Hollywood, brooding about its newfangled competitor, television, likes to think of it as a cloud that is still no bigger than a man's hand. Last week the TV cloud was casting a sizable shadow on one of the U.S. screen's hardiest perennials: the newsreel.
In New Jersey, the 40-theater Walter Reade chain had dropped newsreels experimentally in half a dozen houses without a single complaint from a customer; it decided to ease them, out gradually in other theaters. In Manhattan, the RKO chain admitted that it would try the same experiment in a handful of its 108 double-feature houses.
The painful fact was...
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