Fur-covered toilet seats ($200 for ermine), imported opium bowls of hammered brass ($250), hairbrushes that cost more than $200, and a child's battery-operated Mercedes-Benz for only $400 were all on sale last week along swank Rodeo Drive in California's Beverly Hills. But the most symbolic luxury item that is putting the bloom on the Hollywood boom is the mink-covered TV set ($950). TV has become the star of a new Hollywood, and the movies merely a supporting player. Items: ¶A single Hollywood TV show, NBC's daily Matinee Theater, hires 2,400 actors a year for speaking parts—50% more than the players used by Warner and Paramount combined in all their 1956 movies. The show uses as many scripts—250 a year—as all the studios put together. ¶A single TV film producer, Desi Arnaz' and Lucille Ball's Desilu, which turns out I Love Lucy and 14 other shows, spends $21 million a year, employs up to 1,000 at peak periods, and produces more film footage than the combined output of the five major movie studios. ¶The two biggest talent agencies in U.S. show business, William Morris and the Music Corp. of America, now get $9 in fees from TV deals to every $1 they earn from the movies.
¶In the ranks of the movies' own guilds, fully half of the actors (plus Mickey Mouse, Rin-Tin-Tin and Lassie), cameramen and cutters earn their living in TV.
TV's swarming demand for studio space has revived and even expanded old movie lots that had been virtually silent almost since the silent movie days. In the Kling Studios where Charlie Chaplin made The Gold Rush, and on lots that twinkled with the names of Theda Bara, Mary Pickford, Harold Lloyd and Janet Gaynor, TV now grinds out commercials and films—Burns & Allen, Ozzie & Harriet,
The Life of Riley, etc. In the once wide-open Hollywood acres used for the location shooting of Rudolph Valentino in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse now stands CBS's Television City, so vast a factory for live TV production that the director of the Red Skelton Show shuttles between his set and the control room by bicycle. NBC's sprawling new $13 million color studios in Burbank, hard by the Warner lot, are even bigger.
The big movie studios hoped at first that TV would somehow blow over. Instead, it practically blew RKO right out of moviemaking, threatened to knock over 20th Century-Fox, which rescued itself largely by selling its old pictures to TV.
The impact of the little home screen that Hollywood once scorned made the studios jettison more than half their production schedules, as well as stars, writers, directors—even relatives. It also softened them up for the production deals that give top creative talent between 50% and 75% of a movie's profits. The ill wind has so far blown a windfall of $150 million to the studios for letting their pre-1948 movies go on the air. Except for Paramount, every major studio is also making TV films in earnest. Movie bigwigs curled their lips when such onetime movie performers as Betty Furness, William Lundigan, Lee Bowman and Ronald Reagan emerged as full-time TV commercial pluggers, but now virtually all the studios are in the business of filming commercials themselves. To help make ends meet, once-mighty M-G-M even rents out its sets and props to TV producers.