Pay As You See

For the first time in U.S. history, a new movie had its premiere on television last week. The film, Paramount's Forever Female, starring Ginger Rogers and William Holden, was not very good. But the TV audience was not very large either; it consisted only of those who could crowd around some 70 specially prepared TV sets in Palm Springs, Calif., a far-flung (90 miles away) suburb of Hollywood. What brought the film colony's biggest names on the run was the fact that the Palm Springs experiment was the official inauguration of Telemeter, a coin-box subscription TV. system that is partly owned by Paramount. Like its rivals, Ski-atron and Phonevision (TIME. Jan. 8, 1951), Telemeter is designed to eliminate the commercial message from TV and to move the box office right into the viewer's living room. For a fee inserted into the Telemeter gadget attached to each TV set (Palm Springs Telemetered viewers paid $1.35 to see Forever Female; $1 to watch the telecast of the Notre Dame-U.S.C. football game), set owners can watch new movies, sports events and show-business spectacles in the privacy of their homes.

Palm Springs was honored with Telemeter's inaugural ceremonies because 1) it is close enough to Hollywood for maximum publicity purposes, and 2) it has its own transmission system to Los Angeles and, therefore, does not come under the jurisdiction of the Federal Communications Commission, which has yet to make up its mind about subscription TV. Telemeter's Pressagent Paul MacNamara insisted that "Palm Springs is not a test. We are beginning operations. We have opened our store. The results will be interesting to everyone concerned --motion pictures, football and baseball, business and the FCC--all of the people who, in the future, will be using this new method of distribution."

MacNamara claims that every big studio is behind Telemeter except 20th Century-Fox ("We can't project their big-screen CinemaScope pictures on TV"). He looks forward to a minimum audience of 5,000,000 for TV film premieres. But, at the moment, moviemen are more intent on Palm Springs' 70 Telemeter set owners. Some of their comments: Director William (Roman Holiday) Wyler--"It's fine if we get paid. If movies are going to wind up on TV screens, I don't want to have a picture interrupted to talk about soap." Director Mervyn (Quo Vadis) LeRoy-- "Telemeter is great. If a picture is worth seeing, it's worth paying for. If the payment is right, it can be great for the picture business."

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