Things have changed since Leonard Maltin started reviewing
Things have changed since Leonard Maltin started reviewing
If there’s one guy who knows movies and television, it’s Leonard Maltin. Maltin says he has been reviewing films since the age of 15, and was hired to write the first volume of “Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide” when he was 17 -years-old.
“The book was aimed at people who watched old movies on local television,” says Maltin. “And old movies filled the airwaves of local television, in those days.”
From the 1950s through the late 1980s, the networks ABC, CBS and NBC dominated. But, Maltin says, the biggest difference in television between now and then is that there is a lot more content today.
“Walt Disney was on one of the three big networks,” says Maltin. “He used to command a weekly audience that was roughly equivalent to the Super Bowl audience in television today. If anybody was on the Ed Sullivan show, chances are something like a third or more of the country was watching. And that was a regular event, it was not special, it was a regular weekly event.”
Films have changed over the years as well. Maltin says that although the film making industry has always been a business, the nature of it has changed. Movie studios weren’t always owned by large corporations, like Sony and Comcast. Some owned themselves, and others were owned by movie theaters.
“So now they’re dealing with reporting to people who don’t necessarily care about movies that much, know about movies that much and they are also reporting to shareholders. So there are a lot of people to satisfy,” says Maltin.
Listen to the full conversation in the audio player above.
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