LizzieMaine
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"The New Odor." That made me laugh out loud when I was eight years old, and it still makes me laugh out loud today.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The big difference between radio in the Era and modern audio drama is that the latter is a boutique item, and the former was a ground-out, mass-produced product. There was neither the time, nor the money, for elaborate production technique, and much of it was extremely simple, especially by modern standards.
The average radio drama in the Era was performed with one or two microphones for the cast, one for any necessary manually-produced sound effects, one for the musicians, and a turntable truck for recorded sound effects -- which, by the 1940s, were the majority of sound effects used. Most radio dramas had no live audience, but variety and comedy programs usually did, and while they might have a banner at the rear of the stage advertising the sponsor's products, there was usually nothing else on the stage but a row of chairs for the performers to use while they weren't at the microphone.
The "row of mics" technique seen today, in which all the actors face the audience was not used until the 1970s. In the Era, a single double-faced microphone was usually used by all the actors, which encouraged face-to-face interaction between performers, and heightened the realism of the conversations. Fades were largely accomplished by the actors themselves moving away from the mic, and not by the engineer. Some performers, notably Fred Allen, would perform with their backs to the audience so as to focus their performance on the listeners at home and to avoid the pitfall of hamming it up for the live audience.
It's very hard to do good drama with actors and mics facing an audience. I did a couple of staged readings of shows already in the can and never liked the results. It seems like you can have a performance for the audience or the mic, but not both.
I remember those huge RCA figure 8 ribbon mics. In the studio you could work both sides if you had the space for it. But you couldn't really work close to it if that was the effect you wanted.
I believe they had a lot of trouble with sound when talkies first came out, mainly with the noise the camera itself made. In a few outdoor shots that were not exactly professionally produced for the screen, the wind was making an awful noise blowing against the mic. The particular one I'm thinking of was at Al Jolson's funeral.
You can work an RCA 44 really close if you angle your approach a bit. Some actors would hold up a pencil in front of their mouths to break up the airflow and avoid pops. RCA 77s, the pill-shaped mics associated with TV talk show hosts and such, weren't as good for this. But the 44 was ideal, and remained in use in radio studios well into the DJ era.
I believe they had a lot of trouble with sound when talkies first came out, mainly with the noise the camera itself made. In a few outdoor shots that were not exactly professionally produced for the screen, the wind was making an awful noise blowing against the mic. The particular one I'm thinking of was at Al Jolson's funeral.
I think you are correct in that the microphones now are set up to record only dialogue and that other sounds are added later. Sometimes the sound is obviously wrong, mainly for vehicle and engine noises, but otherwise, it works well enough.
You're talking about an industry I've been around in one way or another, on and off, since I was five years old. So I can speak from personal experience about what I've seen, and what I'm seeing now.
The number one difference between then and now is that filmgoing in the pre-modern era was less about the actual film, and less, even, about the "theatre experience," as it was about the idea of sharing in a communal experience. People in the Era went to the movies because it was a part of community life -- theatres were where you met your friends, shared an experience with your friends, and came away with the feeling that you were part of something more important than yourself. The movie was incidental -- millions of people went to the movies once or twice a week because it was the thing to do, not because they desperately wanted to see some Grade Z Universal potboiler with Lyle Talbot, Linda Darnell and Baby Sandy. It didn't matter what was on the screen. The shared community experience was the real product being sold.
Exhibition today is a far different thing -- there is no longer any mass audience, and there are no more time-filling Grade Z potboilers anymore that people will go to see regardless of how good, bad, or pointless they are. Movie entertainment today is focus-groupped and psychologically marketed to appeal to finely-aimed niche audiences, and theatre exhibition is just a small part of the total deal -- the secondary market is now far more important to Hollywood than the primary, and that secondary market is increasingly a solo thing.
The only place where you'll still find a hint of what movies used to be is your local independent theatre. This is also a niche audience -- generally made up of middle-class white people in their forties or older, and a scattering of "indie" kids -- but it tends to view the experience the way all audiences did in the Era. They come to the show regardless of what's on the screen because it's a chance to mingle with at least a small slice of the community. The appeal is primarily a social one rather than an aesthetic one -- it's people reaching out to try and nullify, at least for a couple of hours, the soul-crushing isolation of the modern world.