Content area
Full Text
Was there ever a golden age of the telefilm corresponding to the Golden Age of TV Drama? Not unless you're a shlock buff who remembers fondly the late Sixties for the trashy pleasures of the movie-of-the-week boom. Or you got off in the early Seventies on the social-problem movies, from runaway flower children to obscene phone callers in business suits. Or you think today's docudramas and novelizations are breakthroughs in narrative cinema. No, by the old definition, there has never been a concentration of proud artisans like John Frankenheimer, Arthur Penn, Sidney Lumet, and Robert Mulligan and writers like Tad Mosel, Paddy Chayevsky, Lewis John Carlino, and Robert Alan Aurthur who were all working in the same approximate time frame and who were beneficiaries of a nearly universal respect.
About the only basic truism to emerge from fifteen years of telefilms is the humbling lesson of the backlot and poverty-row studio: Get in young, learn your trade, and get out quick. Let's face it. There have been hundreds of telefilms, but there is no clamor now or in the perceivable future to incorporate them on even the lowliest levels of the theatrical revival circuit. It is difficult to imagine any body of film more maligned by cineastes, and it is impossible to imagine the great bulk of it existing anywhere but on subsidized, time-killing commercial TV. Yet some very talented directors have thrived on the debris. It may well be that when the Eighties shake down, the alumni of the telefilm will be as important to American cinema as the graduates of the dramatic age were. The lesson is that the telefilm has given us some golden talents, but not a golden age.
Six careers come to mind-William A. Graham, Lamont Johnson, John Korty, Steven Spielberg, John Badham, and Joseph Sargent-as directors who stretched their potential over at least a half-dozen seasons and who survived a producer's medium with their creative instincts intact. For the most part, their careers are both rich in themselves and emblematic enough of a movement to write a partial history of the telefilm.
I only regret that the many cross-references that will crop up in the careers of these chosen few will not extend to minor stylists and good directors...