In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • “Is This Pay-TV to Be the End for Us?”Film Exhibitors Confront Pay Television, 1968–76
  • Deron Overpeck (bio)

Television has been the bane, actual or perceived, of theater owners since at least the late 1940s, when exhibitors blamed it for the precipitous decline in theater attendance in the postwar years. Although Douglas Gomery has demonstrated that television cannot be blamed at least for the initial collapse that began in 1948, exhibitors saw the new medium as an easy explanation for their dire fortunes throughout the 1950s and 1960s.1 The interest the studios took in television—first their attempt to control it, then their eventual sale to the networks of broadcast rights to their pre-1940 films in 1955 and investment in television production—exacerbated the strained relationship between production–distribution and exhibition during this period as well.2 But if broadcast television had become an unwelcome fact of life by 1960, theater owners were determined not to allow cable television to become established as another competitor when that industry began its growth in the mid-1960s.

This essay examines how exhibitors—represented by their trade organization, the National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO)3—lobbied federal agencies to stymie the growth of cable television. Using the records of NATO’s Pay-TV Committee, archived at Brigham Young University, I trace the strategies of public pressure and scholarly research that theater owners used to buttress their arguments that cable television represented a threat both to American consumers in general and to theater owners specifically. This collection includes letters between exhibitors expressing concern over pay television’s growth; correspondence with NATO’s legal representation and federal, state, and local legislators; testimony before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Congress; and drafts of anti–pay television legislation that exhibitors hoped to have passed. Although the committee lobbied at the state and local levels as well, the focus here is on its efforts at the federal level. One reason for this focus is concision: to consider every approach taken by the committee would require more pages than a journal article allows. However, I also argue that the exhibitors’ experiences before Congress and the FCC provided them with lessons in new political and industrial realities. Theater owners had history on their side when they went to the federal government for relief from pay television. The Department of Justice had intervened in the affairs of the film industry twice before, when it filed the suits that led to the dissolution of the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1915 and the vertical integration of the Hollywood studio system in 1948. Yet when they returned to Washington, D.C., in the late 1960s in the hope of attracting federal attention to a number of film industry–related issues, including pay television, exhibitors found little interest in their plight. Although the FCC attempted to shelter broadcast television from cable’s encroachment, it—and, by the early 1970s, Congress—clearly favored the growth of the new medium. Indeed, in 1971, FCC chairman Dean Burch averred that the commission was determined “to get cable moving”4—to set forth rules that would nurture the nascent industry with regulations necessary to differentiate it from broadcast television; the potential impact of pay cable television on theatrical film exhibition was simply not one of the commission’s concerns. In response, the Pay-TV Committee had to adjust its strategy away from an attack on the cable industry itself to one of accommodation that would preserve the primacy of first-run exhibition in the studios’ distribution practices. In short, the failure of the cable television campaign demonstrated to theater owners that they would be but one—albeit important—part of a larger entertainment industry that would distribute its product to many different exhibition platforms as quickly as possible. [End Page 2]

The growth of cable television in the 1970s and 1980s has proved fertile ground for scholars in the past two decades. Michele Hilmes and Megan Mullen have provided detailed histories of the development of subscription and cable television in the latter half of the twentieth century. Hilmes contextualizes her narrative within the overall relationship between the American film and television industries...

pdf

Share