TV to Film: Once a Rarity

TV shows, and films. Is there really a difference? A considerable one, as it turns out.

Jack Webb, the radio actor, wanted to be a film actor. Once he achieved that goal, he wanted to direct. Doesn’t everybody? As a well-known actor, but a novice filmmaker, Dragnet, the 1951-’59 TV show, was Webb’s self-owned film school, where he could try out new ideas about staging and framing shots, about dramatic rhythm, and about acting, all at NBC’s expense. The very word “expense” would have been anathema to Webb. He was, and would always remain an extremely frugal filmmaker, only using actors who would work for Guild minimums, filming as quickly as possible, and using minimal, off-the-rack sets. If Webb hired an actor you’ve ever heard of, they were probably at the start or end of their careers.

Even the oldest people reading this now encountered 1950s television as children. We may forget that TV stars back then—like Jack Webb and Jackie Gleason--were often only in their mid-thirties, ambitious and impatient. Not many 34-year-old guys get to be movie directors. Jack Webb did—because he owned the original material. And like Gleason, whose idol was Chaplin, Webb wanted to be a true Renaissance man, composing the music, writing scripts, and directing.

The episode that opened Dragnet’s fourth season, “The Big Producer”, featured Carolyn Jones, later to be Morticia in The Addams Family, and Martin Milner, later the star of Jack Webb’s Adam-12. The subject matter was shocking for TV, especially back then: High school students buying what in the 50s counted as porno (they never say “naked pictures”, but you get the idea.) Sgt. Joe Friday has to find out where they’re getting it. The source turns out to be a seedy, senile old movie director and photographer, living in the faded ruins of an abandoned studio lot that once shot Westerns.

Friday and his partner arrest the old man but indulge him for a few minutes as he describes the movie he sees in his delusional mind, a saloon shootout that he narrates, with sound effects but without actors, while Jack Webb does an inventive job of imitating the look of a silent film circa 1915. (BTW: This episode was the final project ever filmed at the historic RKO Encino lot.) The two police detectives and their elderly prisoner walk away into a vivid, silent movie sunset with a remarkable crane shot.

Dragnet on radio and television was a realistic “procedural”, notably non-violent for a cop show. The 1954 Dragnet theatrical movie meant to cash in on its popularly promised “Sgt. Joe Friday--as You’ve Never Seen Him Before!”. Webb opened the feature film with a sudden shotgun killing and a shocking close-up of a dying man’s blood red face. It needed to show a paying audience that it was more than the TV show they knew.

For one thing, TV was still small screen and black and white. Hollywood responded with Technicolor (it took most of another decade for TV to convert to color), with stereophonic sound, and by expanding into Cinemascope (which lasted), and 3D (which didn’t at first, though it re-emerges periodically).

For decades, film history buffs have claimed that this 1954 Dragnet was filmed in 3D but released “flat”, like Dial M for Murder and Kiss Me Kate, both of which were released after the 3D fad of 1953-early ’54. Alas, there’s no positive evidence that Dragnet was a stereoscopic shoot, and that’s a fact, ma’am. Nonetheless, rumors do persist, and if you take a look, you’ll instantly see why. Dragnet, planned and designed the year before (in 1953), sure as heck looks as if Webb meant it to film it in 3D. Even non-stunt shots, like ordinary tracking shots across a living room, are carefully framed in the foreground to add a close-up plane of depth.

Webb was a smart guy. His subsequent feature films were a mixed lot, and some deserved to be more popular. After 1962, he concentrated on being a television producer.

There were even bigger leaps from the small screen to the big one, and no leap was greater than Marty, a live TV play in 1953 that not only became a hit movie in 1955, but won best picture, best actor (Ernest Borgnine)*, best director (Delbert Mann) and best writer (Paddy Chayevsky) at the Oscars.

(* Borgnine gets a friendly nod because he once went out of his way to hold an elevator for my wife and I as we hurried down a hallway. He couldn’t have been more genial. “Hop aboard, folks!”, beckoning with a smile. A lot nicer than the guy he played in From Here to Eternity.)

The years when the movies ignored television, hoping it would go away, were over. But none of these Oscar-grabbing, high prestige Paddy Chayevsky live-for-TV plays (or Reginald Rose’s, or Rod Serling’s) were connected to a TV series, on recurring characters the public had already grown to like on weekly television.

After the big success of Lee Marvin’s The Dirty Dozen in 1967, a two-part, 1963 episode of NBC’s Kraft Suspense Theater that Marvin starred in was re-edited into a 1968 feature film, Sergeant Ryker. I remember the posters: “U.S. Sergeant? Or Commie Major??” Marvin was paid for the upgrade, though only under the modest terms of his 1963 contract, which didn’t reflect his market value five years later. This would lead to talent agents more aggressively trying to protect their clients’ earnings as the business became more turbulent.

The Killers (1964) was unique in that it had been made for television—one of the very first feature-length TV movies of the kind we’d all know, premiering on broadcast networks. This post isn’t about TV movies, too often a watered-down hybrid, but about TV shows that made the jump to theatrical release. But The Killers was first released in theaters. Directed by skilled pro Don Siegel, it turned out much better than expected. The finished product was (marginally) too violent for 1964 TV.

A point of speculation was the film’s star, Ronald Reagan. It was the one “heel” role of his entire career, and his final film appearance. 1964 was the year of his successful entry into politics as California’s governor. Back then, Reagan had surprising support even from otherwise-liberal Hollywood, and there was a reluctance to make him look bad. By the time of Reagan’s 1980 campaign, on air media pundits gleefully ran clips of his old movies, especially Bedtime for Bonzo. A scene from The Killers of “villainous” Reagan slapping Angie Dickinson got wide attention, some of it humorous. “Was this the wrong moment for Angie to bring up the Equal Rights Amendment?”

James Bond was riding high at the 1960s box office, and in Hollywood, imitation is always the sincerest form of flattery. A couple of ordinary weekly episodes of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. were re-edited into second class MGM “movies” (The Spy with My Face; One Spy Too Many) for overseas theaters. Writers were quick to notice what critic Judith Crist called “soggy sex scenes”, a wild exaggeration. There’s a shot of Solo, smiling as a woman exits the shower (you don’t see her, just him) and one brief shot of Illya making out with a girl. These rather tame “sex scenes” were so tacked on that you could all but see the “cut along dotted line” instructions to the editor.

The era’s other big spy show also turned broadcast episodes into what Europe would see as Mission Impossible Versus the Mob, but Paramount did a classier job than Metro, eschewing any added sex appeal. They gave the chosen shows a higher budget, more shooting time, and better than average scripts. It was still an imitation of a theatrical film, but a more respectable one.

Battlestar Galactica (1980) was near the end of that TV-to-movies cycle. The two-part pilot episode was released theatrically, slightly recut. Gaius Baltar doesn’t survive this version, and the camera’s point of view is his spinning, severed head. Galactica’s special effects shots were a giant leap over anything TV had been willing to pay for, until the colossal success of Fox’s Star Wars inspired Universal to take a chance on a possible TV-film crossover. The theatrical version was released in Sensurround, Universal’s add-on gimmick of an added track of exceptionally low rumbling sound.

Since then, everything from Charlie’s Angels to The Dukes of Hazzard made the jump to the theater screen, followed by Sex and the City and Downton Abbey. Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible film series is the most successful example of the endless mining of “useful IP”, intellectual property that migrates freely between television and film.

Even the look of the two media has merged, to a great degree: the home “small screen” is much bigger and sharper than it was, with a theater-like wide shape, and nearly all theatrical movies are created, edited and distributed as digitally as TV is.

If there was a time when, as the slogan once went, “Film is art. TV is furniture”, it’s been over for a long time.