The T.N.T. Man

Behind a gold-painted locomotive, a trainload of G.M. brass rolled into Flint, Mich, last week to celebrate the production of G.M.'s 50 millionth car. While G.M. President Harlow Curtice looked on, a gold-plated Chevrolet rolled off the assembly line. At lavish luncheons in 52 hotels scattered through the U.S., and in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall, another 15,000 invited guests watched the festivities over the most extensive closed-circuit TV network ever rigged.

For G.M. it was a great occasion. "Red" Curtice predicted a 10% rise in the auto industry's output next year (to 5,800,000 cars). By 1970, he said, G.M. would produce its 100 millionth car. The party was just as big an occasion for another company: Manhattan's Theatre Network Television, Inc. (T.N.T.), which assembled the private TV circuit. It was T.N.T.'s 75th big-screen production.

Football & Four Roses. T.N.T. was started just five years ago by Nathan Halpern, a University of Southern California graduate who worked as assistant to CBS President Frank Stanton before deciding to go into closed-circuit TV. He thought that movie theaters would be glad to get back some of the customers they had lost to TV.

Halpern has run such star-spangled events as the Marciano-Charles heavyweight championship fight last September and the opening of the Metropolitan Opera in November (TIME, Nov. 22). But he also learned that the big money lay in televising national sales meetings and other conventions for big corporations. In the past two years T.N.T. has televised eleven conventions for companies ranging from National Dairy (Seal-test) to James Lees carpets. At one such TV roundup, International Business Machines was able to brief 2,000 salesmen in Manhattan on a new electronic brain instead of bringing them to its Poughkeepsie, N.Y. plant in groups. Frankfort Distillers (Four Roses, Paul Jones) gave its salesmen in 19 cities fresh tips for selling whisky, along with a variety show put together by T.N.T., featuring Guy Lombardo's band and Aptor Robert Cummings.

Travel & Trouble. T.N.T.'s charges range from $2,500 for a single-city production to $150,000 for national presentation of "package" shows that include cameras, circuit lines, scripts and actors. Customers have found the rates are often far below the cost of picking up travel expenses for an entire company's sales force. Last week's show, for example, cost G.M. several hundred thousand dollars (including rental of 50 giant, mobile projectors that Halpern bought for $500,000). But it was much cheaper--and far less trouble--than trying to bring all the guests to Flint.

When Halpern launched T.N.T., only seven theaters were set up for closed-circuit TV; now there are more than 100. With them, plus a network of hotels and their built-in banquet facilities, Halpern thinks T.N.T. has just started to explode.

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