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Small Screen, Smaller Pictures: Television Broadcasting And B-Movies In The Early 1950s

The exhibition of B-movies on television in the early 1950s is an area that has largely gone unnoticed in most literature surrounding the origins of television. Perhaps the most thorough account of film sales to television is Kerry Segrave’s Movies at Home: how Hollywood came to television, which draws on industry trade reports. There are still many factors regarding the exhibition of B-films on television that are not accounted for in his study, however, and this essay will utilize an extensive amount of additional trade reports not considered by Segrave. He writes, for example, how in the early years of television programming ‘the only movies available to television consisted of westerns, B films produced by ‘‘Poverty Row’’ studios such as Republic and Monogram, a few A pictures from independents and some foreign fare, virtually all from the U.K.’ This essay is an attempt to provide nuance to this general overview of film programming patterns by assessing a number of specific films and stations as illustrations of the under-considered relationship between B-films and television. B-movies have received relatively little scholarly attention in general as compared with their A-picture counterparts, and this also true of studies of film sales to television. Many sources examining television’s origins offer little detail about the sale of films to television whatsoever such as Anthony Smith’s Television: an international history, which contains a few sentences on the sale of RKO’s film library in 1955. Other scholarly accounts of early television programming, such as Christopher Anderson’s HollywoodTV: the studio system in the Fifties, William Boddy’s Fifties Television: the industry an its critics, and William Lafferty’s ‘Feature films on prime-time