Talk:Girl on the Run (1958 film)

Not the first tele-movie

When I encountered it, this article was making the assertion that Girl on the Run was the first tele-movie, and that it "beat" Fame Is the Name of the Game by several years. This is rather contrary to what I see as the central notability of the work. If it wasn't a theatrical film first, then Warner Bros. didn't own 77 Sunset Strip. Granted, it was only a theatrical film in the eyes of the tiniest proportion of the global population, but, as a matter of record, it was made for release in cinemas.

The other thing to note is the timing of the two series which resulted from Girl on the Run and Fame. In Girl's case, the series came immediately; that is, the next week after Girl was broadcast. On the television side of its identity, it was just an extra-long pilot. Many pilots are extra-long, in the same time slot as the series, and broadcast the week immediately prior to the first "normal-length" episode. This doesn't make them made-for-tv movies. It just makes them pilots. The most that you could ever claim for Girl, it seems to me, is that it was the television debut of a theatrical film—that is, if you agree with the Jack Warner party line (and, I suppose, the letter of the copyright law). Even Roy Huggins does not appear to have viewed it as a tele-movie; he claims in an Archive of American Television interview, that it was intended as a regular-length episode of the series until Warner "mysteriously" asked for it to be expanded by 30 minutes. In fact, Girl's runtime was a rather short-for-a-movie 77 minutes.

By contrast, Fame was genuinely a tele-movie. It appeared two seasons prior to the debut of the series. At 100 minutes, it didn't fit easily into a standard television programming block and had to be treated as a special event. There's no question but that it was a one-off, which later was seen as the possible basis for a television series. CzechOut 04:45, 20 August 2007 (UTC)