Over the years I have collected and read through hundreds of vintage NY Metro area TV Guides and to the best of my knowledge, this is the first time I have stumbled across a FULL PAGE ad for WNBC-TV Channel 4’s “Movie Four”. Seems the direct competitor and also ran of WABC-TV’s “4:30 Movie” was pulling out all the stops the week of 11/12/73.
Old Time NY Area TV 
This was from within the last months of “Movie 4” prior to the daily edition’s being cancelled to make room for the two-hour “NewsCenter4″ which debuted April 29, 1974. Here was yet another example of their attempt at a theme week (here it seemed to be ‘Can-Can’ Week”) – notice they weren’t nearly as focused as the theme weeks WABC served up on their afternoon skein. The shot of the director’s chair seemed a subtle dig at the part of Channel 7’s “4:30 Movie” logo as up to ’73 or so where a director seated on a chair holding a bullhorn was in an opening to the left of the “4:30” part of that logo (and sandwiched vertically between “The” and “Movie”).
One month after this ad, the announcement of WNBC’s plans for a two-hour local newscast was made. According to Val Adams of the Daily News in its Dec. 13, 1973 issue: “An expansion of news would eliminate Channel 4’s afternoon movie now televised from 4:30 to 6 p.m. But the station’s inventory of movies is low, and by expanding the news report, WNBC-TV would avoid any necessity to invest large sums in acquiring new movie packages.” Ordinarily this would not have been an issue – but at the time WNBC was in last place among the network O&O’s, behind WABC (with their “4:30 Movie” powerhouse) and WCBS (who was packin’ ’em in with “The Mike Douglas Show”), and thus the money they had to play with was very limited. And around this time, WNBC had lost the rights to a few film packages they’d had for many years, including Warner Bros. TV’s “Volume 2-A” (formerly “Warner Bros. Two”) that shuffled off to WABC (and some of the titles that were once “Movie 4” staples, such as “Parrish” and the original Frank Sinatra/Dean Martin etc. “Ocean’s 11,” were now seen frequently on “The 4:30 Movie”); and a set from Allied Artists (that included the 1963 Steve McQueen/Jackie Gleason pic “Soldier in the Rain”) that inexplicably went to WOR-TV and were seen on such skeins as “Million Dollar Movie” – thus reducing WNBC’s film library to about 300 (this is a guess, based on what was cited of one of NBC’s other O&O’s, WMAQ-TV in Chicago, around the same period as here).
O.T.O.H., it was on WNBC’s “Movie 4” and “Sunday Film Festival” that viewers first saw the future Mel Brooks classic “The Producers” in local syndication, starting in 1971. In the 1966-74 period, viewers also got their first glimpses of such foreign classics as “8 1/2,” “Boccaccio ’70,” and “Marriage – Italian Style” on New York TV.
And also . . . the end of “Movie 4” on weekdays may’ve led to WNBC losing the rights to several post-1960 Universal films (both theatrical and made-for-TV), which by mid-year all migrated to WPIX (one of them being “Arabesque” which aired one night in 1975 opposite WOR’s airing of the Marx Brothers film “Room Service”); and to Viacom’s “Features I” package (of which the Elvis film “Roustabout” was a part) which then went to WNEW. (Not to mention many pre-1948 Warners’ and 20th Century-Fox films which likewise defected to Channel 5.) “Movie 4” continued to run mainly on weekend afternoons only, mostly Sundays, on a more reduced basis, and only when NBC network had no sports events scheduled, up to about 1977 when it, the “Sunday Film Festival” and “The Great Great Show” all had their titles retired and all of them were consolidated into one lone umbrella, “Cinema 4,” airing at the respective times where the previous other skeins were shown.
First thing I noticed about the ad was that it really didn’t seem to be an actual “theme week” other then the airing of “Can-Can” on Thursday and Friday. Good point about the director’s chair dig. I posted that TV Guide ad from 1975 with “Arabesque” and “Room Service” earlier.
This was why I brought that up. Incidentally, the week of Oct. 23-27, 1972, “Arabesque” was one of the films aired as part of “Leading Ladies Week” on “Movie 4,” based on Sophia Loren’s starring in it. (Other pics that week: “The Time Machine” with Rod Taylor and Yvette Mimieux; “Stranger on the Run” with Anne Baxter and Henry Fonda; “The Innocents” with Deborah Kerr and Michael Redgrave; and “You’re a Big Boy Now” with Elizabeth Hartman, Geraldine Page and Peter Kastner.)
That Leading Ladies week sounds awfully familiar. Perhaps I have seen an ad or ads for it in one of my guides.
They had such an interesting array of films on Channel 4, especially in the post-Tonight/Tomorrow slots. The Walter Reade/Sterling holdings like “Children of Paradise” and “Open City.” They also had some European stuff from Teleworld. They did have a couple of WB packages to balance things out. In the early ’60’s they would run the Flamingo films imports. Whatever happened to those movies?