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September 23, 1961…”NBC Saturday Night At The Movies” Debuts

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Eyes Of A Generation.com

September 23, 1961…”NBC Saturday Night At The Movies” Debuts

“How To Marry A Millionare” was the first movie to air, and with this debut, came a new problem…how to show widescreen movies on TV! Thus was born, Pan and Scan.

DOES ANYONE KNOW HOW PAN/SCAN WAS DONE?
Since many of these “new to TV” films were in formats like CinemaScope (including Millionaire), up to 45% of the film frame was not able to be seen on the 4:3 TV screens, so a Pan and Scan method was used, as there was not letterboxing back then.

My question is, who did this? Did the studios provide edited versions to NBC, or did NBC do this “one the fly” with a movable telecine camera during the broadcast? Below is the technique, but this doesn’t answer the question.

During the Pan and Scan process, an editor selects the parts of the original filmed composition that seem to be the focus of the shot and makes sure that these are copied (i.e. “scanned”). When the important action shifts to a new position in the frame, the operator moves the scanner to follow it, creating the effect of a “pan” shot. In a scene in which the focus does not gradually shift from one horizontal position to another—such as actors at each extreme engaging in rapid conversation with each other—the editor may choose to “cut” from one to the other rather than rapidly panning back and forth.

I would think that the studios would provide pan/scan versions, because this required a lot of effort and editing expertise, but I don’t know…how about you? I know we have a lot of great technicians from both TV and film here, so please enlighten us.

By the way, “How To Marry A Millionaire” (1953) was the first film shown on “NBC Saturday Night at the Movies”, which ran until 1978. This was the first television program to exclusively broadcast relatively recent theatrical films on US network television. Until the early ’70s, movie studios held film from television for about 7 or 8 years, and some, like “Ben Hur” were held out for 12 years. In the mid 70s, the hold out period got to about 3 or 4 years.

The idea proved so successful that NBC soon followed it up with another series with the identical format, “Monday Night at the Movies”, and it wasn’t long before the format was taken up by both CBS and ABC.

The first made for TV movies sprang from this place!

With the demand for movies increasing during the 1960s, made-for-television films would soon be created by NBC, along with some help from now-sister company Universal. The first, was “See How They Run”, directed by David Lowell Rich and starring John Forsythe and Senta Berger. It first aired on October 7, 1964 and ushered in a series of other TV-movies over the years, aired on NBC under the title “NBC World Premiere Movie”. -Bobby Ellerbee

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9 responses to “September 23, 1961…”NBC Saturday Night At The Movies” Debuts”

  1. Eyes Of A Generation.com

    Thanks for all the great answers!

  2. Steven Bradford

    My first job out of college in 83 was at a lab that did the master film transfers for cable, network, and videotape releases, for MGM and The Goldwyn company. Mainly we were doing older films that had already been shown on television, and now we were making much better versions for Cable and VCR, though we had some newer MGM distributed films, such as Heavens Gate or Brainstorm. I was just the tape op.

    Rank Cintels were used. They could do very nice programmed pans that looked like tripod pans, unlike the very mechanical looking pans that had been done on Optical printers. I heard there was a special RCA telecine, probably a modified TK29, that could pan, but it also gave a very clunky result.

    Anyways, sometimes the creative folks were involved in the more recent films. We had to send UMatics tapes of the first Videodisc release master of 2001 to Stanley Kubrick for approval of the color and the pan and scan. Doug Trumbull personally oversaw the first transfer of Brainstorm.

    One of the more interesting ones was How the West Was One, a Cinerama film. The chief engineer tried to talk MGM into using the original 3 strip negatives to create 3 masters that would then be merged and panned and scanned. That was too expensive, and just the 35 mm internegative was used, and you could see the joins between the three panels.

    Otherwise, for the MGM and Goldwyn back library, a representative from the studio supervised them all. Unfortunately, for GWTW, they used the internegative for the 1967 wide screen re release, and cropped from that to 4:3. Which means the film was cropped twice from the original release. Turner fixed that several years later after acquiring MGMs library. They went back to the technicolor negs, and made a very good standard def transfer.

  3. David Breneman

    BTW, is it just this picture, or was Marilyn Monroe wall-eyed?

  4. David Breneman

    I was surprised to learn, when I was an exchange student in Germany in 1976, that the networks always letterboxed widescreen films. The difference in resolution between NTSC and PAL was striking (but so was the flicker). I remember having seen many films on American TV where the titles were letterboxed, but as soon as the action started it went to P&S. I became a big fan of letterboxing after seeing it in Europe.

  5. Samuel Nottingham

    P&S was never done on the fly, although some versions I have seen sure liked like it. It did not take long after the home video era started (about 1980) that the stats were more people were watching films on TV that tickets sold in the Theatre. Still, it took many years for creative people to take an interest in the Pan & Scan versions. Frequently, the job was handed off to the colorist, and perhaps check cassettes were sent out to the DP to view when finished. Sometimes the sessions were supervised, but the studios did their best to discourage this because supervised sessions were far more costly. Finally, this began to change in the late 90s, and creative people became more involved. It was not unusual for a feature film to take a week to scan. Today, the process is different with films being scanned into data, then color corrected and formatting for release. Yes, some films are still shot on film (as opposed to direct data); it depends on the director. The basic process has not changed – films are still corrected scene to scene. The various sub-versions are no longer created in a Telecine bay, but once the basic correction is done, other versions are formatted for their specific markets medium to medium by other operators.

  6. Samuel Nottingham

    I spent a good portion of my career doing pan and scan version for TV. Originally, P&S were done at the lab using an optical printer. The introduction of The Flying Spot Scanner moved this process to Post Houses where an incredibly better version could be done. If you think the practice has been retired because of HD, think again. Now films are P&S from CinemaScope to 16X9 for outlets like HBO that don’t want to show things letterboxes. These versions are still performed in post houses.

  7. Steve Dichter

    Kind of like when rectangular tube color tv’s replaced the roundie color sets in the mid ’60’s. We had to make sure any programs or commercials we shot didn’t cut off important picture info or text keeping the millions of round screen sets in use in mind. Guess the same thing occurred when rectangular B&W tubes replaced round screens in the early ’50’s.

  8. Steven B Hammel

    I quibble with one comment. By the late sixties/early seventies the window for a theatrical movie to pass over to network TV was down to about about a year. A little more than the current window for a movie to appear on premium cable now. Some Universal movies like COCKEYED COWBOYS OF CALICO COUNTY hit TV in even less than a year.

    This also introduces the other form of feature re-editing, the Network Version. First with words bleeped, then with re-recorded dialogue and even alternate scenes with many movies brutalized. And often this became the prints that appeared on TV for years to come. I recall overly zealous censors doing things like bleeping the ‘God’ when Doris Day says “I swear to God…” in BALLAD OF JOSIE.

  9. Marc Wielage

    Bobby, the answer is that initially, the LABS did the pan/scan optically on an optical printer. So it was done by an editor working with Technicolor or Deluxe, making a special 1.33 pan/scan version. Years later, various methods of doing pan/scan in telecine were devices in the 1970s. I don’t think it worked well until around 1978-1979, when the Rank-Cintel Scanners became popular, and you could program pan position shot-by-shot and scene-by-scene using computer-controlled positioning.

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