But it's not just AMAZON. For example, is ABC hoarding content for a new streaming service of their own? That's what we've long wondered. The passing of "Carole Lynley" last week made us wonder even more.
See, Carole Lynley made many films but she also made many television movies -- in fact, her first TV movie was 1968's SHADOW ON THE LAND which aired on ABC. ABC, in fact, aired their MOVIE OF THE WEEK from September 23, 1969 to May 14, 1975 and featured original, made for television movies. It might be an unsold pilot masquerading as a movie or it might be some entertaining diversion. Nick Nolte made two of those in 1974 WINTER KILL (with Andy Griffith) and THE CALIFORNIA KID (with Michelle Phillips, Martin Sheen and Vic Morrow). Every now and then, you'd get a true classic like Karen Black's TRILOGY OF TERROR.
Though ABC ended their MOVIE OF THE WEEK in 1975, TV movies continued to air on the network (as well on other networks). Point of fact, Mare Winningham. TIME magazine dubbed Parker Posey "the queen of the indies" due to her dominance in independent film. Mare? From 1976 to 2005, she made 39 TV movies including THE WOMEN'S ROOM (based on Marilyn French's acclaimed novel) and our three favorites: OFF THE MINNESOTA STRIP, AMBER WAVES (she won an Emmy for this one) and FREEDOM (which also features her singing).
39 TV movies? Mare's work could provide a bingeable streaming experience. But where is it? Where is all of Tuesday Weld's TV work? Like Carole, Tuesday starred in theatrical films and TV movies. On TV, she starred in productions such as THE CRUCIBLE with George C. Scott and Colleen Dewhurst, REFLECTIONS OF MURDER with Joan Hackett and Sam Waterston, MADAM X with Eleanor Parker, SCORNED AND SWINDLED with Keith Carradine, Sheree North and Peter Coytoe, CIRCLE OF VIOLENCE with Geraldine Fitzgerald and River Phoenix, F. SCOTT FITZGERALD IN HOLLYWOOD with Jason Miller, MOTHER AND DAUGHTER: THE LOVING WAR, SOMETHING IN COMMON with Ellen Burstyn and Don Murray, THE RAINMAKER with Tommy Lee Jones, A QUESTION OF GUILT with Viveca Lindfors and Lana Wood and THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT with Donald Sutherland and Teri Garr. Tuesday Weld is an important actress, a true original, whose work provides not only entertainment but also inspiration because her technique really deserves examination and study.
There's a reason this is the the third time we've noted her TV work. You can also refer to 2013's "TV: The Death of the TV Movie" and 2017's "TV: The TV movie." From the latter:
Some actresses might stay with the movie of the week genre for a series of films -- Mare Winningham, Donna Mills, Elizabeth Montgomery, Victoria Principal and Lindsay Wagner, to cite a few.
It was a genre actresses could make a mark in with defining performances delivered by Farrah Fawcett in THE BURNING BED, SMALL SACRIFICES and BETWEEN TWO WOMEN; Marlo Thomas in THE LOST HONOR OF KATHRYN BECK and NOBODY'S CHILD; Jane Fonda in THE DOLLMAKER; Angela Bassett in THE ROSA PARKS STORY; Glenn Close in SOMETHING ABOUT AMELIA and SERVING IN SILENCE: THE MARGARETHE CAMMERMEYER STORY; Diana Ross in OUT OF DARKNESS; Ann-Margaret in WHO WILL LOVE MY CHILDREN? and A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE; Cicely Tyson in THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MISS JANE PITTMAN; Bette Davis in WHITE MAMA; Vanessa Redgrave in PLAYING FOR TIME and SECOND SERVE; Alfre Woodard in UNNATURAL CAUSES, THE PIANO LESSON, MISS EVERS' BOYS and A MOTHER'S COURAGE: THE MARY THOMAS STORY; Barbara Hershey in A KILLING IN A SMALL TOWN; Halle Berry in INTRODUCING DOROTHY DANDRIDGE and THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD; Jessica Lange in NORMAL; Liza Minnelli in A TIME TO LIVE; Lynn Whitfield in THE JOSEPHINE BAKER STORY; Sigourney Weaver in PRAYERS FOR BOBBY; Natalie Wood in THE CRACKER FACTORY; Queen Latifah in BESSIE; Mary Tyler Moore in LIKE MOTHER LIKE SON: THE STRANGE STORY OF SANTE AND KENNY KIMES; Elizabeth Taylor and Carol Burnett in BETWEEN FRIENDS; and Cher, Demi Moore, Sissy Spacek, Anne Heche and Jada Pinkett in IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK.
But what happens if all this great work just vanishes? That's very possible. And all the streaming platforms these days -- CRACKLE, TUBI, PLUTO, NETFLIX, HULU, ROKU, AMAZON, etc. -- hasn't resulted in past product popping up.
Until recently.
AMAZON's discovered a few. We stumbled onto the fact after bailing on the so-bad-it-stinks movie THE AGENCY. This Canadian film was available in very few US theaters -- for good reason -- and would make a stronger impression when it popped up on HBO two years after its 1980 release. It's not just the acting that stinks. "No sweat, no sweat!" the actors seem to be singing (it's very hard to hear the soundtrack -- speaking or singing) as they dance around -- the guys in assless chaps of some kind -- in a TV advertisement that Robert Mitchum pronounces, "Perfect. That's money well spent." Someone should have passed the commercial over to Lee Majors. We first see Lee huffing and puffing as he takes his morning run. Valerie Perrine pulls up alongside of him in her car. He hopes in, takes off his sweat suit jacket, sprays some deodorant in his armpits and then pulls on a dress shirt for work. Shortly after, Valerie tells him, "You ought to be ashamed of yourself, grown man." She also says "disgusting" -- she's not talking about his b.o., but she might as well be. Lee may be talking about his body odor when he tells her, "People are more appreciative when I arrive." We believe the term for those kind of people is "scent pigs."
Watching THE AGENCY, we thought at first it was a TV movie. Again, the soundtrack is awful -- it crackles at times. And the film has a washed out visual as though the copy has been overexposed during processing.
That look is there in a number of TV movies AMAZON's added for AMAZON PRIME members. Leonard Nimoy stars in 1973's BAFFLED! which isn't very scary but is interesting entertainment for a number of reasons -- including viewers getting to see Nimoy's take on Jane Fonda's famous KLUTE shag hair-do. The TV movie was actually a British TV pilot that didn't get picked up(in the US, the TV film aired on NBC). Leonard's speeding around a track in a red and white number 37 race car when he suddenly can't see what's in front of him and instead has a vision of "a gravel road" leading to a British manor. After he wipes out on the track, his vision changes to Vera Miles "screaming her head off and a girl, I guess you'd call it a sly grin, smirking at her." From there, the search is on to figure out who is trying to torment Vera Miles. SPOILER: It's not Alfred Hitchcock.
Kate Jackson and Robert Wagner star in DEATH AT LOVE HOUSE a tight little thriller that holds your attention due to the cast which also includes Dorothy Lamour, Sylvia Sidney, Joan Blondell, John Carradine and Bill Macy. Kate and Robert are a married couple and Robert's envious of his father (Wagner plays dual roles of Junior and Senior). The film opens with a Hollywood tour bus traveling through a neighborhood to the late actress Lorna Love's home. The bus driver explains it is "a 36 room mansion built at a cost of over three million dollars for the beautiful and world famous actress whose tragic death in 1935 saddened her many fans across the globe. The day after Lorna's funeral, a shrine was built directly behind the trees up there. Folks use your imagination. Think of Lorna as beautiful as ever, as you remember her, her body embalmed up there in her shrine. Lying up there forever."
His speech is interrupted by Robert Wagner who explains, "We'd like to get off here." When the driver says no, Robert insists that Kate is pregnant, while she adds, "And I'm feeling a little sick." Consider it a bit of misdirection, sleight of hand, that opens the film on a light note and let's you enjoy their putting one over on the bus driver. They're actually going to be staying at the estate -- while they write a book about Lorna. Bill Macy introduces them to the home and, in a foreboding moment, a door closes shutting Kate out of the house. Kate will become more shut out and more victimized as this 1976 Spelling-Goldberg production moves along.
Kate was hot off THE ROOKIES and a household name when ABC aired this movie on September 3, 1976. She was also already connected to CHARLIE'S ANGELS -- the pilot having aired twice in March of 1976. On that show, she would act alongside Cheryl Ladd for two seasons. They did not get along offscreen. Nor had they gotten along in 1973 when they were both in the Spelling-Goldberg TV movie SATAN'S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS. ABC aired a remake (with Kate Jackson, Taraji P. Henson and Shannen Doherty) in March of 2000 but the original remains a horror classic -- one that is also available on AMAZON PRIME. Pamela Franklin plays Elizabeth who goes looking for the reason her sister Martha is hanged. She refuses to believe the death was a suicide. "I can't accept that," she tells the police who tell her the case is closed.
"Not for me, it isn't," she declares as she heads off for The Salem Academy For Women.
It all ends in the school's basement despite head mistress Jo Van Fleet insisting to Pamela Franklin and Kate Jackson, "No, you can't go down there. No, you can't go down there! That's why I'm in trouble! Miss Abigail doesn't let anybody go down there. No, please, please, don't go down there. She'll think I sent you. Please don't go down there. Please."
What do they find in the basement? What do you think they find in a movie called SATAN'S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS?
Kate's the star of TV movies on AMAZON. Along with those two vintage TV movies, AMAZON PRIME members can also stream HARD EVIDENCE (which was JUSTICE IN A SMALL TOWN when NBC aired it September 23, 1994 -- her co-stars are John Shea and Dean Stockwell), they can stream A MOTHER'S TESTIMONY, a LIFETIME 2001 movie and they can stream 1998's SWEET DECEPTION (also LIFETIME and co-stars include Joan Collins, Jack Scalia and Joanna Pacula). The image quality and the soundtrack is better in these later films. That's also the case with the three TV movies starring Lindsay Wagner that AMAZON PRIME offers for streaming: CALLIE & SON (CBS, 1981, co-stars include Michelle Pfeiffer),1988's NIGHTMARE AT BITTER CREEK (CBS, 1988, co-stars include Tom Skerritt) and FIRE IN THE DARK (CBS, 1991, co-stars include Olympia Dukakis).
And it's the case with one Marlo Thomas TV films offered by AMAZON PRIME -- ULTIMATE BETRAYAL (CBS, March 20, 1994, co-starring Ally Sheedy and Eileen Heckart) while the other, 1977's IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT (ABC, 1977, co-stars include Cloris Leachman and Orson Welles), again suffers from the quality of the print being streamed. The same can be said of Farrah Fawcett's MURDER ON FLIGHT 502 (co-stars include Polly Bergen, Ralph Bellemy and Theodore Bikel) whose blurry print is only matched by the underwhelming quality of Danny Bonaduce's emoting while declaring "I always sit alone" and "I bite." Fernando Lamas declares, "The possibilities seem very limited" and it's hard not to take that as a critique of Bonaduce's performance.
One notable exception of the vintage TV movies offered by AMAZON would be GIDGET GROWS UP. As Karen Valentine's Gidget drops out of school and goes to work at the United Nations, she looks gorgeous and so does Paul Petersen as Moondoggie. This is one print that's neither faded or blurred but as sharp and in focus as it was when ABC first broadcast it on December 30, 1969.
We don't understand why AMAZON can't get better prints to stream for most of the vintage TV movies or why they can't offer more movies from that period.
But we also don't understand AMAZON and HBO.
If you're subscribing to HBO via AMAZON, let us break the news to you: You're being ripped off.
There are so many films and specials offered by HBO online that you will not have access to if you subscribe via AMAZON.
HBO: FEATURED MOVIES on AMAZON, for example, offers 200 choices -- some of which are TV series and not films.
If you click on "HBO" from "Your Channels," you are presented with HBO: Series, HBO: Movies, HBO: Documentaries, HBO: Comedy movies and specials, HBO: Kids series, HBO: Kids and family movies, HBO: Sports, HBO: Latino Series and Watch Live -- which provides you with eight boxes (eight live HBO channels).
"HBO: MOVIES"? Again, it provides you with 200 choices. "HBO: Comedy movies and specials" provides you with 200 choices as well -- but seven of those are trailers or promos.
Those are not the full movies and specials offered to HBO subscribers.
If you subscribe to HBO via HULU? You can go to the "Movies A-Z" and get a full listing of the films being offered. You will find 930. That's 730 more choices than you're getting via AMAZON -- and that's despite the fact that both services charge you $14.99 a month for HBO.
If you subscribe via HULU, however, you will get access to those films and specials. Since the subscription cost for HBO is the same at HULU as it is at AMAZON, we're confused why anyone would subscribe through AMAZON unless they just didn't know better.
Oh, and remember those eight live streaming HBO channels? If you subscribe to HBO via HULU, you're going to get 14 live streaming HBO channels.
We're always afraid, each year, that, come summer, we'll run out of something to write about. There's not a great deal of new shows offered in the summer (though more today than when we started). So, for years, we've tried to think up what to write about if we run out of topics in the summer. We usually compile a list in April and it's usually a list of five topics. This year, we put down "streaming services" with the understanding that we'd spend time providing overviews. We didn't get around to that but we did get around to adding HBO to the AMAZON PRIME subscription and SHOWTIME to the HULU subscription thinking we'd compare and contrast those two (HBO and SHOWTIME). We assumed that they'd offer the same content they offered on every platform.
But we were on the road and bored at one point this summer as we were looking at scripts for two fall sitcoms when we wanted to see something actually funny. So we pulled up AMAZON and the HBO channel there intending to watch Tracey Ullman. Not TRACEY ULLMAN'S SHOW -- which is very funny, but we've already seen all three seasons several times. Tracey's worked a lot with HBO so we didn't think we'd have trouble finding other offerings. But we couldn't. We kept hitting the advance key on the remote and scrolling forever right (which always ticks us off anyway -- both for the mind numbing nature of it all and because we tend to tilt left, if you haven't noticed) but nothing.
How could that be?
Because AMAZON doesn't offer all the HBO content.
Go to comedy at HBO on HULU and, look, there's TRACEY ULLMAN'S SHOW, but there's also TRACEY ULLMAN IN THE TRAILER TALES and TRACEY ULLMAN: LIVE & EXPOSED. Oh, and look, there's ELLEN DEGENERES: HERE AND NOW and ELLEN DEGENERES: THE BEGINNING. We couldn't find those clicking through HBO offerings at AMAZON either.
'Okay, but surely you can find this stuff on AMAZON and stream it without having to pay since you're paying for HBO via AMAZON?"
Some of it you can find. But, yes, you have to utilize the "search" feature and search all of AMAZON. On some of the results, it will note that the film, special or series is HBO and that you can view it without an additional cost. On others, you won't see that on the outside results and will have to click on the item to find that out. But, again, that's only on what shows up in the search results and not all of the HBO content is showing up.
If you're going to subscribe to HBO, it's better to do it with HULU which will give you more HBO live streaming channels and more HBO offerings. And you'll get those without having to search all of HULU for an item you want to watch that HBO has.
As we said at the beginning, there's so much that confuses us about AMAZON.