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September 7, 2027, will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth. To generate interest in the Centennial, this website and accompanying podcast are going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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In the 1950s, the relationship between the emerging television industry and the established motion picture industry was a contested landscape of shared foundations and competing interests.
On the one hand, Hollywood had been producing motion pictures for more than half a century. On the other hand, the easy availability of similar entertainment in every living room threatened the industry’s business model, especially its nationwide network of movie theaters.
Some of the earliest experiments with mechanical television in the 1920s drew directly from motion picture technology. Among them, the “Radiovisor” contraptions demonstrated in the mid-1920s by C. Francis Jenkins drew on his extensive contributions to cinema projection technologies.
Once the principle of electronic video had been proven, Farnsworth, too, turned to motion pictures to get past the Image Dissector’s crude beginnings.
Out Of The Ashes
Just a few weeks after his heralded demonstration for the press in early September, 1928, 1Farnsworth’s San Francisco laboratory was extensively damaged by fire. Tragedy turned into opportunity when insurance covered the losses, and the lab gang set about building entirely new equipment.
The reset gave Farnsworth a chance to address critical engineering issues. But before he could measure any progress, he needed an image source with more motion and detail than geometric shapes painted on glass slides. They tried televising live human subjects, but the extremely hot lights still required to render any picture at all prevented the use of live models for more than a few seconds. They had to come up with something else.
An entry in the lab journals from a few months after the fire reports: “Transmission of motion pictures by electrovision attained by Rutherford.” In other words, lab gang veteran Tobe Rutherford had developed what is now known as a “film chain,” a device for displaying motion pictures on television. As one observer wryly put it, that just meant “they bought an old movie projector, got it working, and focused the projection on an Image Dissector.”
Mickey and Mary
One of the first films that the lab gang ran through their projector was a loop from Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie – the debut of a character named Mickey Mouse. But their favorite footage was a clip of Mary Pickford, “America’s Sweetheart,” in a scene from The Taming of the Shrew. One of Farnsworth’s colleagues noted that, “Mary Pickford combed her hair at least a million times for the benefit of science and the development of television.” As the details in Miss Pickford’s features were gradually refined, the team could see much more clearly the obstacles that remained on the path toward producing a commercially viable television picture.
The tenuous dance between film and television was vividly illustrated when that same Mary Pickford visited Farnsworth’s laboratory in early 1930.
In the 1920s, Pickford, her husband Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and others had joined forces as United Artists – their answer to the iron grip that major studios like Paramount and Universal held on both production and exhibition. United Artists was established to give the talent in Hollywood – the actors, directors, and producers – more control over their own films and profits, and to keep a wary eye out for any new developments that might impact the industry. Once television had gone “all electronic,” it was obvious it was going to have just such an impact.
During a visit to San Francisco early in 1930, Pickford, Fairbanks and United Artists president Joseph Schenk expressed interest in seeing the electronic marvel at 202 Green Street. As Pem Farnsworth later recalled, “If they were going to be put out of business, they wanted to be part of the act that was coming in.”
Over the next two decades, the film industry’s curiosity about its potential rival waxed and waned.
New Realities
Then, in 1948, the Paramount consent decree upended the old order, forcing the studios to divest their theater chains.2 As box-office receipts slipped and TV ownership surged, the studios were compelled to cast a wary eye toward the glowing rectangles taking over America’s living rooms.
Necessity finally forced Hollywood to adapt. The first to crossover was Walt Disney, when he produced One Hour in Wonderland, a Christmas special on NBC that doubled as a preview for Alice in Wonderland in 19483. Columbia, Republic, and Paramount tentatively invested in TV production or station ownership. And veteran cinematographer Karl Freund was instrumental in the development of DesiLu Studios’ three-camera film system that revolutionized sitcom production4.
Still, Hollywood’s old guard clung doggedly to their dismissal of television as a lesser art form, a proletarian carnival of novelty acts, sports, and the occasional live drama – certainly not a suitable venue for any of Hollywood’s theatrical spectacles.
The tide finally turned on November 3, 1956, when CBS aired The Wizard of Oz as part of its Ford Star Jubilee series. MGM originally licensed the 1939 classic for one night after trimming it slightly to fit a 100-minute slot (with commercials). Bert Lahr – the Cowardly Lion himself – introduced the film, and Judy Garland’s daughter Liza Minnelli appeared in a live segment afterward.
Risks and Rewards
At a time when only a handful of households owned color TVs, few could see the film’s transition from sepia Kansas to Technicolor Oz. But even in shades of grey, audiences discovered the magic. Oz became part of the national mythology, and “We’re not in Kansas anymore” became part of the national lexicon.
MGM sold the television rights for The Wizard of Oz to CBS for a flat fee – reportedly around $225,000 for that initial 1956 telecast. That was an enormous sum – roughly $2.5 million in 2026 dollars – for what was a considerable gamble for all concerned.
For MGM, the risk was putting one of its cinematic crown jewels on the small screen.
For CBS, it was spending such an enormous sum for a single broadcast.
But the gamble paid in ways that neither could have imagined.
CBS had a willing partner in the Ford Motor Company, who underwrote the telecast to the tune of more than $3 million – $35 million in 2026 dollars. For their expenditure, Ford reached an audience of more than 35 million viewers with commercials for its 1957 line of Thunderbirds, Fairlanes and Rancheros. CBS profited handsomely from the arrangement. And MGM found a lucrative new market for its classic film library.
For many Americans, this was the first time they had seen The Wizard of Oz since it stopped showing in theaters seventeen years before. For the generation born after the war – who had never seen the film in theaters – the telecast soon became an annual ritual.
After that initial airing in 1956, CBS arranged to rebroadcast Oz again in 1959, and then again every year until 1967. NBC outbid CBS for the license in 1968 and continued the tradition through the early 1970s, when CBS regained the rights and aired it annually again from 1976 through 1998.
For television, The Wizard of Oz helped establish the home “movie night” that evolved into network staples like NBCs Saturday Night at the Movies and ABC’s Movie Of The Week. For Hollywood, Oz demonstrated that a major studio feature could find a new life and a vast new audience through television.
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1 The Countdown begins with #100 Black Light Machine and the press coverage after Farnsworth’s first public demonstration of electronic television in San Francisco on September 3, 1928.
2 The Paramount consent decree of 1948 was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that ended the major Hollywood studios’ long-standing monopoly over film production, distribution, and exhibition. The ruling required the “Big Five” studios—Paramount, MGM, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, and RKO—to divest ownership of their theater chains and cease anti-competitive practices such as block booking and fixed pricing. This effectively dismantled the vertically integrated studio system that had dominated Hollywood since the 1920s.
3 Disney’s initial foray into television is covered in Milestone #74, Money Isn’t Everything.
4 The formation of Desilu and the evolution of the 3-camera system used to film I Love Lucy is covered in Milestone #72, Lucy, You Got Some ‘Spainin’ To Do!
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