Brittany Covington
14 January 2014
Professor Temple

“He, who controls the media, controls the mind.” The Hollywood Film industry during the 1950s suffered many threats. One of which is now a favorite past time of most American people today, watching television. Box office ticket sales begin to decline, and the film industry was slowly under attack.
Television broadcasting was rapidly becoming the more dominant media medium in the United States (encyclopedia). During the baby-boom era, there was an increase in marriage and population size in the suburbs. Downtown first-run theaters begin to loose sustainability. The film industry’s fortunes began to decline in the 1950s. In 1951 NBC became the first nationwide network for television and in a short amount of time about fifty percent of American owned at least one television set (Dirks). Once executive film producers noticed a decline in theatre attendance they were forced to come up with more creative ways to continue to keep the flow of cash flowing. Producers began to spend more time focusing on film for television than on featured films. They began selling their film rights to television for broadcast viewing. The Wizard of Oz was the first featured film to be broadcast (Dirks). Television stars became cross-over stars highlighting in both movie features and television shows. A change of wind happened in 1955 when the Warner Brothers produced a show on ABC TV called the Warner Brother Presents. This marked the first entrance of Hollywood Studios into television production (Dirks). In the same year MGM studios produced a television show that played on fox and Warner Bros. continued to create television shows to put on television. It was a way that studios could thrive in the television production rem.
Although many theaters began to suffer from sales and more attention was focused on television, there was a positive side to the adoption of television in the American culture. Some of the major movie directors began to create some of the greatest movies in Hollywood during the 60s (Dirks). Due to television becoming one of the major mass media mediums many studios began to change their sound stages to television production set. Many people began to take their work overseas because the labor was cheaper and more work could get done. Having a television in your home seemed to be a more permanent option for entertainment, movie outings declined. To bring attention back to movie theaters in the film industry, directors and movie producers started to make 3D movies with more color and storylines with more excitement. By the mid-50s no more movies were made in black and white. They figured that would draw more people into the