It's the general consensus that television is what killed the movies, that its emergence drove the studio heads to the desperate measures that initiated a new, more complicated, and - let's say it - sorrier film age: budgets bigger than those to which they were accustomed, an appeal to a younger, less familiar demographic, immersion into expensive experimental technologies.
This, of course, is only partly true. And yet this conception of TV as the Jack Palance-caliber baddie lives on.
Oh yeah?, defiantly rebuts the TV lover. Well about the movies almost killing television - specifically, their failure to recognize those great talents who never would have emerged if Philco hadn't, Gorgeous George-style, taken Filmco?
Shall we look at filmdom's biggest booboo - TV's early comics?
A show-stealing Broadway musical star, Phil Silvers' natural exuberance, rascally self-regard, and subversive seriousness were barely ever displayed on America's movie screens. When given a longer leash - see the joyous Cover Girl, where his chemistry with Gene Kelly is better than Kelly's with Rita Hayworth - he proved without a doubt that he could shine in his own vehicles, a la Bob Hope. Yet he was mostly relegated to small, supporting roles, asked to do no more than squint, smile and occasionally crack wise.
Silvers, understandably, was extremely unnerved by this, a frustration shared by another TV superstar-to-be, Jackie Gleason, who, in that same era, was slumming as a chubby, squeaky voiced stooge to a number of handsome leading men. Eventually, Gleason left for New York, where a start-up network, Dumont, clued in fast to what the movies had never figured out.
Mind you, in Gleason's case, as in that of Sid Caesar's, another talent from that time to whom the movies threw the odd crumb, great benefit was had by early TV's mandate for revue-style variety, a form with which the movies were beginning to cut ties Put in sketch show format, Gleason, Caesar, and another movie reject - though one who had had a slightly better time of it, Red Skelton - were able to display the full range of their talents, each unleashing an inexhaustible roster of characters into peoples' living rooms, as if one of those crowded clown cars had jackknifed just off the kitchen.
So who's the baddie now? Thank goodness Gleason, Silver, Caesar and Skelton had enough ego, insight and drive to announce to the Louis B. Mayers of the world, "And awayyyyy we go!"
