CBS Thursday Night Movie

CBS Thursday Night Movie
Still frame from the animated CBS "color" logo, used by the network at the start of each broadcast of the Thursday Night Movie that featured a color film.
Genre	Film Anthology
Country of origin	United States
Original language(s)	English
Production
Running time	2 hours or more (depending on feature's length)
Release
Original network	CBS
Original release	September 16, 1965 – November 27, 1975

CBS Thursday Night Movie was CBS's first venture into the weekly televising of then-recent theatrical films, debuting at the start of the 1965-66 season, from 9:00 to 11 p.m. (Eastern Time). CBS was the last of the three U.S. major television networks to schedule a regular prime-time array of movies. Unlike its two competitors (NBC and ABC), CBS had delayed running feature films at the behest of the network's hierarchy. Indeed, as far back as 1960, when Paramount Pictures had been offering a huge backlog of pre-1948 titles for sale to television for $50 million,James T. Aubrey, program director at CBS, negotiated with the studio to buy the package for the network. Aubrey summed up his thinking this way: "I decided that the feature film was the thing for TV. A $250,000 specially-tailored television show just could not compete with a film that cost three or four million dollars." However, CBS's chairman, William Paley, who considered the scheduling of old movies "uncreative," vetoed the Paramount transaction.

It was not until after Aubrey's controversial ouster from CBS in early 1965 that Paley finally conceded on the issue and cleared the way for the network to embark on its own prime-time weekly movie broadcast. After initial rounds of negotiations with various studios had been completed that year, CBS finally acquired the exclusive rights to televise a total of 90 titles from Columbia Pictures, United Artists, Paramount, and Warner Brothers—news of which resulted in rumors that the network would actually slate films for two prime-time nights rather than just one. This scheduling addition, however, would not be made until a season later; but reports of further meetings between CBS and Columbia over the acquisition of 20 more titles signaled that the network was now a serious movie-night contender. The Thursday Night Movie thus began on September 16, 1965, with the TV debut of the original The Manchurian Candidate (1962), starring Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey.