The CBS Late Movie
However, three years earlier, scheduling coordinators at many of the network's affiliates, who were programming old movies after nightly local newscasts, took notice of the dwindling stock of new films available for acquisition.
In fact, a 1966 poll of CBS affiliates revealed that approximately 80% of local outlets were demanding the network "supply a late evening entertainment show Mondays through Fridays" to fill the growing void in newer films.
[3] In 1967, at its annual convention, CBS met with 750 affiliate executives and told them the network could provide a Carson-style late night program by the following spring—but only if 85% of station-owners would commit to airing it.
No official poll was taken among the executives, however, and this may have been due to the fact that in 1966 when a similar offer was dangled before affiliates, only 70% of CBS stations desired a late-evening talk show.
But despite his success as a syndicated TV phenomenon, Griffin's CBS ratings could never compete with Johnny Carson's consistently high audience numbers.
And thus, in pulling the plug on Griffin in early 1972, CBS committed its late night programming to classic feature films as well as the debut of more recent theatrical fare.
This move proved an effective ploy because two months after The CBS Late Movie premiered, the Nielsen ratings recorded that it had drawn a larger audience than The Tonight Show.
These included the Richard Chamberlain courtroom drama Twilight of Honor (1963), the original version of the sci-fi classic Village of the Damned (1960), Sidney Lumet's prisoner-of-war entry The Hill (1965), as well as two installments from the Margaret Rutherford-Miss Marple series—Murder Most Foul (1964) and Murder at the Gallop (1963).
These included the Burt Lancaster medieval action-picture The Flame and the Arrow (1950), the Randolph Scott western Fort Worth (1951), and the Richard Widmark military drama Take the High Ground!
But Warners also made available a new package to viewers that showcased the TV premieres of Visconti's controversial anti-Fascist work The Damned (1969), the Beau Bridges outback adventure Adam's Woman (1969) and the Hammer-horror Christopher Lee entry, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1969).
(Violence was often the main factor, with true crime stories and police drama, and occasionally controversial subject matter, or strong suspense, horror, or sci-fi themes.)
Richard Burton's Doctor Faustus, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and The Monkees' Head made their network television debut on this series, as did such lower-budget schlock horror films as The Giant Spider Invasion and Night of the Lepus, the latter of which featured giant rabbits on the loose, becoming a source of embarrassment for one of its stars, Star Trek actor DeForest Kelley, who refused to discuss the film later in interviews.
But not all evenings were devoted to reruns of television serials, for in the summer of 1976, classic British films enjoyed a short revival on The CBS Late Movie.
Repeats of several of the network's situation comedies were also shown in rotation during the 1970s and early 1980s, including The Jeffersons, M*A*S*H, Alice, Archie Bunker's Place and WKRP in Cincinnati.
After T. J. Hooker was canceled by ABC in the summer of 1985, CBS picked up the show and produced new episodes and one two-hour TV movie titled "Blood Sport".
A year later, CBS Late Night returned after The Pat Sajak Show was shortened from 90 to 60 minutes in February 1990 and then cancelled altogether on April 13, 1990.
CBS CEO Les Moonves made a cameo appearance during the series premiere of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, manning a lever that he could use to switch back to The Mentalist reruns if he was dissatisfied with the new program.
