The reel story

There's a great addendum to Monday's listings that was brought to my attention by one of our readers, and for a moment I'd considered using it as the little coda to the listings, but upon further reflection I decided this might deserve a piece of its own. (It's also true that I didn't have anything else planned for the day, but we'll overlook that for now.)

It concerns the 1962 movie The Notorious Landlady, which was shown on the CBS Thursday Night Movie. It's not a particularly controversial movie, not one that sparked a huge uproar or anything like that. (In case you're curious, you can read a decent summary of the movie here.) Nor was the movie interrupted by a breaking news story, or anything like that. No, what happened here was, for lack of a better description, a very special something: the film reels were run in the wrong sequence.

You read that right. Back in the day, movies on television were shown the same way they were in theaters: by playing them on reels. And while various accounts differ somewhat on the precise mechanics, the basic event is consistent: CBS jumped ahead in the story, eventually realized what had happened, stopped the movie, had an announcer apologize*, and then replayed enough of the film to restore the proper sequence.The mistake stretched what was supposed to be a 2¼-hour broadcast to roughly three hours.

*The reader who brought this to my attention, who happened to have seen the broadcast himself, reported that "They stopped the film and after a short break the announcer did a voiceover: 'we were out of sequence. We now return in sequence'." He noted that the announcement was "not the most well-written," but then, I suspect they don't have a specific entry in the book covering "movie shown out of order." 

Now, all of this is a great story in itself, and it happens in this very issue. Needless to say, it garnered a fair amount of attention at the time; Time called it "a classic goof," and who doesn't enjoy one of those every once in a while. But, as is so often the case, the "rest of the story" is where you find the most telling details. In that same Time article, the magazine noted that "Twenty-one million people watched the show, but the network got only a peep of protest." Which tells us one of two things: either the incident caught the viewers in an unusually tolerant and understanding mood, or—and this is the interpretation I prefer—the audience was so indifferent to what they were watching, or so lulled to sleep by it, that nobody noticed. In other words, the fact that a part of the movie was shown in the wrong order didn't, apparently, make any difference to those watching it.

Now, over the years, I've seen my share of movies and television programs that didn't seem to make much sense. There might even have been times when I was tempted to think that the story was being told out of sequence. But, to the best of my knowledge, I've never actually experienced it for real. (Or reel, if you prefer.)

Were this the case, that people were simply numbed to the experience, it would be the perfect example of television having arrived at the pinnacle of its existence. There's actually a theory used to explain such an event, called the Hypodermic Needle Theory, which dates back to the 1930s. According to this article on the "Myth of the Zombie Viewer," "This model suggested that media messages are injected directly into a passive audience, shaping thoughts and behaviours with little resistance. Under this framework, viewers had no agency—they were empty vessels waiting to be filled with whatever the broadcaster chose to transmit." As Time noted, Marshall McLuhan would have loved it.

What about you? Does any of this strike a bell as having been something you saw or remembered? TV

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