Widescreen vs. Television: Hollywood Fights for Its Life

Picture a movie palace on a Saturday night in 1953 — one of the vast, gilded houses that had been the cathedrals of American leisure a decade before. In the mid-1940s those seats were full: some ninety million tickets sold in a single week, a country going to the pictures the way it went to church. Now whole rows sit empty. The audience hasn't vanished. It has gone home, drawn the curtains, and switched on a small gray screen in the corner of the living room.

That screen was the enemy, and Hollywood knew it. The era we left behind had ended at a strange peak — the studio system at the height of its power, film noir at its darkest, and the antitrust axe already falling. In 1948 the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Paramount Pictures had ordered the studios to sell off the theater chains they owned, severing the machine that guaranteed their films a screen. The moguls had barely absorbed that blow when television finished the job the courts had started.

The Glow in the Living Room

The numbers were merciless. In 1948 only a sliver of American homes owned a television set; by 1960 nearly nine in ten did. As the sets multiplied, the ticket lines shrank — weekly attendance collapsed to well under half its wartime high before the decade was out. Theaters went dark by the thousands. The one bright spot was the drive-in, which boomed as families discovered they could bring the kids and the car, but even that was a retreat, not a rally.

The studios' first instinct was fury; their second, more usefully, was to ask what the little box couldn't do. It couldn't do size. It couldn't do color — broadcast was black-and-white and would stay that way for years. It couldn't do the crowd, the hush of a thousand strangers in the dark. So Hollywood decided to sell exactly those things, and to sell them hard.

Bigger Than the Box

The counterattack came in a barrage of gimmicks and gambles, some brilliant, some absurd. In 1952 an independent quickie called Bwana Devil lured audiences with the promise of a lion leaping into their laps, and the 3-D craze was on. Warner Bros. followed in 1953 with House of Wax, a lurid Vincent Price shocker that became the format's genuine hit — directed, in one of the great ironies of the period, by André de Toth, who was blind in one eye and could not perceive the stereoscopic effect he was creating. The fad burned bright and died fast; by 1954 the cardboard glasses were in the trash.

The lasting revolution was width. Also in 1952, the three-projector spectacle of This Is Cinerama wrapped a curved screen around the audience and left them dizzy. But it was Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century-Fox who found the format that stuck. Dusting off an anamorphic lens patented decades earlier by the Frenchman Henri Chrétien, Fox unveiled CinemaScope with The Robe in 1953 — a biblical epic chosen precisely because piety played big and wide. Paramount answered with VistaVision, and the 70mm Todd-AO process arrived with Oklahoma! in 1955. Suddenly every marquee screamed a proprietary name in capital letters, each one a promise that this could never fit inside your television.

What filled all that width was spectacle on a scale the small screen could not dream of. Cecil B. DeMille parted the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments (1956), with Charlton Heston as Moses, in what would be the old showman's final film. Mike Todd circled the globe in Around the World in 80 Days, which took the Best Picture Oscar. And in 1959 William Wyler's Ben-Hur — its chariot race still one of the most thrilling sequences ever staged — cost a then-staggering fifteen million dollars, rescued a wobbling MGM, and swept eleven Academy Awards, a record that would stand for nearly four decades. The message was clear: if you wanted this, you had to leave the house.

The Fall of the Factory

Spectacle bought time. It did not restore the old order, because the old order was dissolving from within. The studio system had rested on the contract — actors, directors, and writers signed for years to a single lot, cast and loaned and disciplined at the studio's pleasure. That machine was breaking down, and one deal showed the way out.

In 1950 James Stewart wanted more than a flat fee. His agent, the formidable Lew Wasserman of MCA, negotiated a radical arrangement for the Western Winchester '73: no big salary, but a cut of the profits. When the picture did well, Stewart earned a fortune — and every star in town suddenly understood that the real money lay in ownership, not employment. The percentage deal was born, and with it the modern movie star as free agent. Actors began forming their own production companies: Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, and Marilyn Monroe, who walked out on Fox in 1954, launched her own company, and forced the studio to renegotiate on her terms. The talent had stopped being inventory and started being partners.

Even the industry's ugliest wound began, tentatively, to close. The HUAC blacklist that had poisoned Hollywood since 1947 was still enforced, careers still ruined, screenwriters still working under false names. Then in 1960 two men called the bluff. Otto Preminger publicly credited the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo for Exodus, and Kirk Douglas put Trumbo's real name on Spartacus — the Roman epic a young Stanley Kubrick had taken over mid-shoot. When the newly inaugurated President John F. Kennedy crossed American Legion picket lines to see it, the blacklist's spell was broken.

"I'm Spartacus!"

Not everyone chased the biggest screen. The same decade that gave us the Red Sea also gave us Marty (1955), a small, tender story of a lonely Bronx butcher — adapted from a Paddy Chayefsky television play — which cost almost nothing and won Best Picture. And in 1960 Alfred Hitchcock shot Psycho fast and cheap in black-and-white, using the crew from his own TV show, proving that intimacy and shock could beat spectacle at a fraction of the price. The lesson sat uneasily beside the epics: nobody yet knew which bet was the future.

That was the truth of it. By 1962 Hollywood had survived, but it had survived by becoming something it did not recognize — smaller, leaner, no longer a fortress of contracts and back lots, its stars now its rivals, its old certainties gone. The studios had even made a grudging peace with the enemy, selling their film libraries to television and producing programming themselves. They had won a reprieve, not a victory. A restless younger audience was rising, the Production Code that had governed the screen since 1934 was beginning to crack, and the runaway costs of the epics were about to detonate. The factory had fallen. What would rise in its place — the anarchic, director-driven upheaval that history would call New Hollywood — was already stirring in the wings.