In a related thread, we’re reminiscing about when the only way to see old movies was to wait for them to appear on television. But movies predate TV, and to my parents’ generation, even seeing a movie on TV must have been a delightful innovation.
Before that, there was . . . what? What did you do if you missed a movie when it first came out, or if you enjoyed it and wanted to see it again a few years later? Was it more common for theaters to re-release old movies? I know that Disney has always done this, but I’ve never heard of it being a common for non-kids movies.
I’m thinking of a block-buster like Gone With the Wind–did its creators envision an after-market for it at all? Did the emergence of televsion lead to any stylistic changes in movies, as it became more expected that they would be subject to repeated viewing?
From what I remember reading about the subject, hugely popular films like Gone With the Wind and the early Disneys were periodically rereleased by the studios. Beyond that, the vast majority of movies just sat in studio vaults taking up space. The arrival of TV proved to be a godsend to these movies but it wasn’t due to any desire on the part of broadcasters and studio execs to rescue classic films from oblivion. TV stations during the 50’s had a lot of programming time to fill and movie studios were looking for someplace to unload their extensive film libraries. In fact, this could just a Hollywood legend, but Warner Brothers was supposedly ready to sell almost their entire pre-1948 film catalog for scrap before it was purchased by syndicators for what turned out to be a pittance of the titles’ actual worth.
My father did have a number of old movies on film reels and we would set up the projector and watch them in the living room. Of course our family was weird so I have no idea how common this was.
In general, the answer is yes. If you missed a movie it was gone forever.
A few large cities had “classic” movie theaters that showed only older films. Most smaller cities didn’t. (All cities had “second run” houses, but those showed movies after the official major release ended, not older movies.)
A few major classics were officially re-released, but those were rare exceptions.
Theater societies existed, again usually only in a few major cities or at or near universities, that showed older movies. A very few collectors existed, and yes, they had to have at least 16 mm if not 35 mm projectors and the space to seat people properly, so that minimized their numbers. I’m not sure if any museums collected or showed movies in the pre-tv age. The Motion Picture Collection at George Eastman House, the leader, didn’t start until 1949. UCLA has the largest collection but its site doesn’t say when it began.
Television both created a market for wide-screen movies - something that tv could match - and then killed off the market for wide-screen movies because they couldn’t be shown well on tv and so had no after-market. Same thing for other gimmick movies, like 3-D, odorvision, and the rest of their schlocky ilk.
Adult content, especially nudity, lasted longer as an alternative, since network tv still won’t show that. Cable has made that unnecessary and in the age of the internet actresses are said to be less willing to do nudity since it instantly spreads across the web out of context.
You were pretty much out of luck. There may have been “revival” houses back then, and the first film societies began developing in the 30s and 40s IIRC, but for the most part, you had to be sure to catch something on first release–though major films back then were distributed over many months, moving from one market to another to another in the pre-Wide Release days that stretched out a film’s life theatrically.
Not necessarily, though GWTW is one film that has had several major re-releases over the years. But if there were films that were popular enough, the studio might license out after-market distribution rights for those titles knowing that they might get mileage at schools & universities, the military, or private functions. Swank has been doing that sort of thing since 1937, so there was certainly some demand even back then, though I suspect the number of titles may have been proportionally tiny in relation to all the product an average studio put out year by year.
Actually, the emergence of TV proved such a threat to the movie industry that widescreen formats developed so as to create an even more significant visual contrast from the 1.33 aspect ratio of TV (which was based on motion pictures pre-1953). The development of other cinematic processes and gimmicks (Cinerama, stereophonic sound, 3D) were also a reaction to TV–so if anything, the industry was as concerned about the short-term competition TV posed as it was excited about the potential the long-term after-market relationship the medium might represent.
Yes, it was. I remember seeing Ben-Hur, for example, in the theater at least 10 years after it was released. Another example, in the Universal Frankenstein boxed set, the trailers they include for Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein are those of the re-release (probably because the original ones are either lost or too damaged).
No I’m talking the 1959 one, it was re-released in 1969 or so. I also remember a re-release of Gone with the Wind a few years later. So even after TV, they still re-released movies. I also remember reading an interview with either Forrest J Ackerman or Ray Harryhausen, mentioning a King Kong re-release.
There were a fair number of popular titles that held out against being shown on TV for awhile (e.g., the 1959 Ben-Hur was not seen on network TV until 1971 when it was aired by CBS). These were mainly epic films that benefitted from being seen in wide-screen and whose visual impact was adversely affected when they were panned-and-scanned for TV. I’m sure a number of Dopers of a certain age can recall finally seeing movies like Lawrence of Arabia, Bridge on the River Kwai, or 2001 for the first time on TV and noticing how crampt and tiny everything looked.
Also, even though it already had been on TV a near infinite number of times, I saw the uncut version of the original King Kong at a neighborhood multiplex in 1973 along with an hour of Warner Brothers cartoons. That was an entertaining December afternoon.
A couple people mentioned old movies at universities, and I can attest to that–at U of I in the late 1970’s, there were scads of old movies playing in auditoriums and basements every weekend. But where I grew up in the suburbs, there was nothing like that at all (that I knew of, anyway). Only theaters showed movies, and only very rarely would they show something not current. Of course, by the time I grew up, for everything except wide-screen spectacles, TV was a satisfactory alternative.
Sometimes I wonder why more people didn’t do that. Movie projectors couldn’t have been that expensive (could they?), and AV geeks from school knew how to work them. I personally, however, never knew anybody who owned one. Maybe it was too hard to get movies.
It was. Buying or renting feature films for home use was way beyond the budget for most people. As for the home movie systems themselves, they didn’t really become affordable for most families until the 50’s and even then, they were silent and only 8 mm. (Sound systems remained fairly pricey until the 70’s.) By that time of course, if you wanted to watch an old movie, you just watch one on TV and not bother with the expense.
When I was in grade school in the early 1970s they would show old movies (2-3 of them) in the school gym one saturday every couple-three months. It cost a dime to get in, and they’d sell store-brand soda, candy and popcorn at low prices. The Vice-Principal, Mr. O’Grady, would run the projector, and they’d have a few parents on hand to keep order. Within limits you could bring older and younger siblings.
The only movie I can recall was the origional flubber movie.
The OP asks about the status quo of old movies before television, so anecdotes from the 1960s and 1970s aren’t quite germane.
A little background on movies and television. Commercial television broadcasting began in the U.S. in 1941, and movies were a regular part of TV programming from the start. But the major Hollywood studios refused to license their films to television, which they saw as a competitor to the studios’ theater chains for the public’s leisure time. So, TV showed movies from independent producers, minor studios (Republic, Monogram, etc.), and Britain. Not until 1955–56 were the major studios willing to license their old film libraries to television, and even then the studios limited the selection to pre-1948 movies, because Screen Actors Guild contracts from 1948 onward required residual payments to actors. Post-1948 movies from the majors were finally shown on television starting in 1961.
(Wondering about the progress of television ownership? In 1950–51, 10% of U.S. households had a television. By 1953–54, 50% had TVs, and in 1962, 90% did.)
So, what did the major studios do with their old movies before the mid-1950s? Actually, old movies regularly played theaters, either because the studio reissued them (or licensed them to distributors who did), or because individual theaters requested inexpensive pictures to run on single or double bills. The regional film exchanges were more than happy to get some mileage out of prints sitting on their shelves. Take a look at the movie listings in a big city newspaper from the 1930s to the mid-1950s, and there will always be a few movies from years previous listed, often things you’ve never heard of (B-musicals for some reason seem to have been popular), not just blockbusters like Gone With the Wind or Disney classics.
There was a compromise solution for home owners who owned small-format film projectors (up through 1980s!): digest prints. 8mm, Super 8 (sound!), and 16mm releases consisting of one or two reels of selected scenes. Imagine an entire film edited down to 8 or 17 minutes (the approximate running times of the two commonly available reel lengths, 200 and 400 feet). The reels themselves are, of course, much smaller than a feature-length 16mm/35mm film; they’re pretty easy to store, being about the same size as a boxed reel-to-reel audio tape. Occasionally full-length features were also released to the home market in this fashion-- with reel changes needed every 16 minutes or so. Cinemascope releases were even available; with an anamorphic lens attached to their projector, a home viewer could watch widescreen reels.
The biggest distributor was Blackhawk Films (which distributed not only digest prints but kept early one- and two-reel short subjects in print for decades). Interestingly, Blackhawk’s prints of some old silent/early films are the only known versions available; Universal 8 was also big, and were well-known for their science fiction/horror/fantasy subjects (the Universal monsters, Star Wars (available in regular and Cinemascope) and Empire Strikes Back, Alien, Close Encounters of the Third Kind). Castle Films also had digests of the Universal monsters, as well as other early features. Walt Disney released some of their own featurettes and digests, and Official Films distributed Chaplin, Keystone Kops, and other early comedies.
Thanks for the info. I was aware that extremely popular titles continued to be re-released but did not know how often other movies would be seen after their initial release.
I remember those. My family used to have some of those films for our old home movie projector. Of course, they were silent and only consisted of a few scenes from the film so it wasn’t like having the full-length copy of the movie.
I saw Gone With The Wind at a cinema in the early 1980s, complete with intermission.
This film has been re-released several times since the advent of television, the last time being in the late 1990s. (It didn’t debut on television until the late 1970s, at least in the UK.) So yes, theatrical re-releases did take place well after TV became ubiquitous.
If you are talking very early films, a lot of silent films arre turning up in places like Australia and Czechoslovakia as they would be the end of the chain. It was not worthwhile to return them.