Hollywood Is Humming

When they are good & ready, Hollywood's moviemakers confidently expect to take over television as entertainment.

After three years of making films exclusively for TV, the Hal Roach studios, well in the black, are now producing 1,500 hours of TV films a year, nearly three times Hollywood's annual output of feature movies. The 18-acre Roach lot, once used for such movie epics as Joan of Arc and Of Mice and Men, now gives houseroom to TV's Amos 'n' Andy, Trouble with Father (featuring Stu Erwin), Racket Squad, Mystery Theater, and a filmed version of Beulah.

Everyman's Entertainment. Burly, 33-year-old Hal Roach Jr., who got his start as an assistant director of Our Gang comedies ("I unbuttoned and buttoned their pants between scenes"), has been in command of the studio since he took over the production reins from his father in 1948. He accounts for his new success with the explanation that televiewers have even lower I.Q.s than moviegoers: "On TV, a character must be immediately self-explanatory--that's why a guy like William Bendix will be great. I'm sure The Birth of a Baby, which made a lot of money in movie theaters, would get you a wonderful TV rating--but what sponsor would buy it? The sponsor is only spending money because he knows or expects he'll get it back in sales. Like it or not, television is Everyman's entertainment."

The "live" producers of the East Coast don't speak Everyman's language with Roach's facility. He discovered this on a recent trip to Manhattan, when some TV-men tried to sell him on the idea of an hour-long ballet show. Says Roach: "I just told them ballet is not mass entertainment and most likely never will be." His credo: "You can't rationalize the public's taste. It isn't a question of intellectuality. It's the same thing as the public liking football and baseball and not liking polo and jai alai. It's just that we're attuned to that sort of thinking--we realize our audiences' tastes."

The Thin Edge. A score of smaller Hollywood competitors are already aboard the TV bandwagon. They range from shoestring producers to such established companies as Jerry Fairbanks, Inc., which employs a timesaving three-camera technique (TIME, March 6, 1950). Broidy Productions (owned by a brother of the head of Monogram Pictures) makes Wild Bill Hickok films for TV, and turns out a 30-minute religious show with such titles as Sister Martha Bets 'Em Big. Bing Crosby Enterprises hopes to captivate televiewers with a new series featuring a cast of chimpanzees enacting Sherlock Holmes thrillers.

Hal Roach Jr. thinks that all this activity represents only the thin edge of the TV wedge. He remembers that three years ago "Hollywood looked at us on the basis that we were almost unclean." Now: "My phone rings all the time. It looks as if half of Hollywood were secretly planning to make the jump into television, too."

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