Small Screen to Big Screen Made-for-TV Movies in American and International Cinemas

The American TV movie has a lowly reputation, generally seen as melodramatic and derivative with low production values. However, this widely held stereotype obscures both the industrial significance of the telefilm and the variation in budget, genre and even exhibition site, within the form. From the late 1960s to the 1980s, each network invested in and broadcast multiple original TV movies per week. Many of these films garnered high ratings, but their success did not stop there - during this period of high production volume, some telefilms were able to jump from the American television screen to cinemas around the world. In this industrial history, I reconstruct the conditions that made possible this global exchange and shift in exhibition site, including the Financial Interest and Syndication (Fin/Syn) Rules, European television policies, and, drawing on Brian Taves' study of B-films, changes in telefilm budget levels. This period of flexibility was short-lived, but it illuminates the shifting conditions that control the movement of media through different sites of exhibition.