CBS Thursday Night Movie

1965 TV Guide Advertisement for CBS's Thursday Night Movie.

CBS Thursday Night Movie was CBS's first venture into the weekly televising of then-recent theatrical films, debuting at the start of the 1965-66 season at 9:00 p.m. (Eastern Time). CBS was the last of the three U.S. major television networks to schedule a regular prime-time array of movies. Unlike its two competitors (NBC and ABC), CBS had delayed running feature films at the behest of the network's hierarchy.^[1] Indeed, as far back as the late 1950s, when Paramount Pictures had been offering a huge backlog of pre-1948 titles for sale to television for $50 million,^[2] James T. Aubrey, program director at CBS, negotiated with the studio to buy the package for the network. Aubrey later summed up his thinking this way: "I decided that the feature film was the thing for TV. A $250,000 specially-tailored television show just could not compete with a film that cost three or four million dollars."^[3] However, CBS's chairman, William Paley, who considered the scheduling of old movies "uncreative," vetoed the Paramount transaction.

It was not until after Aubrey's controversial ouster from CBS in early 1965 that Paley finally conceded on the issue and cleared the way for the network to embark on its own prime-time weekly movie broadcast.^[4] After initial rounds of negotiations with various studios had been completed that year, CBS finally acquired the exclusive rights to televise a total of 90 titles from Columbia Pictures, United Artists, Paramount, and Warner Brothers—news of which resulted in rumors that the network would actually slate films for two prime-time nights rather than just one.^[5] This scheduling addition, however, would not be made until a season later; but reports of further meetings between CBS and Columbia over the acquisition of 20 more titles signaled that the network was now a serious movie-night contender.^[6] The series thus began on September 16, 1965, with the TV debut of the original The Manchurian Candidate (1962), starring Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey.

Controversy

Unfortunately, CBS's new anthology was not to escape notoriety, as the network learned the evening of September 30. During its running of the Jack Lemmon-Kim Novak comedy, The Notorious Landlady, someone at the controls of the film's broadcast inadvertently got the reels mixed up, and it was with some chagrin that a network announcer issued an apology during a commercial break before a substantial portion of the movie was then replayed just to get the continuity back on track. What started out, therefore, as a 2-hour-and-15-minute airing wound up lasting approximately three hours.^[7] Then a month later, when the Burt Lancaster film Elmer Gantry (1960) was televised with approximately 30 minutes total in various deletions from its original 146-minute length, viewers called en masse to complain that because of all the omissions, the movie made little sense.^[8] In fact, quite a few entries in the Thursday night anthology during the first season were over 2 hours long—and this was without commercial interruptions. These included The Counterfeit Traitor (1961; 140 minutes), Parrish (1961; 138 minutes), Ocean's 11 (1960; 127 minutes), Mary, Mary (1963; 126 minutes), and Sunrise at Campobello (1960; 144 minutes). Before their broadcast, each of these films was cut to accommodate what CBS executives deemed a feasible running-time. Sunrise at Campobello, in particular, suffered a loss of nearly an hour from its footage after the network pared it down to a 2-hour broadcast including advertisements. Even so, CBS's affiliated stations were still forced on many occasions to delay the start of their local 11:00 (ET) nightly newscasts until well past 11.

In one case, however—that of the Anthony Quinn film Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962) -- the network considered the entry too short. Requiem had an original running time of 85 minutes, but this was judged untenable by CBS executives. Columbia Pictures, the film's theatrical distributor, was contacted and arrangements were made to "pad" the film with extra footage. According to the film's producer, David Suskind, there were 40 minutes of outtakes from the film in the studio's vault that had to be located. It was from these that an extra 10 minutes was assembled and added to the CBS print. In fact, this is believed to be "the first time television has added footage to a movie."^[9]

First season (1965-1966)

The following list of titles and show-dates was culled from the archives of The New York Times and the Corpus Christi Caller-Times via microfilmed archives. Broadcast running-times of over 2 hours (notated only when they occurred) appear beside the years of release. All other running-times were 2 hours.

1. 09/16/1965: The Manchurian Candidate (1962) (2 hrs., 15 min.)
2. 09/23/1965: The Counterfeit Traitor (1961) (2 hrs., 30 min.)
3. 09/30/1965: The Notorious Landlady (1962) (Scheduled as 2 hrs., 15 min.; however, reel-switching and corrections caused the broadcast to run approximately 3 hrs. -- See "Controversy" section above.)
4. 10/07/1965: Parrish (1961) (2 hrs., 15 min.)
5. 10/14/1965: Houseboat (1958)
6. 10/21/1965: Ocean's 11 (1960) (2 hrs., 15 min.)
7. 10/28/1965: Mary, Mary (1963) (2 hrs., 15 min.)
8. 11/04/1965: Elmer Gantry (1960) (2 hrs., 30 min.)
9. 11/11/1965: The Wackiest Ship in the Army (1960)
10. 11/18/1965: Experiment in Terror (1962)
11. 11/25/1965: Mysterious Island (1961)
12. 12/02/1965: The Bramble Bush (1960)
13. 12/09/1965: Merrill's Marauders (1962)
14. 12/16/1965: Two Rode Together (1961)
15. 12/23/1965: Sunrise at Campobello (1960)
16. 12/30/1965: Rome Adventure (1962)
17. 01/06/1966: Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962)
18. 01/13/1966: Cry for Happy (1961)
19. 01/20/1966: The War Lover (1962)
20. 01/27/1966: The Running Man (1963)
21. 02/03/1966: Guns of Darkness (1962)
22. 02/10/1966: A Fever in the Blood (1961)
23. 02/17/1966: Susan Slade (1961)
24. 02/24/1966: Harvey (1950)
25. 03/03/1966: The Devil at 4 O'Clock (1961)
26. 03/10/1966: The Interns (1962)
27. 03/17/1966: The Notorious Landlady (1962) (2 hrs., 15 min.) (An early rerun. This time, the reels were shown in the correct order.)
28. 03/24/1966: The Ladies Man (1961)
29. 03/31/1966: Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961)
30. 04/07/1966: The Best of Enemies (1961)
31. 04/14/1966: Elmer Gantry (1960) (2 hrs., 30 min.) (Another early rerun. It is not known whether CBS re-edited the film for improved clarity.)
32. 04/21/1966: A Majority of One (1961) (2 hrs., 30 min.) (See section of link titled "Film version.")
33. 04/28/1966: Houseboat (1958) (Rerun of the series' fifth feature)
34. 05/05/1966: John Paul Jones (1959)

From here through the summer, the remaining broadcasts consisted of reruns of many of the above films. The series' initial offerings thus consisted of a total of 31 movies–12 from Warner Brothers, 13 from Columbia, 3 from Paramount, 2 from United Artists, plus one classic (Harvey) from Universal-International. The next season, CBS would add a second anthology on Friday nights. CBS's movie schedule for the 1966-67 season would thus begin in September with the Thursday Night Movie's television debut of the first half of The Music Man (1962), starring Robert Preston and Shirley Jones. The concluding half of the film would be televised the following evening as the premiere offering of the new CBS Friday Night Movie.

1966-67 and '67-68 seasons: Thursdays and Fridays

Among the films from Paramount Pictures that CBS had acquired earlier, there included the Alfred Hitchcock shocker Psycho (1960), which the network had scheduled to be telecast Friday, September 23, 1966. However, just before the film's airing, U.S. Senator Charles Percy's (R-Illinois) college-aged daughter, Valerie, was reported slain by an unknown assailant, and details of the crime went viral in the national print and TV-radio media, including one news article that described Miss Percy as "blonde and pretty...beaten and stabbed to death in her bed...".^[10] The inevitable analogy between Miss Percy and a "blonde and pretty" Janet Leigh, plus the fact that both the senator's daughter and the Leigh character in the film were both murdered while in a vulnerable state (Miss Leigh in the shower, Miss Percy while asleep) became too much of a coincidence for "some of the affiliates in the Midwest" who announced they would not carry the film.^[11] Thus, shortly before Psycho's world television premiere, CBS, without warning, yanked it from the schedule at the last moment and replaced it instead with a Frank Sinatra war film Kings Go Forth (1958). Later that year, CBS announced that Psycho would not be broadcast at any future date.^[12] The film was thus cancelled altogether despite the hefty $500-thousand price that CBS had paid Paramount for acquisition of the film.

The preemption of Psycho aside, however, the 1966-67 season saw an increase in films from the Paramount package, negotiated more than a year earlier before the series' first season. These included Grace Kelly's Academy-Award winning performance in The Country Girl (1954), Marlon Brando's first directorial effort, One-Eyed Jacks (1961), and the Jerry Lewis comedy, The Delicate Delinquent (1957). Columbia films also made a strong showing during CBS's second season of prime-time films with such entries as Sam Peckinpah's Civil War western Major Dundee (1964) and the Jack Lemmon comedy, Good Neighbor Sam (1964). But Warner Brothers studio was represented by only five features that season, and one of those was the animated Gay Purr-ee (1963), a film targeting the pre-teen audience and broadcast just two days before Christmas 1966.

References