plance1 wrote:
The post about the Grand Prix movie reminded me...When I was growing up in the 70's there was no such thing as DVD's or even VCR's (well maybe there was but we certainly didn't have one!) Heck, I don't even think there was "cable" tv.
All I remember was scanning the newspaper once a week to see the TV listings and for some reason my favorite movie Bullitt was only occassionally played in the middle of the night, 1 am or 2 am or some crazy time like that... It was always a treat to see the listing and staying up to watch it.
Do you remember those days?
Yup, and miss em. Before the big companies got into big bidding wars for the rights to broadcast movies, they were cheap enough that a lot of stations could air movies in late night. It's probably how I fell in love with movies in the first place. At my first TV job, they were still doing that when they hired me (1982). A couple of years later, the infomercial was commonplace. The way those things work is usually that they don't pay for the air time straight out-but your station gets a cut of the profits from their sales. Notice that the same infomercial has a different phone no. for every channel it's on..that's how they can tell which station tempted the sucker (Oops! I meant "customer") to call. Didn't take the station management long to figure out that even a few pennies coming in was better than money going out. Good bye, "Will C's Red-Eye Cinema"..
EDIT: "commonplace" for "invented". I don't know when they were actually invented, and I'm not looking it up because I hate the damned things.
