Conversation opened. 1 read message. Skip to content Using Gmail with screen readers in:sent 12 of 1,061 Anderson—Hollywood TV kac attac Sat, Nov 11, 8:25 AM (13 days ago) to Stefan 16 Hollywood TV joy the time both the movie industriarducevsark radio reached the he's hither their popular and commer an Heif-oWn the 29400, Holi)e height efebiles appeared regularly an their oven programs 07 ly ¡Mose. inKe Lux Radio Theatre designed to promote feature films. Pet 'thosers like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby consistently dominated the form einkings of top movie and radig stars, and it is no coincidente ftaß Fope, Crosby, and De Mille were all under contract to Para- Mount, the studio most committed to economic investment in the broadcasting industry during the studio era. Together, the films of ipese three radio celebrities accounted for two-thirds of Paramounts top grossing motion pictures during the 1940s, the studio's most prof. itable decade during the studio era. Is It thus seems possible that the popular success of movies and radio during the 1930s and 1940s de- pended at least partially on the fact that the media were not isolated from one another but were perceived as complementary experiences in which stars and stories passed easily from one medium to another. As these brief examples suggest, the tendency to depict the cinema and broadcasting as isolated cultural institutions obscures their long. standing interdependence. Nowhere is this tendency more evident than in relation to the issue of advertising and commercial sponsor- ship, a point at which the studios' interests seem most distinct from those of broadcasters and yet one at which their interests frequently coincide. Because the movie industry must justify a policy of paid admissions while the commercial sponsorship of radio and TV pro- grams makes them appear to be available free of charge, the movie industry has a stake in differentiating the two media, in making it seem unquestionable that movies have greater intrinsic value than TV programs and thus warrant audience "'investment" at the box office. This pervasive distinction- circulated throughout the culture by film industry marketing, the popular press, scholars, and critics--has been articulated along a number of familiar lines: the cinema's tech- nological superiority (the movie industry's marketing of technical in- novations such as CinemaScope, 3-D, and Dolby sound), its greater capacity for spectacle or verisimilitude (press reports about lavish budgets and special effects or about an actor or director's fanatical obsession with "accuracy"), its relative freedom in depicting sexuality and violence, or the creative license provided to somè of its directors. These criteria and others have been used at one time or another to mark the cinema's difference from television. lithe most conveniently mapped boundary between the cinema and television, however, has been drawn over the issue of commercial sponsorship During the convergence of the movie and television in dustries in the 190s, for instance, a number of Hollywood movies 18 Hollywood V such dissimulations because the movie marratiees-didewide priviages sucks is the characters' motives, revealing ship hidden schemes had arenaoked by commercial television's obsession with surface detal are pa) trese hims construct a preeminent positen for the cinema by representing the medium's epistemological superiority over telew). sipn. Noticing this narrative motif in subsequent films depicting the institutions of television, Colin MacCabe has described it as "cinema's ability to make visible what is invisible to television." Through a vas Fiery of narrative strategies, films that represent television often stress "'Né opposition between the knowledgeable position we occupy as viewers in the cinema compared with the ignorance of the television audience:" © This motif implicitly argues that the cinema is superior to television, not because of inherent technological advantages but because of television's commercialism, which inhibits its ability-or willingness-~-to depict social reality accurately.17 Movie industry discourse has often implied that the cinema exists in an autonomous sphere outside the corrupting influence of the mar- ketplace, an idea best expressed by MGM's famous slogan, ars gratin artis. Along with the studio's unmistakable roaring lion, MGM's as- sertion of artistic autonomy served as the trademark for the particular cultural commodity that MGM marketed--feature films carrying the connotation of aesthetic quality. The irony of an entertainment cor- portion's advancing the doctrine of art for art's sake is obvious. As Theodor Adorno has noted, however, the disavowal of commercial impulses recurs throughout modern mass culture: "Vestiges of the aesthetic claiming to be something autonomous, a world unto itself, remain even within the most trivial product of mass culture. In fact, the present rigid division of art into autonomous and commercial as- pects is itself largely a function of commercialization. It was hardly accidental that the slogan l'art pour l'art was coined in the Paris of the first half of the nineteenth century, when literature really became large-scale business for the first time." '8 Likewise, the studios' efforts to position their films within an autonomous aesthetic sphere devel oped rom marketing strategies designed to differentiate their prod uct from that of competitors. This practice continued even after the major studios themselves began to produce television films, and the separation of the media had become harder to define, because the stu dos still had to justify the distinction between the films they pro duced for television broadcast and those that could be viewed only in ja dpite, of the movie industry's attempts to separate itself trel broadcastings crass motives and obvious ploys, hoWever, the Amert 83 witanism the me dit the sphiered.fig, means for inserting Mipsians nefermale sphere, enfem witch the imption in order (o take n& and pilindsped io pro mates thai ex absita, of the Diamond Jubilee needlet patransform the industrialexpnxition into a media event a publi Went designed to shipvcase contemporary communication techie bey; one created specifically to be televised. "*the term " media event" circulates widely through our culture and has acquired many negative connotations. It commonly defines the ways in which the media legitimizes "'inauthentic" or artificially con- hived public events by treating them as though they are "authentic or natural forms of social interaction. This usage generally implies that, before the introduction of the mass media, events in the public sphere were somehow more authentic because they were untainted by the media's presence. Subsequently, media coverage has distorted preexisting, autonomous events or, as in Daniel Boorstin's notion of the "pseudo-event, " has produced a realm of simulated events that exist only because they have been fabricated by and for the media, 28 In their reflection on the structure and performance of media events, however, critics Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz offer a different definition of the term, one which will be useful in making sense of Light's Diamond Jubilee. They define a media event as an extraordinary television program that disrupts the medium's routine flow of pro- gramming in order to draw the attention of a large portion of the view- ing audience to some sort of national ceremony or spectacle. "Televi- son's power lies not only in the way in which it structures the flow of daily life, but with its consequent ability of deciding to interrupt this flow, " they argue. Media events disrupt the everyday experience of television and transform the normal role of television program- ming; "They cancel all other programs, bringing television's clock to a stop, and while they are on the air, they cannot themselves be in lempied. Their performance belongs to sacred' time. It brings social ativity to a standstill. For a while, it occupies society's 'center,.. ¡Media events of this type often involve television coverage of a- ditonal national ceremonies, such as a royal wedding or a presidene hail nauguralion. Explaining the /function of such broadeasts dentas Sie early years of BBC ' Ta fib, nistorians David Cardiff and Padra Scannell characterize such large-scale events as "programs of national Wildly radio, they sometimes IRe, prational ceremonies that emphit neadthe 'won defer ne-tiradi, aidedhbioty and employed the medium Introduction: Hollywood in the Home 19 can cinema has never strayed far from the call of advertising. "When the first movie cameraman shot the first street scene that included a shop sign," Charles Eckert has written, "all of the elements of a new advertising medium were implicit." * Even during the first decades of ¡he industry, producers signed deals with corporate sponsors, agree- in to tout brand-name products in their films. Studios assigned per- sonnel to facilitate interaction with advertisers and even created di- visions to produce explicitly sponsored films. Although the studios were eager to generate revenue through advertising, exhibitors ap- preciated the need to distinguish the movie-going experience from commercial broadcasting (to justify paid admissions) and, therefore, resisted the presence of advertising in movie theaters. Fearing reper- cussions from angry exhibitors and alienated moviegoers, the major studios ultimately introduced a more sublimated type of advertising and forged a more discreet relationship with advertisers. Brand-name products entered movies through "product placements, " agreements to showcase products subtly within the milieu of the narrative. More- obvious commercial tie-ins were shifted outside of the narrative, to marketing campaigns and celebrity product endorsements that ac- companied a movie's release. The cinema never became an advertiser- supported medium, but its aims have been relatively consistent with those of commercial broadcasters. Although some critics see product placements as a recent phenomenon that demonstrates the contami- nation of the cinema by television's influence, Eckert suggests that the silver screen has always been a type of "living display window" for consumer culture, 20 The motion picture industry's long-standing alliance with commer- cial sponsors, often obscured by common conceptions of the cinema's aesthetic autonomy, provides a pertinent example of the convergence of movies and related social institutions. This convergence blurs the boundaries between narrative and advertising in movies--an accu- sation traditionally leveled at commercial broadcasting. And like com- mercial broadcasting, the cinema promoted the values of consumer culture, including an ideology in which the consumption of com- modities is centered primarily in the home and the institution of the family. The impulse of manufacturers and advertisers to cultivate the home as the primary arena of consumption led advertisers to Hollywood, but it also led Hollywood into the American home--at first tentatively Via the domestic medium of radio, then wholeheartedly upon the ar. tival of television. Indeed, Laura Mulvey argues that the cultural shift from the public exhibition of movies to the domestic reception of tele- DID Disneyland 145 'waits our this With u1 betont-inteerimens that could nit be replaney pulier movies rite va her Proline w distractine elmmick. Foilming pile radition of the earlier tolywood radio shows, therefore, Dn? joy defined television as a companion medium to the cinema, an ins jonational medium that could be used to reveal the process of rim- Whing-since that impulse could not be indulged in the movies themselves. While Disney movies were presented as seamless narra- that reflexivity in itself is not a radical impulse. More a disciple of Barnum than Brecht, Disney had no intention of distancing his audi- ence from the illusion in his movies. Instead, he appealed to the au- dience's fascination with cinematic trickery. Disney exhibited what historian Neil Harris describes as an "American vernacular tradition" perhaps best exemplified by P. T. Barnum. Barnum's showmanship depended on his recognition that the public delights both in being fooled by a hoax and in discovering the mechanisms that make the hoax successful. Through his fanciful exhibitions, Barnum encour- aged "an aesthetic of the operational, a delight in observing pro- cess and examining for literal truth." 28 Far from being hoodwinked by Barnum's artifice, the audiences that witnessed his exhibitions took pleasure in uncovering the process by which these hoaxes were perpetrated. Inheriting Barnum's sense of showmanship, Disney developed his own "'operational aesthetic" through television, enhancing his audi ence's pleasure-_and anticipation-~ by offering precious glimpses of the filmmaking process. Of course, Disney's depiction of the produc ton process was selective; it ignored the economics of filmmaking in havor of focusing on the studio's technical accomplishments. Disney- land never explored such issues as labor relations at the Disney stur Win or the economics of merchandising that sent the largest share of Pietis into Walt's pockets. Instead, in what has become a dliché of "nathina the scene p reporting on almimaking, Disneyland treatedant) merite as a problem tO be solved by the ingenuity of Disney graled then This approach rentedo) vecondary harrative that accompanied pie movie into treaters teston% of crans men overcoming abste fiven finduce a masiereal Pus oto With Inis strategy, viewers wate.fi pio viligemtive to see the cuinpleted movie, because the movie ids I de- Wilted the resoliti the completed pro" he rimmaking provess as de picted on Disneyland. 146 Hollywood TV sidDolived into memory, swepd ewa/gin it' inendless.Aow of seal ») distrion: Although much of televisinen)fmbripnid-tosostraded_the dunediacy of live broadeast, the sale of motion pictures to braia», 'ers meant that television also became the unofficial archive of he American cinema, in which Hollywoods past surfaced in bits t pieces, like fragments of a dream. One of the pleasures of Dangin was the chance it offered to halt the flow of mass culture by renen. bering relics from the Disney vaults. Although Disneyland may have struck a nostalgic chord for older viewers, the program's presentation of studio history was less sente mental than reverential. Cartoons nearly forgotten were resurreded with a solemnity normally reserved for the most venerable works of art. This attitude is apparent from the first episode, when Walt an- nounces that the end of each episode will be reserved for Micker Mouse. After leading the viewer through an elaborate description of the proposed amusement park and other studio activities, Disney stands behind a lectern and turns the pages of a massive bound vot ume, an illustrated chronicle of Mickey's adventures. In spite of the flurry of changes at the studio, he explains, one should not lose sight of an eternal truth: "It all started with Mickey The story of Mids is the story of Disneyland." As he continues, the scene segues ill Mickey's first appearance, in the cartoon "Plane Crazy, " and then dis solves to one of his most famous appearances, as the Sorterers./f prentice in Fantasia. the tone of the scene -Disney's scholarly disposition, the sitt Nicker's history contained in a states book implies thal tie Des ¡budios products are not the disposable commodities of pop ely pout artifacts worthy of remembrance: Wales Tole as naratus.ne thesotten cartoons in the pet tirance; Wall mnetery/by demarte is an electronic museum, Dishevattistic his althe culture mast is audience mainly to publicize lend Disner producis. in opt Hollywood TV simoke, cried that they had purchased an adult Western amaternato or Cunsmate bier hadnectieterd instead a mete "along the lines "Cowboys andale'the-Sseries Warer Brae, a greed without hesitatiodi dians may pop up now and then, E Jack Warner assured Kintner, Duf we are switching to adult Westerns, ( Kintner returned to the spon- newile Chayenne was attemptuh? Westera** an' all family bad occurred. don propram har is mostly designed bat al djounger people* )e "' he said, "it will turn to an "adult Western conception rather paan the Rise Cheyenne was no a TO Many et»'29 a legitimate De haps purpose was to try to hold as many sets at 7.30 as possible horewalter bros, the first adjustment in salvaging Cheyenne wash vreptin@ producer Harve Foster with Jinga Rene producer Roy Flf fins. As the same time, Warner authorized larger salaries for Will; gin all three series, and although script payments, were still only 52,500 to $2,900 per episode, the increase enabled the producers f recruit more experienced writers who previously had been too expen- sive. After Huggins became producer, an eftort was made to rid Chey enne of its B-movie conventions and to emphasize elements of the adult Western. Cheyenne's humorous sidekick was unceremoniously dropped. Since the revisionist adult Westerns had attempted to re- move the Western from an unspecific, mythic West and place it in a landscape invested with historical authority, Huggins tried to bringa sense of verisimilitude to the series, going so far as to order a dozen historical reference books, a "minimum reference investment" for the series. * He also commissioned scripts with plots motivated by char- acter psychology, rather than simply by conventional action. The most successful of these was an adaptation of the studio's 1948 mone Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Once these changes had been made, War her Bros. tipped off the industry press that Cheyenne had been trad formed into an adult Western, hoping that publicity would hep*f ventuate the series in the public eye. Variery reviewed the new Of wine in November, just one month after if had called the serf. "'strictly kiddo fare." While the reviewer a dimilted that the epast pasembled a watered down Treasure of the Sierra Madre,;*he albed Paredad the "'astonishing: "changie-Th fitle series, calling Ina petit mid November the effort expended to acquire the "adult" label ap 316 Notes to Pages 194-201 Warmer Bros. Presents, 22 September 1955. J;, Wamerbros, Piaturep, Jimbernas3 mencan broadcasting Co.;, Contrar, al. Si October 1953 (Warner Bros; Pictures Collection, Princeton,. #Aithe ime for pample, Ad I thience aohsistard Goldension explained inaéinis helmore would pursue an aadign Evanarions, Primarily of youthãd "ABC: An Evaluation, " See Herman Land, Television, December ('amil pi- of john Miake discusses, ligulatinnonertveere television's modes er hip sTiess,indis modes of reception from a thenretisa-perspective in Television (editiume, pp.= 35-39, 72-77. A number of recent critics have argued that tell. Sision'spectatorship is characterized by distraction, rather than concentra tion. For instance, John Ellis contrasts the cinema spectator's "gaze" at the screen with the television spectator's "glance." As a result, television textual strategies are often designed to call the viewer's glance back to the TV screen, in Rick Altman's words, "to identify that which is worth looking at." See Rick Altman, "Television Sound, '" in Horace Newcomb, ed., Television: The Critical View, pp. 566-584; John Ellis, Visible Fictions, Pp. 109-172. 8. Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, pp. 86-6. For a discussion of the implications of segmentation and flow, see Fiske, Tele- vision Culture, Pp. 99-105. 9. "The abc of ABC," Forbes, 15 June 1959, p. 16. 10. Robert Kintner to Jack L. Warner, 6 April 1955. The ABC programs that followed Warner Bros. Presents were The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Make Room for Daddy, and DuPont Cavalcade Theater. 11. For examples of the antagonism between advertisers and the major studios, see "'Majors TV Plan-New Faces; But Ad Accts Want Big Stars,' Variety, 20 April 1955, p. 37; Charles Sinclair, "Should Hollywood Get It for Free?" Sponsor, 8 August 1955, P. 31. 12. Robert Kintner to Jack L. Warner, 14 September 1955, 16 September 1955, 21 September 1955; Edgar Monsanto Queeny to Robert Kintner, 14 Sep tember 1955; Robert Kintner to Edgar Monsanto Queeny, 20 September 1955 Robert Kinner to Jack L. Warner, 21 September 1955; M. F. Mahoney to Rob ert Kintner, 7 October 1955. 13. Milton Orman to Bryan Moore, 15 November 1961. 14. John Peyser to William T. Orr, 19 October 1955. ¡iT John): Louis to Jack L. Warner, 31 October 1055; "Clouds Thicken Ove Film Makers' Part in TV Programming, P. 16. Advertising Age, 31 October 1955, 16. Jack L. Warner to Robert Kintner, 14 October 1955. 17. Robert Kintner to lack L. Warner. 24 September 1955. 18. William TOre to Richard Mi st.losenh.on The Pathology of Mass Production 271 .. the handsome young cast of Surfside Six (Troy Donahue, Lee Patterson, Diane McBain, and Van Williams). (Both photos courtesy of Photofest © Warner Bros.) Even the scripts at Warner Bros. were literally interchangeable. The narrative strategies for the various series were so similar that Warner Bros. management didn't even slow production during a six-month strike by the Writers Guild in 1960. Instead, management simply transposed existing scripts from one series to another, assigning the screenplay credit to the pseudonymous "W. Hermanos" (a joking Spanish-language version of "Warner Bros."). By changing locales ind character names, Western scripts became private-eye stories and pie versa. The studio recycled so many scripts that story editor lames Barnett was able to joke, "You are indeed an optimist if you think lamer Bros. has any suitable story material left for adaptation ales our months of no Witlers. Soon, we'll be digging into old buff, siany story boards for setice material and now that I think of it, there might well be a Maverick or two in them." Atmused studio executives found satisfaction in this ruse becaused. inviad that audientes woes d acept anyaning the studio producion no taller what compromises were thade for the sake of production Hollywood y Frangarorall'ielevision production at Twentieth Century- Pepsid, prayertie' imployers- - Ray tuss Warner Bros.* Varet, the manda jilinstole"or niamueriat, bian man the liThe oh studio series ever to in {pointing Award. in holding therlifewardedi weta exclusive ph pin Sit Waimer Bros, was temporarily ve vardind aith success in P) vast production, but studio executives estrned not to care tarthe Mistest-fising companies also offered legs- restrictive contracts. Any he hot, producer, or writer able to leave Warner Bros, could find a mit inbre Tucrative deal through independent production or through the higher wages and profit participation available at other studios t evitably, Warner Bros. suffered a depletion of its most talented per. sonnel./'This unwillingness to adapt to the economic practices of is competitors reflected Warner Bros. 's larger failure to diversify beyond its most immediate concern with supplying ABC's production orders. Like the other major studios, Warner Bros. had been slow to enter television production because of its reluctance to create a product that it didn't distribute. Warner Bros. had attempted to form its own TV network during the late 1940s precisely because it feared allowing the existing TV networks to monopolize the channels of distribution. Yet when Warner Bros. finally began to produce for television, studio executives allowed themselves to become locked into an exclusive source of distribution-ABC-TV. In fact, after entering television, Warner Bros. only once negotiated with another network. In early 1959, the studio met with NBC to discuss two half-hour series, but when ABC's huge production order for fall 1959 filled the studio to capacity, Warner Bros. broke off negotiations.3 Bound exclusively if ABC, Warner Bros. was both subject to the network's decisions and tied to its fortunes in the industry. ABC achieved remarkable success in the ratings during the lif Bios, and Warner Bros. played a significant role in the networks n Jax programming hourlong dramas produced In Hollywood, ABCr they causht up with NBC anal AS but, in 1000, surpassed them's peri Dielsen ratings for the twenty-fou/'largest markeis. During f Jponse, ABC joined the other hérwauk/largest thing. Is scheduled iona, ex produced programming, by shifting almostenirey.10)it