Where have you gone, Tyrone Power?
For the most part, he has gone the way of Coop, Bette, Spence and Edward G.: He’s now playing on the “classic movie” cable channels, either American Movie Classics, the well-established, highly successful purveyor of movies from Hollywood’s golden age in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, or its new rival, Turner Classic Movies.
The older, more obscure movies that used to be shown on your local broadcast television station as the “Million Dollar Movie” are increasingly in the hands of those two classic movie channels, and are thus available only to movie buffs who have invested in cable (and whose cable systems offer the channels, which has been a problem for the Turner enterprise).
There are exceptions: local channels continue to schedule a few of the true giants, like “Casablanca” and “Psycho.” So we’ll always have Paris and the Bates Motel.
And NBC scored a ratings victory by locking up the rights this year to the holiday classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” and showing it-in its original black-and-white version-on Dec. 10.
In recent years, the 1946 Frank Capra film, which many stations believed was in the public domain, turned up on local stations and cable channels innumerable times every holiday season. To put it politely, the film’s currency was being devalued. But the studio that made the movie, Republic Pictures, managed to reassert exclusive rights to it this year.
John Agoglia, president of NBC Enterprises, looking to create another holiday franchise movie for his network, which already has two-“Home Alone” and “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”-made a deal with Republic to secure the rights exclusively for his network.
NBC had to be especially diligent to ensure that exclusivity. Agoglia said the network scoured program schedules for stations all over the country and called four or five (including Chicago’s WTTW-Ch. 11) that apparently had not yet heard that their copies of “Wonderful Life” would have to go back on the shelf. “They were extremely gracious and promised not to broadcast it,” he said.
The network broadcast of “It’s a Wonderful Life” drew a 10.2 rating, a huge increase over NBC’s usual Saturday night rating of 8.2. (Each rating point represents 954,000 homes.)
Agoglia said NBC has a long-term deal for “It’s a Wonderful Life” and planned to broadcast it once every holiday season. Similarly, CBS still broadcasts “The Wizard of Oz” annually, and NBC has for many years trotted out “The Sound of Music” at Easter time.
But what about movies that are fondly regarded but are slightly less familiar to a mass audience: “All About Eve,” say, or “Stage Door” or “Lives of a Bengal Lancer”? Gradually these kinds of films, not to mention lesser-known ones, have all but vanished from broadcast television and are seen only on cable channels.
Partly this is because the audience for Randolph Scott Westerns or Alice Faye musicals has dwindled, and stations can get a bigger viewership by showing “The Karate Kid” instead. But another reason is that the ownership of old movies increasingly rests with Ted Turner, chairman of Turner Broadcasting, who is, after all, a competitor of the broadcasters.
For Turner’s company, which owns more than 3,800 titles, the biggest film library in the world, the decision on when to license a film for syndication to broadcast stations and when to retain it for use on one of the company’s cable channels is, said Scott Sassa, the president of the Turner Entertainment Group, “an extremely complicated situation, which we feel fine to be in.”
Essentially, Turner executives must decide again and again about their film assets: Should they be used to pump up profits through syndication sales, or should they be shown only on Turner cable channels to build audiences?
“The whole game is balance,” Sassa said. He praised Turner for having what he called the vision to forgo some quarterly profits in syndication for the sake of strengthening his cable channels.
“Some companies have bonuses based on yearly growth,” Sassa said. Their executives may realize they could sacrifice to build a long-term asset, but, he said, “the guys in syndication whine and say, `You’ll lose X amount of money.’ “
Turner instead has adopted a strategy of selectively making its biggest titles available to local stations in syndication packages.
Movies move in and out of syndication for periods of time known as windows. Usually Turner will put a big title in with a larger package of films, to give the stations some incentive to buy less-popular titles. A movie can go into a syndication window for a year, or the windows can be far shorter.
For example, last month Turner offered “Gone with the Wind,” which it owns, to stations for two plays within 30 days. It was what is known as a barter-syndication deal: The stations received several minutes of commercial time in the movie and Turner sold the rest itself.
