1945 - 1960 The Suburban Dream Jump to:
1945 - 1960 The Suburban Dream Jump to:
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4 Switching on to Television
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At the opening of the twentieth century the decisive influence of the ragtime pianists fell on white audiences tiring of the minstrel show and willing to pay to hear black performers. At the same time the American band was being heard everywhere, promoted by John Philip Sousa, the most successful musician of his time, and testifying among other things to pugnacious nationalism. Both phenomena would modulate into dance bands playing vigorous dance music. Burgeoning displays of sheet music in neighborhood stores, often music calling itself rag, attracted a diverse public, much of which never heard the concerts of the creators of ragtime. Modest as well as prosperous homes had a keyboard, either a piano or the less expensive reed organ: the industry built 107,000 harmoniums a year in 1900, and 177,000 pianos. By 1909, the figure was 364,000 pianos. Piano music was available beyond the proportion of the population that could play: by 1925, more than half the pianos produced were automatics, using player rolls for current hits (see Cyril Ehrlich, The Piano: a History). Such instruments, giving out more and better sound than the evolving phonograph had yet mastered, tuned the audience more closely than ever before to the latest fad in music.
A boom in social dancing began during the second decade of the twentieth century, along with the first recognition of music called jazz. Nat Shapiro quotes Variety as estimating that in the mid-1920s there were 60,000 dance bands playing on the dance floors of jazz age America. Beginning in 1920, radio broadcasting brought recorded and live music into homes, posing an economic challenge to pianos and combining with the Depression in 1929 to decimate record and phonograph sales. The music that America absorbed through these media came mostly from New York, from Tin Pan Alley publishing houses and from the flourishing Broadway stage, reproduced also in vaudeville houses across the country. When in the middle of the 1920s recording engineers developed microphones to replace recording horns, a new softer "crooning" performance became possible and stylish on records and over the radio.
Suburban development and the rapidıy booming postwar economy boosted all forms of home entertainment and domestic hobbies, but no new consumer commodity has ever soId so fast or penetrated the available market so thoroughly as television did in the US in the 1950s.
In 1947 there were fewer television sets in use in the United States than there were movie theaters. By 1954 there were 32 million receivers. It was the perfect commodity for the moment. The arrangement of furniture in living rooms across America and increasingly throughout westem Europe changed to accommodate the television set as the focus of attention. Like the recliner chair, it was a consumer durable that "did" something; better than radio, it brought entertainment into the home, and so reinforced the value that suburbanites put on the nuclear home as the center of their existence.
Suburbia relocated American isolationism; the skies over Texas and Alaska might always be marked with the vapor trails of Strategic Air Command's etemally vigilant B-52s, but the nuclear family had taken ideological refuge in what David O. Selznick had called "that other unconquerable fortress, the American home".
Television brought families together to share their entertainment with a huge disembodied audience they need never encounter. The communal experience of cinema-going was being replaced by an ever more abstract sense of homogeneity that came from watching the same TV shows in the similar but separate environments of suburban living rooms.
The accidents of technology placed control of television in the hands of the radio networks. As radio had borrowed its essential forms from earlier entertainment modes, television borrowed extensively from the media whose cultural role it replaced: movies and radio. The earliest television successes were variety shows - hosted by Ed Sullivan, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar - based, like radio's Rudy Vallee's Varieties, on the traditional acts seen in vaudeville.
Television adapted the forms of radio comedy and drama to make its own gemes: sitcoms, soap operas and series. Like radio, it had a "Golden Age" of New York based drama production. Between 1953 and 1955, anthology series such as Philco Television Playhouse and Kraft Television Theater employed rising Broadway performers and directors induding Paul Newrnan, Sidney Poitier and Arthur Penn, in single plays like Days of Wine and Roses and Requiem For a Heavyweight. Writer Paddy Chayevsky described their social realist themes as aiming to present "the marvelous world of the ordinary" on television.
NBC and MCA, Inc., inaugurated 1964 by creating "Project 120," a never fully actualized weekly film anthology whose very name echoed the live dramatic series of the 1950s. NBC allotted $250,000 for the first telefeature, as MCAUniversal hired Hollywood journeyman Don Siegel to direct "'Johnny North,' an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's short story, 'The Killers,' starring John Cassavetes, Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, and Ronald Reagan in his last role. The movie that resulted eventually cost over $900,000 and was deemed by the network "too spicy, expensive, and violent for TV screens." Clearly, it was evident to both NBC and MCA from the outset that the budgetary constraints and the dictates of content would be different for the telefilm from what was previously expected for the usual theatrical picture. As a result, "Johnny North" was retitled "The Killers," and the film was subsequently released to movie theaters nationwide. Mort Werner, NBC-TV vice president in charge of programming at the time, reflected upon this experience: "We've learned to control the budget. Two new 'movies' will get started soon, and the series probably will show up on television in 1965."
Actually, the very first made-for-TV movie, "See How They Run," premiered on October 17, 1964, a few months sooner than expected. This Universal production is a mediocre crime melodrama that was quickly followed six weeks later by the broadcast of Don Siegel's next excursion into the telefilm genre, "The Hanged Man." Like "The Killers" before it, Siegel's second assignment for NBC-MCA is another remake of a classic film noir, "Ride the Pink Horse." Without a doubt, this movie along with the only telefeature to appear during the 1965-66 season, a Western pilot for Dale Robertson entitled, "Scalplock," both point to the fact that the early TV movie was more derivative of Hollywood for source material than any other dramatic avenue. In fact, the telefilm had not yet produced its own crop of production talent. In the late 1960s, this genre harkened most to Hollywood's least "respectable" genres for story ideas and themes: the Western, the melodrama, the spy thriller, and the horror/supernatural tale. Therefore, in retrospect, it is obviously no surprise that the trade publications and movie critics alike were immediately inclined to christen this new form--the rebirth of Hollywood's B-movie; indeed, it would take the made-for-TV film genre a dozen more years to outgrow this benign, though ultimately disparaging label.
4 Next Page: TV dramas and variety shows
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