Television: What's The Difference?

One of Hollywood's favorite open-end discussions concerns the difference between making films for television and making films for theatres. Almost as many answers have been given as there are people entitled to give one. A list of the differences most often cited would have to include size of screen, size of budget, length of shooting schedules, footage restrictions in TV, the pressures of the deadline, plus a long list of special opinions, like the one from Raymond Chandler, who once said that the big difference was words. "Words are more important in TV because the lunkheads would think nothing was happening and go out for a beer."

The size of the screen makes a difference if you're talking about a 70mm epic, but less than ten per cent of motion picture output fits this category. Theatrical films vary in length from 75 minutes to four hours. Dramatic films for TV run from 50 minutes to five or six hours. Budgets and shooting schedules ought to make an enormous difference, but the evidence that they actually do is clear only to agonized accountants. Most of the arguments ultimately invite the comment that a difference that doesn't make any difference is no difference.

When I came into TV I was an advocate of the screen-size argument, it took me two full seasons to discover the hard answer, the One True Difference, and I became a zealot. All conversions result from a searing experience, and so did mine. The experience was a Maverick episode called Gun-Shy.

It was an unusual episode and had received an enormous amount of publicity before and during shooting. The first rough cut was run on a Friday evening. It had been put together with touching care by the editor and one of my colleagues, who had had as much to do with the project as I had. The show was on footage and my colleague felt strongly that it was ready for delivery. I felt just as strongly that it was not. And since I had a profound respect for his talent and opinion, I had a problem. I spent the weekend struggling with that problem, and suddenly the answer seemed as obvious as a missing thumb. If Gun-Shy had not been made for TV, my friend and I would not be quarreling, we would have taken the film to a theatre and let an audience tell us what we needed to know. So I gathered an audience, which hated the show; changes were made and another audience was assembled, which loved the show. Neither audience was adequate, both groups being too small and too professional to be relied upon, but nothing better was available. Gun-Shy was telecast, favorably reviewed, and given a high score by Nielsen, which made the sponsors happy but told us very little. Maybe my colleague was right. Maybe I was.

That is the significant difference, the heart of the matter. With the coming of filmed television, writers, directors, producers and actors forfeited all contact with audiences. The history of drama has been a history of transmission, reception and response. In the medieval period of English drama, the Corpus Christi processions, with their mystery and miracle plays, were organized through the trade guilds, and it was frequently hard to tell the audience from the players. Things got sorted out later on, especially after the actors formed their own guilds, but audiences continued to be an essential part of an equation of which the end result was the social art of the drama. The creative people put the work together, but suffered through preparations and rehearsals in about the same anxious spirit as a groom: the performance was all that mattered. The truth happened, the work of art came into being -- or didn't -- only when the equation was completed, when the work was performed by actors before an audience.

Playwrights still use audiences as an elemental part of the creative process. It is called the out-of-town tryout. And sometimes those audiences say all there is to say. Tennessee Williams could say it wasn't so with a Milk Train, but no writer, producer or director has ever been able to claim a success ungranted by an audience -- except in television, where it happens constantly.

Motion picture producers and directors, many of whom unfailingly ignore the advice of professionals highly paid to provide it, attend "sneak" previews with clammy hands and an esteem for the audience amounting to awe. And if the audience likes the picture, the awe turns to ripe reverence. No producer has ever been known to say, "They're wrong," except in a croaking voice while wondering how much re-shooting he may have to do.

The creative people in motion pictures could cut themselves off from the audience and not attend previews or regular showings, but with the exception of an occasional actor, I have never known one who has done so. Sitting in the darkness of a theatre watching something you have written or directed or produced, surrounded by men and women unknown to you, and to whom you are equally unknown, is a harrowing experience. You look, but what you see is alien to you. That scene you prized so highly appears to have been re-cut and lengthened. A scene you almost deleted takes on new meaning because a line, or just a look in an actor's eye, has produced an audience reaction you didn't expect, the scene is alive and working, not just for the audience, but for you, and for the first time. What you are doing is seeing your film through the eyes of that audience, cued by their restlessness or laughter, or -- sweetest of all -- by their breathless silence.

The experience is chastening, often painful, but seldom misleading, and each time something has been learned, even when there is no remedy, Next time. . .

This interplay with an audience is experienced in television only by the creative people who put half-hour sitcoms on tape before a live audience. In television drama shot on film the experience is denied to the actors, writers, producers and directors. Nor do we have even a faintly adequate substitute for it. As the song goes, "we get letters." Many of the letters are literate and thoughtful, but they represent one individual's opinion, an opinion deeply flawed: that viewer also saw the show without an audience.

The role that ratings play in television bears no resemblance to the role that box-office plays in motion pictures. People constantly question ratings, no one questions box-office results. So what about the ratings? Do they tell us anything? Yes, but no one knows quite what. A high rating may indicate that the show the week before was well liked -- or it may not. A declining rating within the hour may tell you that the show did not hold the attention of the audience. But it could indicate something else, or nothing at all: a decline of two or three points is well within the admitted margin of error of the system. The ratings tell the sponsor whether or not he has made a good buy. They may even tell the creative people something. But ratings do not substitute for an audience, they do not restore the social equation.

I was producing one-hour episodic series and World Premieres at Universal in the mid-60's, and one day I looked up and saw a busload of happy tourists passing by, I recognized them immediately: there went our unseen, unheard audience, the very people I had so desperately needed when I "previewed" Gun-Shy.

I wasted no time asking the executive in charge of the tours if I could steer some of those people into a large projection room to show them a television-show-in-progress. The answer was a fast and happy yes. Universal was bringing 20,000 visitors to the studio each week. They came from every state of the Union, of all ages and sexes, and from every economic group except the indigent and the ridiculously wealthy. And they all had television sets. I began to show audiences of 100 or slightly more, one-hour series episodes or World Premieres. The shows had music and effects tracks (sometimes temp), but negative had not been cut. I sat with the audience looking like a refugee from the State of Washington, which I was. I watched the film and saw it as if for the first time. A laugh goes up that shouldn't be there, a trim will fix it. An episode assumed to be the best choice to open the season is not received as well as two others, which now become candidates. A scene we had thought was funny doesn't get a single laugh, and it is clear why: it isn't funny. That will be a little harder to fix.

Was this putting too much faith in a group of amateurs? Of course not, that's what an audience is. And we did not rely merely on cues picked up from the audience during the runnings, or on the many insights gained by simply being there with them. After each running the audience was asked to complete a brief questionnaire much like the traditional motion picture preview card. These responses were often helpful in revealing ambiguities, confusions, oversights and flat-out errors.

Restoring contact with an audience was not the answer to all our troubles. Shaw was doubtless onto something when he remarked, after one of his own openings, that the play was a success but the audience had failed. But the results of the experiment were more stimulating, more helpful and more edifying than we had dared to expect, and gave strong support to the suspicion that popular drama which is transmitted and received, but to which there is no organic response, may not remain popular for long.

This may sound like a fantasy induced by frustrated need. The events I have just described did indeed happen, but you may never have heard about them because the experiment, after only a few sweet weeks, was abruptly terminated.

The executive who brought me the bad news seemed close to tears -- after all, we had introduced a new "event" to the Tour, and a successful one at that. But there were problems developing, union problems, lots of them, and growing rapidly. All plans for "previewing" television shows were to be stopped -- now, not tomorrow.

Being a loyal member of three Hollywood unions myself, I chose not to question this executive decision. I canceled the experiment and we all returned to what was, and continues to be, the status quo, the condition that so profoundly dissevers television from live drama and theatrical motion pictures.