How Did We Become a Nation of Movie Lovers on that Little TV Box?

Outside of actually buying tickets to the theaters, how did we ever become movie lovers, all those years ago, watching Hollywood films on our little square black and white TVs?  Because movies were always big business on TV, and they reached an even wider audience on the tube.

 

I've often thought about this over the years, wondering how I was able to connect so strongly with works of art that were so seriously compromised through their subsequent exhibition on television.  How did that happen?  It came home again to me this last week when I was preparing a review of 1953's The Robe (for an Easter deadline I missed), the first movie shot in the CinemaScope widescreen process.

 

Growing up in the 1970s, during Easter week, The Robe was a regular on our local TV station's afternoon "Big Show," along with other classics like Barabbas, The Greatest Story Ever Told, and King of Kings.  All of these religious epics sported original projected screen dimensions far outside the limited 4:3 ratio of American TV monitors prior to the late 1990s, and yet they still seemed thrilling to us, as did so many other post-1953 widescreen movies shown on television. 

 

Seeing how good the The Robe's Blu looked, I was curious to compare that experience with watching movies the way I used to, so I dug out my old VHS copy of The Robe (that had been helpfully "formatted to fit my screen"), and played it on my restored 1970s 13in 4:3 black and white GE TV.  How in god's name did ghostly, cramped, mangled images like those capture at least two generations of TV watchers?  Why did we put up with it?  After all, no one goes to the Musee du Louvre expecting to view the Mona Lisa through blinds or a keyhole (although they do make you stand way back now).

 

When I was a kid I knew those TV dimensions weren't right.  I mean, it was obvious.  You went to see The Poseidon Adventure at the drive-in and you got a pretty good (but probably not exact) approximation of its Panavision 2.35:1 image ratio.  A year later you see it on TV, and the image is square and people are yelling at other characters who aren't in the frame (and they're yelling in black and white, too).  

 

I tried to explain that once to my old man, who brushed me off with a simple, "You got it wrong; it's just because the screen is bigger at the theater," before he want back to his newspaper, which was part of my point, the larger implications, however, he entirely missed.  He didn't seem to care at all, as I would image most consumers of movies and TV felt back then.  The technical aspects of widescreen movies largely functioned as marketing--not a science experiment.  If audiences thought Ice Station Zebra might be better in Super-Panavision 70 because the ads screamed it was, they bought a ticket.  They didn't bitch later that their TV didn't follow suit.  It just was what it was.  

 

After all, for my parents and myself, this miracle of television was still just that:  a miracle.  2-dimensional images that brought dawn to midnight entertainment, including old Hollywood movies, "free" of charge (if you didn't mind the commercials...which were often just as entertaining, because they had to be), right into your home, was a modern marvel that made the previous game-changer, radio, seem staid and limited.  When I, purely by accident, snagged a cast-off portable 13in TV from a elementary school friend moving out of town, I felt like I held some sort of mystical, magical portal to a thousand thousand other worlds, when I'd hit all the lights and let that gray, ghostly light bathe me in total passive electronic love (Jacqueline Susann was right...).

 

So who cared (or for most:  knew) that what was showing up, at least in terms of old movies, wasn't being correctly shown.  And yes, I am talking about old movies, too, the ones shot in the old Academy ratio.  They may have seemed to fit our boxy square TV screens perfectly, but the exhibition was still wrong.  After all, these old movies were meant to be seen on big screens, in a theater, on a silver screen, with no commercials.  If you think that doesn't make a difference, it does.  Check out a revival screening sometime of an old black and white movie you've seen on TV.  Just the sheer enlargement of the image makes an impact you can't anticipate.  

When you look back at the actual timeline, it's surprisingly short, the span between the widespread introduction of television (let's say, the late 1940s) and the beginning of the cable and specifically the home video revolution (let's say, the late 70s, early 80s), where getting movie aspect ratios correct suddenly became a selling point (RCA's CED videodisc system was the first, apparently, to employ letterboxing).  Only about 30 years, give or take, where we went from passive watchers of TV, to the beginnings of the more sophisticated consumers of "film" (blech), a small online segment of which still engage in arcane debates about ratios and screen sizes and what have yous.

 

Any kid paying attention, though, could see that letterboxing occured way before the CED, albeit in very brief fashion.  As a kid, I remember quite well seeing most Universal library titles, such as several Don Knotts outings, employing letterboxing for the opening and closing credits, when shown on television (Universal employed this fancy drawn scroll work in the black bars, in the hopes of cluing in panicked viewers that their TV tube wasn't on the fritz).   Why they went to the trouble of that, I'm not sure.  Maybe it was a legal thing, getting everyone's name displayed?  Maybe it was just someone in the telecine  lab having fun.

 

And now...everything's fixed, right?  The wonks have had their say, the TVs are all widescreen, the DVDs and streaming follow the law (of course there's no law...) and display everything at the correct ratio, right?  

Wrong.  I was flipping through Tubi the other night (reams of weird, old exploitation movies are just one of their many treasure troves) when I came upon Lord Jim, the 1965 epic mangling of Joseph Conrad's classic.  The opening credits were 2.35 (which wasn't really the Super Panavision 70's intended 2.20, but why quibble?), before it switched to "full screen" 1.75.  Curious, I checked some other notable widescreen offerings on Tubi--most were incorrectly formatted.  Tubi used to be pretty good about this kind of thing--apparently not any more.

 

You see what's happening, don't you?  Our TVs are again dictating how we see things.  It's probably just easier for everything to fit our widescreen 1.75 monitors, right?  We even now have the downright perverse procedure of "stretching" old 4:3 images to fit our monitors.  M*A*S*H and Leave it to Beaver and even early Friends episodes certainly weren't shot or displayed in widescreen, but they are now.  Nothing's settled.  Nothing's fixed.  We're regressing, oddly enough.

Remember my original question:  how did we become lovers of movies on that little square box?  I guess the answer is, again:  who cares.