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TV and Cinema: Battle of the Giants
99% of American homes own at least one television, and the average American watches well over 2 hours of TV every day. More than any technology available today the television has changed the way we live our lives. Its impact on our daily lives simply cannot be measured.
Despite this apparent stranglehold on entertainment, though, the global market for movie theaters is worth more than $23billion each year. While we may spend much of our free time watching TV, we still love the movies. It’s often difficult to imagine, then, the fear that movie studios felt when faced with the growing popularity of the television in its early days. For a time, it seemed as if the birth of the television would mark the death of the cinema.
Since the tail end of the 19th Century the popular appeal of the movie theater seemed unlikely to diminish. Since the 1920s the movie business has been one of America’s largest industries, spreading American culture around the world and bringing back millions of dollars in foreign currency. However, studio bosses got the shock of a lifetime when, in 1949, attendance figures in America dropped from 90 million to 70 million in the space of a single year. America had discovered the television.
However, the TV wasn’t an invention of the 40s. The television as a concept had been developed as early as the 1880s, and Charles Jenkins demonstrated the first working set in 1925. The first model with sound was demonstrated by John Logie Baird just four months later – and he’d go on to unveil the first color version in 1928.
It wasn’t until the end of World War II, however, that television finally began to blossom. By 1947 there were 170,000 TV sets in the US, and within just five years there would be over 18 million. Millions of people were choosing to stay home and watch the Howdy Doody Show, Lucille Ball and the Lone Ranger instead of making the trip to the movies, and ticket receipts fell dramatically.
In response to this the movie studios had to come up with something new, something to drag people away from their television sets and back to the movie theaters. They came up with two revolutionary new inventions: Cinerama and 3-D movies. Using three separate projectors on a massive curved screen, Cinerama gave viewers the impression that they were taking part in the action in a way that the small screens of television could never achieve. However, it was expensive to install the projectors and screens necessary to show movies such as This Is Cinerama, so the technology never became more than a novelty.
3-D movies enjoyed much greater success, with 69 movies being made in 1953. However, the fad was short-lived, and the novelty quickly wore off.
What eventually saved the movies was the development of larger, curved screens and improved sound – and, most importantly, color. By 1954 over half the movies in production were filmed in Technicolor and by 1955 over 20,000 theaters had installed curved screens, creating the illusion of depth and realism that still attracts hundreds of millions of movie-goers each year.
With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight we can now see that television was never the threat to cinema that it seemed at the time. Instead television inspires the movies to drive technology forward, forcing the studios to develop new methods of entertaining us – something that is still going on today. The movie studios will always have to provide that little bit more – more spectacular, more entertaining, more real – because they know that television is always there, in the background, waiting to steal its thunder.
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