Commercials: One for Three

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Last week's news that ABC has paid $800,000 for the Academy Award-winning French film A Man and a Woman came as no surprise to the industry. All year long, old and not-so-old movies have been winning the ratings race, even from prime-time shows. TV's appetite for more and better movies can only increase. But as the demand goes up, so do the prices, and turning a profit on such expensive shows becomes more and more of a problem.

The obvious solution is to sell more ads, as individual stations have already discovered. These days the average late movie runs one minute of commercial time for every four to five minutes of films. And on the popular, easily sold shows, the ratio changes painfully. A recent showing of The Pawnbroker on Manhattan's WOR-TV was interrupted by 19 60-second commercials and 14 30-second commercials. Afterward, there was another 14 minutes of station identifications and promotion announcements. It added up, Variety noted, to a minute of bucks for every three minutes of movie.