A Change of Screens

Before television, millions of Americans got their first visual news of the outside world from a seat in a movie theater. The lights went down, a stirring theme song swelled, and "News of the Day" or Pathe's crowing rooster flashed on the screen. Even the grimness of today's on-the-spot TV coverage of Viet Nam had parallels in the scene of an injured Chinese baby bawling in the ruins of the Japanese-bombed railway station in Shanghai, in films of Hitler's armies marching across Europe and scenes of the fall of Corregidor. Until TV showed the funeral of President Kennedy, nothing Americans saw in the newsreels had ever stirred them quite so much as the bombing of Pearl Harbor 26 years ago.

This week newsreels surrender completely to television. The movie houses in which they are shown have dwindled to less than 2,000 this year from over 10,000 in the late 1940s. While some newsreels rented for as much as $1,000 a week in their heyday, theater managers now pay about $50 or less. The managers find it more profitable to schedule an intermission instead of a newsreel and give patrons a chance to buy popcorn and 200 candy bars.

Of the five major newsreel companies in business eleven years ago, Warner Bros, (which had bought the name and original 1898 footage of Pioneer Charles Pathe) was the first to go, in 1956. A year later, Paramount News ("The Eyes and Ears of the World") went under; its library, 10 million feet of film dating from 1928, was sold to a TV film distributor. Movietone News (20th Century-Fox) stopped producing newsreels for the U.S. in 1963, though it continues to send them abroad.

MGM-Hearst "News of the Day" distributed its final reels in November, and Universal News planned to call it "The End" the day after Christmas.

While they were still going strong, newsreels put many an unforgettable moment on film. During the 1929 crash, a bankrupt broker was shown plunging to his death from a Manhattan office building. Newsreel cameras recorded the assassination of Yugoslavia's King Alexander in Marseille in 1934, as well as the death of the assassin at the hands of a mob. The Normandy invasion was photographed in all its awesome spectacle and desperate tension. And then there was that time a newsreel man confronted John D. Rockefeller Sr. "Say something," said the newsman, grinding away. Said Rockefeller: "God bless Standard Oil."

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