jimmy Stewart Western.

It wasn’t until 1969 that the networks came up with the television-movie-of-the-week strategy, with ABC first to try it.