El negocio del pasatiempo

Abstract

The eruption of television sets in North American homes represented a strong attack on the oily machinery of Hollywood. In play was not only the financial aspect (at a time that the cinema industry was also confronted with anti-monopoly laws), but also the question of the hierarchies within audiovisual language itself. This led to a radical strategy on the part of Hollywood to spectacularize the cinema format (for example, with Cinema-Scope), while at the same time launching a virulent attack on television as a medium incapable of generating any genuine type of message. This strategy generated a whole way of seeing television through the cinema, a vision that was as exaggerated as it was out-dated and which has gone on to promote the concept of trash TV.