HBO Launched With a Hockey Game, a Paul Newman–Henry Fonda Movie, and 375 Subscribers

You might not remember the 1971 film Sometimes a Great Notion, even though it was directed by Paul Newman, who joined Henry Fonda and Lee Remick in the film’s cast. After all, the film didn’t make much of a dent at the box office or on the awards circuit — though Richard Jaeckel did get a supporting-actor Oscar nod — and it gets overshadowed by another film adaptation of a Ken Kesey novel, 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Sometimes a Great Notion does, however, have a claim to fame in the history of cable television: It was the very first movie that HBO broadcast when the channel launched on November 8, 1972, as only a few hundred households witnessed. But it wasn’t the first programming offered by Home Box Office…

HBO’s very first broadcast was a New York Rangers–Vancouver Canucks hockey game.

That night in 1972, the first thing HBO viewers saw was Jerry Levin introducing that night’s programming before segueing to a hockey game between the New York Rangers and the Vancouver Canucks at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, according to The New York Times. (If you’re curious, the Rangers beat the Canucks that night, 5 to 2.)

At the time, Levin was a lawyer working for the New York City cable TV company Sterling Communications, and HBO put him on the map. “I had a life before HBO,” he told James Andrew Miller for the book Tinderbox: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuits of New Frontiers, as the Times reported in Levin’s obituary. “It was fascinating, but my real life began with HBO. It was my first kiss. It was my first and greatest love.”

Levin, who died in 2024 at age 84, would go on to become chief executive at Time Warner when it was still the world’s largest media company — and when it executed an ill-fated merger with AOL, then the world’s largest internet company, in 2000 — as the Times added.

 

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Later came Sometimes a Great Notion, a film Newman didn’t remember too fondly.

Sometimes a Great Notion, adapted for the silver screen by screenwriter John Gay (Separate Tables), follows the struggles of father and son Hank (Newman) and Henry Stamper (Fonda) and their family of independent loggers amid a union dispute in small-town Oregon.

And the project came amid real-life struggles for Newman. “The time when I was doing Sometimes a Great Notion was a kind of unhinged period for me,” the actor wrote in The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man: A Memoir (per Far Out Magazine). “I felt unsettled, I was warring with everybody. There were even some difficult times with [wife] Joanne [Woodward].”

He added: “The Newman-Foreman Company was producing the picture, I was starring, and our director, Richard Colla, had to be replaced. I ended up having to direct the film myself — and then the production had to be briefly shut down because I’d had a nasty motorcycle accident near our set in Oregon. I had too much pressure on me from every direction, and I didn’t ask for it.”

HBO only had 375 subscribers at the time

When HBO aired that first night of programming, it broadcast the hockey game and the airing of Sometimes a Great Notion to only 375 households, all of which were in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, according to the St. Petersburg Times.

The Times Leader in Wilkes-Barre advertised that “double feature” in its issue that morning. “Available to Teleservice Cable subscribers, Home Box Office will present on Channel 21 a double feature like this every night, seven days a week — a sports event (or special attraction) followed by a current movie hit, or two top current movies. Each event and each move uninterrupted, unedited, complete.”

The idea for HBO came from Charles Dolan, head of Sterling Communications. But because New York City cable franchises weren’t allowed to carry feature-length movies at the time, Dolan had to market HBO elsewhere, as The New York Times reported.

And Dolan, who died in 2024 at age 98, developed HBO with the, ahem, great notion that cable had more potential than just a means for providing better TV reception than antennas. “We realized that if we provided more than a reception service — if we did sports and if we did movies — our service would be far more attractive to the residents of Manhattan,” Dolan once explained, per Newsday. “Then came the idea.”

That idea, of course, was HBO, and the rest is TV history. (Unless, that is, you buy the old slogan that HBO is “not TV.”)