Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties

Students of popular culture will find this exhaustive study of television and the motion picture industry illuminating, and not only because it turns on its head the commonly held assumption that television undermined the film industry. Drawing on the experience of Warner Bros., David O. Selznick and Walt Disney, Anderson, who teaches telecommunications at Indiana University, points out that the major film studios and independent producers moved into television production in the 1950s as new medium's popularity grew and, in fact, played a major role in its development. Television's emergence offered the studios ``a perfunctory salvation, an opportunity to reorganize and sustain established production operations when other social, economic and political forces threatened to end the studios' established hegemony in the movie industry.'' Furthermore, as dominant suppliers of television content, motion picture producers filled the airwaves with episodic series, borrowing narrative and production techniques developed for churning out B-movies. Anderson really excels when demonstrating television's role in influencing popular culture of the postwar period. Disney, who perhaps best understood the power of television, used the small screen to integrate the promotion of his company's movies, cartoon characters and latest venture, Disneyland, part of the brave new concept of ``total merchandising.'' (July)