First Casualty

Hollywood, brooding about its newfangled competitor, television, likes to think of it as a cloud that is still no bigger than a man's hand. Last week the TV cloud was casting a sizable shadow on one of the U.S. screen's hardiest perennials: the newsreel.

In New Jersey, the 40-theater Walter Reade chain had dropped newsreels experimentally in half a dozen houses without a single complaint from a customer; it decided to ease them, out gradually in other theaters. In Manhattan, the RKO chain admitted that it would try the same experiment in a handful of its 108 double-feature houses.

The painful fact was that 4,000,000 feet of film still streaming weekly out of five major newsreel companies (Fox-Movietone, Paramount, Warner Pathe, Universal, M-G-M News-of-the-Day) was being staled in television areas by TV's faster, if still less complete, news coverage in pictures. Peacetime had put a big crimp in the popularity won by the war's combat films. But when such ordinarily surefire films as last year's Louis-Walcott fight and Army-Navy game failed to draw heavily, the realists knew the reason: TV.

Farsighted newsreelers think that one hope for their survival in theaters lies along a trail blazed by Paramount, toward an interpretive digest of the news in a documentary style popularized by the MARCH OF TIME. In the long run, they hope to compete in spot news through big-screen theater television. Theater TV may also become a major movie sideline. Last week 20th Century-Fox was reported nurturing a plan to set up big TV screens in 15 or 20 of its West Coast theaters by year's end. Through closed circuits, Fox would feed topnotch "live" shows to thea ter screens and outbid TV networks and advertisers for high-priced talent.

In the East, cautious exhibitors waited to be convinced. It would be expensive to install the big TV equipment. (Current estimate: $25,000 per theater.) An even bigger headache: supplying the money and imagination for the kind of TV shows that will persuade customers to leave their living-room sets and buy tickets.

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