Strange things blow in through my window on the wings of the night wind and I don't worry about my destiny.
Carl Sandburg
A Made-For-TV movies history: In the 1970s, television networks began producing 90- to 120-minute TV movies as a new form of serialized television, and despite the low budgets and quick shooting schedules, managed to attract a lot of name talent whose schedules otherwise prevented them from committing to a television series. Many of them got big ratings; it was often that you could see a TV movie pull in one-third and even half of the television-watching public. However, increasing budgets and the rise of cable television led to a decline of quality to the point where the glory days were forgotten in favor of being Snark Bait among viewers for their low budgets, Strictly Formula plots, and bad acting. Nowadays, the Big Four prefer to be more conservative with budgets while TV movies are strictly done for cable, where many networks have more money to spend due to being light on in-house production. Also helping is that with many cable networks and websites getting into the series business, actors who in the past had to be content with taking a TV movie role in between jobs can happily reject them for a much more lucrative and satisfying role in a show guaranteed to make 10 episodes at the least rather than being reduced to paint-by-numbers Damsel in Distress fare; those that want to stick with TV movie-like roles can instead take work in much shorter true crime reenactment shows airing on Lifetime, Investigation Discovery, A&E and the network news magazines. A number of TV movies have been released theatrically overseas after airing in the United States. This was especially common in the 1970s to ensure that the studios made quicker profits on these movies. One such example is 'Duel', a 1971 suspense thriller starring Dennis Weaver directed by an up-and-coming young filmmaker named Steven Spielberg. A peculiar recent example is the Liberace Biopic Behind the Candelabra, which was reportedly rejected by US film studios for its gay subject matter, was made as a TV movie by HBO, and then did get a cinematic release in many overseas markets. In the United Kingdom, this is not called a "TV movie", but rather a "one-off drama", and is generally seen as being more serious and artistic than a series rather than the reverse, not unlike how OVAs are viewed relative to anime made for broadcast television. Until the late 80s/early 90s they were called "plays" and were often videotaped on multi-camera, which gave them a more theatrical look; occasionally they were even direct adaptations of works written for the stage. Sometimes they'd even end up spawning an ongoing TV series; Rumpole of the Bailey and The Bill can trace their origins back to one-off dramas included in The BBC's Play For Today and ITV's ITV Playhouse anthology strands respectively. In 2010 director Guillermo Del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth, The Shape Of Water) remade the Made for TV movie 'Don't Be Afraid Of the Dark' adding CGI FX that ruined the frightening elements that the original tv movie had that included bad creature animation, very dark lighting (indirectly leaving room for ominous imagination) and a simplistic scary score based on noises that no contemporary MIDI device should try to mimic. Less is More...always. bye.
