From 1974 to 1989, a special message by Richard N. Hughes, then the vice president and general manager of WPIX-TV, usually preceded the program, which was broadcast every Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, and sometimes both. The cost of broadcasting the program without commercial interruption prompted Michael Eigner, who had been appointed as the station's new general manager upon Hughes's retirement, to cancel it in 1990; incidentally that year, director Whit Stillman included a scene of a New Yorker viewing the "Log" in his movie "Metropolitan". Despite being flooded with hundreds of letters protesting the move, WPIX did not broadcast the program, a move that lasted for eleven years, the longest-lasting hiatus for a television special at that time. Beginning in 1997, WPIX offered various versions of "The Yule Log" on the Internet.