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Not too long ago, television actors were of an entirely different class among professional actors. There were stage actors at the top, movie actors next tier down, then at the bottom were the TV folks. It’s not that they weren’t talented, they were and everyone recognized it. Early television stars like Lucille Ball and Jackie Gleason weren’t just beloved, they were extolled and awarded for their boundless talents. But that didn’t mean they could become movie stars. Lucille Ball had been a second-tier actress with the studios before her television success and after it, couldn’t get much farther. Gleason had some critical success on film, garnering an Oscar nomination for The Hustler in 1961, but was never able to build a successful comedy career on the silver screen that matched his success on television, except perhaps for The Smokey and the Bandit franchise (1977, 1980, 1983). Dramatic actors had it easier. George C. Scott found success on the stage, then movies where he earned two Oscar nominations (one for Anatomy of a Murder [1959], and one for The Hustler with Gleason), before moving to television drama with East Side/West Side (1963-1964) and getting an Emmy nomination. Then he effortlessly moved back to film with Dr. Strangelove (1964) and inexplicably didn’t get nominated. But in the 1970s, when I was first beginning my serious study of the cinema, three actors broke down the wall that held back the comedians, starting with Art Carney and finishing up with Sally Field.
Transitioning between television and movies now is so common that many actors star in successful television shows while maintaining a successful film career at the same time. But before cable and streaming services produced a wealth of opportunities for actors, there were only the three broadcast television networks and the studio system and one followed the other. That is to say, if you started out in films (Buddy Ebsen, Robert Young, Donna Reed, Andy Griffith, Judy Garland), it was okay to finish up on television. But if you started out on TV, you were probably going to stay there for your entire career. Oh, you might get film work, but nothing big.
In the 1970s, that began to change. My first personal experience with it was watching the Oscars as a youngster when Art Carney won Best Actor for Harry and Tonto (1974). Prior to that moment, I’d known Carney primarily as the goofy sewer worker in The Honeymooners (1955-1956). When I saw Harry and Tonto years later, I wasn’t all that taken by the movie but thought Carney was terrific. When I saw The Late Show (1977) a few years after that, it became and remains one of my favorite movies, in no small part due to Carney’s considerable performance, as well as Lily Tomlin and Bill Macy, two other TV to movie actors. It was a big deal for a former sitcom actor to win an Academy Award but maybe it was just an anomaly. Then an actor playing one of the goofiest, most utterly unrealistic, over the top dumb sitcom characters in all of television at the time, snagged a dramatic role and an Oscar nomination for Best Actor to boot.
In 1977, John Travolta, hot on television’s Welcome Back, Kotter (1975-1979) as the insufferably vain and stupid Vinnie Barbarino, got the role of Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever (1977) and won critical acclaim for his performance and earned a nomination for Best Actor. It made him an instant star, and with the nomination, a respected actor, but what was different than Carney, and different than Gleason when he was nominated for The Hustler, was that Travolta was still starring in Kotter during all of it. In fact, he stayed on the show until 1979. And Barbarino is a broadly drawn farcical character. Imagine Max Baer, Jr, playing Jethro on The Beverly Hillbillies from 1962 to 1971, and in the midst of that, say, 1968, he’s nominated for Best Actor for a serious and gritty dramatic role, then goes back to playing Jethro Bodine. But Travolta was simply the middle act. The final act came two years later.
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In 1979, Sally Field won Best Actress for her starring role in Norma Rae (currently streaming on Filmstruck). Prior to this, she was known as the star of the television shows Gidget (1965-1966) and The Flying Nun (1967-1970). The biggest movies she was known for were her works with her partner Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit, The End (1978), and Hooper (1978). But, importantly, she had also done a dramatic turn as the lead role in the television miniseries Sybil in 1976, that helped ease the transition to drama. Without that, she may not have been considered for the role in Norma Rae (although so many Hollywood stars at the time – Jane Fonda, Jill Clayburgh, Faye Dunaway – turned it down, maybe she would have). A few years later she won again and, amazingly, in an era before the internet, still managed to go viral with her acceptance speech in which she proclaimed that a second Oscar confirmed that the first wasn’t just a fluke but that she was really liked. That’s the kind of innocent thing that shouldn’t affect whether you get nominated again but it’s Hollywood so of course it did and she wouldn’t receive another nomination until Lincoln in 2012.
As television expanded over the next four decades, it has become easier than ever to transition back and forth, from one to the other. Of course, it’s never been a problem for non-stars in television to find success in film. Tom Hanks, Morgan Freeman and Michael Keaton all worked in television in the 1970s and found success in film but none of them had the TV stardom of Carney, Travolta or Field. And there are still plenty of big TV stars that find it hard to move back and forth. Jon Hamm may not ever find success on the silver screen despite his smashing success on television. But it’s easier now and actors like Art Carney, John Travolta and Sally Field paved the way. They didn’t let their reputations as broad comedians on sitcoms intimidate them into staying away from dramatic roles in the movies. As for the next forty years of TV and the movies, we can only hope the Oscar winning song from Norma Rae is right: “Maybe what’s good gets a little bit better and maybe what’s bad, gets gone.”
Greg Ferrara
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