In our haste to consume feature films, we often forget the unheralded genre — movies made for television. For many, just because a movie is made for television, it is inferior. Nothing could be further from the truth. To be sure, there are plenty of dire films made for daytime American TV consumption, and with apologies to fans of the genre, there are the Hallmark movies. Today, such distinctions are meaningless, as we consume movies — whichever screen they are originally made for — on a variety of devices.
The game changer for movies made for television was undoubtedly Home Box Office (HBO) Films, as their tagline ‘It’s not TV, it’s HBO’ demonstrated. An early example from HBO was the searing AIDS drama And the Band Played On (1993), directed by Roger Spottiswoode, who went on to make the Bond film, Tomorrow Never Die s. The film that had a budget of $8 million and a stellar cast, including Matthew Modine, Alan Alda and Ian McKellen, laughed in the face of the assumption that films made for television would be lacking in production values.
Such an assumption may seem novel today, given that television series such as Gotham, Daredevil and House of Cards look every bit as cinematic as their big screen cousins, and in many cases, even put them to shame, but back then, at least within the industry, it was seen as a stigma.
Another acclaimed AIDS-themed HBO drama, Angels in America (2003), directed by the legendary Mike Nichols ( The Graduate ), had household names such as Al Pacino, Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson in the cast. In 2011, the Toronto International Film Festival removed the last vestiges of any distinction between television and big screen films when it chose David Hare’s BBC/NBC co-production Page Eight , starring Bill Nighy, Rachel Weisz and Ralph Fiennes, as its closing film. More recently, HBO produced Steven Soderbergh’s brilliant Behind the Candelabra (2013), starring Michael Douglas in the performance of his life as Liberace and Matt Damon as his lover Scott Thorson, which played at Cannes. This is how it works — if a film is made for television, then it plays on the producing channel in its home country and is free to release theatrically elsewhere, as happened in the case of Behind the Candelabra which got a wide release across the world except in the U.S.
To return to Page Eight, it is a wry, funny post-cold war thriller where MI5 agent Johnny Worricker (Nighy deadpanning as usual) is on the run in the U.K., as he knows too much about shady financial deals that could implicate the Prime Minister (Fiennes in perfect smarm). The sequel, Turks & Caicos, sees Worricker resume hostilities on a Caribbean island and delightfully, he now has Helena Bonham Carter for company and Christopher Walken as the opponent. The saga concludes with Salting the Battlefield , a giddy chase across Europe.
The trilogy is made for television, but it is pure cinema.
