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Posted: |
Jan 8, 2017 - 10:18 PM
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By: |
Doc Loch
(Member)
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At the risk of showing my age, when I was a kid I remember how exciting it was to see what theatrical movies were going to be showing on the commercial television networks each year (of which there were only three at the time). All of the networks had regular prime time slots scheduled for showing theatrical releases, sometimes two or three nights a week. When the Fall Preview issue of TV Guide came out there was a whole section devoted to which films had been acquired for airing by each of the networks (some of which never did get shown or were eventually relegated to late-night slots). There were also the slots devoted to made-for-TV movies, which produced some small screen gems. And, of course, there was the annual showing of The Wizard of Oz, which was one of the important days on the kid yearly calendar. With the emergence of home video and cable movie channels, the market for commercial network showings of theatrical films dropped, and eventually even the made-for-TV productions were taken over by cable networks. The networks still occasionally have special airings of certain classic films, such as The Ten Commandments or E. T., but these are pretty limited. So when was the last time one of the major commercial networks (CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX) had a regular weekly time slot devoted to showing theatrical movies? And any idea what was the last regularly scheduled theatrical film that aired during one of these slots?
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No idea on the last one, but your post reminded me of how TV Guide used to state how many minutes of each theatrical film to be aired was cut. I was always horrified when it was a lot. I distinctly remember when Annie aired, they cut an entire 40 minutes of it!
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Slightly different in england. As many older brits on here will remember. Back in the 70s we had only 3 channels BBC1 and 2 and ITV.
Their movie premiere screenings were fitted around the evening news.
bbc1 showed a film premiere every monday night at 9.25pm for years, after the news at 9.
And ITV film premieres were either saturday night or if midweek, 10.30pm after their news at 10.
Then they started splitting long films so 9pm for an hour and then restarted at 10.30. - otherwise they finished too late and people went to bed. Staying up late wasnt that commonplace then and most channels finished sometime between 12 and 12.30am. But their news were sacrosanct and rarely moved.
Bbc2 often showed european premieres on a midweek night - usually a tuesday - about 7.30 or 8pm.
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I distinctly remember when Annie aired, they cut an entire 40 minutes of it!
Jeez, then what was left to even show?
Hmmm, maybe they just had to cut the RIGHT 40 minutes!
No, they cut much of Tim Curry's scenes and some Carol Burnett stuff, which for me were the highlights of the movie!
On the other side of the issue, sometimes when the networks chopped out saucy humor from comedies, the end results were so short that they slipped in unused footage, alternate takes and rejected jokes. When Airplane II aired in 84 or 85 on CBS, it was loaded with really bad outtakes and jokes that were cut from the theatrical release.
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Posted: |
Jan 10, 2017 - 6:11 PM
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By: |
SBD
(Member)
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On the other side of the coin, it was neat when networks would ADD footage to a film that wasn't included in the theatrical showings: "Superman: The Movie" and "Superman II", "The Towering Inferno", the (admittedly-dreadful) 1976 "King Kong", "The Breakfast Club", "Gremlins", "The Godfather Parts I & II" (edited together into chronological sequence) and countless others....
Somewhat in this vein, there's brand new, not-in-the-original-cut footage shot expressly for the network television airings. I'd often heard about this and I find it somewhat ludicrous. I mean, I doubt studios budgeted for additional footage for network showings of theatrical movies. Maybe, it was a very different time, but it strikes me as weird that there was enough in the studio coffers for this kind of expense.
Off the top of my head, TWO-MINUTE WARNING apparently added an hour of footage to make up for the sniper violence. It was about an art heist or something. Just weird.
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Posted: |
Jan 10, 2017 - 6:26 PM
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By: |
jenkwombat
(Member)
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Somewhat in this vein, there's brand new, not-in-the-original-cut footage shot expressly for the network television airings. I'd often heard about this and I find it somewhat ludicrous. I mean, I doubt studios budgeted for additional footage for network showings of theatrical movies. Maybe, it was a very different time, but it strikes me as weird that there was enough in the studio coffers for this kind of expense.
Off the top of my head, TWO-MINUTE WARNING apparently added an hour of footage to make up for the sniper violence. It was about an art heist or something. Just weird.
John Carpenter's "Halloween", for its network airings, had footage added which was shot during the making of "Halloween II". The scenes aren't really terrible or anything, but they're not really essential to the overall plotline, as you'd expect.
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Off the top of my head, TWO-MINUTE WARNING apparently added an hour of footage to make up for the sniper violence. It was about an art heist or something. Just weird.
The TV version was vastly different, not just in additional footage, but the entire plot, additional characters, and even the motivation of the sniper. They basically re-shot/re-wrote half the movie and glued it in pieces to snippets of the theatrical film. It was a ridiculous butchering of the original film, and interestingly, it was included as a bonus on the recent Blu-ray.
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John Carpenter's "Halloween", for its network airings, had footage added which was shot during the making of "Halloween II". The scenes aren't really terrible or anything, but they're not really essential to the overall plotline, as you'd expect.
Plus, with the Jamie Lee scenes, you can tell it was shot 3 years later. She doesn't look quite the same and I think even her hair wasn't quite right. That said, I did enjoy the additional Donald Pleasence scenes.
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I'm reminded of the night when Star Trek: The Motion Picture aired on ABC, I think in '82, and the last 30 minutes of it was audio only due to some sort of broadcasting glitch. My dad and I were horrified to sit there listening to the finale of the movie having no clue what was going on.
I also remember seeing Jaws for the first time on network television. What an event in those days before VHS came along. I used to look forward to reading the little blurbs in TV guide...I forget what they were called, but they took up the corner of a page and always went into depth about the film.
EDIT: I think they were called Close-Ups.
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I've always wondered if this is my memory playing tricks on me, but I could swear when Taxi Driver aired on network TV they not only removed the violence and language for obvious reasons, but also cut the famous "Are you talkin' to me?" speech, which changed the entire ironic message of the film and left the impression that Travis was a hero rather than a disturbed psychopath.
I don't remember the network airing of Taxi Driver, but it makes sense. That's why Two-Minute Warning was twisted up, to avoid the notion that someone could be a crazed killer at a sporting event for no apparent reason. The network was uncomfortable with the connotations.
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Do you remember the inclusion of Kirk exiting the Enterprise with the sets scaffolding clearly in view in the frame?
I suppose that scene was supposed to have a matte painting in the background, but it was never finished.
I do, although in those days not sure how visible it was because it was pre letterbox/widescreen home viewing. Widescreen movies looked so blown up and terrible on TV in those days!
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