How has the Evolution of the Silver Screen affected the theater and movie going experience in the...

[LizzieMaine]

I can only barely remember newsreels but I'm surprised they lasted as long as some of them did, longer than I realized. The interesting thing about them is the way news that you see on Yahoo or MSN almost exactly parallels what you saw in a newsreel. In fact, some of the events are the same; only the dates have changed. There would be something about the saber-rattling in Europe or the Far East, something about new hats in New York, something about the floods on the Mississippi (it's always flooded, you know), bathing suits in Miami or Atlantic City, something about the economy perhaps or politics. I always wondered who did the voice-over. It was good, just like the narration on Walt Disney nature films.

Most of the newsreel announcers were radio veterans -- Lowell Thomas narrated Movietone News for over thirty years, but was better known as a radio newscaster, who remained on the air thru 1976. Graham McNamee, probably the most famous radio announcer who ever lived, narrated Universal's newsreel until he died in 1942. He was replaced by Ed Herlihy, the cousin of radio comedian Fred Allen, and would eventually become known as the announcer-voice of Kraft Cheese in commercials lasting into the 1980s. An actor by the name of Gregory Abbott was the narrator for Paramount News for its entire run -- an achievement duplicated by no other newsreel voice. Pathe never had a definitive voice, but used several popular radio announcers over the years, including Alois Havrilla in the 1930s, Dwight Wiest in the 1940s, and Andre Baruch in the 1950s.

Most newsreels also had specific commentators for sports and feature news. Movietone used Ed Thorgerson and Mel Allen, both radio veterans, for sports reports, and Vyvyan Donner for fashion news and "women's features." But perhaps the best remembered Movietone feature was a German-dialect comedian named Lew Lehr, who hosted the "Newsettes" segment. This was where you'd find comedy footage of crazy inventions, bathing-beauty contests, circus acts, or, most popularly, animal footage -- with Lehr punctuating the footage with brutally awful puns and jokes. His catch phrase, which came out of the popularity in the 1930s of film clips of chimps doing ridiculous things, was "Monkeys iss der cwaziest peoples!"

You can see dozens of original Movietone News reels here -- these are the actual reels as released to theatres, not compilations or clips of individual stories, and they give you a good idea of how a typical newsreel was put together in the Era.

 

[BlueTrain]

I just remembered that one thing that has changed in television, is the almost total lack of local programming, with the exception of news. The local programs weren't always much more than hosts who introduced a movie or cartoon but they were definitely local color and well remembered. Sometimes there would be something a little more substantial, nearly always in the daytime and typically aimed at women, but I don't think they were too common. I think they were probably replaced by daytime talk shows, of which there are many.

When did the Friday night fights go off the air?

 

[LizzieMaine]

The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, which presented boxing every Friday night starting in 1946, went off the air in 1960. There may have been locally-originated boxing programs in individual cities after that, but the Gillette program was the primary national broadcast.

Local hosts were still common into the 1970s, especially on independent stations, but they were gone by the end of the 1980s. Our own local host, a goofy character named Eddie Driscoll, was on the air from 1954 to 1985, hosting everything from cartoons to monster movies to "Dialing For Dollars." He was the only celebrity I've ever met in person who genuinely impressed me.

 

[BlueTrain]

My wife remembers the local host of a cartoon program on television named "Captain Tug." He was supposed to be holding forth from a tugboat on the Potomac River.

Something more in the way of real programming, as opposed to hosting, were a lot of local country & western music programs where I lived. In fact, one of my neighbors had one. There were also religious programs (send in them cards and letters and help keep this program on the air). There seemed to be some others that were probably regional, rather than national, like the Porter Wagoner show but I don't know anything about them. I rather doubt they were broadcast in Maine. I was surprised, however, to see lots of American C&W CDs for sale in German stores when I was over there a couple of years ago, so I guess the genre travels better than I imagined.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Country music was very popular in the Era in Maine, continuing well into the 1970s on television -- but it wasn't Southern-style country. It was Canadian-influenced country, as practiced by Hal Lone Pine and his Mountaineers or Curly O'Brien. Dick Stacey's Country Jamboree is a legendary local program in Maine television -- it started in the mid-sixties as "Frankenstein's Country Jamboree," after the original sponsor, a furniture store in Milbridge called "Frankenstein's." In the seventies, "Stacey's Fuel Mart," a giant gas station in Brewer, took over sponsorship and it ran as a live late-Saturday-night show on Channel 7 out of Bangor into the mid-1980s. It was hugely popular in Atlantic Canada, and many of the acts came from there.

There were also local religious programs -- every day on Channel 5 out of Bangor, a local clergyman would deliver a five-minute sign on sermon after the test pattern and before Jack LaLanne, and these continued well into the 1990s. There were also broadcasts of local evangelical-type services -- although most Mainers don't subscribe to such beliefs, there are pockets where Baptists and Pentecostalists are common, and they would televise their Sunday morning services as paid broadcasts. These were very common in the 1970s and 1980s, but have become much less common as those churches have lost membership and influence in the wake of various fundraising scandals.

When I was in radio in the '80s, our station here in town featured the very last live program of religious music to exist on Maine commercial radio -- "The Living Waters Revival Hour," broadcast every Sunday morning at 9. The singers -- four elderly ladies -- and their accompanist, who played an accordion -- would group around a big old Western Electric ribbon mic on a floor stand in the news studio, and at the crack of 9 would start singing "DRINKING FROM THA SPRANG OF LIVIN WAH-TAHS -- HAPPY NOW AM I -- I'M SO SAT-IS-FIED -- A WONDAHFUL AN BOUN-TEE-FUL SUP-PLLLLY..." It was like a time slip back to 1940, and I kick myself now for not saving any airchecks.

 

[BlueTrain]

Put your hands on the television and be healed!

One program in particular I remember was something called "Ask the pastors" or something like that. There was a Roman Catholic clergyman and another one who was protestant, probably Methodist. Can't imagine a Baptist doing something like that. It was a live, call-in program and callers would ask questions. I remember them frequently sitting and chatting to each other while the phone sat there between them, not ringing. But another characteristic of a lot or most of the local programming was that it was live. I also think there were even some fifteen-minute programs, too. None of the news programs back then were as long as they are now. I guess maybe there wasn't as much news.

Early radio--and it didn't have to go back all that far to be early--was similar. There was a lot of local programing, and I mean entertainment programs, that was live and frequently they were short programs. Almost surprisingly, there were programs broadcast live from hotel ballrooms. I don't recall what the term was, though, for a linkup like that. I don't know that anything like that happened on television, except maybe on New Year's Eve.

I once got to visit a TV studio to be on one of those live programs that also had a children's gallery, like the old Howdy Doody show. It was very informative. The studio was basically one large room with the cameras in the middle and all the various sets that you saw on TV arranged around the room more or less in a big circle.

 

[LizzieMaine]

One reason why there were so many local programs before the 1980s is that that stations were required by federal law to serve the public interest, convenience, and necessity as a condition of retaining their licenses, and this wasn't just words on paper -- the station was required to furnish full documentation that it was living up to this requirement at renewal time. Public service was an obligation under the law, not simply something the station did when it couldn't sell the time to a commercial sponsor. There were also restrictions on ownership of stations, ensuring that they remained owned by local people with an emphasis on service to local markets.

With the deregulation of the broadcasting industry in the 1980s and 1990s, this has all gone by the wayside. Stations are rarely locally owned anymore, and in radio, especially, rarely do anything at all to serve their local market -- when Clear Channel comes to town, the very first thing to be dumped is the local news and public service staff.

What you're thinking of is "remotes," or "nemos," as they were often called by engineers. Dance band remotes were a fundamental piece of radio, both network and local, from the twenties thru the fifties, and they continued in a vestigal form on the networks until CBS ended the last ones in 1971. But local remotes were a mainstay of every peanut-whistle AM station on the air into the 1990s -- "I'm Joe Blow broadcasting from the Western Auto here in East Bunghole, and we've got free hot dogs so come on down and test drive a new lawn mower today!"

The high class stations broadcast their remotes via a portable shortwave transmitter called a "Marti", which would send the program over the air back to the station studio for retransmission. We weren't a high class station, though, so we did our remotes by unscrewing the transmitter cap from a telephone and clipping a mixer to the terminals with alligator leads. Sometimes we'd even do this with a payphone, if it was an old-style one, and we could find a beer can tab to jam under the contacts to defeat the coin lockout.

 

[Fading Fast]

This could also go in the "Terms which have disappeared" thread. The phrase is, "This is where we came in." When I was a boy in the '50s we paid little attention to starting times. We just went to a movie and sat down, no matter how long the feature had been running. They didn't clear the theater at the end of the film in those days. We just sat through the end, then the cartoon, previews, travelogue, maybe another feature and when we got to the part where we came in, we got up and left. As long as we saw the whole movie, the continuity meant nothing. It would drive me crazy to do that now, but children have no need of narrative continuity. They just need to experience the whole story.

I think it was less about being a child and more about a cultural norm. My grandmother went to the movies 'till she died in the early '70s and never checked a time, just showed up, went in, watched the end of what was playing, waited for it to start up again and watched 'till she got to the point where she came in and, then, left. I went to many movies with her this way.

She was a smart, successful small business owner who taught me things to this day that are more helpful than much of the "smart" advice out there - but to her, that was just the way you went to movies.

I do think, and I noted this before, that part of it was the general attitude toward movies when she was younger - they were light entertainment, "something to do for a few hours" and not "art" to be experienced the way the director "envisioned" it.

I couldn't watch a movie that way anymore, but having lived through it, I think I understand it.

And that last thought is one I think a lot about. No matter how much we read - even contemporary account of the Golden Era - it is hard to fully appreciate the mindset / the cultural norm / the "feel" of a period having not witnessed it first hand. I (think I) fully appreciate the mindset that could allow someone to watch a movie "out of order" because I lived it through my grandmother - how many other things form that period do I not really understand having not experienced it first hand?

 

[LizzieMaine]

I do think, and I noted this before, that part of it was the general attitude toward movies when she was younger - they were light entertainment, "something to do for a few hours" and not "art" to be experienced the way the director "envisioned" it.

I couldn't watch a movie that way anymore, but having lived through it, I think I understand it.

This is very true. The idea of movies as "art" didn't become common, let alone mainstream, among even "sophisticated" Americans until the rise of the French "auteur" theory in the 1950s and 1960s. Prior to that, most intellectual types disdained "the movies" the same way they'd disdain a comic book -- trash culture, something for the unsophisticated rabble, and beneath the notice of an educated mind.

Not every intellectual felt this way, of course. You had "art films" in the Era, usually made in Germany, France, or the Soviet Union, but they were not shown at your neighborhood theatre -- you had to go find some "art theatre" in the weird part of town if you wanted to see this sort of thing. You wouldn't even see them advertised except in the Daily Worker or in the tiny fine print in the New Yorker.

Meanwhile, I think we're in the middle of an even more fundamental change right now in the way television is experienced, and the way in which television stories are told. Since Correll and Gosden invented the broadcast serial in the 1920s, there has been a certain way broadcast stories have been paced and written: with the understanding that a big part of the audience would not experience every episode. It was necessary to slow the pacing of serialized stories to accomodate the people who missed episodes along the way, and this has continued to be necessary right up to our own time.

Now, however, with the whole idea of "binge watching" series in one session, you will see stories developing in a faster pace, with much less repetition of story points, and much denser plotting. When binge watching becomes the norm, you will no longer be able to follow a story if you miss an episode -- and that's something entirely new to the way we experience those stories.

 

[Fading Fast]

...Now, however, with the whole idea of "binge watching" series in one session, you will see stories developing in a faster pace, with much less repetition of story points, and much denser plotting. When binge watching becomes the norm, you will no longer be able to follow a story if you miss an episode -- and that's something entirely new to the way we experience those stories.

And the quality of a well done "binge-style" series like "The Man in the High Castle" or "Boardwalk Empire" reveals two weaknesses in their less-or-not-well-done peers: one being the old wash-rinse-repeat story telling of even decently written shows like "House" seem immature now and, two, those "binge" structured shows that don't really have the story arc and writing skills to create a compelling, intricate but also narrative-consistent story over a season or seasons come off as weak - "Hell on Wheels" (after season one) and "The Vikings" are two shows that I like but don't love because they suffer from this second affliction.

Lizzie, I thought you'd be all over my comment about how directly experiencing the "out of order" movie watching meme of my grandmother gave me a unique window into the Golden Era (yup, don't like that term much either, but I think we're stuck with it), which made me question how well I truly understand other cultural norms of that period that I only read about.

Also, I was surprised you didn't comment on my note in the "What Movie Have You Just Scene" thread about the "Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" being a Dench / Smith movie for your bourgeois audience. You know my feeble comments aren't validated in my insecure mind until you sharp elbow them or, occasionally, pat them on the head.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Didn't see that comment yet, but as for Dench/Smith you're absolutely right. Bourgeois white women in their sixties would gladly watch the two of them recite the Penal Code on screen for two hours.

 

[BlueTrain]

I do remember, from about 20 years ago at least, of a radio remote at a car show at a local rec center. They, the radio people, had a special trailer for doing just that and they actually played their records while they were there. They probably don't do that anymore. There were some remarkable cars there, by the way. I also recall hearing some other local station doing a remote from a diner, no less, on some weekday morning. That was a while ago, too.

I live in the Washington, D.C., area and the stations do a pretty good job of covering local news with their trucks and reporters at the scene. And of course, when there's a good snow, they pull out all the stops. They even had someone broadcasting from inside a truck as it drove around town during a snowstorm.

I think all entertainment, at least for us low-brow and middle-brow types, should be light. There's enough heavy reality to go around. That doesn't mean it has to be sweet and absent of any action, just nothing that has to be taken too seriously. That may not describe movies aimed at women, possibly. But the mention of an "art film" conjures up images of an European film with a lot of nudity that is shown at a theater just over the state line.

You know, a lot of the changes in things we see in the movies and on television are the results of decisions made by one person. I don't mean one single individual over the last 50 years, of course. But the decision, for example, to drop a certain kind of TV programming, like the rural-oriented programs such as Green Acres, was ultimately made by one person. There was no cultural shift involved. It's just television, after all.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

One of the best things about being a child in the '50s as I was, was that there wasn't much made-for-kids programming so local tv stations ran old movies and cartoons. The studios wouldn't release anything post-1949 to television, so we saw all the movies our parents had watched, but we saw them out of order and we saw them over and over again. Cagney and Bogart and Bette Davis were as immediate to us as they had been 10-20 years earlier. Same with the cartoons. We were hardly aware of how old those Betty Boop cartoons were. And we saw some truly un-PC stuff. Try running those "Bosco" cartoons now. But we soaked it all up.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I first met Bosko on PBS's "Matinee At The Bijou" in the 1980s, and he's been a favorite ever since. He was basically Mickey Mouse without the ears.

Now if you really want to get into Un-PC territory, look at few early-1930s Terrytoons and early-talkie Aesop's Fables -- the latter had an entire season's worth of shorts with each one built around specific nationality stereotypes: the one about China featured more "laundry" jokes than you'll ever see in one place. And a few years later, Walter Lantz had a whole series built around a character called "Li'l Eightball," for reasons that I won't get into. Suffice it to say that Bosko looked like Ralph Bunche next to that one.

 

[EngProf]

I first met Bosko on PBS's "Matinee At The Bijou" in the 1980s, and he's been a favorite ever since. He was basically Mickey Mouse without the ears.

Now if you really want to get into Un-PC territory, look at few early-1930s Terrytoons and early-talkie Aesop's Fables -- the latter had an entire season's worth of shorts with each one built around specific nationality stereotypes: the one about China featured more "laundry" jokes than you'll ever see in one place. And a few years later, Walter Lantz had a whole series built around a character called "Li'l Eightball," for reasons that I won't get into. Suffice it to say that Bosko looked like Ralph Bunche next to that one.

We liked the WWII-era Popeye cartoons, which we watched during the fifties and early sixties, and which were *very* "insensitive". Since they were made as wartime propaganda, what would you expect?
As for live remote radio broadcasts, they do them almost every weekend here in Nashville (at some car show or grand opening or ??) ("Come on by - get free hot dogs - etc.")

 

[LizzieMaine]

The Warner Bros. wartime cartoons were superior to all others -- the "Gremlins from the Kremlin," Bugs Bunny seducing Hermann Goering, Daffy Duck avoiding the Little Man From The Draft Board, etc. Brilliant stuff that still works, for the most part, even seventy years out of its context.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

See if you can find the first one or two Bosco cartoons, when Bosco had a deep, gravelly faux-Black voice. Very different from his later high-pitched, childlike voice without the "dialect".

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Mmm, mm -- dat sho am fine." That was actually Max Maxwell, one of the animators. After the first couple of shorts, he didn't want to do the voice anymore, so they hired an actor named Johnny Murray to do a more Mickey-Mousish falsetto. But when Harman and Ising took Bosko to MGM in the mid-thirties they changed him from an inkblot character to an actual caricature of an African-American boy, and brought Maxwell back to do the voice.

Some of those MGM Boskos are really irritating -- not so much for the racial caricaturing as for the absolute lack of any other kind of personality for the character. Warner Bros. Bosko would play music by blowing into a goat's udder and playing it like a bagpipe. MGM Bosko just stood around looking "cute."

 

[BlueTrain]

In a sense, black characters as well as the stereotypes show more integration in American society in most places than we usually acknowledge, although it is certainly true that in most but not all instances, it showed distinct class differences. And there was segregation in a lot of places, of course. People of Asian ancestry, usually were usually Chinese, also had to put up with a lot but it was not quite the same. The whole race thing in America is very complicated. It is equally complicated in Latin America and different in every way and also different in every country. And it keeps changing everywhere.

There are curious and interesting trivialities from the past that relate to race in connection with entertainment. One was from the radio show "Fibber McGee and Molly." In some episodes they had a maid, whose name I think was Beulah. She spoke with a typically stereotyped African-American voice and usually had comical lines. The reality was, the character was placed by a white man. The show was performed before a live audience and it was very startling for the audience to see who Beulah was being played by.

On the subject of radio shows, I can only imagine what they were like, being recorded. Comedy works best before a live audience and in those performances, it was just the actors essentially just standing in front of the mike and reading their lines. There would be a sound effects man and usually a band, too. Today, that would seem like a very odd thing but there are still live radio shows like that, usually rather more sophisticated, but I wonder what the Prairie Home Companion looks like in person, especially Guy Noir.

There were also B-westerns with entirely black casts. It sounds bizarre but there were really black cowboys. Otherwise, they weren't any more unrealistic than Buck Jones or Gene Autry movies. There was even one black singing cowboy. There are some things displayed about him in the Gene Autry Western Museum in L.A. His name was Herb Jefferies and he lived to be 100. He was actually of very mixed race, however, but "passed" as black for some purposes. Overall, black people have been successful in show business but often had to take the part of comical characters and underlings.

Then there was Lena Horne.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Warner Bros. wartime cartoons were superior to all others -- the "Gremlins from the Kremlin," Bugs Bunny seducing Hermann Goering, Daffy Duck avoiding the Little Man From The Draft Board, etc. Brilliant stuff that still works, for the most part, even seventy years out of its context.

Freakin' outstanding parody of Hitler speaking at Nuremberg.