Film at 11
Idiom
"Film at 11" or "Pictures at 11" is a US idiom from television news broadcasting, in which viewers are informed that footage of a breaking news story will be screened later that day. The word "film" in the phrase dates back to the early decades of TV news when footage was regularly recorded on film. 11 PM is the traditional time for late evening local news broadcasts in the Eastern and Pacific time zones of the United States, while the late evening news comes at 10 PM in the middle time zones (Mountain and Central).
History
Television news gathering originally involved crews using 16 mm film (or, at lower-budget stations, Super 8 mm film) that would be processed at the station and had to be edited before it could be aired. The time taken for this process meant that film of an early evening event would only be available in time for the late newscast.
The purpose of these "Film at 11" promotions was to attract viewers and increase the program's ratings. However, news broadcasts were not counted in ratings during the time 16mm film was used in newsgathering and hence promotions typically took the form of "newsflashes" or "special reports" that conveyed the facts of the story.
The phrase entered popular culture in the 1970s, often describing ordinary or mundane events with an implication that the said events were being overly sensationalized, or as a short-hand expression akin to "tell you later." The phrase was used in many TV shows and movies from the 1960s through the 1980s, for instance The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), WKRP in Cincinnati (1978), and Short Circuit (1986).
Whether or not he is to be credited with originating the phrase, in West Coast local news the phrase is commonly attributed to Jerry Dunphy during his time with KABC-TV in Los Angeles.
The phrase became obsolete with the advent of videotape as the medium of choice for news reporting, which made playing back news stories instantaneous.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Film at 11” as idiom. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5448996. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1977, 1978 and 1986.
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This entry incorporates text from “Film at 11” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.