I well recall "Saturday Night at the Movies," and the
others that followed it, such as "Tuesday Night at..."
and almost every other night of the week, depending on the network.
As I recall, all 3 networks had such programs
scheduled throughout the week.
The drain on the film supply for these programs soon
led to the advent of the gawwwddd-awful "TV-Movie" to
fill those nightly network time slots.
Thank heavens for the independent channels, in those pre-cable days.
In NYC, where I grew up, we had several independent channels,
many of which showed movies all the time.
In particular, ch.5(WNEW), ch.9(WOR), and ch.11(WPIX) had the
most movie-heavy schedules.
The call-letters of some of these stations have changed,
but they are all still there, with plenty of company (not including cable).
When I was a kid, films on TV were a major influence on me,
and directly led to my career managing first-run theaters in Manhattan.
--D.--
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Eightythreeyearoldguy
13 years ago
Living in Southern California suring the 50's and 60's, KTLA and KTTV were the heaviest movie channels...Channel 5 & Channel 11 as I recall. I remember one movie feature called "sneak preview" which never announced the first run movie they were going to show before hand...I remember seeing such films as THE DEVIL AND DANEL WEBSTER and THE PHANTOM LADY. And the program had a neat gimmick of sneaking the commercials in so that they appeared to be part of the movie.
Life, every now and then, behaves as though it had seen too many bad movies
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