Ten - Victory Abridged: For Film (1954) and Television (1960)

Summary

As Victory began production in 1951, NBC was aware of the many poten-tial viewers—American and otherwise—unreached by broadcast television. Though Henry Salomon later proposed a re-cut, theatrical Victory, the idea of theater screenings had surfaced earlier. NBC's director of TV operations Edward Lyman Munson, earlier the head of the Army Pictorial Service, had written: “Having had control of production of all Army, Air Force, and industrial incentive films during the war … I believe that the item ‘basic terms of proposed agreement’ [with the Navy] could well be revised… . we should attempt to work out some sort of theatrical exception to re-coup expenditures… . We should reserve 16 mm film distribution rights … [and] … foreign theatrical rights.”

Commercial TV's fastest-growing years were the late 1940s and early 1950s, with production still centered in New York. The networks routinely prepared kinescopes of many live programs for re-broadcast, though neither visual nor sound quality could compete with film of the actual programming itself. This hastened the gradual move to filmed shows, which were preferred by syndication buyers. Late in 1951, though Victory's future was still uncertain, Henry Salomon ambitiously proposed a new “NBC film board” and expansion of film production:

The tools for making films are very scarce and expensive. NBC has now made this initial investment. To disband it, to sell it, or to allow it to stand around idle would again represent a great waste… . Let us compete with the Hollywood films on their own ground, and detail a top Hollywood press agent to work in New York and the West Coast boosting NBC's films. This may seem a bit premature, but I think that we should be thinking about it seriously… . Some time ago … I suggested that we might undertake a se-ries of films with TIME, Inc. I now retract that recommendation… . There is nothing that an organization such as that can get or give that we cannot get or give better.

NBC announced its new Film Division in March 1952. The FCC was about to end its new-station “freeze” and the syndication value of NBC's filmed programs could only increase as more stations—and viewers—appeared.