Word: networks
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...network produces 40% of the shows that light up its channels, compared to 30% for CBS, 5% for ABC. Chief network-produced items: news and sports shows; a scattering of hard-to-sell prestige features (NBC Opera, Project 20); a hard core of moneymakers (The Jack Paar Show, You Bet Your Life); and two quizzes (Dough Re Mi and Concentration), originally developed by Barry & Enright, from whom Kintner bought eight other shows last year...
Madison Avenue's top-drawer advertising agencies have followed the trend; five years ago, agencies spawned 10% of all network shows, now also save on overhead by shopping for their clients among the packagers. The ubiquitous package firms range in size from giants, e.g., Revue Productions Inc., dog-wagging tail of the Music Corp. of America, which grossed $38 million on its filmed series (M Squad, Wagon Train) last year, down to one-shot independents, e.g., Jack (Lassie) Wrather. The range is qualitative as well: Independent Robert Saudek has won Emmys and Peabody Awards for Omnibus, while Warner Bros...
Highbrow or low slung, virtually all packagers operate with small flexible staffs, hire equipment and actors only as needed, produce completed films or live shows to order. This year some 300 packagers are providing 70% of the regularly scheduled network shows, a fact that to some critics explains many of TV's ills. With so much programing in the hands of outsiders, networks have little control; every rigged quiz started out as a packaged product. Some cozy alliances have been formed between the nets and packagers: NBC has traditionally catered to M.C.A. products, ABC to Warner's imitative...
...should the packagers be sent packing? Few think so. Tax-haunted Hollywood talents savor the capital-gains advantages of independent production. Adds NBC's Kintner: "We simply haven't enough creative brains and personnel to supply all the programs." Undoubtedly, there should be far more network-produced shows, but the real trouble is not that the networks buy from packagers, but that they do not exercise enough care in what they buy. Example: ABC bought the disastrous Adventures in Paradise from 20th Century-Fox, Alaskans, Bourbon Street Beat and Hawaiian Eye from Warner's-all without even...
...Pattern. The packagers could never have risen to their present power were it not for the fact that, as Packager (Screen Gems) Harry Ackerman puts it, "the networks are run by businessmen, not showmen." Robert Edmonds Kintner, 50, has no quarrel with that situation. A Swarthmore graduate, he started out as a New York Herald Tribune Wall Street reporter in 1933. Son of a Stroudsburg (Pa.) schoolteacher, Cub Kintner, a lean, spectacled Hall-of-Ivy type at the time, at first "didn't even know where Wall Street was." But he learned quickly. Though an ardent New Dealer...