The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [96]
A full description of the consequences of the commercialization of art lies beyond the scope of this chapter. And yet that commercialization is the constant background to the ideas being developed here, some of which will be thrown into greater relief if we pause to illuminate what lies behind them. Two news items addressing themselves to art and the marketplace will provide a kind of counterpoint. The first (reproduced verbatim from the New York Times) tells us a great deal about how drama is currently produced for commercial television:
“The irony,” Robert Thompson, producer of “The Paper Chase” on CBS-TV, says, is that “other producers write me letters saying that my program is the best show on the air.”
If praise could be translated into audience-popularity rating points, “The Paper Chase” would not be stuck in the swampy lowlands of the Nielsen list with an average 19 percent of the audience.
In an attempt to give “The Paper Chase” a transfusion of rating points, CBS will move the program away from the blockbuster opposition of “Happy Days” and “Lav-erne and Shirley” for five weeks. It will be shown Friday night at 10 P.M. against the weaker competition of a “Dean Martin Roast” on NBC and a movie about teenage suicide on ABC …
“If ever there existed a series too good to succeed on television …” was the melancholy lament of most of the country’s television critics when the program went on the air last September. The critics were not only referring to the style and literacy of the show, which deals with a group of first-year law students and their tyrannical professor …, but they were also wincing at the fact that CBS had scheduled “The Paper Chase” at 8 P.M. Tuesdays, opposite the two major ABC hits.
“They certainly put us in Death Alley,” says Sy Salkowitz, president of 20th Century-Fox Television, producers of “The Paper Chase …”
The current economics of television make “The Paper Chase’s” survival—even this long—more than unusual. “If ‘M*A*S*H’ were to start its career this year and get its original low ratings,” Mr. Salkowitz … adds, “it would be canceled at mid-season. The people running television have hardened because the economics have changed. At one time everybody lived or died on the cost-per-thousand viewers. If a show’s audience dwindled, the cost-per-thousand went up. Now cost-per-thousand doesn’t matter.
“With a great deal of trepidation several years ago, the networks raised the cost-per-thousand by raising their per minute advertising prices; and they discovered that the advertisers didn’t make too much fuss. At about the same time, television became a seller’s market, the most desirable advertising medium for certain products—for cars, beer, mass-produced foods, and soap.”
Now, advertisers pay $45,000 for a 30-second commercial on an average show and $90,000 for the same spot on a very successful show. “So a single Nielsen rating point on a single program over the course of a year has become worth $2.8 million,” according to Mr. Salkowitz. “The stakes are so much bigger that it’s like a World Series ball-game. In an ordinary game, you might replace your pitcher once. In a World Series game, you’ll replace your pitcher three or four times.”
In fact, CBS has already tried several other pitchers against the ABC comedies—with harrowing results. “The Fitzpatricks,” “Shields and Yarnell,” “Challenge of the Sexes,” “Young Dan’l Boone” and “Sam” have all ended as bleached bones. “Sam,” a half-hour series about a police dog, had a considerably higher rating than “The Paper Chase.”
A second news item strikes some of the same chords in terms of an individual artist:
With his business affairs in disarray, his health failing and his hands trembling so badly that he can no