Nonmovie Movies

If Hollywood feature films do well on TV, what would happen if movies were made for TV to begin with? They would be pretty bad, that's what. But they would also attract big entertainment-hungry audiences. Last week, after the third round of World Premiere, a series of special, two-hour TV-movies being filmed by Universal Pictures, NBC was in gleeful possession of at least the No. 2 and 4 ratings among all the movies shown this season--topped only by ABC's incredibly popular rerun of a movie-movie, Bridge on the River Kwai. With five more such originals to follow--at a cost of $750,000 to $1,000,000 apiece--NBC is all but assured of the only conspicuous new success of the year.

One-Liners. Television and cinema have been edging toward this wedding for years. The first step was for Hollywood to take over production of almost all prime-time entertainment; while 84% of nightly TV was done live in 1955, barely 5% of it is now. As hour-long shows came into vogue, film makers learned the knack of the two-part story, which could then be stitched together and peddled in Europe as a Walt Disney or Man from U.N.C.L.E. feature film. At the same time, TV programmers discovered that, say, a ten-year-old Danny Kaye film could outdraw a brand-new Danny Kaye variety show. From that point on, there were no impediments to a final, formal marriage.

But World Premiere is, after all, a marriage made in Hollywood. The casting in the three films shown so far is second-rate, the direction and pace third-rate and the scripts cut-rate.

Noodling around the discarded film scraps from old adventure and spy movies, pasting the label "camp" on anything that does not make sense, the producers are the flattest Pied Pipers ever to lead the television industry into its next phase. In Fame Is the Name of the Game, for example, Tony Franciosa is a dashing magazine writer who regales his rookie researcher with snappy one-liners: "What's the matter with you? You look like your Living Bra just died." Tony spends so much time tracking down the killers that he has no time to write the story; Dead Bra does it for him, a few weeks out of Barnard.

The credibility gap widens in How I Spent My Summer Vacation, in which a social-climbing bum (Robert Wagner) cadges an Onassis-style cruise of the Greek islands from Multimillionaire Peter Lawford and Daughter Jill St. John. Once aboard, he detects dead fish in Lawford's bullion and bumbles off in search of the source. Lest the implausibility of it all seem unimportant, all traces of wit, style, imagination, intelligence or any other compensation have been carefully expunged. So too in Doomsday Flight, in which it is revealed that a self-pitying psychopath (Edmond O'Brien) has placed a bomb aboard Captain Van Johnson's airliner. The bomb is set to go off when the plane descends to 4,000 feet; two sniveling hours later, fast-thinking Captain Johnson lands at Denver (altitude 5,470 feet).

Money Belt. Jennings Lang, senior vice president in charge of TV production at Universal, argues dubiously that the quality of these films "has been pretty good, compared to most movies and most of the programs on television." To the nation's TV critics, who have greeted the series with unmelodious hoots, Lang retorts: "They wouldn't be able to tell which were made for television and which were made for theaters. The only difference is the size of the screen." Still Lang admits that the program's sights have been set, at least in the beginning, somewhere around the level of the money belt. "First we have to build a commercial appeal," he says, "then we will go on to other things."

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