Return To When Television Was Film
By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Nov 3, 2011 8:20PM
Today, celluloid apologist Roger Ebert was forced to admit that digital has definitively displaced film, even going so far as to declare film "dead." I don't think any of the rest of us are as surprised as he is, and rather pondering what this might mean, we'll note that this won't be the first time the medium was pronounced deceased. Take the rise of television (please). The steep drop off in cinema attendance that began in the '50s with the rise of television audiences turned many a studio executive prematurely gray and pronounced the patient beyond hope, but while what followed in the next decade may have been the death throes of the studio system, cinema itself it experienced a worldwide re-invigoration.
Even on the boob tube itself, the supposedly-dead format of film lived a zombie existence behind the scenes as stations acquired film by the truckload to play directly over the airwaves. Next Sunday, the Northwest Chicago Film Society presents an evening of 16mm film liberated from Midwestern television stations showcasing some amazing artifacts of this period. Feature movies, Saturday morning cartoons, commercials, sitcoms... everything a station needed to pad out a broadcast schedule was retrieved from a can of film. These prints would then be projected directly into a TV camera. "Imagine the pressure," notes NCFS projectionist Kyle Westphal, "if the film breaks, every rugrat in metro Detroit sees your mistake!"
NCFS's Rebecca Hall says that they always see well-worn, beaten up prints of the feature films that TV stations owned floating around, and one day they realized that all the non-movie content, "the original-to-TV-as-a-form stuff... the shows, cartoons, commercials, etc" had to be out there too. When NCFS co-founder Julian Antos discovered a black and white copy of an odd, Hanna Barbera Monkees-inflected show about a musical band of cats called Cattanooga Cats in a box of assorted films he snagged off Craigslist, they knew that they decided to put a program together.
By hitting up Chicago-area collecters, they have put together an evening of cartoons, commercials and TV shows from the '50s and '60s that you're not going to find on TV Land, Youtube, or anywhere else. Film buffs will be interested in an episode of Boris Karloff's hour-long TV Horror show from the early '60s, Thriller, but there promises to be something for everybody on tap: Superman, Rocky and Bullwinkle, I Love Lucy, Rod Serling, and more. There are also commercials that will make us laugh and/or light-up once-abused but now untraveled neural pathways ("Please don't squeeze the Charmin!," anyone?).
TV on FILM happens at Sunday, Nov. 13 at Cinema Borealis, 1550 N Milwaukee ave., from 6 p.m. until 11 p.m.