ABC Movie of the Week

Did You Know?

• The title sequence was designed by Harry Marks and animated by Douglas Trumbull using the slit-scan process he created for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
• The theme music was an orchestral version of 'Nikki', a song composed by Burt Bacharach and named for his daughter.
• The series was often used as a platform to show pilots for possible series, including Kung Fu, The Six Million Dollar Man, and Starsky & Hutch.

History

In the 1960s, movie studios charged high fees for broadcast rights, viewing television as a second-rate medium and a threat to theatrical revenue. Networks experimented with films made specifically for TV to lower expenses; NBC created the first weekly umbrella for such films with World Premiere Movie in 1966. ABC, running a distant third behind CBS and NBC, was willing to consider plans the other networks would not. Barry Diller, then a junior executive at ABC, is often cited as the creator of the Movie of the Week, though the concept was originated by producer Roy Huggins.

Huggins reasoned that many older theatrical films ran shorter than 90 minutes, making a 120-minute time slot unnecessary. His proposal was rejected by NBC and CBS but became the subject of a cover story in the March 21, 1968 issue of Variety. ABC executives read the article and contacted Huggins, who could produce the series through Universal. Universal demanded a larger budget and exclusive rights, conditions that pushed ABC to control production on their own, purchasing films from various studios.

Because the Variety article had effectively placed the concept into the public domain, ABC continued development without Huggins' permission, though they allowed him to produce several films.

Time slots

ABC slotted its Movie of the Week on Tuesdays at 8:30 p.m. Eastern, following The Mod Squad. The film's shorter runtime allowed a full hour-long show at 10 p.m., initially Marcus Welby, M.D., and the earlier start discouraged viewers from switching to competing movies at 9:00. In the 1971 season, a Saturday edition called Movie of the Weekend was added. The next season, that Saturday show moved to Wednesday, and the titles became Tuesday Movie of the Week and Wednesday Movie of the Week. For 1973–74, a third Saturday film, the ABC Suspense Movie, aired, featuring thrillers, mysteries, and horror, including reruns from the original series.

Actors

Most actors in non-recurring roles appeared only once or twice. Notable exceptions who appeared in three or more films as different characters include Doug McClure, Darren McGavin, Dennis Weaver, Clint Walker, Earl Holliman, Leonard Nimoy, Robert Culp, Barbara Eden, Larry Hagman, Elizabeth Montgomery, Donna Mills, Ed Nelson, Ken Berry, Connie Stevens, Lee Majors, James Brolin, Lloyd Bridges, Cloris Leachman, Ricardo Montalbán, Richard Anderson, Lesley Anne Warren, Janet Leigh, John Marley, Kay Lenz, William Schallert, Ted Bessell, Karen Valentine, Ben Murphy, Lee Grant, Barra Grant, Myrna Loy, Carl Betz, Henry Jones, Farrah Fawcett, Dina Merrill, Stefanie Powers and William Windom.

Many telefilms credited actors as guest stars, special guest stars or special appearance by, even if not a pilot. Death Race and The Weekend Nun billed their leads as special guest stars; in Assault on the Wayne, all first-billed cast members were credited as guest stars.

End

The ABC Movie of the Week series ended in 1975, the same season the network’s ratings fell sharply. Analysts attributed part of the decline to an over-reliance on the franchise, which had lost viewer interest and suffered a perceived quality drop. This was marked by a rise in pilots and remakes of existing properties, including The Swiss Family Robinson, The Mark of Zorro, The Hatfields and the McCoys, and Matt Helm. After 1975, ABC’s made-for-TV movies appeared as standalone specials or in slots that mixed original films with theatrical releases, such as the ABC Friday Night Movie and ABC Sunday Night Movie.

The Tuesday Movie of the Week later became part of ABC Late Night, a program that ran from 1976 to 1982 and mostly aired repeats. ABC continued to debut new TV movies on Sunday nights until 2005. In the 1970s, some ABC-owned stations in major cities ran The 4:30 Movie on weekday afternoons, which occasionally rebroadcast Movie of the Week entries. Also in the mid-1970s, several of these films were rebroadcast on The CBS Late Movie.