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When
PANDORA’S BOX
Was on PBS
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Sorry, but I have not studied this movie simply because I do not speak German.
As far as I know, Pandora’s Box was severely censored and altered from its very first public performance,
and had never been seen in anything even remotely resembling its original intentions until 44 years later.
I could be wrong about that.
As far as I know, it was in the early 1970’s that Jim Card found sufficient missing footage
to piece together something fairly close to the original director’s cut.
His reconstruction was 110 minutes at 24fps, about 20 minutes longer than the censored release editions.
As far as I know, it was Janus Films that premièred Jim’s reconstruction, and that was in 1973.
It seems, though, that Janus also had a print that ran a mere 89 minutes,
and where on earth that came from, heaven only knows.
Unless, of course, everybody was lying to me.
Yes, I would love to study all the release editions from 1929 through 1972, but I have no clue where to find any of them.
My understanding is that there are currently only three known sources,
all of them dupes, each of them significantly shorter than the original,
all taken from the German edition rather than the English export edition.
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Now that I’ve worked out this much of the Metropolis mystery,
it finally occurs to me why the “PBS Movie Theater” edition of Pandora’s Box
was so different from any other version.
Easy.
It was an early reconstruction.
Earlier and later reconstructions were issued, but that one on PBS seemed to be an
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PBS had worked with
William P.
Perry
in years past, and so hired him to write a score for that film.
Since there was no soundtrack to lock down the speed, PBS told its techies to slow it down to 20fps,
which is almost exactly right for that particular movie.
It looks just fine at 20fps. No complaints.
Bill composed the most hypnotic, haunting, lovely piano score I have ever heard in my life,
and for decades now I have been humming the “Lulu” theme tune to myself. Calmative.
For nearly eight years, I searched high and low for that particular edition of the movie, but could never find it.
I spoke with the folks at Janus, who insisted that the film was 89 minutes, or 110 minutes, that it was never 132 minutes.
I spoke with the folks at PBS, who insisted that the program was 110 minutes and not a minute longer, period, end of story.
The people on the other end of the phone line insisted, INSISTED, that my memory was at fault.
That version of the movie was broadcast only once, and then the master quads were deposited at Bill’s company,
the Great Amwell Corporation (271 Madison Ave, Manhattan NY 10016), where they soon began to rot, as quads are wont to do.
In 1985, I was finally able to trace the rights owners, and I spoke at length with a fellow at Great Amwell,
who INSISTED that the containers for the three-reel quad explicitly stated that the program was 110 minutes,
which would hardly make any sense, because 110 minutes would be on two reels, not three.
“But it has Bill Perry’s score?”
“Yes.”
“And it was the tape broadcast on PBS in December 1977?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s 132 minutes.”
Nope, he said.
We cut a verbal deal:
I would put a $200 check in the mail and they would put a VHS in the mail, and the two would cross.
They got $200 and I got euphoria.
He included a letter with the tape, apologizing for the occasional dropouts,
and responded that, “Yes, it’s 133 minutes.”
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Fifteen years later, a gal named Diedre Conn, who had just started at the office where I worked, got to chatting.
To my utter astonishment, she spoke of silent movies.
Her two favorites were Lon Chaney and Louise Brooks.
You could have knocked me over with a feather.
I told her, “I’ve got something I know you’ve never seen.”
So, I loaned that VHS to her, but she was on her way to visit her family in Kentucky, I think for the Thanksgiving holiday,
and she promised to talk with me about it upon her return.
While in Kentucky, she suffered an aneurysm.
What a way to lose a friend.
So I’ll never see that tape again.
Who knows what on earth ever happened to it.
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When a Killiam Shows employee and I chatted by phone again shortly after Diedre went comatose,
I groaned that I would never see my tape of Pandora’s Box again.
He was a bit stunned.
Killiam had a professional copy! Exactly what I had described!
He instantly figured out that my $200 had funded the transfer that was on file at his office.
So he ran off another VHS for me.
So, by something resembling a miracle, I had it in my hands again, almost right away!
It actually looked better than the one I had received directly from Great Amwell.
The biggest difference was that the first tape opened with a caption that was spoken by a narrator:
“THIS
PROGRAM HAS BEEN MADE POSSIBLE IN PART BY A GRANT FROM THE EXXON CORPORATION.”
The replacement tape deleted that announcement.
About 15 years ago, I burned it to a
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UPDATE, MONDAY, 2 DECEMBER 2024:
I just got back to Albuquerque and retrieved the tape. Hoorah.
I see more than ever before that the film source for this tape had errors.
Three credits were misspelled, the eight act numbers were deleted,
and one title was grossly mistranslated:
“Mäzen” means “patron” or more properly,
in this context, it means “sugar daddy.”
Judging from what we can see, Lulu is understating the case, as Schigolch was clearly her pimp.
Yet the word is inexplicably rendered as “friend” in this print.
Further, at least nineteen titles were missing altogether.
I made what corrections I could by adding captions at the bottom of the screen.
There are some video glitches, too, as blue speckles suddenly pop up over the images.
There is also a segment, beginning at 0:10:29 and lasting about 19 seconds,
in which the quad’s control track got corrupted
and so the image breaks up and blacks out altogether and the music slows down and speeds up repeatedly
as the machine was trying to lock to the pulses again.
Then at 0:14:03 the music goes out for four seconds.
Nothing I can do about that. Sorry.
The bungled
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It is so easy to spot the
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By the way, in case you’re curious, the 16mm print from 1974, 110 minutes at 24fps,
had a few editing and translation corrections, and it had a piano score by Curtis Ivan Salke.
The VHS edition from Embassy Home Entertainment in 1988 had a piano score by Stuart Oderman.
Neither was a thousandth as good as Bill Perry’s score.
For what it’s worth, Salke’s score has never been issued on video.
The only way to hear it is to get that 16mm print, if it still exists.
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If you’re looking for an image of better quality,
you can get the Criterion 358 DVD from 2006.
The Eureka “Masters of Cinema” # 280 EKA70505
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The other scores on video don’t do much for me.
Two of the four scores on the Criterion DVD are passable but nothing more.
The other two, well....
I purchased the Tartan Video VHS, issued in the UK in 1993, 25fps,
just so that I could check out the musical score.
Well, there isn’t one.
It is completely mute, but the liner notes suggest that we put on some Tangerine Dream while watching the movie.
Or The Orb.
Or Bernard Herrmann.
Thanks guys. Very helpful. Not.
And it’s from a dark, dupey, flickery print with gobs of jitter and weave, probably a 16mm bootleg.
Worthy of nothing more than the garbage bin.
I once heard an accompaniment to Pandora’s Box by a trio —
piano, violin, French horn (the program notes say piano, guitar, and trumpet, and so my memory must be at fault) —
playing the same several seconds of agonizingly discordant noise over and over and over and over and over and over again,
for two and a half hours.
The trumpet sounded like a whale moaning in agony
as it was being tortured to death by the other two instruments,
which ceaselessly took turns picking through its flesh with a chisel.
They totally killed the movie.
And I wanted to kill the musicians.
Most of the audience politely stood and applauded when the abomination was over,
and that was one of the most offensive spectacles I have ever witnessed.
It would have been better had there been no accompaniment at all.
Had I not been there as part of a group of four who drove me there and back, I would have walked out.
As for the other three in our group, they had never seen the movie before and they absolutely despised it.
Two of them soon fell asleep out of oppressive boredom.
That awful racket killed the film, killed it dead.
That horrid endless-loop wailing transformed a captivating, beautiful movie into an ugly endurance test.
As that repetitious cacophony continued, I wanted to scream out,
“SHUT OFF THAT NOISE ALREADY!!!!! SHUT UP!!!!! STOP IT!!!!!”
That is when I decided never again to attend a silent film unless I am assured that the accompaniment
will be by musicians who have been trained in silent cinema and who know what they’re doing
and who are not using the opportunity to show off.
I am so lucky, so so so so so so lucky, that my introduction to Pandora’s Box was via Bill Perry, not via that trio.
I grieve for all the people who were introduced to the movie through that trio.
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By the time high-intensity carbon-arc lamphouses were installed in the deluxe cinemas in 1920–1923,
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 https://youtu.be/I_lqtFtB63s Click on the above image to watch the video. When YouTube disappears this video, download it. |
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The above was shown at the
Borderlines Film Festival
on
Sunday, 7 March 2015, 6:15pm, at The Courtyard in Hereford.
As projectionist Simon Nicholls confesses in the note beneath the YouTube video,
he ran it with the Academy 1:1.375 aperture (.600"×.825") rather than the full 1:1.33 silent aperture (.6796"×.90625").
Why?
I’ll tell you why.
Because his owners did not deem it worth the bother to purchase the correct aperture or the appropriate longer lens to accommodate.
That’s why.
To compensate somewhat, he inserted the aperture only part way in order to have a crop that was centered.
Actually, it is amazing that a modern cinema had even the 1:1.375 setup.
That was exceedingly rare, and nearly every cinema on earth would have cropped the image much, much, much more than that.
Look at the booth setup!
A single machine with all six reels spliced together onto a gigantic outboard reel,
and the film had to go through torturous winding paths.
Bad in every way.
Now that film prints are rare, they should all be treated as archival.
Chopping off leaders and tails to splice all the reels onto larger reels should be verboten.
Such assemblies damage the film.
The winding path doesn’t faze projectionists, except for this particular one.
Triacetate and diacetate films are all brittle and getting brittler.
A winding path, as I have personally experienced, can rip a brittle film to shreds.
There is more.
The machine was slowed down to 20fps, or 75'/min.
Pandora’s Box can be slowed down that much, and it looks fine that way,
but it was never shown that way originally and 21fps would be more authentic.
As Simon further confesses:
“Trial and error dictated 20fps was about right for the pianist without too much flicker.”
Yikes!
If you’re gonna slow it down to 20fps, you need to install three-wing shutters or,
better yet, just drop a filter in front of the lens to darken the image slightly.
That eliminates objectionable strobe (it’s strobe, not flicker),
and no matter which method is used the result looks identical, as far as the human eye can discern.
Instead, he just ran it with the normal setup but slowed down, resulting in more strobe, though, he says, not “too much.”
Ach, Mein Gott in Himmel! Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
This is how things are done at a festival?????
Festival presentations are supposed to be flawless.
There should be no compromises whatsoever.
What has the world come to?
Why do I almost never go to movies anymore?
This is why.
Except in the rarest venues, rare venues that are getting rarer by the month, the presentations are all ruined.
I would rather not see a movie at all than see it massacred.
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Once again, I am going to be tiresome, even though I have discovered that NOBODY cares a fig about this atrocity:
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 Silent |
 Cropped to Academy sound format |
 Cropped to widescreen |
 Silent |
 Cropped to Academy sound format |
 Cropped to widescreen |
 Silent |
 Cropped to Academy sound format |
 Cropped to widescreen |
 Silent |
 Cropped to Academy sound format |
 Cropped to widescreen |
 Silent |
 Cropped to Academy sound format |
 Cropped to widescreen |
 Silent |
 Cropped to Academy sound format |
 Cropped to widescreen |
 Silent |
 Cropped to Academy sound format |
 Cropped to widescreen |
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Nobody cares. Nobody. Nobody.
Except for me.
I am the only one who cares.
And nobody understands why I care.
People get fed up with me for griping about this.
When people ask why I didn’t attend a silent movie I really wanted to see,
I tell them that this is the reason, and they sigh in exasperation and walk away, done with me forever.
“Picky, picky, picky.”
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Ah!
Click here for an article
that tells us what sources still survive on this film.
Nothing original survives.
Only three much-later copies have been passed on to us.
That confuses me completely.
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Below is what little I have been able to dig up.
Just after I did the bulk of this research,
I discovered that I am not the first person to plough into this.
Thomas Gladysz
beat me to the punch by a full five years,
and then he beat me to the punch again
by a month and a half!
Once I dig up my old VHS, I think I should give him a jingle.
We’d have a lot to talk about.
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The scheduled opening day:
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The advertised closing day:
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Actually, I am quite certain that it did not play at all.
It was scheduled and advertised, but the censor board killed it.
Perhaps the 55th Street Playhouse went dark these two days?
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Why was Pandora’s Box censored?
There is not a single objectionable image in it.
There is not a single objectionable word in it.
Vajda and Pabst kept it all as inoffensive as possible.
The problem was with the story and the characters:
a hooker, a pimp,
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.png) Image stolen from Wikipedia. |
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 Ran two weeks, Saturday, 30 November 1929, through Friday, 13 December 1929. |
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Every copy of this movie that I have ever seen misspells Alice Roberte as Alice Roberts.
I see this problem goes back to December 1929! Please pay attention to the German poster above.
This is what you see:
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_detail.jpg)
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Also, the French poster:
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 Image stolen from Wikipedia. |
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You still disbelieve me, so here’s an autographed photo as listed by Wittenborn Art Books of San Francisco:
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And from Cyranos.ch:
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So there.
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 Alice Roberte was most definitely not Wedekind’s widow. |
 It ran one week, from Sunday, 26 January 1930, through Saturday, 1 February 1930. |
 So the marriage was omitted? That’s a pretty darned crucial plot element. |
The NYC print had been censored, but the print sent to Baltimore was seemingly authentic, probably maybe.
The reviewer writes that in the preview edition, the Countess murdered Quast.
No she did not!!!!
Either he misremembered, misperceived, or misspoke, or he saw a print that had already been altered.
So we can be certain that the distributor had ordered at least two prints.
According to IMDb, the US distributor was
Moviegraphs,
which seems to have been a fly-by-night
that seems to have folded within a few years.
After a private screening, the Maryland censors hacked away at it.
The censors deleted the murder of Quast?????
They deleted the ending?????
Sorta kills the whole point to the story, doesn’t it?
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 Ran for one week, Saturday, 10 May 1930, through Friday, 16 May 1930. |
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Thomas Gladysz includes the above ad in his essay, but I have searched high and low for it and can find it nowhere,
not in ProQuest, not in Newspapers.com, not in NewspaperArchive.com, not in GenealogyBank.com, not in Google Newspapers,
not in Chronicling America, not in Google Books, not in Archive.org.
Maybe on Old Fulton Postcards? Maybe, but the site is temporarily down.
I cannot figure out how he found this, unless, perchance, he did it the
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Or was it a preposterous claim?
A critic whose initials were “R.H.” wrote in
“The Week on the Screen: Three Silent Films,” The Guardian, Saturday, 19 April 1930, p. 8:
“I had no idea when I wrote last week of
Pabst’s ‘Lulu,’ that it would be
trade shown so soon. It was rumoured that it
was being synchronized, but it was shown
silent last week under its original title of
‘Pandora’s Box’....”
Okay. Whatever. This R.H. also wrongly supplied Alice’s surname as Roberts.
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 The 5th Avenue Theatre advertised only sporadically. The movie played at least three days. |
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Jim Card revived Pandora’s Box at the Dryden screening room at the Eastman House in Rochester.
It seemed to have been a regular repeat, which is good.
Of course, Jim, as always, insisted on running all silent films at 24fps,
because that’s how he remembered movies being presented when he was a kid in the 1920’s.
He didn’t seem to understand that, prior to 1922, 24fps was usually way too fast.
He also seemed not to understand that many foreign films did not follow Hollywood practice,
and so they need to be slowed down a bit.
In my opinion, Pandora’s Box looks horrible at 24fps.
It looks great at 21fps. In my opinion.
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The Dryden revivals led to other revivals.
Those revivals also got people to talking about a movie that absolutely NOBODY would otherwise have known about.
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n058_sec_IV_p_59_872837164.jpg)
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Thomas Gladysz did a little bit of newspaper digging, and that inspired me to do the same.
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WNET/13 in Manhattan licensed “PBS Movie Theater” but chopped off the series opening
and instead rolled the movies into its own established series, “Cinema 13.”
The WNET signal covered not only New York City but also much of New Jersey and Connecticut and
at least as far up north as Poughkeepsie and at least as far down south as Philadelphia.
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 Channel 8 is where Channel 13 landed on the cable box. |
 WSIU/8 in Carbondale, Illinois, and its satellite WUSI/16 in Olney, Illinois. |
 WSIU/8, Carbondale. |
 WSIU/8, Carbondale. |
 WGBH/2, Boston. The signal reached New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, and probably other places, too. |
 Repeat. “Cinema 13,” WNET/13, New York City. |
 Repeat. “Cinema 13,” WNET/13, New York City. |
 WETA/26, Washington, DC. We see that the “PBS Movie Theater” opening was expunged and replaced with “Cinema 26.” |
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Enough already. I’m tired of all these capturoos.
Here follows a simple list of the broadcasts I was able to trace down.
Because TV listings insist that midnight ends the day rather than begins it,
I have indicated this as 24:00 rather than 0:00.
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| DATE | TIME | STATION | CITY | SERIES |
| Sat 08 Jan 1977 | 24:00 | KAET/8 | Phoenix AZ | ? |
| Fri 20 May 1977 | 24:00 | WNET/13 | Manhattan NY | Cinema 13 |
| Thu 09 Jun 1977 | 21:00 | WSIU/8 | Carbondale IL | ? |
| Thu 09 Jun 1977 | 21:00 | WUSI/16 | Olney IL | ? |
| Mon 13 Jun 1977 | 23:00 | WGBH/2 | Boston MA | ? |
| Mon 18 Jul 1977 | 14:00 | WNET/13 | Manhattan NY | Cinema 13 |
| Mon 18 Jul 1977 | 14:00 | WETA/26 | Washington DC | Cinema 26 |
| Wed 21 Sep 1977 | 23:00 | KLRN/9 | Austin & San António TX | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sat 22 Oct 1977 | 21:00 | WGBY/12 | Springfield MA | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sat 22 Oct 1977 | 21:00 | WGBY/57 | Springfield MA | PBS Movie Theater |
| Wed 16 Nov 1977 | 14:00 | WETA/26 | Washington DC | Cinema 26 |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 21:00 | KFME/13 | Fargo ND | ? |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | KISU/10 | Pocatello ID | ? |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 21:00 | KLRN/9 | Austin & San António TX | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | KNME/5 | Albuquerque NM | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | KQEH/54 | San José CA | ? |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 23:00 | KSPS/7 | Spokane WA | ? |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 24:00 | KTCA/2 | Minneapolis MN | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | KUED/7 | Salt Lake UT | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | KVIE/6 | Sacramento & Stockton CA | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | KVIE/12 | Sacramento & Stockton CA | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | KYW/3 | Philadelphia PA | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | WABW/14 | Pelham GA | ? |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | WBRA/15 | Roanoke VA | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | WCBB/10 | Augusta ME | ? |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | WCES/20 | Wrens GA | ? |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | WCML/6 | Alpena MI | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | WEDH/24 | Hartford CT | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | WEDU/3 | Tampa FL | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | WEDW/49 | Stamford CT | ? |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | WENH/11 | Durham NH | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | WFYI/20 | Indianapolis IN | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | WGTV/8 | Athens GA | ? |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | WHYY/12 | Wilmington DE | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | WJSP/8 | Columbus GA | ? |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | WKPC/15 | Louisville KY | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | WKPO/15 | Knoxville TN | ? |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 21:00 | WLPB/27 | Baton Rouge LA | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | WMFE/24 | Orlando FL | ? |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 21:00 | WNIN/9 | Evansville IN | ? |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | WNJS/23 | Camden NJ | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | WQEX/16 | Pittsburgh PA | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | WQLN/54 | Erie PA | ? |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 21:00 | WSRE/23 | Pensacola FL | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | WTIU/30 | Bloomington IN | ? |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | WUFT/5 | Gainesville FL | ? |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | WVAN/9 | Pembroke GA | ? |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | WVPT/51 | Harrisonburg VA | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sat 24 Dec 1977 | 21:00 | WYES/12 | New Orleans LA | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sun 25 Dec 1977 | 20:00 | KQEC/32 | San Francisco CA | ? |
| Sun 25 Dec 1977 | 21:00 | WGBX/44 | Boston MA | ? |
| Sun 25 Dec 1977 | 12:30 | WHYY/12 | Wilmington DE | PBS Movie Theater |
| Mon 26 Dec 1977 | 22:30 | WSIU/8 | Carbondale IL | ? |
| Mon 26 Dec 1977 | 22:30 | WUSI/16 | Olney IL | ? |
| Tue 27 Dec 1977 | 20:00 | WLIW/21 | Garden City NY | ? |
| Tue 27 Dec 1977 | 23:30 | WVIA/44 | Scranton PA | PBS Movie Theater |
| Wed 28 Dec 1977 | 21:30 | KVDO/3 | Salem OR | ? |
| Wed 28 Dec 1977 | 13:30 | KVIE/6 | Sacramento & Stockton CA | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sat 31 Dec 1977 | 23:30 | KERA/13 | Dallas TX | ? |
| Sat 31 Dec 1977 | 14:00 | KTCA/2 | Minneapolis MN | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sat 31 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | KUHT/8 | Houston TX | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sat 31 Dec 1977 | 22:00 | KVPT/18 | Fresno CA | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sat 31 Dec 1977 | 23:30 | WGTV/8 | Athens GA | The Foreign Film II |
| Sat 31 Dec 1977 | 23:30 | WPBT/2 | Miami FL | ? |
| Sat 31 Dec 1977 | 14:00 | WPTD/16 | Dayton OH | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sun 01 Jan 1978 | 15:00 | WNED/17 | Buffalo NY | PBS Movie Theater |
| Fri 06 Jan 1978 | 20:00 | KHET/4 | Hilo HI | PBS Movie Theater |
| Fri 06 Jan 1978 | 20:00 | KHET/11 | Honolulu HI | PBS Movie Theater |
| Fri 06 Jan 1978 | 20:00 | KMEB/10 | Wailuku HI | PBS Movie Theater |
| Sat 07 Jan 1978 | 24:00 | KAET/8 | Phoenix AZ | ? |
| Sun 08 Jan 1978 | 13:00 | KCET/28 | Los Ángeles CA | ? |
| Mon 09 Jan 1978 | 24:00 | KAET/8 | Phoenix AZ | ? |
| Sun 05 Feb 1978 | 15:00 | WNED/17 | Buffalo NY | PBS Movie Theater |
| Fri 05 May 1978 | 14:00 | WETA/26 | Washington DC | Cinema 26 |
| Sat 24 Jun 1978 | 19:00 | WILL/12 | Urbana IL | ? |
| Sun 10 Sep 1978 | 13:00 | KLTM/13 | Monroe LA | Silver Screen |
| Sun 10 Sep 1978 | 22:00 | KLTM/13 | Monroe LA | Silver Screen |
| Sun 10 Sep 1978 | 22:00 | KLTS/24 | Shreveport LA | Silver Screen |
| Sun 10 Sep 1978 | 13:00 | WLPB/27 | Baton Rouge LA | ? |
| Sun 10 Sep 1978 | 22:00 | WLPB/27 | Baton Rouge LA | ? |
| Tue 26 Sep 1978 | 13:30 | KPBS/15 | San Diego CA | ? |
| Mon 09 Oct 1978 | 22:30 | WLEF/36 | Park Falls WI | ? |
| Sat 14 Oct 1978 | 22:30 | WLEF/36 | Park Falls WI | ? |
| Mon 11 Dec 1978 | 24:00 | WNPI/18 | Norwood NY | ? |
| Wed 09 May 1979 | 23:30 | WNPI/18 | Norwood NY | ? |
| Sat 02 Jun 1979 | 10:00 | WXXI/21 | Rochester NY | ? |
| Thu 14 Jun 1979 | 21:00 | WITF/33 | Harrisburg PA | ? |
| Sat 16 Jun 1979 | 23:30 | WNET/13 | Manhattan NY | Cinema 13 |
| Wed 08 Aug 1979 | 13:00 | WNED/17 | Buffalo NY | PBS Movie Theater |
| Wed 08 Aug 1979 | 13:00 | WXXI/21 | Rochester NY | ? |
| Fri 10 Aug 1979 | 13:00 | WCFE/57 | Plattsburgh NY | ? |
| Fri 10 Aug 1979 | 13:00 | WCNY/24 | Syracuse NY | ? |
| Fri 10 Aug 1979 | 13:00 | WLIW/21 | Garden City NY | ? |
| Fri 10 Aug 1979 | 13:00 | WSKG/46 | Binghamton NY | ? |
| Fri 10 Aug 1979 | 13:00 | WXXI/21 | Rochester NY | ? |
| Sat 11 Aug 1979 | 23:00 | WCNY/24 | Syracuse NY | ? |
| Fri 17 Aug 1979 | 24:00 | KCET/28 | Los Ángeles CA | ? |
| Sat 25 Aug 1979 | 23:00 | WCNY/24 | Syracuse NY | ? |
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I’m just barely beginning to understand how “PBS Movie Theater” worked.
PBS headquarters shot out an entire season’s worth of movies at a single go,
and member stations who had paid the license fees captured those satellite transmissions onto 2" quad.
It must have been in late December 1976 that PBS shot out Pandora’s Box,
and that was the one and only time it did so.
Member stations could keep those quads and play them whenever they liked, but not past August 1979.
Member stations were free to chop off the “PBS Movie Theater” intro/logo
and substitute something of their own.
Member stations were free to work these movies into different series.
PBS licensed 102 movies, but 9 of those required extra fees, individually, which many PBS stations did not want to bother with.
So most PBS stations got only 93 movies, though a few licensed one or two extras.
PBS sent out a recommended schedule and a list of nine recommended repeats
for those stations that did not wish to license the premium episodes.
Member stations, though, were free to mix up the order as much as their little hearts desired.
Some stations followed the PBS recommendations.
Some let all the tapes sit in a corner and collect dust, but then aired them all in one big swell foop in July and August 1979.
Come the first of September 1979, the quad tapes had to be wiped or returned or destroyed.
How I wish at least one copy of each had been archived! Oh well.
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