Size Matters: Television’s Effects on the 1950s Film Industry

There is a scene in George Cukor’s A Star Is Born (1954) that demonstrates not only the director’s mastering of the new widescreen format and the careful balancing of composition within a larger frame, but also Cukor’s awareness of its history and value. It features aging matinee idol Norman Main (James Mason) getting fired by head of the studio Oliver Niles (Charles Bickford). The actor’s popularity had been slipping, along with the studio’s power and commercial viability after the introduction of television into the American home. During the conversation, the men stand between two flickering black-an-white images on the left and right edges of the frame. To the far left is a television set turned on to the fights, to the far right a movie, projected onto a screen in the next room. Main and Niles talk to each other precisely between a video image and a film image—a visual translation of the historical crossroads where all the studio heads and stars found themselves in 1954, with box office revenues plummeting.

Two years earlier, 1952 had marked the first full year in which the whole nation was blanketed by network television, and for the first time since the early years of the Depression, the movie industry was in a state of decline. 1952 was also, not incidentally, the year that brought wide screens and stereophonic sound, more practicable and less expensive color, a growth of independent production, and a landmark Supreme Court decision on film censorship. This was the beginning of a transition that would lead the American film industry from the hardened confines of a production-distribution-exhibition pattern that had lasted for over two decades into uncertainties and changing forms. Television was, of course, not the only factor that prompted this transition, but it was a heavily influential one. If the theater screen was to compete with the small one, Hollywood had to offer audiences something that they couldn’t get in their living rooms: new, bigger screens and visual effects, better sound quality, color, new genres, more sex, more violence.

Censoring Cinema: Hollywood's Production Code

“Suspicious of a flickering amusement that mesmerized the commonest of folk and the dullest of immigrants…, reformers of all stripes viewed the motion picture as a gateway to personal damnation and social deviance… the motion picture medium, if left to its own devices, was more liable to pollute and degrade than refine and uplift,” Thomas Doherty writes in Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen & the Production Code Administration (32). These were the sentiments that led the film industry to adopt the Motion Picture Production Code in the 1930s, a form of self-censorship that regulated film content for over three decades. “Just as a single lustful spasm in a brothel might sow the seeds of disease and dissipation,” the author continues, “a brief session at a nickelodeon might undo years of educational guidance and moral instruction” (32). But the reasons behind adopting and enforcing the Code were varied, ranging from morality to economics, from religion to the need to protect the industry from government censorship. The effects the Production Code had on film content were as diverse as the reasons for adopting it. Although the Code was never considered unconstitutional—because films were not protected under the First Amendment until 1952—the document undoubtedly encroached on the motion picture industry’s right to expression and free speech.