the big game in the world is the movies. it's the biggest game. it always has been the biggest game. television is the exact opposite. it's a postage stamp and it has to draw you in. there's no question that this is the age of images and it became that way because of television. and the movies, of course, have to deal with that. i think we're on the verge of a media revolution comparable to the arrival of television itself. annenberg media ♪ and:

with additional funding from these foundations and individuals: and by: and the annual financial support of: hello, i'm john lithgow. welcome to "american cinema." in 1946, hollywood didn't think a tv screen only inches in size could ever compete with a theatre screen 30 feet wide. movies were king.

television was a novelty developed by radio industry. barely 6,000 sets were in use across the entire country. by 1951, it was a new world and television was a part of it. movie theatres were closing in waves, 55 in new york alone. to make matters worse, hollywood was coming apart. anti-trust action dismantled the entire studio system. the monopoly of the movies was over. hollywood's reaction to tv was like one of its plot lines. at first denial, then feeling threatened, followed by fierce competition until embracing the adversary. yet it was television that produced a new generation of movie directors that told stories in new ways, with movies like "the manchurian candidate," "bonnie and clyde," and "mash." the studios didn't disappear; they adapted. and so did the movies. today, we are on the verge of another revolution, as a whole new range of digital technologies

will change both the business and style of motion pictures. in this program, narrated by cliff robertson, we will see some surprises as tv collided with the movies in "film in the television age." ♪ just friends ♪ lovers no more ♪ just friends ♪ but not like before ♪ film... tv. one is reverential, the other is "i'm dominating." (charles champlin) the whole story of movies in the last 40 years

is the competitive fight with television, the movies responding to what tv does do or doesn't do, can't do, and so on. i don't think it's been a struggle at all. i think there's been a complete symbiosis. i think they are mutually dependent. i think they are coming closer and closer together. i don't think it's a struggle at all. (robert altman) any film i've made has been seen by more people on tv than it ever has in cinema. but i don't think it makes any difference. eventually, every house will have a 6- to 8-foot screen and you sit 10 feet away from an 8-foot screen, you just as well be in the front at the ziegfield. (music playing) ladies and gentlemen, the break in our motion picture is made out of respect for the tv fans in our audience who are accustomed to constant interruptions in their programs for messages from sponsors. tv is a remarkable invention. where'd you go?

oh, there you are. hi. (music playing) (narrator) in 1946, america's romance with the movies peaked. over half of our population, 90 million a week, were filling theatres. (charles champlin) moviegoing was a national habit. you went automatically because, theoretically, all films were, as we would now say, rated "g." there was nothing in any movie that was presumably disturbing to the least sophisticated member of the audience. some might bore part of the audience, but otherwise, we just went all the time. (narrator) though americans didn't know it their exclusive love affair with the movies was about to end. the same year that movie attendance peaked, the television networks began daily broadcasts from new york. the competition between motion pictures and television

would transform expectations, revolutionize hollywood, and usher in a new generation of film directors trained in the television medium. i had a job lined up as an assistant to john ford. he had to go into the hospital and have cataract operations, and he told me that, "look, i don't know when i'm going to be functioning again. and, if i were you, as a young guy today, what i would try and do is to get into television." (arthur penn) it was so unknown as a medium, we were sort of inventing it as we went along. and that was both the thrill and the excitement and part of the danger of it, very considerable danger. (sidney lumet) try to imagine what the scale meant. a 17-inch piece of glass was a large television set. they were 12-inch glass pieces, what they used to call, "14 inches diagonally."

the reduced dramatic material to that kind of size, as opposed to movies, which had a 40-foot image, it was absolutely a new form. (narrator) the early networks borrowed heavily from the new york theatre to create dramas, broadcast live across the nation. changing characters and stories from week to week, these fast-paced collaborations produced some of america's best-known writers, directors, and actors. (peter falk) live television did have the same tension as the theatre did in the sense that once started, you couldn't stop it. you got the same butterflies, the same nervousness about it there used to be three cameras and the one with the red light

was the one that was on. now there wasn't an actor alive that wasn't sneakin' looks to see which one was on. "am i on?" "and if i'm not, why not?" it had hideous technical difficulties. you were always having, when you were acting, to step over great big cables and boxes and run around fast to enter another thing, and it was live. so you did get sort of an idea that you could do anything. and it took a certain kind of nerve of steel to do live television because you never knew when the cameras were going to break down on the air, which happened really more frequently than not. it was madness in that you had so little time. (delbert mann) you'd finish the show 10:00 on sunday night, come in the next morning, pick next week's script. staging and acting rehearsals monday, tuesday, wednesday.

on thursday, the producer would arrive. and at that time i already had to have the shot list, the camera moves, the camera cabling. saturday we blocked the show on camera. sunday we'd come in at noon, pick up the blocking, do a one run-through rehearsal, and you're on the air at 9:00. the show was done from beginning to end l-i-v-e. so the audience was able to cope with the mistakes, and the perspiration dripping off the actor's nose. it's kind of like an audience sitting in theatre, so it had a kind of excitement. not a bad crowd tonight. there was a girl in a black dress wearing beads. the only thing that was wrong, she's a little too tall for me. hey, there's a nice-lookin' short one for you down there. what we would get is a series of domestic dramas broadcast into american living rooms. and i think it's not an accident.

it's as if one living room meets another living room. i don't wanna go to the waverly ballroom. they stand around, make me feel like i'm a bug. i got feelings, too, no, thank you. marty! (marty) i'm going to stay home and watch sid caesar. you goin' to die without a son! so then i... i will die without a son. marty, put on the blue suit. i'm a fat little man, a fat, ugly little man! (sidney lumet) you were coming to their homes. this is a new experience in the history of entertainment and i don't know whether we know its significance yet. (charles champlin) it was a time of terrifying transition. television was taking hold, the graph of television sets and uses climbing like this, and the graph of attendance was going like that.

(music playing) (clicking of movie projector coming to a stop) hey, that was a good movie. yeah, seen it here before once. well, s'long, miss mosey. sorry you're closin' the show. nobody wants to come to shows no more. got baseball in the summer, television all the time. won't be much to do in town with the picture show closed. yeah. (charles champlin) hollywood was in a very peculiar period then. you had a curious hesitation of leadership in the industry, and i think they didn't quite know how to cope with tv. (upbeat music playing) (jonas rosenfield) when i was at 20th century fox, we developed the theme "movies are better than ever," we went around to promote that to the exhibitors, the industry and to the public.

we had trailers on the screen telling them all the pictures that were coming and so on and so forth. it was an attempt to utilize publicity to fight what was a major technological change. (narrator) hollywood turned to gimmicks, each more and more outlandish. 3-d, smellovision, psychorama. (gene siskel) it was a carny show in effect. there was the impulse that we must offer something that they can't get at home, and one of the things would be to widen out. that was triggered by television. (announcer) ladies and gentlemen, this is cinerama. (screams in the background)

(charles champlin) cinerama has 3 projectors, wonderful effects. i mean you really did get a 3-d effect on a 2-d screen, (screams in the background) but it was just too cumbersome and you had wavering lines where the images met and it was wonderful novelty, but it just wasn't going to do it. (sound effects as doors slide open) (narrator) although it failed to catch on, it led to new widescreen forms. this motion picture was photographed in the grandeur of cinemascope and gorgeous life-like color. (single musical note) gorgeous life-like color by deluxe! (music playing) (jonas rosenfield) imagine, in september of 1953, the impact of this huge image

on the audiences which attended the showing of the first of the cinemascope pictures. studios were quick to realize that cinemascope offered one of the solutions to the fight against television and forever committed motion pictures to widescreens. (gene siskel) movies always offered a chance to go someplace you can't go. tv wasn't going to present something of that scale then. this kind of lavish spectacle was the kind of thing that was being attempted in response to tv in the 1950s. (jesus from cross) father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. (lightning strikes) (sad music playing)

(sidney lumet) it's overwhelming. i like the screen to just fill everything. television is the exact opposite. it's a postage stamp and it has to draw you in. this is where we'll kill 'em. you're kiddin'? i'm not kiddin'. hey, frankie, this is where we live. you an' me in this house and baby next door. you an' me and baby makes three, 'eh? this is the place. i don't know when we'll do it, but it's gonna be here. nobody believed we worked in our own backyard ... (sidney lumet) kitchen sink drama is what we all specialized in. what it really meant was a small set, because our studio facilities and our budgets were tiny. but what it showed was that a television show

is capable of having real depth and moving people enormously. i wouldn't ask you to drink with me. and i control it -- you can't control it. we're alcoholics. i'm not! yes, you are! you and i were a couple of bums on a sea of booze. only i got something to keep me from going under. i'm not gonna let go, if you want, grab hold, but there's only room for you an' me, no threesome! (john frankenheimer) we had great writers working in television, like paddy chayevsky, rod serling, j.p. miller. somebody asked me once, "well, why were you guys able to do all that good stuff on television then compared to what they do on television now?" i think the answer is then most people didn't have tv's. (narrator) by 1956, over two-thirds of american households had at least one television set. with this explosive growth came a change in program style.

i know. television's a menace to the american family. people no longer eat together, think together, talk together. they just watch tv together. and you don't think that's right? gee, mom, i think pop's all wet. a tv family is a happy family. suddenly everybody became aware tv had produced a huge audience and with that came the guys in the grey suits. (arthur penn) and they began to say, "wait a minute. if we're sponsoring this, they can't say this" or "they can't say that." and that was the beginning of the exodus for all of us from serious live television. (narrator) the rise of network television gave moviemakers a new chance. with movie attendance at half the level of a decade before, hollywood saw a chance to counter its own decline by producing programs directly for this new medium.

(todd gitlin) studios turned television into an assembly-line product. it did that by building a set, using it on 39 episodes a year. they had a regular cast. the division of labor was very precise. the turnaround time on episodes was very brief. now, of course, the studios had always done that. let's not romanticize the old studio set-up, but here the formulas were even more confining because week after week "the phil silvers show" or "ozzie and harriet" had to be recognizably the same. (announcer) "ozzie and harriet" starring the entire nelson family ozzie, harriet, david and rickie. hello. i'm mister ed. (narrator) these weekly television series, shot on film, marked the end of the era of live television. (sidney lumet) you've got filmed television. so the result is you've got the worst of both mediums. you don't have time and care that you can put into a movie

and you don't have the thrill and adventure and completion of seeing the entire piece at once. (narrator) while much of hollywood turned to television, studio directors responded with more sumptuous cinema fare. (romantic music playing) (todd gitlin) well, the movies then tried to deliver what tv couldn't... big stars. big screen, big sound, big effects ... big. (narrator) grand epics and larger-than-life melodramas by directors like douglas sirk infused classic filmmaking with a lushness rarely seen before. (loud music with percussions playing)

(loud music with percussions playing) (finale of music) i guess i can recognize pain a mile off, you know. all my brothers and sisters, they're always tellin' me what a good-hearted guy i am. you don't get to be good-hearted by accident. you gotta be kicked around long enough ... (narrator) at the other extreme, in '55, united artists released a film version of "marty." they're always tellin' me what a good-hearted guy i am. you don't get to be good-hearted by accident. you get kicked aroun' long enough and you get to be a real professor of pain. i know exactly how you feel.

and i also want 'cha to know i'm havin' a very good time with you right now and really enjoyin' myself. you see, you're not such a dog as you think you are. the ability of feature pictures to deal with the intimacy, like "marty" did have an impact on hollywood filmmaking, being the fact that it won the oscar. what do you feel like doin' tonight? i don't know, ang'. what do you feel like doin'? we ought to do somethin', it's saturday night. hollywood always needed new talent and i think that these men had begun to have reputations. frankenheimer, with all his working on "playhouse 90," and the emmys he was getting, was suddenly a hot property. i turned down a lot of movies. it was only until live television stopped being. (john frankenheimre) due to the invention of tape and changes in management

it became necessary to go into film. (arthur penn) we weren't landed gentry. we weren't part of the hollywood establishment. we were these nuts from new york mostly, and kind of crazy because the live tv experience had made us a little fearless, a little unorthodox certainly. the big game in the world is the movies. it's the biggest game. it's always been the biggest. so when a television director gets a chance to make a feature, they're going to go flat out. (jazz music playing) (gene siskel) they were determined to break with the patterns and genres. they would make revisionist detective stories, revisionist westerns. they thought they could do something fresh.

(narrator) frankenheimer, cassavetes, lumet, penn and tv directors now began to make feature films. the intensity and innovation that characterized their work on television challenged conventional filmmaking, leading to the most important films of the next decade. you can imagine getting out to a place like hollywood, where everything is very tightly proscribed. a director does this. a first assistant does that. i didn't know, for instance, i was supposed to say "action." (woman moaning) (arthur penn) it's a combination of what i would call the irreverence of television and technique of film. (wom (arthur penn) wouldn't it be wonderful if you put a camera on a little hydraulic lift in the middle of the floor

and we panned it 360 degrees and then as she came forward toward the camera and fell, there was her face... poverty and naivete are very good ways of making some interesting movies. (arthur penn) after the success of "the miracle worker," i was able to say, "i want to make certain films, and they will be very low-budget films, but i don't want to have to explain the movie to you." and so that's what i did. (man) read it. (woman) but why is his shirt on inside-out? (man) open it, read it. (warren beatty) "dear lois... " (woman) mickey! (man) lois! (man) they're sending their reports to the secretaries now? give the beard a quiet brushing? (man) the what? who sent you here? (woman) why is his shirt on inside-out? (man) shut up with his shirt. get him outta here!

but it, again, was an idea of breaking the story orthodox getting into another kind of narrative form. it's a character study, it's a character study, and it ultimately is a character study, okay? and if you wait for something to be ultimately resolved, it's not that kind of movie. and that's refreshing. it's also extremely frustrating for a mainstream audience. do i hear anybody? (things falling and ringing sound) it was the first of that series the only one of that series, because they didn't want to honor the contract after that. they thought that was too crazy a film. and it probably was. (scary music playing)

(narrator) like penn, john frankenheimer alternated between mainstream and more innovative features. in 1966 he directed "seconds." (john frankenheimer) "seconds" was a weird movie. there's quite a bit of editing in that first section to show emotion and tension. bop-bop-bop. that kind of thing to really jar the audience. kind of like slapping them in the face. (scary music playing) we always tried to stretch the medium. and we found ways to make things work. i mean, we didn't think, "my god, we can't do this." it was always the opposite, "how can we do this?" and we did it. (man in tv) i am a united states senator.

i have a question so serious that the safety of our nation may well depend on your answer. (john frankenheimer) the tv image was actually done by a television camera shooting him at the same time we shot the film camera. television plays an important part in that movie. politicians use television. the media is powerful. television bores right into your very existence. he made television virtually a character. if you remember the film, which was a long time ago, we all see them again and again through cassettes and so on, everything as being watched on television was a crude form of television monitoring. (charles champlin) but so much of the action existed on television screens. everyone remarked about it, its technological ingenious. my dear girl, have you noticed that the human race is divided into two distinct and irreconcilable groups? those who walk into rooms and automatically turn tv's on

and those who walk into rooms and automatically turn 'em off. ♪ living color ♪ panoramic sound ♪ rca victor, the color tv ♪ that capture the picture ♪ that capture the sound ♪ rca victor ♪ the color tv ♪ living color through ♪ an ever big screen ♪ (narrator) by 1960, 90% of american homes had television sets. the average person watched 5 hours of programming a day. ♪ living color ♪ panoramic sound my study of history has convinced me every strong, healthy society from the egyptians on, the mass had to be guided with a strong hand by a responsible elite. let us not forget that in tv we have the greatest instrument for mass persuasion in the history of the world. on the high end of the movie business, among the people who had had serious ambitions within movies

like elia kazan, tv was seen as the menace, as the creature from the black lagoon, as the great dumb-out. (todd gitlin) and "face in the crowd" carries out that fantasy. ♪ oh, vitajex! ♪ vitajex ♪ what you do to me! ♪ vitajex ♪ what you do to me! ♪ (announcer) keep your eye on that rating. ♪ vitajex puts a gleam ♪ in your eye ♪ (audience yelling in unison) (haskell wexler) the demand of television reaches through that glass tube and holds you there for the commercial. the demand of theatrical traditionally was different... darkened room, screen, asking for involvement, asking for the audience to discover things.

(charles champlin) television had stolen the mass audience. movies were playing catch-up, but they were also freed from making movies that were all things to all people. from the beginning, movies were all rated "g." then that "g" audience was gone and the movies had the right to a kind of a freedom of expression. tv is radicalizing the viewer in america stylistically, (muffled voice on tv) telling the viewer that life is larger than a window frame. (muffled voice on tv) it's introducing a new possibility into film itself. (narrator) john cassavetes came of age as an actor in live television. as a filmmaker, he brought to the screen

an edginess and improvisation he learned in the tv studio. hey, i got the money! i got the bread! yeah, i got the twenty. wait a minute... (charles champlin) in the early '60s movies began to show the influence of television itself. there was almost a proscenium feeling of being very close and not -- the film was no longer necessarily larger than life, but maybe the film was the same size as life. that was one of the things john cassavetes pioneered in, going against conventions, going against the norms, just saying that life is chaos, life is strange. life is full of ambiguities and maybe there's a way to get that on film as well as boy-meets-girl. we talked facts and figures until we went out of our mind. losses, gains, ratings, schmatings. you can lose your mind if you keep analyzing things. is that so? i think it's dishonest.

it's honest, but it's a good piece itself. and so, we're a little nervous about hitting you with this. no, i have insomnia and i stay awake all night looking at pictures, worrying about pictures. i walk all over the place. let's see it, j.b. i'd rather hear him talk about it again. he'll talk about it later. j.b.? all right, otto. roll it! (gena rowlands) i said, "how do you know when the light is right?" and john said, "you know the light is right when if you're in the audience, you want to reach through to touch the face of the person that you're looking at." and i thought, you know, that's how immediate the characters in the audience, how intimate they were. and i don't know. for some reason, i always found that enormously touching. (narrator) john cassavetes collaborated with a close circle of friends,

including his wife, gena rowlands, to explore a world of emotional chaos outside the standard hollywood fare. (gena rowlands) every time you break a rule in anything a certain number of people are going to be disturbed. and people were not used to being disturbed in the movies. john didn't write a logical, intellectual, well-crafted script from beginning to end, which everyone is always comfortable with. (gena rowlands) he'd write a very full script, but when he gave you the part, that was yours. now you! you let me finish! you're a man who doesn't say what you mean very well. what you meant was this was a wonderful evening and you enjoyed my house and you liked me, but, like you said, you're crude. he didn't give a damn how much you suffered, how frustrated you were, how bewildered you were, how confused you were. he didn't care.

he was not gonna help you because sooner or later out of all that frustration and bewilderment and confusion, something would come out that would be close to you. (peter falk) and he didn't care how he got you off balance, but he would take away all your defenses. and i still don't know how, but he always did it. (man) i love you! joe! i'll lay down on a railroad track for you. if i've made a mistake, which i did, i'm sorry. but so what? what's the difference? i love you! now relax! come back to me! be nice to me! get outta here! i'll kill you! (ranting) nick, i need your help now. these would be films challenging the establishment

in every single way, including established form, and this would creep into main studio productions. it put a premium on movies that would be doing something a little different from what they were getting on tv. i think they were just suffused with sitcoms and that stuff, and i think that there was a market, an audience that was more sophisticated. of the screen. (p.a. announcement) (robert altman) and i tend to be sloppy, not slick and clean. i think of films in terms of painting and i think in terms of murals, they carry lots of information. i may have the idea for the mural and i may kind of sketch in where to put the horses, or this or that, but then you start.

the actors become the pigment that you put on there and so you put the paint up and it starts moving on its own i say, "wow, the red is gettin' over there next to the blue." and so i invent something else and finally i find that i'm following this phenomena around. i'm filming what they're doing rather than have them do what i want them to do. (narrator) robert altman's early days in episodic television helped him develop the quick reflexes he would use as a feature film director. his use of sound, action, and camera creates a spontaneity that frees his actors to react, as well as perform. (gene siskel) i think he's a real rebel, a real troublemaker, but he thinks that most films are calcified. what's his overlapping dialogue all about? he hears overlapping dialogue in life. he's making films about life. why do we --

he thinks there is something false in "i-talk-then-you-talk, you-talk-then-i-talk" that there's a stodginess, a phoniness in that that says, "you know what? the reason why you probably start talking when i stop is we've rehearsed this." (gene siskel) and he would believe that that could be communicated across a lens. this is a catholic chaplain. and here's captain forest. (overlapping dialogue) (robert altman) had i made the film in the way that the tv series was made in, the film would have failed. the audience saw in "mash" something they'd never seen, an attitude in texture, and so it was exciting for them. it expressed a political idea they were ready for in 1970.

how altman does what he does is sometimes very mysterious because he does it so effortlessly. listen, i wanted -- could i ask -- would it be all right if i asked -- (charles champlin) i mean, it's like he's not so much filming a scene as spying on a scene. i know him. that's eliott gould. yeah, he's a really well-known actor. oh, yes, eliott gould, curly hair. yeah, he was married to barbra streisand. that girl that sang "people." i just shook his hand like he was somebody off the street. now, you go over there and bring him on over. yes, sir. (woman) oh, delbert! (robert altman) i don't trust documentary films very much, but i think you can use that technique of real people to make a fictional drama that reflects the truth.

(singing in spanish) (robert altman) some people went down to see "nashville" the other night. they called me up at 11:00 at home. he said, "listen, why did that guy kill the singer? we're having an argument about it." "gee," i said, "i don't know." "come on, you can't say, 'i don't know.'" i said, "i certainly can. i don't know why he shot her. i'm just showing you that he did." (cheers and applause from the audience) (four gunshots) (man) i'm all right. (man) you get him. you get him. (robert altman) we had 4 assassins incarcerated and had for years. there's not one person alive, nor has there ever been,

who can sit and really tell you why any of these people did the act they did. (gunshot) so my assassination was politically inspired, but it was not a political assassination, because i'm saying it doesn't make any difference. okay, everybody, sing! somebody, sing! (screams from the crowd) (narrator) in 1968, haskell wexler used the riots surrounding the democratic national convention in chicago as a backdrop for a feature film. "medium cool" employed real and fictional elements to explore the impact of tv on the 60's traumatic event. (screams and commotion from the crowd) the title "medium cool" is derived by marshall mcluhan,

who spoke of television as being a "cool" medium. (haskell wexler) what was happening was happening in the street and there were other cameras shooting. i had a camera where my actress was involved in the situation. (crowd chanting) people in the streets recognize that their validity would not be certified unless it was on television. when it was on tv it existed, because if tv ignores you, if tv does not present you to the people, then it does not exist in our world of image control. (narrator) in 1976, sidney lumet and paddy chayevsky examined the colliding worlds of fiction and documentary tv.

the result was the darkly comic film, "network." i would like at this moment to announce that i will be retiring from this program in two weeks' time because of poor ratings. since this show was the only thing i had going for me in my life, i have decided to kill myself. i'm going to blow my brains out on this show a week from today. (woman) ten seconds to commercial. (newscaster) so tune in next tuesday ... what we are is mosaicists. we take one little stone and we polish it and hope we get it the right color, and another little stone and polish it and 600 little stones, 800 little stones, i don't know how many -- whatever number of set-ups you've got in a movie and the number of times you use them. and it's not until you start pasting them up there together that you either have something or you don't have anything. (charles champlin) i've talked to a lot of people out of that live tv generation

and there's no question that a kind of creative freedom that existed in television no longer did. and i think it was a protest about the medium that lumet and chayevsky loved had in a sense betrayed them. i want all of you to get up out of your chairs. i want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, stick your head out and yell, "i'm mad as hell and i'm not going to take this anymore!" i want you to get up right now, get up and go to your windows, open them, stick your head out -- (sidney lumet) chayevsky, who was a magnificent writer, wasn't just talking about television as television; he was talking about the whole mechanization of society.

they're yellin' in baton rouge. get up! get up! how about this! we struck the motherlode! (todd gitlin) the peter finch character in "network" understands tv's not just an instrument of political power, it's not just an instrument for selling; it's an instrument by which people's view of the world is consolidated. television is much deeper in the american soil, in the american sensibility than was thought before, in ways that are maybe much too complicated to understand. i'm mad as hell! i'm not gonna take it anymore! (todd gitlin) this is post-watergate when people are fed up, thinking everything is corrupt. and people have become aware that there's become a blur, there's developed a blur between entertainment and news. there's no cavalry to come and rescue you because the cavalry is also watching television. five-four-three-two-one. ladies and gentlemen, let's hear it! how do ya' feel?

(group) we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore! (announcer) ladies and gentlemen, "the network news hour" with sybil, the soothsayer. (sidney lumet) everybody kept saying, "what a brilliant satire," and paddy and i kept saying, "it's not satire. it's sheer reportage." it would be milder today because almost half the things predicted in "network" have come true. entertainment and news are the same thing now. finally tonight, as if things weren't confusing enough with a dozen candidates criss-crossing new hampshire trying to sell themselves to voters in tuesday's primary, now there's an added starter. as brit hume reports, it's a case of art imitating life. (brit hume) they have all been in new hampshire lately, bush and dukakis and dole and tanner ... tanner? that's actor michael murphy, who's presidential candidate jack tanner in a movie, airing on primary eve, on hbo. it's the story of a democratic congressman

who jumps into the 1988 race after gary hart drops out. no movie has ever blended fiction and reality as much. (robert altman) we created a candidate and put him out on the road and so it says you're doing a documentary film following gary hart around; we were following mike murphy or jack tanner around. and we put a staff around him and we operated as if that's the way it was happening. no, i think it's going to be you and me in the final stretch if i can hang on that long. good luck see ya in november. (robert altman) we had a fictional character that we were passing off into a world of real people. where i seem to feel i get the best results is by finding what the arena is and then set up that event and let it happen. i'm trying to give the audice a sense that,

"oh, this is really happening maybe." and i'm trying to just break that fourth wall out. so our techniques became the same way. our lighting reflected that. we didn't want any good movie lighting because you say, "well, how could they get that with hand-held videocams?" so suddenly we were -- the medium was the message. (haskell wexler) whenever there's a device which has a recordable image, we're seeing reality filtered through human consciousness. and it can be artful. it can be devious. it can be truthful. it can be lying. but it is not -- reality has literally disappeared from modern world. when i showed up at the restaurant to do the scene from "the player,"

burt and i were allegedly doing a breakfast interview. burt, larry levy. i hope you don't remember me. and if you do, no hard feelings. i worked for caster then. altman explained very roughly the plot was going on behind us and that the two principals would stop to say hi to burt. he asked what to say, i said, "i can't tell you." you're not a character; you're playing yourself. you have to represent yourself. here's the situation i've got. here's the arena. you behave any way you want." take care. who's that? an executive over at fox. until this breakfast, anyway. good morning, mr. mills. hi, susan. (charles champlin) as the villain of the piece stopped by ... hi, burt. griffin mills. hi, griffin. good to see you. (charles champlin) and burt turned to me, and unscripted said -- asshole. (charles champlin) but the minute he said it, i said, "that scene will stay."

i trust my instincts. that's all i have to trust and hope that ever 4 or 5 years i intersect with an audience and we connect. and when we connect, it's terrific. i mean "the player" connected. we were at the right place at the right time. had we done it two years before or two years afterward, it would have been the biggest dud of all time. same with "mash." same with "nashville." (music playing) (narrator) today, with movie attendance at 20% of what it was in 1946, a movie's theatrical release is just its first step in an increasingly long journey through an entertainment world. a theatrical run is followed by a pay-per-view release, a cable release, a home video release, and eventually by broadcast on network or syndicated tv.

the main effect of tv now on a movie seems paradoxical. some television is imitated in the movies. some television is evaded in the movies, but television is sort of the subtext. it's the unspoken alternative for all the movies. and all the movies take up a position in relation to tv. television is sort of the big force. it's the oxygen. it's always there. what's more interesting now is how technology refines tv. ♪ a whole new concept ♪ in tv society ♪ new shapes ♪ new sizes ♪ new convenience ♪ baby of the family ♪ (charles champlin) the irony is that what tv did to the movies, which is to fractionalize the motion picture audience,

television's doing to itself. it's now fractionalizing itself thanks to its cable technology and cassettes. ♪ on big, rubber ♪ carpet wheels ♪ i think we're on the verge probably of a media revolution comparable to the arrival of television itself. ♪ it silently glides ♪ from room to room ♪ (haskell wexler) this is the age of images. it's that way because of tv. so television has given people an acuity of image retention that is incredible. and movies, of course, have to deal with that. what is slow in movies now was considered fast before. so just the pace of image multiplication has been enhanced because of television.

you're going to have big home entertainment centers. there's no doubt about that. and who's to say you won't be making films directly for that? when you see it in close-up and you say, "oh, that's a video" or "that's film," there's quite a difference. i also think there might be something in video that's a little different from film, when the electricity's shut off there's nothing there. and when it's turned on, there's movement. so that stuff is moving. those little molecules are moving all the time. how do i know they aren't changing? i don't know what it is, but it's a different -- it's got a different basic philosophical feeling for me.

(robert altman) i think eventually that film will disappear, strips of film. i think it will all be done electronically. and i can't edit that way because i'm old-fashioned. i mean i have to sit in there and run my film back and forth and move my soundtracks around and all that. but i don't think -- i think that'll be -- i think i'm doing something that will shortly be archaic. ♪ we loved ♪ we laughed, we cried ♪ and suddenly, love died ♪ the story ends ♪ and we're just friends ♪

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