Movie presentation on broadcast TV actually began in the late 1940s, when British companies rented films to new TV stations. Minor Hollywood studios (in particular Monogram and Republic) joined in this process, delivering approximately 4,000 titles to television stations before the end of 1950. Most of the films were genre works such as westerns or B-grade fare. The repeated showings of these low-budget offerings served to remind movie fans of the extraordinary number of treasures resting comfortably in the vaults of the major Hollywood studios: MGM, RKO, Paramount, 20th Century-Fox, and Warner Brothers.

The dominant Hollywood studios finally agreed to tender their vast libraries of film titles to television because eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes, owner of RKO, had run his studio into the ground. By late in 1953, it was clear Hughes had to do something to salvage RKO, and so few industry observers were surprised in 1954 when he agreed to sell RKO’s older films to the General Tire and Rubber Company to be presented on its independent New York television station. By 1955 the popularity of Million Dollar Movie made it clear that film fans would abandon theaters to curl up and watch a reshowing of their past cinematic favorites.

Thereafter, throughout the mid-1950s, all the major Hollywood companies released their pre-1948 titles to television. For the first time in the 60-year history of film, a national audience was able to watch, at their leisure, a broad cross section of the best and worst of Hollywood “talkies.” Silent films were only occasionally presented, usually in the form of compilations of the comedies of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton.

By the mid-1960s, innumerable “Early Shows,” “Late Shows,” and “Late, Late Shows” dotted TV schedules. For example, by one count, more than 100 classic black-and-white films aired each week on New York City television stations, with fewer movies being broadcast in less populous cities. But with color television becoming a more dominant presence, the three TV networks wished to book newer, Technicolor Hollywood feature films. The network with the most invested in color, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), thus premiered, at the beginning of the 1961–62 TV season, the first prime-time series of recent films as Saturday Night at the Movies. Ratings were high, and the other two major networks, the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), seeing how poorly their shows fared against Saturday Night at the Movies, quickly moved to set up their own “Nights at the Movies.” Early in 1962, ABC, then a distant third in the ratings, moved to first with a midseason replacement, Sunday Night at the Movies. CBS, the longtime ratings leader in network television, did not join in the trend until September 1965.

Soon thereafter, television screenings of recent Hollywood movies became standard practice. In 1968 nearly 40 percent of all television sets in use at the time tuned in to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (theatrical release date, 1963). Recent feature films regularly attracted blockbuster television ratings, and when Gone with the Wind was shown in two parts in early November 1976, half the nation’s television-owning homes tuned in.

By the early 1970s, American viewers could choose from ten separate “movie night” programs each week. It soon became clear that there was an imbalance between the many scheduled movies showings on network television and the relatively small amount of new product being aired. Hollywood knew this, and the studios began to charge higher and higher prices for TV screenings. For the widely viewed September 1966 telecast of The Bridge over the River Kwai, the Ford Motor Company paid nearly $2 million to be the sole sponsor.

Network executives found a solution: make movies aimed for a television premiere. The networks began making made-for-television movies in October 1964, when NBC aired See How They Run, starring John Forsythe. However, the historical turn came in 1966, when NBC contracted with MCA’s Universal studios to create a regular series of “world premiere” movies made for television. The initial entry of this continuing effort was Fame Is the Name of the Game, inauspiciously presented on a Saturday night in November 1966.

By the early 1970s, made-for-television motion pictures had become a mainstay of network programming. Profits proved substantial. A typical movie made for television cost $750,000, far less than what Hollywood was demanding for rental of its recent blockbusters. The ratings were phenomenal. Few expected that millions would tune in for Brian’s Song (1971), Women in Chains (1972), The Waltons’ Thanksgiving Story (1973), or A Case of Rape (1974), but such fare regularly outdrew what were considered the biggest films of the era: West Side Story (1961; 1972 premiere on network television), Goldfinger (1964; 1972 premiere on network television), and The Graduate (1967; 1973 premiere on network television).

ABC led the way in made-for-television movies. The ABC Movie of the Week had premiered in the fall of 1969, placed on the schedule by the young executive Barry Diller, then head of prime-time programming at ABC, later a founder of the FOX television network. During the 1971–72 television season, the series was composed entirely of movies made for television and finished as the fifth-highest series of the year. TV movies also began to earn praise for the upstart ABC; for Brian’s Song, the network earned five Emmys, a prestigious George Foster Peabody Award, and citations from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Cancer Society.

Made-for-television movies made it possible to deal with topical or controversial material not deemed appropriate for regularly scheduled network series. Celebrated actors and actresses who did not wish to work in series television would agree to be featured in miniseries. Running over several nights, miniseries such as Holocaust (1978), Shogun (1980), The Thorn Birds (1983), Fresno (1986), and Lonesome Dove (1989) drew large audiences during key rating-measurement periods. In 1983 ABC presented Winds of War on six successive February evenings for a total of 18 hours at a cost of production of nearly $40 million. This miniseries required more than 200 days to shoot from a script of nearly 1,000 pages. Winds of War, starring Robert Mitchum and Ali McGraw, more than returned its sizable investment in this key sweeps month by capturing half the total viewing audience and selling out all its advertising spots at $300,000 per minute.

Six years earlier, ABC’s miniseries Roots had aired for eight consecutive nights in January 1977. An estimated 130 million households tuned in to at least one episode, with approximately 80 million Americans watching the final episode of this docudrama, breaking the TV ratings record set just a year earlier by Gone with the Wind. Thus, Roots created for network television an event that was the equal of any blockbuster theatrical film.

However, even as Roots was setting records, the TV marketplace was changing. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, pay TV, particularly in the form of Time’s Home Box Office (HBO), drew millions to its uncut screenings of films, free of advertisement breaks. Later in the 1980s, home video spread to the vast majority of homes in the United States, allowing film fans to watch their favorites—uncut, uninterrupted, and whenever they liked. Theatrical features began to have so much exposure on pay TV and home video that they ceased to be as valuable on network evening showcases, and made-for-television films came to fill more and more of the time reserved for network “Nights at the Movies.”

There was change on the local level as well. The number of independent television stations doubled in the 1980s, and all used movies to help fill their schedules. Independents developed movie libraries by contracting with Hollywood studios for five-year rentals and aired acquired titles as many times as possible dur- ing that period. Researchers told executives of independent stations that movies tended to draw a larger-than-average share of valued female watchers, in particular those from the 18- to 34-year-old and 18- to 49-year-old age-groups so prized by advertisers.

By the 1990s, in an average week, a film fan could choose among hundreds of titles scheduled on TV. Reliance on television for the presentation of motion pictures extracted a high price in terms of viewing conditions. The dimensions of a standard television image are constructed on a four-by-three ratio, while the standard image for motion pictures made after 1953 is much wider. To accommodate the larger image on TV, the wide-screen film is cut off at the sides. Panning-and-scanning companies reedit the widescreen film so that the action shifts to the center of the frame, but the fan misses any subtlety at the edges.

Of course, films need not be panned and scanned. One could reduce the image for television until all of it fits; in practice, this technique of letterboxing fills the empty space above and below with a black matte. During the 1980s, there was a great deal of lip service paid to letterboxing, but movie watchers en masse in the United States did not seem to care for it. Fans seemed to prefer that the TV frame be filled, with the primary action in the center of the screen. In the early 2000s, the increasingly pervasive adoption of wide-screen television technology and the popularity of widescreen TVs addressed this problem.

However, the biggest complaint from the average television viewer of motion pictures has long concerned the interruption of the movie by advertisements. To fit the formulaic slots of television, a station or network shows but 90 minutes of film for a two-hour slot. Stories of how television companies cut films to fit the program length are legendary. It is said that Fred Silverman, when he was a lowly film editor at WGN-TV in Chicago, solved the problem of fitting in the 96-minute Jailhouse Rock in a 90-minute slot by cutting all of Elvis Presley’s musical numbers. Indeed, the key attraction of pay TV and then home video was the elimination of interruptions for advertising.

Just when experts declared that, in an age of pay TV and home video, blockbuster movies shown on network television could not draw an audience, NBC offered Jurassic Park. The box office hit, widely available on home video for less than $15, was shown on Sunday, May 7, 1995, at the beginning of a key sweeps month. Advertisers paid $650,000 for each 30- second advertising slot, and more than one in four television households in the United States tuned in.

In the early 2000s, broadcast networks and cable channels continued to present feature films and made-for-television movies. Indeed, the latter represented a common strategy for cable channels in their moves to create original programming that could replace material previously aired on network television or produced for other venues. The music channel Video Hits 1 (VH1) produced feature-length films based on performer biographies, whereas the sports channel Entertainment and Sports Network (ESPN) made movies about athletes and coaches. The Court Channel produced dramatic representations of legal battles. A&E produced mysteries based on Nero Wolfe novels. Turner Network Television (TNT) produced westerns and thrillers. At the same time, HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax continued to produce original movies as regular additions to their schedules of previously run theatrical features.

Meanwhile, a new technology for watching films on TV, the digital video disc (DVD), grew in popularity, with one in four U.S. households owning a DVD player in 2001 and various distributors phasing out their VHS stocks altogether. While it is too early to tell whether VHS-format videocassettes and DVD will exist side by side in most households or whether DVD will replace VHS as the preferred means to play movies on television, the popularity and ease of home movie viewing will surely remain a common aspect of the uses of television.