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From "remote" possibilities to entertaining "difference": a regional study of the rise of the television industry in Los Angeles, 1930-1952

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From "remote" possibilities to entertaining "difference": a regional study of the rise of the television industry in Los Angeles, 1930-1952

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Content FROM "REMOTE" POSSIBILITIES TO ENTERTAINING "DIFFERENCE": A REGIONAL STUDY OF THE RISE OF THE TELEVISION INDUSTRY IN LOS ANGELES, 1930-1952 by Mark J. Williams A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (Cinema-Television Critical Studies) December 1992 Copyright 1992 Mark J. Williams UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY PARK LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90089 This dissertation, written by ...... ~r.~ .. .J., .. HiJiJi;I;~~ .......................................... . under the direction of h. .is....... Dissertation Committee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted by The Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of re quirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ............... ~ ........................................ . Dean of Graduate Studies Date .... R'~P.~.~1?~.:r: ... ~Z.\ .. ~?.~? ..... :.:-..-.:1z:~°.7. i. ~:: .~ .......... . Chairperson ~ ....... ~~··· · ······································ 9~~ ~ ....................... g:~ ................................. . pr--,D, c;~ ) g '2._ w 7'2_'5 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My interests in Los Angeles television began rather unexpectedly during research on Paramount studios for a study of Preston Sturges. The studio's television investments, which were previously unknown to me, suggested an array of topics for directed research, with seemingly few already-determined guideposts: little had been written on Paramount and TV, or even more generally, the motion picture industry and the broadcast industry. Fascinated as much by this "gap" as by the topic itself, and inspired by Beverle Houston's great interest in television as a socio-cultural force and denigrated object, I began work on both Paramount's varied television projects and, more particularly, their Los Angeles station KTLA. Envisioned to be something like a case study that would reveal the history of relations between the broadcast and motion picture industries (and having no idea what I was getting into), the project transformed, as my research continued, into a regional television study with an emphasis on a studio-owned station. (A good thing, too, since recent work by Michele Hilmes and Tim White cover the broader topics much more capably than I could have.) iii As a result, this dissertation is more "television" centered than originally conceived. Its regional focus responds to contradictions and methodological limitations that arose first in attempting to position KTLA strictly as a Paramount dependent, and then in trying to understand the context for the station's practices and operations. Recent work in the history of Los Angeles happily supplements this focus. My sincere gratitude is expressed to everyone who had a hand in continuing this study. Mary Desjardins has sustained me throughout this effort, in large ways and small. My parents and family have been loving and supportive even when they didn't quite know what I was up to. My brother David has helped with both his good humor and, once or twice, with his checkbook. The Desjardins family has also been a source of great support. Paul and Rosemary Desjardins have accepted me seamlessly into their family. Vincent Desjardins and Jim Dailey have maintained a warm open-door policy at their eclectic and wonderful home. Friends and colleagues in Los Angeles have offered comfort, hospitality, and good company. In particular, Val Almendarez and Barbara Hall haven't once charged me rent for the unlimited use of their sofa-sleeper. They have in addition offered valuable companionship, and help iv in research and brainstorming. During the final stages of this project, the Dana and Patty Driskel family provided company, a place to work, and good cheer. Kathy Carnahan and Marti Mangan in the Film Studies off ice at the University of California at Santa Barbara were generous and gracious in allowing me computer and off ice privileges. Chris Bonham was kind enouqh to transcribe an oral history. Charles .Wolfe and Edward Branigan, exceptional mentors and colleagues, offered encouraqement and good advice. My dissertation committee has been both patient and insightful, and I owe them a great deal of thanks. Michael Renov, the chair of the committee, was always fair in his criticisms and timely with his compliments. He deserves credit for the completion of this study. Marsha Kinder was one of the first and most important influences on my studies at USC, and remains an inspiration. Everett Rogers brought his expansive knowledge of media history to the project. Special thanks for aid in practical research goes to Howard Prouty of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who generously lent me galleys of his collection of Daily Variety television reviews; Leith .Adams of the Warner Brothers Archive at USC; and especially Ned Comstock, a researcher's treasure at the Cinema-Television v library at use, who located and assembled the Hal Humphrey Los Angeles Mirror television columns. Don Zirpola and Fritz Schwab at Loyola Marymount made available to me tapes of early television programs. Ron Wolf at the Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters is a willing source of information, and kindly transcribed some radio programs of interest. At KTLA, Joel Tator gave me access to tapes of kinescopes, while Ed Harrison allowed me to read through station files. Above all, my sincere thanks go to the many veterans of early Los Angeles television who accepted my off er to interview them as part of my research. Lenore Kingston Jensen was instrumental in putting me in touch with most of these individuals. Lenore, David Crandell, William Stulla, Stan Chambers, and Cleve Landsberg were kind enough to lend me materials from their personal collections of memorabilia. I hope to speak with them again, and to many others whose contributions and insights have yet to be accounted for. Finally, my other peers, teachers, and especially my students these past few years have allowed me to recognize most of the reasons for pursuing this degree in the first place. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One: Introduction Chapter Two: An overview of the Historical Development of Television In Los Angeles • • • • • • • • Chapter Three: "Remote" Possibilities: KTLA's "Live" News Remotes vi 1 38 and Their Role in Popularizing Television • • • • • • 116 Chapter Four: Section One: Entertaining "Difference": Representations of Race and Ethnicity in Early Los Angeles Television • • • • • • • • • • • 267 Section Two: Oral Histories of Women on Local Television • • • • • • • • • • • • 300 Conclusions and Further Questions • • • • • • • • • • 343 Bibliography • • • • • . • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 352 Appendix One: Leland G. (Gerry) Muller Oral History • • • • • • • • 370 Appendix Two: Betty White Oral History • • . . . . . . . . . . . . 381 Appendix Three: David Crandell Oral History • • • • • • • . • • • • • 392 Chapter One Introduction 1 This project concerns Los Angeles television history. It adopts a regional approach in order to address, with specificity, some of the margins and aporias in the study of the relationships between the media industries of the 1930s to the early 1950s, especially as these relations impacted on the socio-economic and ideological agendas of this period. This dissertation will open up and critically analyze not only the competition between discourses which so affected media and society in this time and place, but also the methods and practices necessary to approach more effectively such a diffuse and problematic object of study. While some inaugural work in early Los Angeles television history exists, the basic media histories have generally ignored television activities on the west coast, especially prior to the networks' move to and coopera~ion with Hollywood and the motion picture industry in the mid- 1950s .1 These industrial and institutional studies have detailed the strategies of the established radio networks to contain and control the national television market and its programming, directing both the focuses and the methodologies of early television history. But in 2 delineating the seemingly linear movement from national network domination of radio to that of television, it is important to locate the gaps, or potential gaps, in that trajectory. As Foucault suggests, such a linear model implies a continuous chronology of "reason," a web of causality which ignores or effaces the numerous, often conflicting and discontinuous forces and systems which determined that history.2 Los Angeles, as a critical site for motion picture production, the post-World War II economic boom, and ultimately television production and postmodern culture, provides a unique and preeminent region for researching some of the less continuous forces and systems of that history. Indeed, Los Angeles was the most. independent, distinct market in early television, physically separated from the network formulations in the east (especially before transcontinental microwave relay and coaxial cable "linked" the two coasts in 1951, first in San Francisco), but also strongly influenced by the attempts of the motion picture industry to gain a foothold in this new visual industry. Chief among these attempts was Paramount's KTLA-TV, the flagship station of what was planned to become a network, and the first commercial station in the city. Emphasizing live remote broadcasts and also employing a higher quality of kinescope, KTLA was clearly 3 the region's leading station and chief competition to the networks, establishing programming and viewing "habits" which both reflected and reinforced basic socio-economic fluxes in the Los Angeles populace. The period to be considered in this study is 1930 to 1952 (though earlier economic and institutional determinants of the broadcast industry in Los Angeles will be briefly surveyed). 1930 was the year pioneer TV inventor Harry Lubcke first arrived in Los Angeles, to begin experimentation with electronic television. 1952, a pivotal year full of transitions, marked the end of the FCC "freeze" on television station applications, the opening of the CBS and NBC television network production centers in LA, and the first full year of national "live" telecasts employing the transcontinental systems. The study of Los Angeles television during these years, especially due to the predominance of KTLA, affords the opportunity to address several central and centralizing questions regarding this critical period in television history. Directly influenced by the usually ignored participation of the motion picture industry, situated in contrast and conflict to the emergence of the national networks, even establishing distribution chains for the syndication of locally-produced kinescope programs, early Los Angeles television as an object of 4 inquiry affords considerable avenues for understanding the changes in media and society during this period. This regional approach does not position the present study as merely a supplement to these larger general histories, nor does it attempt to produce an even more totalizing representation of early television history. On the contrary, this approach requires a dismantling of the assumed certainties and finalities of traditional "histories," conditioned as it is by a variety of "difficulties" and "absences" concerning the object of study itself, among them: 1. The program "texts" available: a number of kinescopes have "survived" and still exist, but in many cases are difficult or impossible to access. It is equally important to recognize that all of this material is conditioned .by the original determinants of what was kinescoped, and therefore represents a limited and unavoidably skewed sample of early television programming; 2. The dearth of archival material related to early television, whether one looks in libraries or the television stations themselves. What materials do exist chiefly consist of records and collections from network and other "empowered" sources and individuals, with very little attention to non-network or local sources. 5 3. The ability and efforts of contemporary television to reconstruct its own history--part of a larger tendency which Mimi White refers to as television 1 s persistent invocation of "history" as an anchoring point of its fragmentary, multiple, contradictory discoursel- offering a dubious but persuasive "insider's" perspective on this history; 4. The problematics inherent to oral history, which must serve as an integral research source: difficulties in locating and reaching the dwindling number of participants/"witnesses" in the actual production of early television; unsurprising but recurring tendencies in these reminiscences toward misinformation, nostalgia, self interest, or decontextualized, "factual" professional recountings; the methodological difficulty of introducing these "texts" to, and positioning them within, an academic, theoretically-informed discourse which will inevitably distance this work from those who not only provided valuable input, but actually lived some aspect of the area of study. In addition, or perhaps as a naturalized procedural correlative of these conditions, much work in early television history relies on such stalwart "historical" methods as "great man" determinations; simplified causal timelines that serve to validate assumed notions of 6 "progress"; recountings limited to those participants deemed "major players" (e.g., important inventors, the networks, etc.); and the reliance on extended metaphors as another means of totalizing and providing linearity to this history (e.g., the expanding network "web", the motion picture industry "hiding its head in the sand," wishing that television would disappear, etc.). To be sure, many of these studies contain valuable historic information and insights. Yet especially since directed toward an object of study which would seem to refuse any possibility of a "complete" or centralized understanding, historical work on early television should emphasize the importance of theoretical reflection concerning its methods, and work to avoid the closure or erasure of discontinuities and contradictions in this history via the assignment of readily apparent causalities that seem to insure a "certain" truth about the past and its representations. These conditions necessitate that this study be to some degree speculative: the "object" of study itself--a vast majority of its textuality so ephemeral as to be literally "lost in the air"--and the condition and status of the extant materials and information pertinent to its study--in no way stable or exhausted--preclude any assumption of totality or even finality in the writing of 7 its history. I will contend, however, that these conditions are not to be considered merely as severe limitations or strictures on this study (for clearly, on most practical levels they are so). What they also call for, and what I will insist upon, is that historical work in this area must be positioned and read as in "process," never as product or endpoint. This does not relieve the critical worker in this history of the rigors in providing support for claims, nor of some effort in empirical labor (though the relation of empiricism to the study must be theoretically examined, not assumed). Rather, it serves to require that these relations be foregrounded and highlighted as they are determined, and to refuse standardized assumptions, so as to open historical work up as an inquiry, an investigation, a questioning rather than a series of always already determined conclusions. This work, as it proceeds, may attempt to realize "history" which is in some way more thorough (which is to say more plural), yet at the same time resistant to totalization- emphasizing heterogeneity and marginality, vigilant in attempting to recognize or demarcate what are assumed to be inevitable tendencies toward nostalgia, refusing altogether the intent or affect of closure--in short, to endeavor toward discours, and not histoire.4 8 These same principles inform the methodology of regional study: for both practical and theoretically informed reasons, the study of a distinct locale affords a perspective which is also at least potentially resistant to totalizing or globalizing trajectories. More specifically, the focus on Los Angeles television in this study provides a certain freedom from the fixed "origins" and "knowability" or "mastery" of early television history as a linear narrative of network hegemony. Certainly the networks played a role in this history, and ultimately assumed increasing levels of power and control in this market. But this process was neither as simple nor as immediate as might be expected, based on the sure linearity of network-centered, totalizing histories. Regional/local studies can demonstrate the limits of such histories, but also suggest an alternative perspective for the impact of network growth and power~ Foucault advocates the methodological difference implicit to local or regional study as a means to analyzing the forms and relations of domination as they occur in society: [I]n speaking of domination I do not have in mind that solid and global kind of domination that one person exercises over others, or one group over another, but the manifold forms of domination that can be exercised within society . . • not the uniform edifice of sovereignty, but the multiple forms of subjugation that have a place and function within the social organism. • • • • • . the analysis in question • • • should be concerned with power at its extremities, in its ultimate destinations, with those points where it becomes capillary, that is, in its more regional and local forms and institutions.5 Applied to this field of historical inquiry, this would entail a more localized analysis of not only the 9 network "domination" central to most early television histories (rather than generalized "national" conclusions based on the tendencies of the east, etc.), but also toward the analysis of the growing domination of television overall as an apparatus and institution of contemporary society. Local study, in other words, can serve to invert the assumed trajectory of power so as not to privilege the dominance of the networks in such a way as to participate in the cultural legitimation and the institutionalization of network television. Again, for Foucault [T]he important thing is not to attempt some deduction of power starting from its centre and aimed at the discovery of the extent to which it permeates into the base, of the degree to which it reproduces itself down to and including the most molecular elements of society. One must rather conduct an ascending analysis of power, starting, that is, from its infinitesimal mechanisms which each have their own history, their own trajectory, their own techniques and tactics, and then see how these mechanisms of power have been--and continue to be--invested, colonized, utilized, involuted, transformed, displaced, extended, etc., by ever more general mechanisms .•.• 6 What this suggests, then, is an analysis not of 10 network power as it was gradually disseminated west, but rather an analysis of local television (or, television as appropriated and consumed locally) which develops varying dynamic relationships with network or other non-local sites of control or power. Los Angeles may be the most obvious region to begin an analysis of this type, but it is not an isolated or peculiar example--! would contend that more localized studies in any region will produce and promote more pluralistic and heterogeneous historical work in this field. Regionality, then, can be used for more than convenient or pragmatic reasons (though surely these reasons, as regards Los Angeles television, exist). It also can provide access to the gaps and aporias that traditional historical work tends to repress or subsume-- so as to resist the control an~ domestication of the past which results, according to Foucault, from the pretense of "knowing" it. Foucault contends that work in history should refuse to enact a totalization of past and present, should recognize the complexities and discontinuous aspects of the past so as to impact on how we comprehend the structures of domination in the present. As Mark Poster points out, Foucault stresses that history is both 11 a form of knowledge and a form of power, and warns that historical writing may serve to "erase the difference of the past and justify a certain version of ~he present."' By privileging a network-centered discourse, most work in television history practices just such an erasure of differences, most obviously by not considering the other possible avenues or determinations that were in evidence, but also by ignoring questions related to localized appropriations, establishing a continuity which verges on homology: the history of television's impact and growth is the history of networks. In so doing, they participate in a certain ideological effect inherent to untheorized histories. As Foucault suggests, Continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject: the guarantee that everything that has eluded him may be restored to him; the certainty that time will disperse nothing without restoring it in a reconstituted unity; the promise that one day the subject--in the form of historical consciousness--will once again be able to appropriate, to bring back under his sway, all those things that are kept at a distance by difference, and find in them what might be called his abode.8 Early Los Angeles television can be seen to demonstrate, indeed to be largely determined by, a variety of discontinuities and contradictions not so easily assimilated. Characterized by often Byzantine, shifting economic, legal, and industrial ties and affiliations; 12 dominated by a station that represented one in a series of seemingly related but often conflicting investments in television by Paramount Pictures; breeding a number of relatively autonomous, competitive if not openly antagonistic attempts to both expand coverage and market strength to regional/national levels, and consolidate the resultant power from these attempts locally; this history will be considered as complex, multi-determined, and disunified. Rather than aiming for this history to be "reconstituted," this project will attempt to maintain this history's "difference" from contemporary society (e.g., contemporary experiences and receptions of television and its impact on our lives), but also seek out "difference" within this history, especially in terms of how social difference was managed, contained, or even possibly, problematically, given a voice. Therefore, especially in recognition of the methodological "problems" detailed above, this study will endeavor to be a "discourse about discourses," analyzing constellations of power-knowledge relations as they appear to have displaced one another.9 In response to the limitations on program texts, for example, the available discourses surrounding these programs will be sought out and analyzed, always calling into question the determinations of such discourse as well as its partiality. 13 Part of the delimitation of these discourses can be achieved within a review of the literature, source materials, and discursive registers available and pertinent to this study. Such a review begins below, followed by a brief overview of Los Angeles history during this period, and a survey of the chapters comprising the present study. Review of the Literature A variety of resources have been investigated during the course of this study. This section consists of a survey indicating the value and utility of each kind of resource. Local Television stations: Individual stations have paid surprisingly little attention to their own history. None of the Los Angeles stations has a prepared history, even though, or perhaps because most of the stations have undergone significant changes of ownership, sometimes regularly. There appear to be few if any extant records or files pertaining to these earliest years. Even KTLA, which has maintained a consistent interest in its history, J 14 has destroyed and disposed of a considerable mass of such materials. This seems to be a condition of the industry in general, which generates great amounts of recorded discourse (correspondence, proposals, studies_ , reports, ratings, memoranda, etc.), yet has little space and seemingly less compunction to save or preserve any of these materials. What principle efforts toward history do exist are self-produced commercial programs, which provide contexts and emphases commensurate with the perceived "demands" of the television marketplace. KTLA, KTTV, and KCBS have produced television specials surveying their respective station histories (KTLA has four such shows: 20th anniversary in 1967, 30th anniversary in 1977, 40th anniversary in 1987, 45th anniversary in 1992; KTTV produced a 35th anniversary show in 1984; and KCBS produced a 40th anniversary show in 1989). These programs occasionally provide information or coverage of the other stations in the area, but principally serve as promotion for the house station. In any case, they are significant attempts to represent the history of Los Angeles television, demonstrating many of the limitations and aporias which condition these attempts, and valuable to this study as meta-discursive texts: television representing its own history. While these programs were helpful and suggestive for all of 15 these reasons, any analysis of them in this study will be limited to segments related to specific incidents. Kinescopes: Aside from the clips contained in the station-produced specials mentioned above, only two stations are represented in material available for extended scholarly analysis. KTLA has preserved several of its shows in conjunction with the Museum of Broadcasting in New York, including examples of many of the musical variety shows, children's shows, syndicated shows, and even news/special events telecasts. Also collected are the anniversary specials. At the UCLA Film and Television Archive Research and Study Center, tapes of many KTLA shows as well as highlights of KTTV history can be viewed. The category of kinescopes is perhaps the most likely to expand in the future (at least one hopes so), since many film prints are discovered quite accidentally in attics, garages, basements, etc. An archive such as the one at UCLA will prove crucially important to preservation as these prints become unearthed. Academic Studies: The most important previous study on this topic is Susan Wilbur's 1976 USC Master's Thesis "The History of Television in Los Angeles: 1931-1952," completed in partial fulfillment of a degree in History. 16 Also excerpted in three installments in the Southern California ouarterly,10 Wilbur's study is chiefly a comprehensive survey and reworking of notices and articles related to Los Angeles television in the trade magazine Broadcasting from 1931 through March, 1953. Supplemented by several other magazine and journal pieces, by visits to each of the local stations (except KCOP, channel 13}, and by some of the quantitative research in early Los Angeles television pursued by what were, in the early 1950's, the USC Departments of Radio and Telecommunications, Wilbur's M.A. thesis represents a welcome and necessary step in the process of this history. Establishing a chronology of significant events and persons according to industry supporti ve media and studies contemporary to those events, Wilbur's work is not commensurate with the goals and methods of this present study but is nevertheless a most helpful tool. It is diligent and well-organized, offering empirical guideposts with which to evaluate some aspects of oral histories. Its reliance on the trade press (the survey of which is an increasingly prevalent method in this field) lends to the study a firm profile of industrial relations. While the contextualization of this history within larger media dynamics (especially that of the motion picture industry} is limited, and many of the methodological concerns discussed above are not addressed, Wilbur's study is an excellent example of traditional historical work directed toward the object of early television. 17 Trade Journals: As mentioned above, these sources are important documents of industry-supportive discourse. In addition to my own survey of Broadcasting (directed to some degree by Wilbur's bibliography), this study is informed by a survey of Television, a New York publication started in 1944 by Frederick Kugel. With the exception of a few early unlocated issues, I have examined the publication through 1952. While focused primarily on the east coast, this journal also pays surprising attention to localized developments and issues across the U.S., oftentimes those in Los Angeles. Radio Life is a weekly local Los Angeles publication started in 1940 as a radio-focused prototype of magazines like TV Guide. While some limited mention of television can be found in these early years, it began to cover this medium in more detail in the late 1940's, as commercial television grew, and eventually changed its name to Radio Teleyision Life. As such, the magazine offers one of the few resources regularly (if sparingly) discussing local experimental television before and during World War II, the period of its publication which I have been able to 18 closely survey. (This magazine is collected in a complete run only at the Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters offices, which are open to the public one afternoon per week, most weeks of the year.) Several issues after 1946 have also been examined, in research directed toward specific performers and incidents. Daily Variety contains marked local Los Angele. s coverage, since published in LA (as opposed to the New York-based Weekly Variety). This industry paper regularly reviews local entertainment of all kinds, and began reviewing Los Angeles experimental television in a limited way in 1946·. These reviews have recently become available in published form due to the efforts of Howard Prouty of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who has assembled the run of Daily variety's television articles and reviews for Garland Publishing, Inc. The perspective of these pieces is again industry-supportive, even parochial in terms of insisting that the medium ultimately achieve a preordained, never fully-defined "entertainment" level. Aside from this pervasive ideology, the reviews are helpful in their occasional detail about the shows, and especially in simply identifying the formats for program titles that exist quite mysteriously in the limited local newspaper listings. Also useful is the premiere date of these shows and formats, although the 19 development of each show and length of its run cannot be discerned. Local Newspapers: Because no local papers are indexed for the period of this study, these resources have been of limited use. The most readily available of these papers, the Los Angeles Times, practiced a self-serving reportage of television news, severely restricting their coverage of early TV until involved in the market themselves, and then privileging their own station KTTV's activities. For example, there is no mention of KTLA's premiere in the paper, even though the program was a star-studded affair and inaugurated commercial television in the western half of the country, let alone the city. Similarly, KTLA's coverage of the Kathy Fiscus rescue attempt in 1949, for which the station was recognized industry-wide, is ignored completely in the Times' coverage of the event, although KTTV's more limited appearance on the scene is highlighted.11 While certain periods of this publication within the time frame of this study have been examined closely, a day-to-day survey of the paper was not conducted. Research at the Times offices resulted in some access to the paper's internal publication "Among Ourselves," which contains information about the early years of development at KTTV. 20 The files of the defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner, a Hearst publication, are collected at the Regional Cultural History Collection near use, and contain news clippings regarding television, gathered according to general topic. These files do not contain .regular television listings nor columns pertaining to television, but do provide contextual details and perspectives concerning many developments considered to be newsworthy. The most useful newspaper-related source is the collection of television columns written by Hal Humphrey for the Los Angeles Mirror, a comparatively short-lived paper started by the Times-Mirror Corporation in October, 1948. Housed in the Special Collections of USC's Cinema Television Library, these columns have been arranged chronologically by curator Ned Comstock, and therefore provide a singular, rather continuous perspective on the daily ruminations about the growing commercial medium. Because the columns exist on full pages torn from the published paper, other media discourses such as advertisements, program previews, and publicity photos are also available for purposes of contextualization and analysis. The page on which Humphrey's column appears is often the obverse of the paper's editorial page, leading to still further opportunities for contextualization. Occasionally a news article from another section of the 21 paper is included among the columns, usually because it is related in some way to television. These materials do not seem to duplicate the KTTV bias of the Times itself (indeed, Virgil Pinkley, publisher of the Mirror, made regular appearances on KNBH, the local NBC affiliate). They nevertheless do indicate the significant opinions and biases of Humphrey and the larger industry at this time, / regularly including photos and remarks about women, which demonstrate a fascination with decolletage. Oral Histories: Because of sparse archival and station resources, the most immediate alternative method of research concerning early television is personal interviews. Many of those who worked in the medium's earliest years are alive and most willing to discuss their experiences in television. As might be anticipated, the scheduling and coordinating of these meetings is far less predictable than is studying in housed collections. In addition, as mentioned earlier, some degree of inaccuracy is generally assumed (even by those interviewed), usually related to nostalgia, simple mismemory, or perhaps even self-interest. Nevertheless, these interviews can provide otherwise unobtainable details about a number of aspects of the industry, and often lead to new directions for further research. 22 Los Angeles History Synopsis Several recently published studies of Los Angeles history have proven most valuable in providing information about the prevalent social, economic, and ideological dynamics of this region during the period covered in the present study. Foremost is City of Quartz by Mike ·Davis, l2 a rigorous and wide-ranging analysis of the shifting power structures of LA. Roger Lotchin's .Fortress California 1910-196113 is a comprehensive survey of the rise of the military-industrial complex in the state, particularly in the major urban centers of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego. Also helpful has been Edward Soja's Postmodern Geographies,14 which contains two chapters that deal specifically with contemporary LA. Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt's Tbinking Big 15 is an excellent precursor to these more recent studies, as is Robert Fogelson's The Fragmented Metropolis.16 Los Angeles history since 1880 can be considered as a series of "booms," each of which represents a spurt of economic and population growth that was sought and promoted by community leaders. Driven for decades by land development monopolies and real estate speculation, the proponents of which were centered downtown, the LA economy eventually became increasingly industrialized, and increasingly fragmented. 23 The 1920's "boom," which pushed LA past San Francisco in population, continued the real estate and oil speculation of previous generations, made more expansive by the proliferation of automobiles. Cars provided exceptional mobility, but also the first gridlocks downtown (particularly in altercations with the elaborate mass transit electric-rail system), leading to the growth of decentralized pockets of manufacturers, and regional separations of economic power. The Depression rocked local financial speculators (the Arroyo Seco bridge in Pasadena needed a high barbed wire fence installed to end the suicide attempts there), and also led to a number of popular cults and money schemes. Leftist politics grew in power, as in the mid- 1930s Upton Sinclair was narrowly defeated in his neo Socialist campaign for governor, while activist Clifford Clinton (whose famous, glamorous downtown cafeteria suggested "Pay what you wish") had his home bombed after pushing for political reforms against Mayor Frank Shaw and his police department "enforcers." Shaw was ultimately defeated in a recall election, by moderate Fletcher Bowron. 24 Despite these instances of unrest, LA County was fifth in U.S. industry by 1935, and led the nation in motion picture production, oil refining, and airplane manufacturing. (This latter industry would grow enormously as the nation prepared for war.) Buoyed by the consistent "transfer" of capital from other parts of the U.S. (in the form of the savings of retirees, wages of sun-seekers, etc.), and also the burgeoning agricultural sphere in the region, parts of Los Angeles seemed to prosper during the 1930s. The region's water and electrical power supplies were expanded as well, allowing for the remarkable industrial growth of the wartime years. World War II led to another "boom" period, as government-subsidized factories and defense appropriations ballooned the Los Angeles economy. At the peak of production, LA was second only to Detroit as an industrial region. From 1941 to 1945, capital investment increased nearly half a billion dollars, with increasing participation from the private sector. By the end of the war, Los Angeles led the nation with nine industries whose annual production was $25 million or more. The city's population grew proportionally, leading to a variety of significant social dynamics after the war. Many of these dynamics were related to class and race issues. The intolerance toward migrant Okies in the 25 1930s, internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, and "Zoot Suit Riots" of 1943 (during which bands of white sailors combed East LA in brutal attacks on Mexican Americans) are notorious examples of LA class and race relations of this period. The everyday experience of these social relations was less dramatically pronounced but only occasionally less segregated. The wartime economy had accelerated the emigration to Los Angeles of workers from minority races and ethnicities, while court protected housing restrictions exacerbated for these groups the housing shortage that existed across the region. Some of these restricted zones, for example the primarily black area along Central Avenue south of downtown, were thriving cultural centers, served by the Red Car trolley lines. (Central Avenue, where Tom Bradley once served as a policeman, was a jazz center for decades, attracting the likes of white and black Hollywood stars, and popular entertainers of color since the 1920s.) But even after the war, when suburbanization began to swell, much of the Los Angeles region was demarcated by explicitly restricted housing. The San Gabriel Valley had been restricted since the early 1940s; developers building the San Fernando Valley attempted similar practices over a larger terrain; smaller developments grew in unincorporated areas of LA County, increasing the tax 26 burden for County services across the region yet zoning out property rights for many of its citizens. The developers and savings and loans crucial to this suburbanization--many of which were located on the Westside, and some of which represented "minority" race and ethnic interests--gained considerable power in the postwar ear. Freeway construction, begun in the early 1940s, enabled the further decentralization of LA, which led to exercises of power at both neighborhood and civic levels. Homeowner associations worked to enforce community (white, middle-class) interests, mandating and prohibiting specific social and economic practices and behaviors. As a corollary to the politics of suburbanization (and the emerging "baby boom"), participation in the public sphere became increasingly rare--the economic and ideological goals of "privatization" now predominant. In the late 1940s, the leaders of the Downtown power structure attempted to integrate rail and freeway designs into a system radiating from central LA (hoping to determine the retail trade patterns of the new suburban areas). Condemned by the Westside interests as "socialistic," and also resisted by the suburban front, the plan was narrowly defeated. The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 spurred extant anti-Red sentiments and 27 led to the further militarization of the local economy, as defense industries again prospered and expanded with the help of Federal subsidies. By 1952, Mayor Bowron was on his way to def eat by right-wing Congressman Norris Poulson, during a campaign which railed against "Bolshevism" and public housing. After the Korean War, "white flight" and the build-up of unincorporated farmland became even more prominent. As will be suggested in the present study, the rise of television in Los Angeles complemented and gave representation to many of these social, economic, and ideological dynamics. The spread and social fragmentation of the populace presented little difficulty for television's broadcast technology. As programming expanded, it accommodated domestic schedules and priorities while providing regionally-inflected "entertainments" at night, always employing a friendly, para-social demeanor. "Live" reports of breaking news and events of socio-political importance likewise helped to incorporate the television apparatus as a part of everyday life. Television'· in other words, served many of the consumer-directed imperatives of postwar Los Angeles, especially those revolving around the privatized suburban and farmland communities of the region. As will be demonstrated, this "service" both mirrored and contributed 28 to the conflicts and contradictions implicit within the Los Angeles community in this era. survey of Chapters Chapter two will present a chronological overview of Los Angeles television history from 1930 to 1952, and therefore represents the section of the present study closest to approaching "histoire." The structure of this chapter emphasizes the pre-commercial, experimental period of Los Angeles television (which Wilbur, based on her resources, necessarily does not cover in detail), and focuses primarily on the industrial practices in this period, locating the chief economic, technological, and ideological determinants of Los Angeles television. Coverage of the commercial television period of the present study will employ a synopsized time-line for each year (1947-1952), accompanied by discussions which will contextualize the major events as noted. This chapter will privilege station KTLA as a consistent focal point, to some extent continuing the bias in work on this history towards that station. Attention will be paid to the activities of other Los Angeles television stations in this period, especially since KTLA -while predominant in these years--did not operate in a 29 vacuum. The other six stations provided essential aspects of the programming and industry competition within which KTLA flourished, often influencing, presaging, or even assimilating that station's personnel and practices. Within the consideration of these other stations, the activities of local independents will be foregrounded. While relying to a great extent on early Los Angeles television history's own "major players" (Paramount Pictures, Don Lee Broadcasting, the Los Angeles Times, the networks), and "great men" (Harry Lubcke, Klaus Landsberg, etc.), this chapter will also emphasize aspects of discontinuity in this history, in order to develop a criticism and analysis of assumptions behind many of the conclusions reached in previous work on this topic. Despite these intentions, I recognize that this chapter, since closest to the traditional paradigms of work in history, is probably more susceptible to the logical leaps and inaccuracies of historical work in general, and is most likely to be subject to revision. Though apparently more conclusive, it should be recognized as potentially the most "in process." Chapter three is a case study in textual analysis, focusing on three famous uses of remote telecasts by KTLA, in order to speculate about the role of this station and its use of this mode of address toward establishing television as a part of everyday life. 30 Developed by Landsberg into a practice that served as a kind of station identification, remote telecasts "solved" certain industrial, economic, and programming limitations while capitalizing on opportunities in the burgeoning community for both "entertainment" and "public service" programming. Entertainment remotes of sporting events and performers/variety shows afforded staple regular programming fare, but broadcasts of a newsworthy or documentary quality were even more important in fashioning the station's community identity. Three examples/variations of this more journalistic mode of remote telecasts will be considered in detail: 1. The Kathy Fiscus tragedy (April 8-10, 1949): allegedly responsible for more Los Angeles TV set sales than any other single event, this broadcast entailed 27.5 continuous hours of coverage of the unsuccessful attempted rescue of a three-year-old girl who had fallen into a San Marino well. While only some audio of the telecast remains, it is legendary in early Los Angeles TV recountirigs. 2. "Operation Big Shot" (April/May, 1952): the telecast of two A-bomb tests in Nevada, the coverage of which was engineered by Landsberg but carried over all 3 31 major networks. Kinescope recordings of both telecasts exist, and will be discussed. 3. City at Night: a regular program begun in the late 1940's and enduring with minor breaks and format changes until the mid-1960's. Called "your surprise program of the week" and originating from a different and unannounced locale every program, the show introduced its audiences to a variety of the industrial, commercial, and socio-cultural changes taking place during this period. A recording of this program from 1949 exists, and will be discussed. These programs were all important to the growth and popularity of the medium of television in Los Angeles, and indicative of some differences in this growth from that occurring within the domain of network formation in the east. They are however also distinct from one another, both in terms of mode of address and the resultant positions afforded viewers, and in how they manage or negotiate the dichotomy of fear and knowledge at play in such "reports." Finally, in their limited textual accessibility, they are representative of many of the problems and questions surrounding the study of early television. Utilizing personal interviews with the participants involved in these telecasts, textual analysis when 32 possible, and reports of these events and shows in print media (newspapers and trade journals); placing these practices within the regional context of post-war Los Angeles; and applying discourse theory and essays on "catastrophe" television by Claus-Dieter Rath, Mary Ann Doane, and Patricia Mellencamp, this chapter will examine these shows as significant to transforming the perception of television as a novelty to one which includes it as a regular part of everyday life. By trying to understand both the Imaginary threat that these programs exploited or promulgated, the socio-historic moment of this dynamic and its proliferation, and also the role that these events play in the Imaginary of the history of these phenomena, this chapter will suggest not only the significance of these shows to the development of Los Angeles television, but also the larger historiographic and methodological implications for the ongoing study of early television history. Chapter four addresses gaps and marginality in this history, examining specific issues of gender, race, and class. This analysis is an attempt to introduce both the range and the complications of these previously underrecognized areas of this history. This chapter has two sections: 33 1. An analysis of the representation of non-white and non-American performers on early Los Angeles television in the pre-1952 period, when the medium was primarily local and independent. This section will focus on "entertainment" programming, specifically shows featuring Korla Pandit, Renzo Cesana ("The Continental"), and Harry Owens and His Royal Hawaiians. These programs share similarities in the representation of race and ethnicity but also differences, again often ~n terms of mode of address and resultant viewer positions. Examined together, they are representative of many of the issues surrounding the representation of social "difference" in this period. Special attention will be given to those aspects of this topic which most effectively reveal the contradictions and problematics of the representation of race and ethnicity in early Los Angeles television. 2. An overview of women's activities in this history, based primarily on oral histories with three "on air" women performers from this period: Lenore Kingston Jensen, an avid ham radio enthusiast and president of the Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters, who began her media career as a radio actress, moving on to ~elevision, and ultimately creating and hosting her own local TV shows; Dorothy Gardiner, the principal "female" member of Klaus Landsberg's troupe of on-air personnel at KTLA, and an 34 original host of City at Night; and Monty Margetts, a veteran radio actress who hosted a hit television cooking show during this period, comically highlighted by the fact that she had little or no experience in this traditional domestic activity. The final portion of this dissertation will address conclusions and further questions raised in this study. I also include an appendix, consisting of excerpts from transcriptions of three selected oral histories undertaken as part of my research for this project: Leland G. (Gerry) Muller, who worked at KTLA for several of its earliest years on the air, beginning at the station in 1946; David Crandell, who organized the television courses and activites at the Pasadena Playhouse in the late 1940s, when that institution was affiliated with KTTV; and Betty White, whose successful career in television was begun locally on KLAC, and who appeared in a syndicated comedy produced at that station. A list of all those who granted me the opportunity to interview them is included in the bibliography. As the design of this study and its methodology suggest, the history of early Los Angeles television challenges more than it confirms the traditional paradigms of broadcast history. It affords as well the opportunity to consider with specificity the early impact of 35 television on a regional audience. The goal of this study is to make a decided intervention toward these projects, and to suggest avenues for their continuation. 36 1 For example, Erik Barnouw, The Golden Web; A History of Broadcasting in the United States. Volume II--1933 to 1953 (New York; Oxford University Press, 1968); Erik Barnouw, Tube of Plenty; The Evolution of A1Derican Television (New York: oxford University Press, 1975);. Christopher H. Sterling and John M. Kittross, Stay Tuned: A Concise History of American Broadcasting (Belmont, California; Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1978); and Sydney w. Head, Broadcasting in Ainerica (Boston; Houghton Mifflin Company, 1972). 2 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), P.· 8. 3 Mimi White, "Television; A Narrative--A History," Cultural Studies 3, No. 3 (October 1989): 283. 4 Emile Benveniste, "Subjectivity in Language" in Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables: University of Miami, 1971), p. 209. 5 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. by Colin Gordon (New York; Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 96. 6 Ibid., p. 99. 7 Mark Poster, Foucault. Marxism & History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), p. 76. 8 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (New York; Pantheon Books, 1972), p. 12. 9 Lynn Hunt, "French History in the Last Twenty Years: The Rise and Fall of the Annales Paradigm," Journal of Contemporary History 21, No. 2 (April 1986): 218-219. 10 Susan K. Wilbur, "The History of Television in Los Angeles, 1931-1952," Southern California Quarterly 60 Nos. 1-3 (Spring, Summer, Fall, 1978). ll "Television Has 27-Hour Fire Trial," Los Angeles Times, 11 April 1949, p. 2. 12 Mike Davis, City of Quartz; Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 1990). 37 13 Roger Lotchin, Fortress Califonia 1910-1961: From warfare to Welfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 14 Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies; The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York; Verso, 1989). 15 Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt, Thinking Big: The story of the Los Angeles Times. Its Publishers. and Their Influence on Southern California (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1977). 16 Robert Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles. 1850-1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967). 38 Chapter Two An overview of the Historical Development of Television in Los Angeles While Paramount's KTLA is centrally important to Los Angeles television during the period of this study, lending to this region's early television history much of its differancel--in terms of programming tendencies but especially in its financial backing from a motion picture studio--it is important to recognize that, as in most of the country, local business and newspaper interests in radio formed the backbone of early local television. This "backbone" was to a certain degree industrial: successful radio stations made good profits even during the Depression, and were in a position to fund television research. Perhaps more important was the social and ideological aspect: the public in the 1920's became learned in "the customary ways of thinking about b:i;oadcasting."2 As William Boddy has pointed out, the basic determinations of the United States' unique broadcasting system were established by the larger radio industry near the end of the 1920's. Radio came to exist primarily as an advertiser-supported domestic consumer good with significant legal and economic barriers of entry, marked 39 by the privatized, home-centered consumption of rigidly scheduled programs and commercials. These seemingly "natural" characteristics, according to Boddy, were conditioned by, and complicit with, the 1910's and 1920's growth of U.S. commerce and industrialism. Although the structure and mode of address of the developing television apparatus and industry were important items in the power struggles of early television history, many expected television to resemble the broadcast characteristics of radio. As Soddy's study suggests, the issue of this resemblance should not be assumed, and any teleological relation or naturalized technological determinism between the two media should be resisted. In 1922, the first "boom" year of radio, four newly established stations marked the sketchy beginnings of organized and institutionalized broadcasting in Los Angeles. Information about the early years of Los Angeles radio is scarce, and most of the discussion of early LA radio in this section is based on a few secondary sources. But what information exists is sufficient to indicate that while three of these stations--KFI, KHJ, and KNX--would become major radio stations, and to some degree condition the local entry into Los Angeles television, the ultimate involvement of these stations in television was neither 40 linearly derived nor simple, and certainly was not implicit in their founding or early years of operation. Early Radio in Los Angeles The level of radio's organization in 1922, of course, was considerably less well-developed than contemporary standards (network practices, for example, did not evolve for several years). Indeed, early Los Angeles radio technique has been characterized as "one of hit and miss, of trial and error."3 This was true of the industry as a whole. In fact, while Marconi's invention had been "developing" for 25 years, broadcasting itself was a relatively recent, and even "surprising" phenomenon. As Boddy has insisted, the very capacity for a general diffusion of messages, the essential characteristic of broadcasting, was an unexpected use of radio technology, which was originally designed for confidential point-to point transmissions.4 A local example of this amended utilization is the case of Earle c. Anthony, founder of Los Angeles pioneer radio station KFI and eventually an early and notoriously anti-union investor in Los Angeles television. An engineering graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, Anthony became the leading Packard automobile 41 dealer on the west coast, and experimented with "wireless telephony" to connect his Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland dealerships.5 This plan was never realized; like almost everyone else interested in radio, Anthony instead opted for public programming. He is said to have personally built his first 5-watt station on a drawinq board in his kitchen, initiating broadcasts of KFI on Easter Sunday, 1922. The first Los Angeles radio audiences were crystal set enthusiasts. Within a few years, Anthony was catering to an upscale audience of potential car-buyers. He underwrote early losses to present musical and educational features: KFI's programming included symphony orchestra and opera broadcasts, educational talks for government and city employees, interviews and addresses by the important personages who visited the west coast, and the first Hollywood Bowl broadcasts. 6 In 1924, KFI increased in power from 100 watts to 500, and joined KPO of San Francisco in the first west coast network; the station became a member of the popular Red network of NBC (the premier chain of NBC stations) in 1927. Anthony acquired Los Angeles station KECA in 1929, continuing experiments in educational and musical activities, and starting the first published monthly magazine of radio schedules and program notes. In 1931, KFI became a maximum-power 42 50,000-watt clear channel. While considerably less powerful in wattaqe, KECA became an affiliate of NBC's short-lived Gold network in 1934, and of NBC's more successful Blue network in 1936, increasing its power that year to 5,000 watts.7 As will be discussed later, both KFI and KECA would eventually branch into local television in the late 1940's--but under different ownership from one another, and significantly different network affiliations. The other two major radio stations bequn in 1922, KHJ and KNX, were founded by newspaper interests (a nationwide trend that year)8, although neither station remained a newspaper property for very lonq. KNX, called "the stormy petrel of early radio in Los Anqeles, 11 9 was the publicity tool of the Los Angeles Express, under the direction of that newspaper's promotion manager Guy c. Earl. First givinq away 1,000 crystal sets in a circulation campaign, the station was soon broadcasting from a Studebaker Sales Building at 1616 Hollywood Boulevard. Earl courted listeners with the sensational: "He provoked feuds with other radio stations and newspapers to gain publicity, sold advertisinq space to whoever [sic] wanted it, no matter how questionable the product, and broadcast a murder trial, although his reporters were repeatedly thrown out of the courtroom. nlO In 1928, he broadcast the 43 Rose Bowl game via telephone, even though the broadcast rights had been sold by the telephone company to KFI.11 The station eventually became the only independent 50,000-watt clear channel in the country before becoming an owned-and-operated station in the CBS network in 1936. KNX assumed its residence as western flagship of the CBS network in the $2 million Columbia Square facility at Sunset and Gower in 1938. While CBS of course became involved in local television, its efforts were not directed through this local radio station. As a network, CBS did not get involved in experimental television as early, nor attempt the wholesale expansion of its radio system into television, as did NBC. KNX would ultimately become the sister station of a Los Angeles television station owned-and-operated by CBS, but only after years of the network's trial affiliations and machinations with local independent television. Radio station KHJ, the third major radio station begun in 1922, was founded by Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler. A good deal more conservative than his peers at the Express, the station specialized in public events and children's programming.12 In 1927, Chandler sold the station to Don Lee, exclusive Cadillac distributor in California. To allow for an exchange of programs with San Francisco station KFRC (which he had 44 purchased the previous year as an entry to the broadcasting business), Lee arranged for full-time network-line installations between the two stations. He soon expanded his affiliations to form the first major broadcast network on the west coast: in 1928, the Lee stations linked up with three stations owned by the McClatchy newspaper chain (in Fresno, Stockton, and Sacramento); in 1929, CBS extended their transcontinental facilities to the west, and invited the Don Lee system stations to become the CBS California affiliates. Within a year, Lee had added four stations in Oregon and Washington to form a nine-station Don Lee Columbia Network.1 3 This existed until 1936, when the CBS affiliation ended: the McClatchy stations joined the newly formed California Radio System, and Don Lee became affiliated with the Mutual Broadcasting System (comprised originally in 1934 by major independent stations WGN in Chicago, WOR in New York, WLW in Cincinnati, and WXYZ in Detroit). More an aggregation of broadcasters than an integrated network, Mutual afforded the Lee stations with the benefits of a nationwide link (some shared programming, news coverage, national spot advertising, etc.) while maintaining their relative autonomy and west coast identity. Most important to this study, these national network ties afforded Lee the opportunity to 45 finance experimental television research, which he initiated in 1930. The resultant research and initial programming funded by the Lee System would represent the sole early television activities on the west coast for over a decade. Mutual's lack of a centralized organization and financial structure, however, would prevent an effective expansion into network television. Harry Lubcke and Don Lee Television As historians of television are fond of pointing out, the "idea" of television--images transmitted instantaneously across a certain distance--has existed since at the latest the 1870's, when fantasies of a combined telegrapy/photography apparatus arose. (As part of the general scientific interest in duplicating motion, television, too, should be considered in Bazin's "myth of total cinema.") Practical experimentation toward such a device begun shortly thereafter culminated in the marked anticipation of the 1920's, when the public demonstrations of Baird, Jenkins, and others gave promise of an imminent new television age. This promise was short-lived, as the limitations of this work in what would become known as low-definition, shortwave "mechanical" television became clear by the early 1930's.14 46 There is evidence of some limited experimentation with mechanical television in Southern California: a July, 1928 list of television stations published in the New York Times notes station W6XC in Los Angeles;15 Joseph Udelson also mentions a Bakersfield station licensed to Pioneer Mercantile Co., granted a construction permit in September, 1931 and beginning transmissions the next year (they apparently ceased operations in 1935).16 Udelson also notes that Don Lee began mechanical television station W6XS (2100-2200 kHz) near Gardena in 1931, moving it to the downtown Los Angeles headquarters of Don Lee Broadcasting at Seventh and Bixel Streets in the spring of 1932, and synchronizing regular one-hour transmissions with radio station KHJ (the Don Lee station) in December of that year. "[F]ilmed action and close-ups of motion picture stars" were transmitted at 80 lines and 20 frames per second on 1,000 watts of power.17 The only other reference to this mechanical station that I have so far located is in a 1931 list of licensed stations in Everyday Science and Mechanics, a Hugo Gernsback publication, which indicates W6XS at only 500 watts of power but, curiously, no "Lines per Frame" listed. 1 8 This missing latter piece of information may simply mean that frame line figures were not available, or could perhaps indicate that the station was being used for only sound 47 transmissions in conjunction with the Don Lee System's recent move into experimental electronic television (this point will be discussed presently). The earliest mention in Udelson's book regarding electronic television in Los Angeles concerns a temporary move to that city in 1926-27 by Philo T. Farnsworth, one of the pioneers of electronic television. 1 9 He soon moved to the San Francisco area, after receiving needed financial backing from the Crocker Bank interests there. His research represented the primary work in electronic television independent from radio networks and manufacturers, and is more securely linked to Los Angeles television development through the person of Harry Lubcke, a young electrical engineering student at the University of California at Berkeley, whom Farnsworth hired as his assistant. Lubcke's 1929 speech before the I.E.E.E. (Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineering) in San Francisco on vacuum tube volt meter design led to a work offer from Farnsworth, but also offers from larger concerns such as General Electric, RCA, and Westinghouse. Lubcke chose Farnsworth, a local San Francisco company recently making news in the world of TV,~ yet so small that only Lubcke and Farnsworth himself comprised the research staff. Still a college senior, Lubcke worked 48 Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday for the Farnsworth Labs, completing his classwork on Mondays and Wednesdays.21 His position was more temporary than anticipated, however, since the financial reverse in October, 1929 led to the end of Cracker's backing of Farnsworth. Lubcke was released in 1930, but not before helping to develop an advanced scanning system important to the design of electronic television. In his own words, Farnsworth developed and was developing electronic television. Previous to that, everything had been the scanning disc. And I made practical some of the necessary scanning systems--that is, .thg scanning system: horizontal and vertical. Previous to that, Farnsworth had been using sine wave scanning in both directions, which gives you four images. And to try to superimpose four images and get a clear picture was very difficult. I didn't even try it, because I had another way to go. I was sawtooth minded--you know, a quick over and a slow back, the useful scan and the quick return. So that kind of blossomed out.n The impact of innovations such as these "blossomed" indeed: this was the period in which mechanical television research was superceded by that of electronic television (RCA committed its research facilities to the electronic method by 193123). Farnsworth was an important innovator in this development, though clearly the smallest player: The three principals [of electronic TV research]--RCA, Philco, and Farnsworth- each represented an entirely different level of industrial organization. RCA was one of the original radio-group giants; Philco was the leading independent radio manufacturer; and Farnsworth was the lone inventor. In this three-way struggle RCA sought to extend over television the patent monopoly it already possessed; Philco and Farnsworth each tried to check RCA with alternative technologies of their own.24 Farnsworth's "alternatives," developed in part with 49 Lubcke, were ultimately considered to be so groundbreaking and valuable that RCA, after years of refusing to do so, signed a contract in September, 1939 agreeing to pay to Farnsworth royalties for the use of his patents--the first agreement of its kind in RCA's patent-pool controlling history.25 After his release from Farnsworth, Lubcke contacted Don Lee, who agreed to hire Lubcke in November, 1930 as part of Lee's radio system, funding continued experimentations in television. Lubcke started work in January, 1931, and, working from scratch at the Don Lee facilities at Seventh and Bixel, was able by May 10, 1931 to construct an all-electronic apparatus which transmitted a television image from one side of the room to the other.2 6 The FCC license applied for in January was granted to experimental station W6XAO in June. Don Lee died unexpectedly later that year, from an attack of acute indigestion, and the entire broadcasting operation 50 transferred to the hands of his son, Thomas s. Lee, who continued to support Lubcke's experimental work. Lubcke constructed a unique paddle-wheel antenna 200 feet atop the eight-story Don Lee Cadillac building (eight stories was the limit height of construction in LA at this time). On December 23, 1931, he began transmitting at 44.5 megacycles (channel 1) one hour daily, every day but Sunday. The audience for these transmissions was, needless to say, limited: Lubcke prepared and distributed to local electronics amateurs the plans for constructing receiving sets, and found the most concentrated interest among members of the motion picture industry skilled in electronics (mostly sound technicians, who regularly worked with electronic recording devices, etc.).2 7 Because the reception of television waves was resticted to a "line of sight" range, this audience also lived within a 30 mile radius of the eighth-floor, Seventh and Bixel transmitter. 28 The "programming" of this period is not well documented, nor was it consumed in the manner we are accustomed to today. Basically produced by and directed toward an informed mix of professional and amateur electronics enthusiasts, the "interest" or "entertainment" of the telecasts was often more related to questions of resolution and technical quality than to subject matter or 51 questions of content. Indeed, the programs that are privileged in the literature about the station in this most experimental era seem to have been remembered for technical/industrial reasons (important in demonstrating "achievement" and "progress" to the FCC), and somewhat tangentially for reasons of social impact or aesthetic significance. On May 21, 1932, for example, the public relations staff of Don Lee Broadcasting helped arrange the demonstration of a self-synchronized cathode ray receiver of Lubcke's design.~ A group of reporters was assembled to watch TV during a flight above the city in a Western Air Express tri-engine Fokker airplane. 3 0 This silent broadcast proved that the synchronization between transmitter and receiver was not provided by connected power lines--the receiver was "self-synchronized". 31 Also considered important was the discovery of new information about the demonstration's format ("ultra-high-frequency airplane television reception"), especially the observance of "ground and obstacle reflections. 113 2 Though the actual reception was less than ideal, the demonstration proved valuable as a technical exercise. Of all the accounts, only Abramson mentions what was viewed: an image of Loretta Young (who of course would go on to a much more lucrative and extensive television career 20 years later). 52 Some surveys of this period include the March 10, 1933 telecast of a full length motion picture, The Crooked Circle (1932), which was notable to the extent that the film enjoyed a concurrent theatrical run. 33 Allegedly the first broadcast of a feature film, 34 this event indicated the potential entertainment value of television. It demonstrated a capacity to telecast work in the motion picture medium for an extended period of time, important because the suitability of films for television purposes could not be assumed, especially at early levels of resolution.35 The film itself is a little-known independent production (Sano Art World-Wise producers), which was ultimately included among 213 independent features made available for rental to TV stations in 1942, as a package prepared by Advance Television Pictures, which represented a consortium of independent film producers . 36 A different example of early Don Lee TV achievements is the transmission of March 10, 1933: "First television coverage of a disaster by means of rapidly processed newsreel film, showing scenes of Long Beach earthquake. 11 37 This event establishes to a limited extent the paradigm of television's relation to "disaster": its ability to access a proximity to disaster both spatially and temporally (a quality which, as I will discuss later, 53 would become a trademark of sorts for Klaus Landsberg and KTLA). The significance of the event at this period of the medium's development, however, has been positioned once again in terms of optimal and prototypical technical properties and achievements (e.g., the successful broadcast of newsreel, the unique film processing capabilities involved, etc.). The attendant social significance was of course limited by the audience the station could reach, but was supplemented to a degree: Night scenes of the distressed area were shown first, and then day scenes. Later, two full reels were telecast which gave a comprehensive picture of the whole damaged area. These broadcasts were received in several stores and homes throughout the city. Two stores held public demonstrations of the event. Since the public was not admitted to the stricken area for some two weeks, many saw television images of the damage before they were permitted to visit and inspect the actual scenes • 38 Lubcke has suggested that this telecast inaugurated the "active program service of the Don Lee television station. 11 3 9 Public awareness of and interest in television slowly grew in the 1930's. Lubcke completed a 300 line, 24 frame sequential system for W6XAO (considered to be "high definition" at the time). 40 Programming was expanded to four hours per day,41 and the new apparatus was demonstrated daily on the main floor of the Don Lee 54 building beginning on June 4, 1936. That first month alone, Lubcke estimated, about 5,000 people saw these demonstrations: whether curious passers-by or respondents to newspaper column notices, most were seeing television for the first time. Lubcke recalled that Their reactions were largely favorable and many requested information as to where receivers could be purchased. Although receivers were not for sale, and have never been sold by our orga.nization, many skilled persons constructed their own television receivers from _plans made available without charge.47 . Aside from courting enthusiasts from the public sphere, Lubcke and Don Lee Television also demonstrated TV to professional groups. In April, 1937, an installation at the California Institute of Technology presented this new apparatus to scientists at that school, and drew the attention of the surrounding Pasadena/San Marino community. More novel was the installation of a receiver in a large private residence some four miles away from the Don Lee building, creating a kind of "home theater" that was used to demonstrate TV to a variety of entertainment industry professionals: Here, apart from the living room, a "television room" was created in which the receiver stood. Two rows of chairs faced this in the manner of a miniature theater. Demonstrations were held on many evenings with as many as eight separate showings in a single ·evening. Admission to the demonstrations was by tickets, which were obtainable without charge. In this intimate setting, more than 2,500 people made their first acquaintance with television over a period of three years. Many individuals representing the general public, motion picture and radio stars and executives, as well as groups from such organizations as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Radio Engineers, attended these evenings of television entertainment. 43 55 Interest in television was also generated within the public sphere. The Hollywood Television Society was founded by George H. Seward in 1938. Comprised of mostly non-professional community enthusiasts, the Society held weekly meetings to discuss technology and equipment, television techniques, etc. They also administered the public demonstrations of TV at the Don Lee Building. Little information is available on this non-profit group, though Lubcke suggests they were, at least in spirit, the forerunner of the Television Academy: Mr. Seward, he was .•. a voice crying in the wilderness, so to speak, but interested and enthusiastic. And he evolved, put together, this Society which met for the purpose of discussing television. • • • [W]e in the Don Lee organization were so busy putting on the television--working day and night, and involving the equipment and everything- that we were pretty much busy. They went their own way and they did more the lighter side of television • • • the acting-directing-producing • • • aspects. 44 While these more production-based aspects may not have been central to Lubcke's concerns, they were 56 nevertheless also in development. Programming at W6XAO became increasingly varied and ambitious. Experimental forays into "living-room education" included documentary films and demonstrations of diverse activities by guests from use, other local schools and art centers, etc. Pottery-making, golf, first aid, charcoal drawing, lie detectors, and origins of the alphabet were among topics covered. This approach was based, naively perhaps, on the theory that Americans at home will enjoy specially and intimately presented educational programs that would not draw them to school rooms or motion picture theaters. 45 Intentions such as these were fairly common in early television, important to establishing a "public service" record that the FCC would appraise alongside a station's technological standing and "entertainment" profile. As to this latter concern, Lubcke relied on two innovative modes of production: "live" remotes from locations nearby (Pasadena, nine miles from the station, was rather a stretch), and theatrical "units" which would perform 20- minute plays with some regularity (perhaps every two weeks per unit). The most significant of these units was from The Pasadena Playhouse, and was headed by Shirley Thomas, a graduate of that noted Southern California institution. Among the dramatic units, this one "tended to put on 57 costume dramas and items of considerable stature. 1146 (The Pasadena Playhouse would form an alliance with the L2§. Angeles Times station KTTV after the war.) Other units would specialize in different kinds of production, such as the comedy unit with Sweeney and March, or the Teletheater Guild unit, presenting Alice in Wonderland in installments, etc. Lubcke has mentioned plays produced by Max Reinhardt's Hollywood workshop, and a rendition of Macbeth staring Fritz Leiber. Performing without pay, these units would select a project, OK it with the station, arrange their own cast and overall production, rehearse in their own facilities, and then dress-rehearse and finally perform at the studio (at first, before only one camera). Even these spartan conditions called for discretion on Lubcke's part: he was careful to avoid an association with any group that might exploit its access to air time (for example, by selling memberships to aspiring actors hungry for television exposure). 47 Another notable unit performed an early serialized drama called "Vine Street," a 15-minute show which appeared twice a week (Tuesday and Friday) and ran for at least 22 episodes (Udelson suggests 52 episodes 48 ). Written by Wilfred Pettitt and Maurice Anthony, and starring Shirley Thomas and John Barkeley, the series concerned Sandra Bush (Thomas), a stage-struck girl trying to get into the movies and television. Lubcke has described the series as ranging from comedy to drama, following "the principals from poverty to riches, from park bench to movie studio, from San Fernando to Hawaii. 114 9 Little other detail about "Vine Street" is available (it apparently aired sometime in 1939-1940), 58 though Lubcke's decription of the show's opening reveals an attempt to adapt this radio form of narrative to a manner of presentation more in keeping with the best of motion picture exhibition: A visual and aural introduction is provided for the episode by means of a theme, a miniature stage, and an appropriate introductory paragraph, which is prepared by the writer of the script. Concurrently, an appropriate World Broadcasting transcribed theme, "Sophisticated Lady," plays on the aural channel. In motion picture title fashion, a miniature stage starts the performance by the raising of the main curtain, the draping of a side curtain, and the retraction of the side wings. This reveals a sign reading "Vine Street by W.H. Pettitt." The side wings are then moved to obscure the sign, which is immediately replaced by a second sign reading, "Starring Shirley Thomas as Sandra Bush." In the same manner her photograph is next displayed, then a sign reading, "and John Barkeley as Michael Roberts," which is followed by a photograph of Mr. Barkeley. Simultaneously with the visual action, an off stage announcer ties the forthcoming episode to the previous action and introduces the episode. A second camera then takes the scene, the action starts, and carries on to conclusion.~ 59 According to Udelson, the station was broadcasting seven hours daily (except Sunday) by spring, 1939: five and one-quarter hours were "live;" one and three-quarter hours were film. W6XAO was shut down at some point that summer, in order to convert to the new 441-line, single side-band standard of the Radio Manufacturers Association.51 Early in November they were back on the air, preparing for what appeared to be the industry's imminent growth: RCA's television exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair had been successful, while locally a handful of set manufacturers placed TV receivers on the market (including RCA, GE, Stewart-Warner, and Gilfillan Brothers, a Los Angeles concern). The station ordered portable transmitting equipment from RCA.52 Remote broadcasts were popular, and featured an array of sports, including Coast League baseball, a rodeo, and boxing and wrestling from the American Legion Stadium in Hollywood. The most demonstrative response to TV in this period may have been the February a, 1940 telecast of a wrestling bout, which drew such an audience outside a radio store in Long Beach that police were called to manage the crowd and resume traffic.53 Lubcke also planned to use the mobile equipment in creating a "nightly spot newsreel service based on topics of local 60 interest. 115 4 Other remotes reportedly covered Hollywood premieres and Hollywood Bowl sunrise services, etc. The station took advantage of its industrial roots by featuring remotes of radio programs, which were telecast as they were simultaneously sent over the national Mutual radio network. Lubcke referred to these shows, which featured performers such as Maxine Gray, Betty Jane Rhodes, and the Sons of the Pioneers, as "part of the process of making the transition from sound to sight-sound broadcasting. 1155 Betty Jane Rhodes, who was a regularly featured Mutual singer, would soon become locally touted as "The First Lady of Television." In a precedent-setting remote, Lubcke arranged the first telecast of the Tournament of Roses Parade in 1940, employing his two new RCA portable ("suitcase") cameras and placing a transmitter atop the Elks Building on Colorado Boulevard, to provide pictures that accompanied Mutual's nation-wide audio coverage. Due to rainfall that day, many owners of TV receivers in Los Angeles enjoyed the parade at home, as the images were relayed nine miles from Pasadena to W6XAO, then telecast area-wide over the station's standard wave length. To further prepare for the anticipated commercialization of TV, Lubcke convinced the Lee organization to move and expand the station. They 61 purchased a prominent hill from the estate of motion picture producer Mack Sennett, renaming it Mt. Lee, and began construction of a modern, state-of-the-art television facility.56 (This is the same hill on which the famous "Hollywood" sign rests, though at the time it still read "Hollywoodland.") The project was a considerable financial undertaking. In addition to the cost of the property and that of the station itself (including studios, equipment, etc.), water, power, and telephone lines were installed and a road was paved up the side of the steep mountain. Lubcke's zeal for the site is apparent in his 1940 description of it, which makes it sound preferable to even NBC's location in New York City: This is an ideal . situation, a high natural eminence of 1,700 feet, located near the center of a population of a million. It is expected that an area of fifty or sixty miles will be dependably covered. Mt. Lee is one and one half times the height of the Em_pire State Building in New York City. ST The station itself was carefully planned, reportedly costing from $100,000 to $250,000. Sheathed in one-ounce copper sheeting, in order to prevent both outside and intra-building electrical disturbances, the two-story structure featured two stages, control booths, a transmitter room, a laboratory, a machine shop, a film room, a lounge/viewing room, and offices, as well as make- up and dressing rooms, and scenery and prop storage areas 62 for in-house productions. The stages--one 60 x 100 feet, the other 25 x 40 feet--were shorter than motion picture stages (to eliminate echoes) and less acoustically "live" than radio stages. outside was a pool, used to stage aquatic events. The Don Lee Broadcasting System also planned to expand its television operations state-wide, applying for a license in San Francisco in order to establish the first west coast network. With signs of commerciality on the horizon, other local interests began to obtain television permits as well. In addition to Television Productions, Inc. (the title of Paramount's west coast TV company), concerns such as CBS, the Hughes Production Division of Hughes Tool Company (also seeking a San Francisco permit), Le Roy's Jewelers, May Department Stores, Earle c. Anthony (of radio stations KFI and KECA), and .American Television Laboratories, Inc. (a joint venture of radio pioneer Lee De Forest and television inventor ·u.A. Sanabria) had applied to the FCC for permits in Los Angeles during the 1939-1940 period. Promotional activities also began to expand, as a complete television and facsimile demonstration was installed in April, 1940 at NBC's Hollywood Radio City, located at Sunset and Vine. Department stores and radio stores, now selling TV receivers, held demonstrations 63 nearly whenever W6XAO was on the air, 5 8 which was between twelve and fifteen hours per week (depending on sports schedules). A television receiver was installed in July at Griffith Observatory, encased in glass to enable visitors to examine all of its inner parts. Also that month, the CBS network radio studio at Columbia Square began demonstrations of TV in which half the tour group saw the other half "televised," and the process was explained by Electrical Engineering graduates of usc.59 But larger industrial and governmental concerns were clouding the future of TV's growth as a commercial medium. In February, 1940, the FCC announced that sponsored programming would begin on a limited basis in September. Thus began a series of strategies and decisions which would lead to a great deal of consternation in the young industry that year. Battles to achieve an economic advantage were being fought by the major players, and since comprehensive technical standards had not yet been set, some attempted control at that level. In March, RCA announced a plan to sell a glut of some 25,000 TV receivers at reduced prices--on the surface, merely a ploy to popularize the medium on the verge of its financial viability. The FCC recognized this as an attempt to "freeze" current RCA standards as the industry norm, however, and set hearings to investigate RCA's 64 actions. They rescinded the commercialization decree the same month as RCA's announcement, removing the economic motivation for the reciver sales, since, they claimed, research on other systems had been curtailed. Finally, after a hearing in April that featured many of the best known powers in early television, the FCC asked the industry itself to agree on standards, after which the agency would "consider" full commercialization. 6 0 The Radio Manufacturers Association established a committee of all interested parties, whether RMA members or not, giving rise to the National Television Standards Committee (NTSC). 6 1 Local LA concerns represented were Don Lee, Hughes Tool, and Television Productions. W6XAO was impacted by these and other industry dynamics, but forded ahead in its local preparations. In May, 1940, the FCC designated forty FM channels, some of which overlapped the frequency for television channel 1 {44-50 me). The Don Lee station was forced to briefly shut down, in order to convert its transmitters to the new channel 1 frequency (50-56 mc). 6 2 In August, the station increased its picture definition from 441 lines to 525 lines, again stopping transmission (for 24 hours) to implement the change, which anticipated the technical standard to come. Then in late September, they went off the air for a projected three months, in order to move operations to the new Mt. Lee studio. 65 The Don Lee radio station was also in transit, moving to 5515 Melrose in Hollywood the following month, which left the Seventh and Bixel building to the Cadillac business. still a west coast broadcasting power, the Mutual-Don Lee chain was seen to be potentially the first radio concern in this region to broadcast the new technology of FM. Thomas Lee announced that FM transmissions would not begin until the Mt. Lee facilities were operational, and suggested that the audio portions of telecasts might employ FM. The first FM radio broadcasts in the west were carried over station K45LA, airing from Mt. Lee, in August, 1941. W6XAO was primed for commercial telecasting when the U.S. entry into World War II placed on hold all television research and development in the private sector. Lubcke convinced station management to allow one transmission per week (in order to keep the equipment functional), in addition to carrying out regular tests for the military. (The precise nature of these tests is unknown, though Lubcke received for his wartime contributions a citation from the U.S. Army Signal Corps in 1946, and a certificate of commendation from the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ships in 1947. 6 3) Eventually, the air-time allowed for maintenance 66 was utilized for public service programming. By 1943, as reported in Radio-Teleyision Life, almost every department of the war has been offered on W6XAO. Beryl Wallace, Earl Carroll's star, presented a "buy bonds quiz," Nancy Dixon of KHJ produced an ersati fashion show under the direction of the ·war Production Board, the Junior Army demonstrated how the suggestions of the OPA could best be carried out to success, .and Doris Kenyon, former motion picture star, made W6XAO a promotion unit for her work in USO. 64 While the station's practices and resources were limited, telecasts such as these afforded continued practical production experience. The Red Cross, the WAVES, and the WAACS all received TV time to explain their respective projects; popular defense-supportive habits and practices were discussed (e.g., "proper do's and don'ts of victory gardening"); and informational films about the war effort were regularly screened for television "lookers" (the prevalent term for viewers at the time). Other siqnif icant broadcast industry events during the war included the FCC's decree that NBC split its radio networks in 1942, which resulted in Earle c. Anthony's June, 1944 sale of station KECA to Edward Noble's "Blue" network (which would become ABC). In December, 1944, Anthony broke ground on Mt. Wilson for a new television and FM antenna, the ceremony presided over by Mayor Fletcher Bowron, Lee de Forest, and other public 67 personalities. (Bowron, recently elected to a second four-year term, was regulalrly heard twice a week on radio, rotating the local stations that would acrry his address.) Anticipation for post-war television growth was widespread, as the University of California announced an extension course in "television background, principles of optics, television cameras and theater-projection television" in August, 1945. 65 In what was apparently the first post-war dramatic television program produced in Los Angeles, W6XAO presented Oh. Miss Tubbs, which starred Verna Felton and was written by Peggy Weber and Mal Boyd. Set in a grade school, and narrated by the school janitor, the show followed the exploits of the title instructor and her fellow teacher, Cornelia Udahl. An episode synopsized in Radio-Television Life places the series as a precursor to sitcoms such as I Love Lucy, featuring the best-laid plans by a pair of intrepid women. (The show was also apparently a precursor to Our Miss Brooks, a sitcom also set in a school, which as a radio series was · first heard on CBS in 1948 and of course was adapted into a popular television series.) Miss Tubbs discourages "Corny" and her housekeeper from listening to radio serials, but then "decides, as have many before her, that she could do a much better job 68 herself!" Misusing the jargon of the industry, she seeks sponsorship for what she calls her "strip show" from a cement company, whose president is happy to support what he thinks will be a burlesque show. Before long, word spreads, and the newspaper claims that Miss Tubbs and Corny are ex-burlesque performers now sponsoring exotic dancing. When Miss Tubbs arbitrates their dismissal as teachers into merely a stern lecture at the next faculty meeting, Corny complains that it will conflict with her favorite serial.~ Other shows and personalities appearing on radio in this period would soon find their way to local television: Queen for a Day, the Alan Young Show, and performers such as Mike Stokey, Hopalong Cassidy (William Boyd), country western ("hillbilly music") stars Spade Cooley and Cliffie Stone, Daws Butler, Shirley Dinsdale, Stu Wilson, William Stulla, and many others were establishing their broadcast careers in the immediate postwar years. The NBC radio network began making inroads to Hollywood, approaching motion picture studios about possibly making films for TV, and established Hal Bock as Western Division head of NBC's television operations. But these activities were to be eclipsed by those at station W6XYZ, the experimental television station owned and operated by Paramount Pictures. On the air only since 69 the limited-telecasting wartime period, W6XYZ would soon distinguish itself as the first commercial television station west of the Mississippi, due to the efforts of its technical and programming director, Klaus Landsberg. Klaus Landsberg and Paramount's ·KTLA Paramount studios, under the control of mogul Adolf Zukor, had been interested in broadcasting early on, attempting in 1927 to originate a network of stations called the "Keystone Chain," and offering that same year to invest in the small United Independent Broadcasters (UIB) radio network. 6 7 These ventures never materialized, though the reasons for this are unclear. Michele Hilmes suggests that it was primarily due to the Federal Trade Commission's attacks on the motion picture industry, and Paramount in particular, for "unfair methods of competition" after the studio's purchase of the Balaban and Katz theater chain in 1926. 68 UIB was instead soon controlled by the Columbia Phonograph and Record Company, later changing its name to CBS. Zukor and Paramount did invest in this later concern (strengthened and expanded after its 1928 controlling purchase by William s. Paley) in 1929. By 1932, however, Paley had bought back Paramount's holdings in CBS to prevent the studio's takeover of the network.69 70 Television posed a threat to the motion picture industry similar to that which radio posed in the 1920s and 1930s. The lessons learned from that earlier broadcast medium, however, convinced the film industry to respond to the threat of television quite differently, if no more effectively. The benefits of centralized network radio had become clear to the film industry well after radio's networks had become established. Paramount, in fact, signed a number of radio stars to contracts, including Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, Bing Crosby, Fibber McGee and Molly, and Bob Hope, creating whole series of films to showcase this talent in various ways. Their attempts to enter the new broadcast medium of television were decidedly earlier in that medium's development. Paramount's entry into television actually began in New York, when in August, 1938 the studio began to buy what would become a 29 percent interest in the Allen B. Du Mont Laboratories of Passaic, New Jersey, which they sought as an equipment source willing to undertake mutually advantageous research in video developments. Paramount engineers cooperated in establishing an experimental station in Passaic, and it was generally understood that Paramount planned to use films in 71 television broadcasts.70 On March 24, 1939, the year NBC publicly "introduced" television at the World's Fair in New York, Paramount sound engineer Homer Tasker announced the studio's plans to begin its own Los Angeles experimental television transmissions, the programming of which would entail televising Paramount talent in the flesh until such time as the company starts turning out films especially designed for tele-viseo purposes only· 71 This statement indicates one plan that Paramount may have envisioned for the new medium: utilizing the star system, television could be used to serve the motion picture industry. Their decision to begin experimental broadcasting in Los Angeles rather than New York also indicates a plan to utilize the facilities and properties (including stars) available at the west c·oast production facilities. Eventually, the Paramount corporation considered several cities nationwide for network stations,72 and invested in research towards developing theatrical television as well as pay-TV, apparently planning to combine the advantages manifest in radio (as a publicity tool and source of talent) with an expansion of their theatrical market. But the medium itself first had to be tested and developed. When the FCC approved the studio's application for a Los Angeles television permit, Television 72 Productions, Inc. was formed in 1939. A survey of figureheads indicates the integration of Paramount's television interests. Television Productions, Inc. was headed by Paul Raibourn, a Paramount vice-president and the treasurer of Du Mont. Y. Frank Freeman, in addition to his duties as Paramount's vice-president in charge of studio operations, was the new television company's vice president. Paramount treasurer Walter B. Cokel! served in the same capacity for Television Productions. But Raibourn was clearly the central figure in the studio's television efforts, becoming a leading member of the Television Broadcasters Association as well as Paramount's chief representative to the FCC hearings which plagued for years their early ventures into television. In his industrial study of Paramount's array of ventures into television, Timothy White has suggested that this investment in TV was central to Paramount's attempts as a corporation to diversify its operations, and broaden the scope of its business practices beyond the vertically integrated ones of motion picture production, distribution, and exhibition. The purchase of Du Mont stock in 1938 initiated this investment, which soon expanded to include the building and operation of two experimental television stations (located in Chicago and LA), and the continued purchase of increasing amounts of 73 Du Mont stock. Du Mont itself developed into an important television industry manufacturer, as well as a network of stations. As argued by White, the failure of Paramount's diversification into television was due to 1) its treatment of Allen B. Du Mont and his company as "employees," rather than part of the management structure (which led to the Du Mont executives' "active resistance" against Paramount's television plans), and 2) Paramount's opposition from the FCC, the federal regulatory committee overseeing broadcasting, which had a regular if stormy relationship with the radio interests who wished to control the television industry. This led to the blockage of Paramount's attempts to either expand into a network of owned and operated stations, or to develop nonbroadcast TV formats (e.g., theater television and subscription television). 73 None of these developments, of course, were apparent at this early stage of investment. While important as the industrial context for local station operations, Paramount's investments outside of Los Angeles were experienced by those who worked at W6XYZ/KTLA as rather distanced and non-determining. The license for Los Angeles experimental station W6XYZ (tentatively assigned channel 4) was granted in 74 1939. Significantly, Raibourn remained in New York with the studio's business offices, while the west coast officers and personnel showed a condescending lack of interest. The station amounted to little more than a novelty until Raibourn hired Klaus Landsberg, a German emigre television and electronics expert, who joined W6XYZ in 1941 by way of Du Mont. Landsberg's technical background was extensive and dramatic. Born in Berlin in 1916, he began constructing various electronic gadgetry as a youth, and at age 18 was designing early mechanical and cathode-ray equipment as an assistant to Professor Faerber, director of one of the first television labs in the world. Landsberg soon lectured throughout Europe on the principles of television technology and production, and eventually became involved in the historic 1936 television broadcast of the Berlin Olympics.7 4 In 1937, he became laboratory assistant and engineer for Dr. Arthur Korn, an important German inventor of "picture telegraphy, n75 and the co-author of the first book containing a history of television, published in 1911.76 Later in 1937, when Landsberg's invention of an electronic navigational aid (related to radar) was suppressed as a military secret, he came to America, with his basic radar principle said to have been his passport. In 1938, shortly after landing in the U.S., he began work 75 at Farnsworth Television, Inc. in Philadelphia as a Television Design Engineer. He moved to New York the next year to help NBC stage its 1939 World's Fair demonstration. He later moved on to Du Mont, where he helped to inaugurate their New York station WABD, and, among other duties, supervised technical operations of the television unit in use for U.S. Army maneuvers in Canton, New York.77 At Du Mont, Landsberg also designed a system called "genlock," which consisted of automatic synchronizing circuits that allow several cameras to simultaneously function on the same sync pulse. 78 After two years with Du Mont, he joined Paramount in Los Angeles in the summer of 1941, carrying the parts to two video cameras in his suitcases. The conditions for work in television were not nearly as ample on the west coast, however. Despite Raibourn's marked interest in television and Harry Lubcke's years of local experimentation, Landsberg was met in Los Angeles with little cooperation for his "novelty" on the Paramount · lot. The sudden onset of the war effort months later meant a slowdown of even limited programming, and a military demand for materials, engineers, and technical personnel severely restricted Landsberg's progress in putting W6XYZ on the air. In September, 1942, he completed a hand-built antenna which was placed atop the 76 station's facilities on the Paramount lot, extending the station's reach and officially inaugurating its broadcasts. With limited studio facilities of his own, Landsberg accentuated mobility in the station's experimental programs, doubtless drawing on his experience with the German television system of the mid-1930's. 79 Late in 1942, his first "remote" telecast came from the set of This Gun for Hire at Paramount, featuring glimpses of stars· Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake.80 But as the broadcasts increased in mobility, they moved off the studio lot, and the station began to resemble and assimilate conventional broadcast strategies, emphasizing an identity as a community medium rather than a motion picture surrogate. Remote telecasts would become the station's trademark, affording both "entertainment" and "public service" programming in accordance with FCC preferences and standards. By 1943 the station had a fully operative mobile unit, highlighting special local events, the first of which was the Sheriff's Rodeo from the LA Coliseum, an operation which required some 40 hours of preparation. 81 Regular bi-weekly programming began on February 1, 1943, and the operating budget for that year totalled $896,000, completely paid for by Paramount.82 77 Like many stations broadcasting part-time during the war, W6XYZ telecast public service programs. By April, 1943, for example, it was credited for having trained hundreds of air raid wardens and auxiliary police. On every Tuesday and Friday evenings at 8:30 pm, members of the LA Citizens Defense Corps had been gathering at various points across town which were equipped with receiving sets. Training demonstrations of civic preparedness, martial arts and weaponry featured an interactive component, as "televiewers" could phone in to ask and respond to questions.83 The station's reputation was enhanced when Landsberg won two awards for local television, one in 1944 from the Television Broadcasters Association, for adapting motion picture techniques to television (a category ripe for critical research and analysis), and another in 1945 from the American Television Society, for continued excellence in programming. 84 Dick Lane, a motion picture actor who had appeared in over 250 films, developed a friendship with Landsberg on the Paramount lot in 1942, and first appeared on W6XYZ in 1943. Hosting vaudeville-like variety programs on the station (featuring gymnastics, comedy acts, singers, etc.), Lane soon became one of the first "regulars" on the air, and was one of the station's first newsmen before finding his niche as host, announcer, and salesman. A 1944 show called either E1Dbarrassing Situations or Embarrassing Moments reportedly sometimes featured outtakes from Paramount films. Another studio-related 78 program was Interview of the Stars in 1945, which promoted Paramount talent. (How often and how long these shows ran is unknown.) The FCC resumed peace-time station licensing October 8, 1945, reserving channel 1 for emergency use, and bumping extant channels up by one number. Landsberg resumed ~is bid for a commercial license for channel 5 by increasing programming in i946 to two nightly broadcasts per week, and winning yet another award from the Television Broadcasters Association, for best public service program, educating the citizens of Los Angeles by means of the television program Your Town, as to the problems of their government, as well as informing them of the growth of the community in an interesting and highly entertaining manner.~ But the bulk of the stationis 1946 programming focused on local sports coverage--boxing, horse and auto racing, basketball, ice hockey, and the two sports virtually coterminous with television, professional wrestling and roller derby--offering the burgeoning community an abundance of this staple of early "entertainment" programming. 79 In addition to its expanded programming, the station's regional coverage was greatly enhanced when Landsberg decided to move the broadcasting tower to Mt. Wilson, nearly 6,000 feet high and located 18 miles from Hollywood, above the city's center of population. Telecasts were beamed via microwave relay to the tower and then transmitted area-wide, from Santa Barabara to San Diego. This not only increased the station's potential for coverage, enhancing their future prospects to engage advertisers, but noticeably improved the resolution of their broadcast signal, the clarity of which became a station trademark. (This property of "resolution" is one of the more challenging and potentially fruitful areas of early television history to be theorized, drawing as it does technological, aesthetic, and legal concerns into direct relation with the positioning of the viewer). 1946 competition for television licenses in Los Angeles included nine applicants jockeying for seven channels. 86 In addition to Television Productions, Inc. (Paramount) and Don Lee (W6XAO), Earle c. Anthony (KFI), the Times-Mirror Company (whose proposal included an exclusive contract for programming with the Pasadena Playhouse), and Broadcasting Corporation of America (a small radio concern in Riverside) were loca1 ·companies with varying amounts of broadcast experience. ABC and NBC 80 were national networks. (NBC, in fact, was applying for their own LA station against the wishes of Anthony, whose station KFI was the NBC radio affiliate in LA.) Hughes Tool Company had no broadcast experience but was seen as a local concern. (They also had an application pending in San Francisco.) Dorothy Thackery, the publisher of the New York Post, had plenty of broadcast experience, but little regional profile. (She owned three radio stations nationwide, and was applying for three TV stations.) Nevertheless, the station applications would in the next few years be awarded to all but Hughes Tool and BCA. Television institutions were also being formed on a more grass-roots level. A gathering of seven people at a November, 1946 meeting in Hollywood, loosely organized by television enthusiast Syd Cassyd, formed the modest beginnings of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Conceived by Cassyd as a professional forum, equivalent to the National Academy of Science, the proposed television academy needed a famous public figure to give it credibility. On January 7, 1947, Edgar Bergen was elected the first president of the academy, which was incorporated a year later as a nonprofit organization. The chief aim of the organization was "to promote the cultural, educational, and reserach aims of television."~ (The award ceremony was not established until 1949.) 81 In December, 1946, the FCC approved Paramount's · commercial television license, the first in the western United States. On Wednesday evening, January 22, 1947, the station began commercial broadcasts as KTLA, debuting with an impressive cast of Paramount talent, but following a programming paradigm which had and would continue to serve the station's best interests: an extensive program of light "entertainment," legitimated by a modicum of high-profile "public service" programming. A 15-minute preamble titled "KTLA: A New Public Servant" featured addresses from a variety of local civic dignitaries, foregrounding the station's responsibilities and advantages to the local community. After Cecil B. DeMille and Landsberg gave inaugural addresses, Bob Hope (long a professional in radio) emceed the subsequent 60- minute variety program: even though holding his script, he misread the station's call letters but later correctly read a commercial, as did William Bendix. Other members of the cast included Dorothy Lamour, Jerry Colonna, William Demarest, Ann Rutherford, Peter Lind Hayes, Eddie Bracken, the Decastro Sisters, and the Rhythmaires. The program's size proved to be rather unwieldy, especially when compared to the station's regular fare to that time. Using six cameras, nearly 500 people were involved in the telecast, which was produced by Landsberg 82 with the assistance of Leon Benson of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, who represented the chief sponsor for the evening: Lincoln-Mercury dealer Tupman Motors paid $4,000, supplemented by four other minor sponsors. Inside the studio, quests included representatives from New York advertising agencies and several east coast television directors. The evening's events were reportedly amateurish--due to the Petrillo ban, prerecorded music was necessary for the singing acts, but the synchronization was off. Daily Variety's review labelled the performers alternately "cold," "scared," and "lacking in warmth. " 8 8 Jack Hellman's "Light and Airy" column in that paper (focused on the broadcast media), began "'You can't make a producer out of an engineer any more than you can make an engineer out of a producer.'" Complaining about the lack of showmanship in the telecast, Hellman ultimately tempered his critique of Landsberg, but nevertheless concluded that the telecast left the 350 auditors dubious of television's advance and completely unsold on production technique so necessary to its ultimate success. Engineers have done their part • • • it now remains for showmen, experts in sight and sound entertainment, to put the shows together and get them ready for the cameras in workmanlike fashion. 89 83 The trade paper was more readily impressed the next week with a modest second commercial telecast: a weekly news roundup illustrated by projected slides and narrated by station announcer Keith Hetherington. While noting that without the pictures, it would have been little different from a radio broadcast of the news (the categorization of news was unchanged from the radio paradigm), Hetherington's reading was supplemented by "typical newsreel march music" in the background. The review concluded that even "with a lot less than it had on hand" for its first commercial program, the station had "come off with a lot more in the way of a show. n90 This telenews program was at least temporarily sponsored, again by Tupman Motors. Expensive programs such as the station's premiere did not of course become the rule of KTLA broadcasts, and neither did any programming that featured Paramount talent (though better success with national ad agencies might have induced this). Rather, KTLA's foregrounded public service identification, embellished by Landsberg's programming awards, was its trump card, extremely important in building the station's reputation as an industry and community leader, qualities highly regarded by the FCC. Because the motion picture industry (and Paramount in particular) was heavily involved in anti- 84 trust litigation, its interests in television were overseen with a jaundiced governmental eye. Paramount's investments in television, covering a wide variety of potential market growths, served their corporate attempts to diversify, and to insure against what ill effects television might have on the motion picture business. The effect of these investments was to alert the FCC into a position of wary surveillance against further monopolistic practices by the studio within another medium. As a result, Paramount found itself in an unenviable economic position: their early investments were condoned when seen as contributing to the "development of television," in fact absorbing a sizable chunk of the enormous investment that the television industry incurred in its early years. But investments which might have led to an advantage for the motion picture industry were ruled to be a conflict of interest (e.g., the Scophony anti-trust suit against Paramount in 1945, concerning their interest in the manufacturing of a British theatrical television apparatus). Using Paramount's star talent on KTLA would have meant even greater losses, since their broadcast appearance fees were considerably more than early television revenues.91 But even had they produced "Paramount tele-films," this practice most likely would 85 have raised further questions of conflict of interest. The studio played only a minor role in the content of KTLA's programming, providing occasional settings and props, etc., as well as newsreel shorts, but rarely amounted to more than an intriguing location for one of KTLA's many remote telecasts. As previously mentioned, one motion picture-related staple at the station was Dick Lane. In the commercial era, he became the first television "fender bender," selling cars for Central Chevrolet on the Spade Cooley Show for years, and actually denting a few during his pitch. Soon the host of the musical variety show Dixie Showboat, Lane was always best known as the announcer on wrestling telecasts, which for many years were syndicated throughout the country. While the station's motion picture industry ties were not as important to its profile as might be expected, KTLA played a central role in developing the Los Angeles television market. Both in coordination with other corporate entities and by establishing itself as a provider of integral access to community events and entertainment, the station cultivated television viewing as a habit. The size and importance of the post-war Los Angeles market had been evident for several years. Many 86 servicemen had returned to the area with various electronic and technological skills, creating a labor pool for the local TV industry. But above all, Los Angeles had emerged from the war as a potential commercial and industrial giant. In light of this, television promotion was industry-wide in 1947, even with only one commercial station on the air. Commercial Television Years 1947 -KTLA the only commercial station -Groundbreaking for Don Lee-Mutual radio/TV station on Vine St. -KTLA covers electroplating plant explosion -city-wide TV promotion: "T-week" (RCA sponsored) -Los Angeles Times starts daily TV log -W6XAO premieres Queen for a Day -Philco is a major KTLA sponsor -Other set manufacturers increase their local profile -Sports promoters complain about TV impact on box off ice KTLA's programming was beginning to serve the area's rising need for entertainment that could be consumed at home. Landsberg obtained the broadcast rights to the Los Angeles Angels baseball games in the Pacific Coast League, and sports continued to play a major programming role. A chatty "man-on-the-street" program, Meet Me in Hollywood, catered to audience desires to see both celebrities and themselves on the new TV screens, as interviews were conducted with anyone who happened to pass by the corner 87 of Hollywood and Vine. Shopping at Home was on the air, as was Lane's variety program, Hits and Bits. The impact of covering local news stories was demonstrated on February 20, 1947, when an electroplating plant explosion levelled several city blocks. Preempting regular programming, KTLA's coverage began before sundown and continued for several hours, with Dick Lane interviewing people at the scene and providing details as they arose. Occurring as it did during the dinner hour, the telecast "scooped" the newspapers and demonstrated KTLA's potential for "live" news reporting, increasing the station's profile as a public servant. That same month, RCA began preparing its local merchandisers for the sale of television receivers. The Los Angeles Electrical Club sponsored "Television Week" in March, opening with "T-Day," March 10, which was so successful that every available set in the city was sold, and a backlog of orders taken.92 (Sets ranged in price from $272 to $2500.93) KTLA and W6XAO cooperated with dealers to demonstrate sets, with KTLA expanding its programming to 24 hours per week, including broadcasting a sponsored exhibition baseball game. Landsberg even slyly arranged for 80 hours per week of test pattern to be sponsored, since these patterns were used by dealers and servicemen to demonstrate, install, and repair receiving 88 sets.94 As a result of the great sales success, the Los Angeles Times began a daily log of television programs, and set manufacturers began to buy large shares of local advertising time and space. By September, there were an estimated 3000 sets in use. W6XAO was still actively programming, even in its experimental status, and adapted for television on May 21 a popular radio favorite, Queen for a Day. According to a survey conducted in August by an outfit called Television Research of South Pasadena, wrestling was the most popular sports program at the time, while Queen for a Day was the most watched program of all,95 indicating room for a good deal more variety in the programming schedule than spo'rts as a staple. (Also suggested by the survey was a popular favorable reaction to subscription television, which included Paramount's "Telemeter" system. Since the survey question did not mention specific shows, this response seems to indicate a degree of audience dissatisfaction with extant programming overall.) Wilbur details a lawsuit brought by a local boxer, Alejandro Chavez, against W6XAO and the American Legion, at whose stadium Chavez boxed. 96 Claiming reduced attendances at public events that are televised--a claim that seemed unfounded based on KTLA's experiences covering boxing at the Olympic auditorium and the South Gate Arena- 89 -the suit was defeated when the court pointed out that Chavez had not withheld "television performance rights" in his contract. As this indicates, the stakes over commercial television were beginning to rise. A proposed AT&T cable link between LA and Atlanta, under consideration since 1946, had raised .considerable interest but now looked unlikely. Nevertheless, it had been a year of growth for KTLA, which was airing 35 hours of programming per week by year's end, and had increased its number of sponsors to 24. The station began to advertise its success in such industry magazines as Television, and even started to associate its activities with the home studio: an ad in the November issue of Television features a photo of Lizabeth Scott, hyping her appearance in the Paramount film I Walk Alone, and suggesting that everyone in movies and radio "is anxiously watching television to see what effect it will have on his future."~ Finally suggesting that "KTLA sells Hollywood--Hollywood sells the world," it seems clear that the relationship of the ad to Lizabeth Scott is tangential, connotative of glamour, etc., while the real purpose of the ad is to convince national spot advertisers to take advantage of the station's unique address to the Los Angeles and Hollywood markets. 90 1948 -KTLA premieres Pantomime Ouiz--celebrity charades -Some theater TV demonstrated in LA -Times-Mirror begins construction of station KTTV; Closed-circuit TV system set up at Pasadena Playhouse -W6XAO receives its commercial license--becomes KTSL -KTLA broadcasts premiere of Paramount film The Emperor Waltz -KTLA series Your Town produced with city hall and Mayor's office -KTSL signs pact with LA Herald-Examiner -NBC premieres Milton Berle on Texaco Star Theatre -KTLA premieres Sandy preams; Armchair Detective; The Spade Cooley Show -KTLA premieres Hopalong Cassidy films -FCC "freeze" on TV stations begins -KLAC, channel 13, begins commercial broadcasting -KTLA markets kinescoped programs -KTLA signs pact with Daily News -KFI, channel 9, begins commercial broadcasting (Earle c. Anthony) -National elections are covered locally -FCC rules Paramount has controlling interest in DuMont; Neither concern is allowed to expand; Station applications denied 1948 was a year of renewed competition in local Los Angeles television, as three more stations received their commercial licenses. On May 6, W6XAO was granted a 90 day temporary license, on condition that Don Lee Broadcasting receive approvals for its license renewals. (Difficulties with the radio industry interests of the company had led to delays in receiving the television license.) The station changed it call letters to KTSL, channel 2. Earle C. Anthony's KFI, channel 9, began a test period of broadcasts during August. In September, just as the FCC was to begin its "freeze" on station applications, Dorothy Thackery's KLAC, channel 13, signed on commercially--only 91 two months after breaking ground on the transmitter, and with no experimental test period. KFI began commercial telecasts in October, with a gala premiere featuring Adolphe Menjou as emcee. This gave Los Angeles four independently-owned commercial stations (though KFI did act as an NBC affiliate for a few months). KTLA was both producing more original programming and seeking other sources of revenue. Pantomime Ouiz, one of the biggest hits of early television, was first aired in January, the initial effort at the station by producer (and host) Mike Stokey, whose Stokey-Ebert Productions would create other shows in the months to come (e.g., Armchair Detective later that year). In February, the station released price rate information for filming transcriptions of commercials or shows in either 16mm or 35mm.98 Producers or sponsors could in this way have a record of their television performance, perhaps to be used as a demonstration reel. As the other stations began to contract for even more sports programming (USC and UCLA football on KLAC, Los Angeles Rams football on KFI, KTSL's continued wrestling and boxing, etc.), Landsberg began to seek out alternative program sources. Keying into the region's affection for country and western entertainers, he began in July to telecast remote performances of Spade Cooley from the 92 Santa Monica Ballroom--resulting in The Spade Cooley Show, which would become a KTLA standard for years. The station's director of film programs, Leland Muller, scheduled some old serials starring Hopalong Cassidy, which became so popular that NBC eventually started to run them, revitalizing the career of William Boyd and turning Cassidy into an early 1950s children's icon. Also in July, Landsberg televised the local premiere of Paramount's The Emperor Waltz, which proved to be a popular success. In an effort to substantiate the station's "news" capabilities beyond such "feature" material (and in answer to KTSL's July agreement with the Los Angeles Herald Examiner), KTLA signed a five-year contract with the Daily News in September, which "called for the joint development and presentation of outstanding news stories, educational features, and public service programs. 1199 The success of this endeavor, and the actual programs and services shared, are not documented. In December, the FCC decided that Paramount's financial interest in Du Mont rendered the two corporations as one, at least in terms of determining the number of television stations each could own. Since Paramount owned two stations and Du Mont owned three, their joint ownership equalled the total number allowed under the regulations of that time. Neither would be 93 allowed to expand any further, and their pending station applications were denied. The impact of this decision was crippling to the network plans of each corporation, and effectively removed them from competition with the · powerful radio network interests. The precise impact on KTLA is somewhat speculative, since no record of its proposed role in a network scheme exists. But it seems fair to suggest that the decision insured that Landsberg's impact on television would remain at a local level, at least for several more years. The degree of this impact would be vividly demonstrated in just a few months. 1949 -KTTV, channel 11, begins commercial broadcasting on New Year's Day: Times owns 51%, CBS owns 49% -KNBH (NBC), channel 4, begins commercial broadcasting -First Emmy Awards--largely local in focus, KTLA wins most -Talent drain of KTLA begins -KTLA signs Spade Cooley to 7-year pact, keeps kine syndication rights -KFI begins first local daytime programming -Kathy Fiscus tragedy; KTLA on air 27.5 hours -KNBH completes kine studio, starts preparing shows for distribution · -KTSL changes schedule; closes Mt. Lee facility, moves to Vine St. -KECA (ABC), channel 7, begins commercial broadcasting -Ed. Wynn Show (CBS-KTTV) is first network show produced in Hollywood -LA Chamber of Commerce announces plan to make Los Angeles the "Television Capital of the World" -KTLA premieres Harry Owens show -KFI adds morning programs in light of daytime success -KTTV premieres Buster Keaton show By the end of 1949, the Los Angeles television scene would be almost fully established, and would institute 94 practices that no other local market was able to match. The area's full complement of seven stations would all be actively programming on a commercial basis; attempts would be made to expand the distribution of local programming; and the potential social impact of television as an apparatus would be demonstrated. The 90,000 sets in Los Angeles at the beginning of the year tripled by year's end. 1 00 The year began with the commercial debut of KTTV, channel 11, the station which would soon become KTLA's chief rival in the local market. Co-owned by the I&§ Angeles Times and CBS (in a 51/49 percentage agreement, with the Times as majority shareholder) ·, the station premiered with the telecasting of the Rose Parade on January 1. ·(The programs on KTTV appeared in boldface in the Times TV listings.) About a week later, the NBC-owned station KNBH, channel 4, came on the air commercially- thereby converting KFI, channel 9 into a local independent station. KTTV had plans to produce a number of local shows, especially in concert with the Pasadena Playhouse--in fact, they planned to build the station next door to the Playhouse, but instead moved into the Bekins storage building in Hollywood. (They had established a "chain" of equipment at the Playhouse in 1947 to facilitate 95 instruction about television from both sides of the camera.) But the station's proposed programming was limited by neither the Playhouse nor CBS: the Times Mirror station proposal to the FCC includes shows such as "Telequizicalls," based on a successful program on WBKB in Chicago (the other Paramount-owned station); "Whoa Bill Club," an adaptation to TV of a popular local radio show on KFAC; and dramatic programming from other local theater groups, such as the Hollywood Turnabout Theatre.101 KNBH was figuring into network plans virtually from the start, building in June an expensive kinescope recording studio in order to enable the distribution of their Los Angeles programs to the east. The kines of NBC's popular Milton Berle program, Texaco Star Theater, were very successful in Los Angeles, and often defeated KTLA's shows for the number one rating in the area. But KTLA was still the predominant station in LA, and when the first Emmy Awards were distributed on January 25- -telecast over KTSL, channel 2--KTLA won three of the six awards presented, including the Outstanding Station Award. (Since the Academy was still such a local concern, most of the awards were won by Los Angeles stations.) A sure sign of the market's new competitiveness was when both of KTLA's other winners--ventriloquist Shirley Dinsdale, who won for Outstanding Television Personality, 96 and Mike Stokey's Pantomime Ouiz, which won for Most Popular Television Program--were almost immediately offered more money from rival stations with network affiliations, and wooed away from KTLA. (Dinsdale went to KNBH, and Pantomime Quiz to KTTV.) Landsberg replaced the children's program with a puppet show conceived by former Warner Brothers' animator Bob Clampett. Time for Beany (which was kinescoped on 35mm film negative) would become one of the station's biggest hits, eventually syndicated nationally. Stokey's show was replaced by Movietown, R.S.V.P., a program which proved successful with a format si. milar to that of Pantomime Quiz. KTLA's prominence in the region was solidified as a result of their 27.5 continuous hours of coverage of the attempted rescue of Kathy Fiscus, a three-year-old child trapped in a San Marino well. (This event is discussed in detail in chapter 3.) The impact of this telecast and event on the area is legendary, virtually bringing the city to a halt, and resultantly changing the popular perception of television. The final station to come on the air commercially was the ABC affiliate, KECA, channel 7, which premiered September 16 with a dedication program featuring Mayor Bowron and a variety show hosted by Art Linkletter. (The station was built on the old Vitagraph Pictures lot in the 97 Los Feliz area.) Relying on local sports coverage and kinescoped network fare from the east, KECA quickly became competitive. KTLA's shows still dominated Los Angeles, as a November survey by Woodbury College in Los Angeles indicates: KTLA is identified as the "station most used" (41 percent of the time), and also features the two favorite performers of area children (Beany the favorite of 39 percent; Hopalong Cassidy the favorite of 27 percent) .102 An advertisement in the November issue of Television indicated that KTLA had 43 of the top 50 time segments in Los Angeles, as determined by the Hooper "Teleratings" for August and September. l03 In that same issue is reported that kinescopes of KTLA programs syndicated by the station (a practice begun only that year) were already circulating to nearly 20 stations across the country .104 But despite new levels of competition and popular perception, television in 1949 was still developing, as is evident from KFI's move in March to begin daytime programming--the first station to do so. (Later in the year, they added morning programs.) KTSL showed signs of infirmity when it closed down the Mt. Lee facility, and moved operations to the Don Lee studios in Hollywood. (The station had become a part-time affiliate for the Du 98 Mont network, which had no other Los Angeles outlet. The Mutual Broadcasting System, with which the Don Lee radio stations were affiliated, did not incorporate into a television concern.) A November article by Hal Humphrey reported on a local television serviceman who complained that eighty percent of the television sets in the area were not functioning properly, blaming this condition on the erratic station schedules, which made it impossible to properly align a set for all seven stations at one time.W5 A sign of financial dealings to come was Thackery's offer to sell KLAC, channel 13, which had been announced in late 1948, attracting the interest of BCA's William Gleeson in Riverside, oilman Edwin Pauley, and Warner Brothers Pictures. Although Warners won the bid, a delay on approval of the sale by the FCC (still uncertain about motion picture interests in TV) lasted over a year, and scotched the deal in 1949. Thackery was forced to reimburse Warner Brothers over $1 million for operating expenses incurred during the waiting period.106 On the national front, however, Los Angeles television began to establish a reputation unheard of for local markets. KTLA syndicated kinescopes of Wrestling From Hollywood, Time for Beany, and Armchair Detective, while KTTV began kinescoping the first network shows from LA--first The Ed Wynn Show, and then The Buster Keaton 99 Show. But if the area stations appeared to be on the verge of reconfiguring network hegemonies, economics and network interests were soon to reconfigure the stations themselves. 1950 -KLAC is second with daytime programming; KTTV is third -Paramount restructures -Thomas s. Lee dies; Don Lee Broadcasting reverts to his uncle -Local wrestling promoters begin banning TV coverage -Local stations balk vs. NYC-centered Television Academy -KTTV moves to larger facilities; Attempts network of stations owned by newspapers -Don Lee stations put up for sale; CBS bids -KFI (Earle C. Anthony) first TV station to require loyalty oath -KTSL applies to shift transmitter to Mt. Wilson -Korean War breaks out; news coverage increases in importance -Hoffman Radio and TV Co. builds local profile -LA to SF television link completed -Arrangements for sale of KTSL to CBS 1950 saw a number of changes in Los Angeles television, both in programming and in station management. The most drastic local event was the sudden death of Thomas S. Lee, the son of Don Lee and owner of Don Lee Broadcasting. After his death in January, KTSL and the other Don Lee properties reverted to a distant uncle in the Lee family, who had no broadcast experience and no real interest in the stations. In May, the properties were put up for sale, attracting offers from CBS (unhappy with the KTTV co-ownership, and seeking their own 100 station), local electronics manufacturer Hoffman Radio and Television, and General Tire and Rubber Company (the company that would ultimately purchase RKO Pictures from Howard Hughes later in the decade). The General Tire bid was accepted toward the end of the year, but they decided soon after to make a deal with CBS. The negotiations and final agreement, which grew into something like a "station swap," were not concluded until 1951. In February, the seven LA stations formed an association called the Television Broadcasters of Southern California, in response to what they perceived was a cooptation of the Television Academy by east coast TV interests. (This disaffection for the Eastern control of the Academy would culminate in five of the seven stations withdrawing from the Academy in 1952.) KTTV was attempting to move beyond the role of a network affiliate when it expanded station operations by moving in March to the Nassour studios in Hollywood, for the purpose of producing low-budget filmed TV programming. (KTSL reportedly was also planning to distribute both kinescoped "live" programs and programs shot on film.1° 7 ) By May, KTTV had interested close to twenty-five other newspaper-owned stations in these filmed shows. Later in the year, the station also announced that it was consulting with Zenith for the local rights to 101 "phonevision," a pay-TV system. (To my knowledge, neither of these projects was ever developed.) Boxing and wrestling promoters initiated months of debate and irregular programming by announcing a ban on the televising of local matches, due to reduced box office revenues. After talks with promoters, a strike by wrestlers, and action from the LA Chamber of Commerce, an overall consensus between stations, sponsors, and sporting establishments was reached. Nevertheless, even after an innovative arrangement conceived by college football sponsor Hoffman Radio and TV (e.g., a non-profit "Gridiron Club" would purchase tickets to the games, to be distributed to kids and servicemen), the Pacific Coast Conference would ban the televising of their games the following year .108 In July, KTSL was awarded the only FCC construction permit granted during the "freeze," when it applied to move its transmitter from Mt. Lee to Mt. Wilson (where all the other stations' towers were located). On a wider scale, direct "live" contact to another city was initiated when a microwave relay system to San Francisco was completed in September. The first telecast was a "live" one-hour variety show, co-produced by the NBC and CBS stations in both cities. 102 The outbreak of the Korean War in late June created a new interest level in news, and all of the stations began to implement more newscasts and a higher news profile. (This dynamic is discussed in more detail in chapter 3.) The charged political atmosphere led KFI owner Earle C. Anthony to require that everyone at his stations swear to a loyalty oath, disclaiming any affiliation with the Communist party or subversive groups. The only such oath required by a network was enforced at CBS in late 1950. 1951 -CBS begins building "Television City" at Fairfax and Beverly -KFI-TV splits from KFI-radio -CBS terminates KTTV affiliation; finalizes purchase of KTSL; KTTV negotiates to become DuMont affiliate -General Tire, involved in KTSL/CBS deal, offers to buy KFI-TV; KFI-TV to become Don Lee Broadcasting -NBC begins constructing $25 million radio-TV center in Burbank -FCC approves General Tire purchase of KFI--becomes Don Lee, KHJ-TV -First use of transcontinental microwave relay, to SF; LA viewers see it via SF to LA relay -World Series from east coast seen on two stations locally -KTSL becomes KNXT; transmits from Mt. Wilson -Announcement of NAB television code In terms of industry relations, 1951 was the key transitional year in early Los Angeles television, as stations were realligned into a configuration that would prove more amenable to the emerging three-network control of the U.S. television system. The networks themselves did not pull all the strings for these shifts, though the 103 inevitability of transcontinental TV broadcasts, which was expected to primarily serve network interests, may have influenced several of the local decisions made in this year. January saw construction begin on the CBS network's "Television City" production facilities at Fairfax and Beverly. Also that month, the third annual Emmy awards- the last to privilege local Los Angeles shows under condideration--resulted in KTLA winning five awards for its 1950 programming: City at Night (Best Public Service), the coverage of Marines departing for Korea (Special Events), Time for Beany (Best Children's Show- Beany's second of three consecutive Emmy's), the KTLA Newsreel (Best News Program), and the award for Station Achievement. Also notable locally was the winning of two awards by Alan Young, whose CBS show was produced at KTTV. (The Alan Young Show had first appeared as a summer replacement for The Ed Wynn Show.) KTLA stepped up their kinescope syndication in 1951, adding shows such as Hollywood Reel (a cross between fan magazines and home movies, produced by cameraman Coy Watson and syndicated Hollywood columnist Erskine Johnson), The Spade Cooley Show, and others. New on the air locally was Lawrence Welk, whose Saturday evening shows were telecast by remote from Lick Pier in Santa 104 Monica. (These practices occurred in the shadow of Paramount's final divestiture of its theater chain, and the resultant United .Paramount Theatres' plans to merge with ABC .109) In March, as Senator Kefauver's hearings on organized crime became a kinescoped hit in LA, Earle c. Anthony separated the TV and radio departments of KFI, a harbinger of the changes to occur at that station. KTTV, which had announced the impending break with CBS in October, 1950, made plans to become a Du Mont affiliate on April 1, the day that all 22 hours of CBS programming would change stations to KTSL, channel 2. The station facilities of KTSL were now under CBS control. (General Tire, which had purchased KTSL, retained ownership of Don Lee Broadcasting.) In October, CBS began sending their signal from the Mt. Wilson transmitter that Don Lee Broadcasting had applied for in 1950, changing the station's call letters from KTSL to KNX (in order to match the CBS network radio station in LA). A few days later, on April 4, station personnel at Anthony's station KFI began a uniquely organized strike, as the picketing of the station was televised on the station as · it occurred. Led by the Television Authority (the TV branch of AFRA), the strike continued in this rather good-natured way for several days, during which 105 each side presented its stand to the viewers. (Anthony had always been anti-union, and never signed an AFRA contract for his radio stations.) A week later, talent agent Jack Douglas (who would go on to host travel shows on KLAC) arranged for the three best-known performers on KFI--William Stulla, Stu Wilson, and Monty Margetts--to move to KNBH for substantially more money. Anthony, in an act of frustration that ultimately cost him millions of dollars in the years to come, sold the TV station on June 8 to General Tire, who changed the station's call letters to KHJ (Don Lee's call letters) in August, and resumed telecasting as an independent. In July, NBC began construction of their muti-million dollar network TV production facility in Burbank. But the biggest network boost came from the inauguration of AT&T's coast-to-coast microwave relay on September 4. (This circuit actually ran to San Francisco, with the San Francisco to LA link completing the relay locally.) The fully-realized link direct to Los Angeles debuted September 30, and both KNBH and KHJ telecast the World Series "live" for the first time to LA audiences. In an incident that reveals both a naivete about television's impact and the economic risks of early TV sponsors, a local vitamin company, Thyavals, decided to nationally sponsor KTLA program Frosty Frolics (an ice- 106 capades review) on the ABC network in October. The attempt was short-lived, however, as the company went bankrupt .within days after offering free samples of vitamins on the air, flooded by hundreds of thousands of requests. Their demise also affected The Spade Cooley Show and Leo Carrillo's Dude Ranch Varieties on KLAC, which Thyavals had sponsored locally. 1952 -5 of 7 local stations withdraw from TV Academy in protest -KTLA telecasts A-bomb tests from Nevada -FCC "freeze" lifted -NBC complex opens -CBS complex opens 1952 was the first full year of "live" network transmissions from coast-to-coast. Hours of programming had expanded to fill most of the day, and all seven local stations were fully functional and competitive. A new Los Angeles source of national programming arose when KLAC station manager Don Fedderson (who would go on to produce a number of popular series for CBS, including My Three SQn§ and Family Affair) began filming for national syndication a few of the successful shows on channel 13. Liberace, who soon became a 1950's phenomenon, had made his first television appearance locally, on KLAC. Li.f.g_ With Elizabeth, a sitcom separated into three unrelated vignettes, starred newcomer Betty White (who made her mark 107 on channel 13 as the assistant to Al Jarvis, a popular local disk jockey whose television show ran several hours every day) • 110 But sentiments concerning the local/national interface were not entirely cordial, as evidenced by a withdrawal from the Television Academy by managers of five local stations, in response to that institution's control by the east coast television concerns. (KTSL and KNBH retained membership.) The five formed their own Hollywood Society for Television Achievement, to further the advancement of local television. (The success of this organization is unknown.) The most prominent example of a local station making a national impact in 1952, however, is clearly KTLA's telecasts of A-bomb tests from Nevada in April and May.111 (These telecasts and their impact are discussed in Chapter 3.) One of Landsberg's final programming coups, these telecasts transformed KTLA into a local source of "network live," since the station's feed was used by all three major networks. Landsberg was the only industry representative willing to undertake the preparations necessary for these telecasts, organizing and building in less than three weeks a complete microwave relay system to Las Vegas via four line-of-sight mountain peaks. KTLA and Paramount had gambled the entire cost of the enterprise, 108 which paid off only if successful. With the use of a Marine helicopter, the relay was achieved in time, and the telecast was received nationally. To suggest that such a resonant icon as an atomic blast is representative of KTLA's fall from local prominence would of course be overdramatizing the case. The station remained quite competitive in Los Angeles until the mid-1950s, and maintains its local reputation for news programming and technical and programming innovations. But Landsberg's untimely death in 1956, at the age of 40, after a long battle with cancer, seems somehow indicative of the changes in the local market. Los Angeles would soon become the production center for television, as the NBC and CBS network facilities opened later in 1952. Network "stars" {some of whom were drawn from local shows) as well as network capabilities {such as those demonstrated in news coverage) were now available to Los Angeles "live" and around the clock, and soon overtook the local stations' abilities to produce competitive programming. Eventually, KTLA and the whole of Los Angeles' independent television market was forced into a more subservient role, after having produced a dynamic and notable introduction of the allure and ideological project of the U.S. television system to this region. 109 1 This term is borrowed from Jacques Derrida, to indicate that early Los Angeles television history represents a disturbance in the network-centered signifying chain of broadcast history, exceeding and disturbing a classical, linear economy of representation. This "disturbance" does not, however, represent a radical break: LA television did not, for example; offer alternative economics or access to production that worked against prevailing U.S. broadcast industry paradigms. Nevertheless, Los Angeles television history offers a "defamiliarization"--in Christopher Norris' phrase, "a kind of internal distancing" implied by the term differance--a possibility "to criticize institutions from within an inherited language, a discourse that will always have been worked over in advance by traditional concepts and categories." See Christopher Norris, Derrida (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 16. 2 William Boddy, "The Rhetoric and the Economic Roots of the American Broadcasting Industry," Cinetracts (Spring 1979): 37. 3 The Writers Program of the Work Projects Administration in Southern California, Los Angeles: A Guide to the City and Its Environs (New York: Hastings House, 1941), p. 98. 4 Boddy, op. cit., p. 38. 5 Bernard Smith, "Station KECA--Los Angeles," California Magazine of the Pacific 23 (July 1938): 19. 6 Writers Program, op. cit., p. 99. 7 Writers Program, and Smith, op. cit. 8 George H. Douglas, The Early Days of Radio Broadcasting (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1987), p. 33. 9 Writers Program, op. cit., p. 98. lO Bruce T. Torrence, Hollywood: The First Hundred Years (New York: New York Zoetrope, 1982), p. 168. ll Writers Program, op. cit., p. 98. 12 Ibid., p. 99. 13 Robert L. Pickering, "Eight Years of Television in California," California Magazine of the Pacific 24 (June 1939); 10. 110 14 Joseph H. Udelson's The Great Television Race; A History of the American Television Industry 1925-1941 (Tuscaloosa, Alabama; The University of Alabama Press, 1982) is an excellent survey of this research and its succession by research in electronic television before World · War II in this country. 15 Ibid., p. 37. 16 Ibid., p. 76. 17 Ibid., p. 76. ll "Giant Television Images," Everyday Science and Mechanics 2, No. 12 (November 1931); 695. 19 Udelson, op. cit., p. 101. 20 Albert Abramson, The History of Television, 1880 to 1..2.il (Jefferson, North Carolina; McFarland & Company, Inc., 1987), p. 131. Abramson's book is another fine survey of the pre-World War II period of television's development, adopting an international perpsective on TV research and experimentation and therefore containing many aspects of this history that Udelson's study does not. 21 Harry Lubcke, interview with author, 2 April 1989. 2 2 Ibid. 23 Udelson, op. cit., p. 79. 2 4 Ibid. 25 Abramson, op. cit., p. 254. RCA purchased several patents from Lubcke the previous November. Abramson, p. 248. 26 According to Abramson, this was an image from motion picture film: "All television transmission was from motion picture film, there being no 'live' pickup." Abramson, pp. 180-181. 2 7 Lubcke, op. cit. Lubcke has identified the very first viewer of the station to have been a motion picture studio engineer, Howard Tremaine, who had built his own set. See "Telefile: Don Lee's KTSL (TV) Marks 18 Years in Television," Broadcasting 38 (2 January 1950); 47. U Pickering, op. cit., p. 10. 111 29 Parts for this receiver were acquired from Gilfillan Brothers, Inc., radio manufacturers in Los Angeles. Abramson reports that Lubcke built some of his own picture tubes, while purchasing others from RCA and from Manfred von Ardenne, a famous television inventor in Berlin. Abramson, op. cit., p. 181. 30 Ibid. According to Abramson, four flights were made of about 10 minutes each. n "Telefile: Don Lee's KTSL," op. cit., p. 4. 3 2 Harry R. Lubcke, "Television on the West Coast, " in Ke. Present Television ed. John Porterfield and Kay Reynolds (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1940), p. 226. n "Telefile: Don Lee's KTSL," op. cit. 34 Lubcke indicated to me that he began borrowing old pictures (shorts, documentaries, features), some of them silent, from Paramount Pictures in 1932. Lubcke, interview, op. cit. 35 Lubcke addressed these difficulties a few years later, offering guidance to interested motion picture technicians in the form of "seven rules for good motion picture photography for television." See Harry R. Lubcke, "Film is Most Valuable in Television," American Cinematographer (November 1937): 450-451, 482-483, based on a talk Lubcke delivered before the American Society of Cinematographers on August 30, 1937. ~ "Television Getting Pictures But Nearly All Are Dated." Motion Picture Herald (4 April 1942): 47. TI "Telefile: Don Lee's KTSL," op. cit., p. 4. The newsreel company was identified by Lubcke as Pathe News at a special "History of Los Angeles Television" meeting of the Radio and Television Women of Southern California on September 25, 1962. 38 Lubcke, "Television on the West Coast, " op. cit. , p. 226. 3 9 Ibid. 40 Abramson, op. cit., p. 230. He adds that "there was no interlacing due to the fact that the Los Angeles area was served by both 50- and 60-cycle power." 112 41 Udelson, op. cit., p. 123. ~ Lubcke, "Television on the West Coast," op. cit., pp. 236-237. 4 3 Ibid. I pp. 237-238. 44 Lubcke, interview, op. cit. 4 5 Lubcke, "Television on the West Coast," op. cit. , p. 228. 4 6 Lubcke, interview, op. cit. 47 Ibid. 48 Udelson, op. cit., p. 123. ~ Lubcke, "Television on the West Coast," op. cit., pp. 230-231. ~Ibid., pp. 233-234. 51 Abramson, op. cit., p. 254. 52 Ibid. 53 Lubcke, "Television on the West Coast, " op. cit. , p. 238. 54 Ibid. I p. 2 2 8 • 55 Ibid. I p. 2 2 9 • ~ Udelson, op. cit., p. 123. 57 Lubcke, "Television on the West Coast, " op. cit. , p. 239. 58 Ibid. I p. 2 3 8 • 59 This information was culled from items in various issues of Radio-Television Life from the period April, 1940 to August, 1941. 60 Abramson, op. cit., p. 260. 61 Ibid., p. 262. 62 Ibid. I p. 2 61 • 63 Lubcke, interview, op. cit. 64 Fair Taylor, "What Next in Television?" Radio Teleyision Life (28 February 1943): 32. 113 65 "Television Class," Radio-Television Life ( 26 August 1945): 26. ~ "Is Television Going to be Like This?" Radio-Television Lifg (30 September 1945): 4-5. 67 Michele Hilmes, Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), pp. 38-39. Hilmes' study is an original and important intervention into the history of the relationships between the motion picture and broadcast industries. 68 Ibid., pp. 37-43. 69 Timothy R. White, "Hollywood's Attempt to Appropriate Television: The Case of Paramount Pictures," (Ph.D. diss, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1990), pp. 105-106. 70 "Paramount Enters Television; Would Utilize Motion Pictures," Motion Picture Herald (13 August 1938): 17. 71 John c. Mahoney, "Setting the . TV Record Straight," Performing Arts 6, No. 12 (December 1972): 8. n "Firm Security Interest Under Scrutiny by FCC," Broadcasting 31 (1 July 1946): 24. 73 White, op. cit. 7 4 "Klaus Landsberg Biography," Paramount Television Productions, Inc. press release, n.d., p. 3. 75 Ibid. I p. 4. 7 6 Abramson, op. cit., p. 41. 77 "Klaus Landsberg Biography," op. cit. , p. 5. 78 Sherrie Mazingo, "Home of programming 'firsts' , " Television/Radio Age (March 1987): AlO. 79 The German operations are discussed in William Uricchio, "Rituals of Reception, Patterns of Neglect: Nazi Television," Wide Angle 11, No. 1 (1989): 48-66. 114 8 0 "KTLA' s Unmatched History of Television Firsts," KTLA Promotional Sheet, n.d., p. 1. 81 John Silva, interview with author, 26 February 1990. ~ Susan K. Wilbur, "The History of Television in Los Angeles, 1931-1952: Part I," Southern California Quarterly LX, No. 1 (Spring 1978): 69. 8 3 "Instruction by Television," Radio-Television Life ( 4 April 1943): 10. 84 "Telefile: A Non-Network Station in Los Angeles Passes the Competitive Test With Flying Colors," Broadcasting 38 (20 February 1950): 70. 85 "TBA Awards Given to Nine for Notable Achievements," Broadcasting 31 (14 October 1946): 83. 8 6 "Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia," Television (May 1946): 4-5. 87 Thomas O'Neil, The E1Dmys: Star Wars. Showdowns. and the Supreme Test of TV's Best (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 8. 8 8 "Commercial Tele's Debut Here Rates Low as Entertainment," Daily Variety, 23 January 1947, reprinted in Variety Television Reviews, 1923-1988, vol. 1, ed. Howard H. Prouty (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988- 1991). 89 Jack Hellman, "Light and Airy" Column, Daily Variety, 24 January 1947, reprinted in Variety Television Reviews, 1923-1988, vol. 1, ed. Howard H. Prouty (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988-1991). 90 "Tele Review" Daily Variety, 3 February 1947, reprinted in Variety Television Reviews, 1923-1988, vol. 1, ed. Howard H. Prouty (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988- 1991). 9 1 "Paramount TV," Broadcasting 34 ( 28 June 1948): 70. 92 Susan K. Wilbur, ""The History of Television in Los Angeles, 1931-1952: Part II," Southern California Quarterly LX, No. 2 (Summer 1978): 184. 93 "Television Week Opening Fete to Be Held Today," ~ Angeles Times, 10 March 1947, p. 1. 115 94 "Telestatus Report: Program Analysis," Broadcasting 34 (26 April 1948): 10. ~Wilbur, Part II, op. cit., p. 185-186. % Ibid., pp. 188-189, 192. 97 KTLA advertisement, Television 4 (November 1947): 2. 98 "Paramount Transcription Rates," Television 5 (February 1948): 18. 9 9 Wilbur, Part II, op. cit., p. 195, 198. WO Susan K. Wilbur, ""The History of Television in Los Angeles, 1931-1952: Part III," Southern California Quarterly LX, No. 3 (Fall 1978): 258. 101 "Television Programs Proposed by The Times-Mirror Company," Times-Mirror Company Station Proposal, n.d., pp. 24, 34-35. 10 2 Woodbury Television Ratings, Survey 2 (November 1949). 10 3 KTLA advertisement, Television 6 (November 1949): 2. 10 4 "Focus," Television 6 (November 1949): 5. 105 Hal Humphrey, "L.A. TV owners Aren't Getting Top Reception," Los Angeles Mirror, 21 November 1949, p. 33. 106 Wilbur, Part II, op. cit., pp. 201-202. 107 Wilbur, Part III, op. cit., p. 264. 108 Ibid., pp. 265-267. 109 See White, op. cit., Chapter 4, pp. 150-200. 110 See excerpts of my oral history with Ms. White in the appendix. 111 The most detailed report on the production of these telecasts is the May 9, 1952 speech by Charter Heslep to the Georgia Radio and Television Institute, excerpted as "They Said It Couldn't Be Done" in I<TLA: West Coast Pioneer (New York: The Museum of Broadcasting, 1985), pp. 35-40. 116 Chapter Three "Remote" Possibilities: KTLA's "Live" News Remotes and Their Role in Popularizinq Television Introduction The following two chapters represent an attempt to expand the parameters of the present study of early television beyond the chronological programming survey and industrial/institutional emphases of the previous chapters, in order to consider issues related to specific televisual practices and program texts. Specifically, these chapters will focus in part on questions of textual mode of address in selected non-fiction and entertainment programs. These texts afford considerable room for speculation about perhaps the most interesting, yet most difficult aspect of this history: the potential effects and changes in audience subjectivity wrought by and through the growth and development of this new apparatus. The difficulties in considering questions of subjectivity in early television revolve around two conditions of its history: 1) the previously cited problems concerning the small sample of recorded programming and archival material, which virtually ensures 117 some degree of overstatement and oversight in the analysis of what material does exist, and 2) the debates regarding television's textuality itself (e.g., the definition and delimitation of the television "text," the multiple and variable contexts that exist for the "readings" of programs, the uses and appropriations of television by the audience, etc.1). In relation to television history, all of these debates are further complicated by our markedly more televisually-saturated contemporary culture, which necessarily acts as a standard of comparison and as a filter for viewers' memories of early TV. My discussions of kinescoped programs are therefore positioned as work directed toward a partial and privileged sample of early shows. (A further, extensive study of early TV viewers in Los Angeles would also be most valuable, entailing research and methodological problems sufficient for a separate, and potentially revisionist, project.) While my study of these texts will therefore not benefit from the kinds of extensive audience survey and analysis suggested by much of the work in cultural studies, I will consider each text as "discourse"--that is, as Diane Macdonell suggests, "in terms of the struggles transversing it, so that the contradictory modes in which it exists as a whole can be 118 studied." 2 I will also examine samples of surrounding discourses contemporary to these shows (from newspapers, magazines, etc.), which represent at least a sample of the reading positions in which these texts were experienced, and the meanings which were derived and consumed. Central to my analyses will be the address offered by these texts, especially in terms of temporal, spatial, verbal, and perspectival modes. These kinescopes provide empirical evidence of programming tendencies and practices, and raise issues which purely industrial studies of the medium can rarely address, at least with any degree of specificity. Textual analysis is therefore a crucial component of this larger introductory examination of regio~al Los Angeles television. In this kind of analysis, whatever the alternative readings that may exist (and which should be addressed), questions regarding television's discursive structures, and the development of the conventions of these structures, can be considered with some rigor. These discursive dynamics represent are, in fact, material practices, and are rare and important sites for proposing and analyzing the socio-historic specificity of early local television. This chapter will focus on three different yet related examples of "live" remote telecasts on KTLA, in 119 order to suggest what they can reveal, separately and collectively, about their significance to this history and to the cultivation of TV viewership in Los Angeles. As previously discussed, Klaus Landsberg developed remote telecasts into a KTLA practice that reportedly served as a kind of station identification, capitalizing on opportunities in the burgeoning community for both "entertainment" and "public service" programming. Entertainment remotes of sports and variety shows became popular as regular programming fare, but broadcasts of newsworthy or documentary events became even more important in fashioning the station's community identity. I will discuss in detail three distinct examples of this more journalistic mode of remote telecast. Perhaps the most famous broadcasts of this period--the Kathy Fiscus tragedy of April 9-10, 1949, and two telecasts of Nevada A-bomb tests in April and May, 1952--were popular and landmark television events, signaling important changes in local television's relation to its audience and KTLA's role in these changes. They also indicate related poles of "news" broadcasts: in each case the station detailed an event which involved physical danger, and in each case they affected the social impact and ultimate "newsworthiness" of the event in the act of covering it. The third remote telecast to be examined is an episode of 120 a regularly scheduled show, City at Night, which was an entertainment program based on a documentary-like premise: advertised as "your surprise program of the week," each show originated from a different and unannounced location within the city, and offered a behind-the scenes glimpse of the principal activity in that location. A more conventional telecast, less dramatic in what it presented, the series nevertheless promoted and relied on the intentionally unexpected quality of its format. These three variations of "live" remotes are distinct from one another in terms of 1) mode of address and the positions afforded viewers, and 2) how they manage and negotiate the dichotomy of fear/wonder and knowledge at play in such journalistic reports. My analysis will entail situating these telecasts within their respective historical contexts, in order to more fully recognize and examine their differences and congruences. This examination will be informed by recent work in television theory, especially work on crisis and catastrophe coverage by Claus-Dieter Rath, Mary Ann Doane, and Patricia Mellencamp, and will offer opportunities for reflection on the role of historical specificity in this theoretical work. 121 Kathy Fiscus: A Child is Being Rescued The telecast of the unsuccessful attempt to rescue Kathy Fiscus is legendary in its impact on the Los Angeles community, and on the growth of Los Angeles television. Especially as positioned by KTLA in its self-histories and in the recollections of station personnel, the Fiscus event appears to have been a turning point in both the public acceptance of television in Los Angeles and the station's ongoing reputation as a regular presence at local news events. No kinescope recording was made of the Fiscus telecast, though a home viewer is said to have recorded the audio portion of much of KTLA's coverage. (According to Stan Chambers, this recording has been misplaced; I have heard one section of it preserved on a videotape of historic KTLA events.) This lack of a program "text" places severe conditions on attempts to study and analyze the telecast and its significance. To some degree, then, my discussion of the Fiscus television coverage is permeated by the already substantial gloss of KTLA achievement and Imaginary longing that seem inextricable to recounti_ ngs of the incident. As recourse, my analysis will involve both a reflexive positioning of the coverage (in order to recognize gaps and areas of ambiguity, rather than smooth over them), and a consideration of the fluidity of the incident's Imaginary figuration, particularly in relation to its social and historical impact. 122 One issue that should be raised up front concerns my focus on KTLA's coverage. Even though the coverage of the incident by Los Angeles Times/CBS station KTTV lasted nearly as long, KTLA's notoriety for televising the Fiscus rescue effort is unequalled--this despite the Los Angeles Times' exclusion of KTLA and promotion of KTTV in their initial reports of the rescue and its impact.3 Aside from this one biased and partial report, KTTV's contribution to the impact of the Fiscus event has been little documented -a gap which I will not be able to rectify here.4 Stan Chambers suggests that the overall recognition of KTLA's coverage reflects the actual viewing practices in the city: KTLA was an established and popular television presence and was well-experienced in remote telecasts, while KTTV had received its commercial license just three months prior.5 Chambers' assessment is supported by KTLA's prominence in other accounts contemporary to the televising of the rescue effort. Daily Variety's report that appeared the morning after the telecast's conclusion credits all of the parties involved in the coverage of the rescue effort-- 123 which it called "the most thoroughly covered local event in the history of radio and television"--and singles out KTLA for its contribution. 6 The next day, Daily Variety writer "A.U." authored "A Plaque for KTLA," in recognition of "The greatest job for the development, progress and advancement of television" in the station's presentation of the Fiscus rescue effort: Hundreds of thousands of people kept close to their television sets during this period, watching the screen and listening to the wonderful word picture and description of events given by Bill Welsh and Stanley Chambers, who handled the running story from 5:30 p.m. Saturday until "30 11 on Sunday night. Their endurance and interest in the events were Herculean. The camera work of James Cassin, Ed Resnick and John Polich was top notch. The picture they brought through was always clear. They got the dramatic touches in their photography. The drama we can safely say as it was televised was on a par with any big dramatic screen or stage presentation.7 Whether any of this trade journal attention is the result of publicity contacts or friendly relations between the station and Daily Variety is unknown, but the basic slant that KTLA was the clearly predominant station at the event seems to be a consensus opinion. More recently, KTLA's prominence regarding the Fiscus coverage has been continued in the Los Angeles Times itself, in the form of personalized recollections by Chambers and by Evelyn De Wolfe, Landsberg's first wife, who today is a writer for 124 the Times.8 While the contribution of KTTV to the coverage is acknowledged, and worth future consideration, my assumption here is that their coverage complemented that of KTLA, rather than significantly differing from it. A more general issue to be considered here is television's implicit centrality in many recollections of the public experience of the Fiscus event. The rescue effort had been ongoing for nearly 24 hours, attracting considerable local and national media coverage before local television crews arrived. Certainly a large portion of the Los Angeles community did not learn of the story via television, and many did not experience the television coverage. (A percentage of the population doubtless was otherwise occupied, and paid little mind to the Fiscus rescue effort at all.) Nevertheless, the popular memory of the Fiscus rescue seems to be strongly intertwined with television. One reason for this is KTLA's effort to promote itself via the station's regular historical retrospectives: television as the circular link between history and itself. But television was seen as a noteworthy, if ancillary component of the Fiscus event even in the recountings contemporary to the rescue attempt. This points to the shared topicality of the rescue effort and television's presence within it: in 125 many ways television was making news by covering the news. The overwhelming public interest and concern for Kathy's rescue, which by many accounts virtually brought the city to a standstill, merged in a silent way with an adjacent topicality--that of television, still new to most as an apparatus, and especially new as a primary source of "live" news coverage. The Fiscus telecast, which has achieved an almost mythical status in accounts of television's local impact, can be seen as genuinely singular and potentially pivotal in forging a public awareness of and experience of television in relation to emotional identification and social mobility. In order to understand the dynamics of this event in detail, a more complete synopsis of the rescue attempt is called for.9 Late in the afternoon of Friday, April 8, 1949, 3- year-old Kathy Fiscus, playing in a vacant lot some 200 yards behind her home in San Marino, fell through the 14- inch, grass-covered opening of an abandoned 110-foot water shaft. Her 9-year-old sister and 5-year-old cousin ran to the Fiscus house to summon Kathy's mother and aunt, who located the water-well opening and briefly spoke to Kathy ~ before phoning the San Marino police. When authorities arrived, they began to pump air down the well, and made 126 futile initial efforts to lower ropes to rescue the crying child. Shortly thereafter, heavy equipment and more than 150 feet of 30-inch pipe was voluntarily rushed to the scene, to begin digging next to the well. The six acre field was being transformed into an excavation site. Kathy's parents and doctor began a steady vigil: her mother viewed the rescue effort from inside a car, ready to rush to the hospital, surrounded by the crowd which kept a respectful distance; her father, the San Marino manager of California Water and Telephone Co. (which until recently had owned the lot), paced between home, the car in which his wife waited, and the rescue scene. As word of the rescue attempt circulated, crowds began to gather around the lot. By 6:30 pm, Kathy's faint calls and cries had stilled. Soon the noise from bulldozers, clamshell cranes, and a well-digger--the tools for digging two separate rescue paths--made it impossible to hear her any further. A call went out for experienced miners, while oil-well and water-well engineers began to supervise operations. A newscamera was lowered in hopes of documenting her condition, but the lens fogged. Radio appeals, police action, and even a call to Hollywood's Screen Actor's Guild and Central Casting brought a variety of children, jockeys, and midgets (including Clyde Beatty Circus thin men, and Johnny, the "call" boy in Philip 127 Morris advertisements) as volunteers to enter the well. Authorities decided against such a ploy, since the pipe's inside was so badly corroded that severe cuts would be suffered by anyone going through it, especially in a head first position. Large portable floodlights (some reportedly from motion picture studios) arrived to light the rescue scene, and police and fire departments from San Marino, Los Angeles, Pasadena and other surrounding areas joined the California Highway Patrol in admonishing the growing crowd, which swelled to 2,000 during Friday night. A public address system was installed for use between miners and the ground crew. At midnight, a 5-inch sand-filled rubber ball was lowered, to determine the child's position; it was estimated that she was beyond a bend some 50-60 feet down, trapped at a point approximately 87 feet below. Since the ball was dry, hopes were raised that the well was dry below the child's position. The rotary well digging machine, burrowing a JO-inch shaft, was interrupted after striking a boulder many feet below the surface. The clamshell-crane workers, on the other side, anticipated reaching the child by the morning. Early on Saturday, workmen in the clamshell pit began to tunnel across, toward the well, at a depth of about 60 feet. At 6:45 am, they called for general silence in an 128 attempt to listen for signs of life. Machinery stopped and the crowd quieted, as workman Albert Linell, inside the tunnel, pressed his ear and a sensitive microphone to the pipe. A minute or so later, the silence was broken when Linell's voice announced through a loudspeaker that he couldn't hear anything. The work continued. Kathy's doctor reassured Mrs. Fiscus that children under conditions of shock may lapse into a period of unconsciousness that can last for many hours. At 11 am, rescue worker O.A. Kelly finished cutting a window into the pipe, and rescue leader H.E. (Whitey) Blickensderfer spotted Kathy's dress and arm some 40 feet below that point. But renewed efforts in the pit were soon halted when it became clear that sliding earth made this site of approach too precarious. All efforts shifted to the well-digger hole, which had been abandoned at the 65-foot level. Blickensderfer worked closely in the shaft with Kelly, an unemployed miner, while many other seemingly tireless workers rotated with these two men or toiled on the surface. The event was drawing national, ·and even international press coverage, as newspaper, radio, and newsreel crews documented the rescue scene. (The story of the rescue was front-page news for the New York Times all weekend.) Telephone calls had already been 129 received from across the country, expressing sympathy for the family and suggestions for the rescue. All of this had transpired before local television stations arrived to prepare their coverage on Saturday. Landsberg was aware of the rescue attempt Friday evening, via radio reports and telephone calls, and began to consider attempting a remote from San Marino after reading the dramatic accounts in the Saturday morning paper. Incidental conditions for such a telecast were optimal: San Marino was not far from Mt. Wilson in northeast Los Angeles, which would ensure a strong, steady signal to be broadcast;lO principal announcer Bill Welsh, who worked full-time at an advertising agency but announced KTLA sports and special events telecasts on what was then an undemanding nighttime schedule, would be available on a weekend. Landsberg and the station's two remote trucks headed to San Marino Saturday afternoon, staffed by remote technician John Polich and cameramen Ed Resnick and Jim Cassin. Stan Chambers (who left the Biltmore Hotel in the middle of a speech to a woman's group) and Bill Welsh arrived in their own cars sometime later. After the still considerable effort necessary to set up such a telecast, KTLA was on the air by 5:30 pm.11 Shortly thereafter, KTTV remote equipment arrived, with regular news announcer Walter Carle and Bob Purcell, special events director 130 Stuart Phelps, technical supervisor Joe Conn, and engineers Chuck January, Ted Hurley, and Dick Bowen on camera. Local NBC affiliate KNBH sent newsreel cameras to the rescue scene, primarily to supply (delayed) film coverage to the network's "linked" television stations in the east. The television coverage of the Fiscus rescue attempt was therefore tapping into the already considerable public awareness of a continuing story that was nearly a day old. Nevertheless, the telecast of the Fiscus incident, which would last over 27 hours, covered some of the most hopeful and most difficult periods of the rescue attempt. With rescue efforts now entirely dependent on the second tunnel, engineers decided to bore even deeper than Kathy was expected to be, to facilitate removal of the dirt and to give those in the tunnel more maneuverability. But the digger ran into several concentrations of boulders, slowing progress to inches at a time. Successive buckets of tools and drills were supplied the workers, who began to rotate more frequently in two-man teams, cheered by the crowd as they exited the tunnel. Reporters clustered around the loudspeaker connected to the microphone at the shaft's bottom. Rumors circulated that the workers had heard Kathy inside the well. 131 Though many in the crowd at the scene reportedly dispersed during the cold Saturday night, television sets across the city--even in the windows of retail shops, with crowds of their own outside--were tuned to rescue coverage all night long. The Los Angeles Times' Sunday morning banner headline read "Kathy Rescue Race Nears Goal." Whether or not the child was alive--and the entire community seemed to be engaged in hoping and praying she was--the goal of reaching her seemed immanent. But early on Sunday, water seeped into the cramped base of the rescue shaft, raising fears that Kathy could possibly have drowned. The wet conditions also delayed the tunnelling for nearly three hours, and patience waned as water was forced out via pumps a quarter mile away. The sides of the shaft were shored with heavy timbers. The crowds returned in force, many after Palm Sunday church services, and were estimated to number between 5,000 and 6,000. Late Sunday morning the tunnel work resumed, and rescuers were near the pipe. Cracking open the well, they discovered dry twigs and debris; since Kathy was predicted to be above that point, fears about her drowning were ?llayed. At noon, family doctors ordered Kathy's parents to rest in bed at home, rather than in the brown sedan in which they had been keeping their vigil. 132 Work was again interrupted when three feet of wet sand fell on workers in the tunnel, leading to further reshoring of the sides. After rods had been slipped through the well, to keep Kathy from falling any further down, a drill and then a saw were used to begin cutting another window into the pipe. By late afternoon the crowd had swelled, anticipating a climax. Just before 6:00 pm, Kathy's parents were again waiting in a police car, with the engine running. But signs of the rescue effort became difficult to interpret, and then disheartening. Kelly and Blickensderfer requested that their microphones be disconnected from the public address system. A few minutes later, the pump which had furnished air down the well for two days was stilled. Supervising engineer Raymond Hill announced that Kathy's body had been sighted, but did not report whether she was alive. An ambulance was backed in near the well opening. At about 7:30 pm, air was again pumped into the well. But when Kelly was later pulled from the rescue shaft, tired and worn and without Kathy, expectations declined considerably. Sometime after 8:00 pm, Dr. Robert Mccullock descended into the tunnel. Several men took part in gently hoisting a rope that led down the old well. The rescuers held a conference. Activity around the well- 133 shaft slackened. Just before 9:00 pm, Kathy's doctor, Dr. Paul Hanson, announced to the crowd that the child was dead, and had apparently died Friday night, when she was last heard speaking. After a long pause the crowd began to disperse quietly, remorsefully. abruptly ended shortly thereafter. Television coverage Blickensderf er was taken to a hospital, suffering from the "bends." Kelly said he would "sleep for a week," reiterating that he had no job to keep him from doing so. Hill vowed to have the rescue area cleaned up and filled in by morning, to erase all signs of the long ordeal. Even though no complete recording of the Fiscus telecast exists, details about the coverage of the event, its reception, and its formal characteristics suggest a great deal about its impact and historical significance. This impact was mostly unanticipated and fairly immediate, occurring in just over 24 hours. But the response to the telecast indicated the propensity of television toward this sort of event, and demonstrated that KTLA had happened upon, developed by necessity, and ·helped to establish several of the precedents and conventions of "live" television coverage. As Stan Chambers has suggested, the Fiscus telecast "broke the mold" of television news coverage in its day, 134 which had generally consisted of an anchor reading news service reports from behind a desk for 15 minutes.1 2 The "live" and simultaneous, uninterrupted and open-ended qualities of this newscast set it apart. KTLA had previously reported "live" from a remote news location (the 1947 electroplating plant explosion, etc.), but not from within a still-breaking story, full of contingencies and in the process of working toward a resolution. Part of the telecast's historical significance was the development of its own process in covering the rescue attempt, a process which quickly evolved but dramatically changed common perceptions about television's relation to news events. The contingenc~es of the coverage became clear in even the most rudimentary considerations. The general impression among those producing the KTLA telecast was that the rescue would be achieved sometime soon: no preparations were made for extended coverage; the crew brought no changes of clothes or even coats with them. (Eventually, friends and associates provided meager supplies--among them, banana-flavored ice cream bars and a couple of overcoats.) In fact, Landsberg did not know whether the equipment would last for more than a 3-4 hour telecast, having never televised for periods greater than that length. (According to surveys in Television 135 magazine, the station at this time was accustomed to only 36 hours of telecasting for the entire week.13) Fear that the tubes and equipment might actually melt down never materialized, and the crew discovered that continuous use, especially of transmitters, was actually better for the equipment than the wear and tear of often shutting them down and turning them back on.14 The format of the telecast developed quickly--Welsh and Chambers alternated in 5-10 minute segments, describing the activities at the rescue scene and eventually interviewing individuals related to the rescue effort. While one was on the air, the other scouted for new information, seeking another person to interview, etc. 15 Much of the reporters' description of the event was directed by Landsberg, who by necessity would convey to the announcers what the two cameras were focusing on (there were no monitors outside the remote trucks). Chambers has said that not only did Klaus direct that coverage, but he provided the narration. He saw so many human interest things happening through the eye of the camera. He'd describe them to us in our earphones, and we'd simply repeat him word for word.16 This was doubtless important to the success of the largely inexperienced announcers, and especially to Chambers, for whom this was the first significant on-air appearance. Landsberg's direction from the trucks often 136 included instructing the reporters what avenue of attention to next seek out and cover. He also instructed the cameramen what to focus on and what to follow. The specifics of these instructions, and the resultant organization of the representation of the event, would indicate much of the socio-cultural perspective that KTLA and Landsberg brought to these events as they unfolded. The lack of a recording of the coverage precludes such an analysis. But while such a study of Landsberg's contribution would yield valuable insights concerning the impact of the event, this lack of a program text does not preclude consideration of the telecast's larger social significance and processes. Both at the rescue site and city-wide, popular and practical conceptions of TV were being significantly altered. Stan Chambers' rise from fledgling employee to dependable on-air persona was literally established as a result of the telecast.1 7 Chambers has related that the rescue workers, who were of course busy and preoccupied, were at first unavailable to the television reporters--unf amiliar presences at such an event--but that after a time the television crew became accepted as "part of the rescue team," regularly documenting the progress and disappointments of the effort but also sharing blankets and supplies, and offering 137 comfort and support.18 The most striking example of this kind of transformation occurred near the end of the telecast: the police captain in charge of the operation approached Bill Welsh and asked him to break the news of the child's confirmed death to the Fiscus family, who had been watching the coverage but had turned off their set when the outlook became too bleak and depressing. The family felt they "knew" Welsh from his television proximity, and he consented to break the news to them.19 The impact of these reporters and their eventual acceptance by the Fiscus family, the rescue workers, and the television audience are indications that this event should be recognized as mobilizing an emerging social dynamic, with historical implications beyond the personalized contributions of the telecast's director. The unique conditions of the telecast's reception, for example, forged among its viewers unanticipated configurations of the personal and the social experience of the event. The impact of these configurations was noteworthy even to those who were not viewers. Cecil Smith, who was covering the rescue effort for the Los Angeles Times, and would later become that paper's television columnist, recounted that his own awakening to the potential of television resulted from the Fiscus incident: [W]hen I left the rescue scene briefly to go home and shower and change clothes, driving down Wilshire Boulevard at about 2 a.m. that Sunday morning, I was astonished to see a mob of people, a hundred or more, standing on the sidewalk and spilling over into the street outside a music store. In the show window of the store, a television set was turned to the Kathy Fiscus scene I had just left. Seeing all those people standing through the night mesmerized by the moving shadows on the screen made me realize how profoundly important this gadget could be.~ 138 Stan Chambers expanded on the impact of the Fiscus event in KTLA's 40th Anniversary progra~ in 1987: It was the watershed for television. Prior to that, television was a toy, was a plaything, was a flickering picture in the living room that showed old movies and really not too much [else]. And for the first time people were able to literally live through an event, to be part of it, to be so emotionally involved it was as if they were there on the scene. And people literally went over, slept on the floor in front of the sets, stayed with a neighbor all night long • • • clusters of people in front of furniture stores that kept their sets on all night, in bars • . • and the whole city became very much involved.21 The issues raised in these recollections--the re- evaluation of the television apparatus, the emotional identification and continuous experience of the event afforded by the coverage, the mixture of public and private audience positions that resulted from the viewing conditions--are all important to understanding the impact of the Fiscus event. For those involved in the telecast, watching the telecast, or to some degree even aware of the 139 telecast, the significance of the Fiscus rescue to Los Angeles television is that of a liminal event: a key transitory experience charged with both personal and social involvement and identification for much of the Los Angeles populace. Anthropologist Victor Turner utilizes the term "liminality" (borrowed from Arnold van Gennep's notions of rites de passage), to focus not on personal transitions, but instead state or social transitions, especially those experienced in "communitas"--a modality of social interrelatedness so general as to be lived by everyone, regardless of social structure.22 Liminality refers to that stage of transition that is manifestly "betwixt and between," ambiguous, at the threshold, on the margin, not yet settled into fixed points of classification.23 The telecast of the Fiscus rescue effort, characterized by widespread concern for the undetermined fate of the child, but also by emerging conceptualizations and valuations of television as an apparatus, qualifies as just such a liminal event. It represents a social "moment" in which television both unexpectedly contributed to the growth and continuation of communitas (even for non-viewers), and served as the link by which many felt they experienced this communitas. What made the event manifestly liminal--a community at the 140 threshold--was not only the group identification with the plight of the child and family, but also the city-wide configurations of television viewing that the Fiscus event motivated: socially-determined boundaries of the public and the personal broken down as neighbors and strangers crowded into homes with sets, in bars and other gathering spots, and even on the street; groups of viewers slept in shifts; local restaurant and entertainment establishments suffered a marked drop in business; and people ventured out only to the grocery store to restock food supplies. In other words, in a paradoxical way the Fiscus telecast broke down the accelerating divisions of public and private space and time so characteristic of late capitalism and suburbanization. I suggest that this impact is paradoxical because the ultimate result or long term effect to which the telecast is said to have contributed--a result which also determines and defines much of the event's liminality--was the subsequent privatized ownership of and consumption of television, part of the larger trope of domestic and familial privatization so prevalent in the post-war U.S., and Los Angeles in particular. The liminality of the Fiscus telecast can thus be seen to suggest a utopian potential regarding the social divisions implicit to this larger privatization trope. 141 The event compounded and expanded upon examples of more common (but short-lived) "social" viewership of the apparatus: neighbors congregating about a newly-acquired TV set, or crowds watching sporting events outside a store window, forming a limited, irregular, ad hoc "public sphere" brought on by the novelty aspect of the spectacle of early television. In its social impact, the Fiscus telecast seems to have broken down social boundaries, momentarily reconfiguring the already strongly-demarcated class, ethnic, and racial lines of post-war Los Angeles. In other words, it subverted the domestic separation/isolation (rooted in the "patriotic" consumerist ethic of privatization) that enforced and shielded from view these social divisions.24 The question remains as to just what characteristics of the Fiscus telecast can be understood to have rendered such a liminal moment. What seems to be primary to the impact of this telecast is its specific configuration of "liveness," a term which refers to the technological capacity of electronic media to broadcast an event simultaneous to its occurrence. At an institutional level, Robert Vianello has discussed how the networks employed "liveness" to their advantage in consolidating their positions as centrally powerful broadcast industry entities, both in radio and television.25 Jane Feuer has 142 introduced contemporary ideological aspects of "liveness," which often is positioned as television's "natural" ontology, suggested to guarantee objectivity.26 What "liveness" also provides, suggests Feuer, is a proximity to "real time" which works to overcome the fragmentation of television's flow, smoothing the disconti. nui ty that is characteristic of contemporary television. While these conceptions of "liveness" are not wholly appropriate to the Fiscus telecast--which was local and independent rather than national and network-affiliated, and also occurred within nascent, scattered program schedules--they nevertheless introduce a means by which to understand more fully the unique impact of the event. Certainly it functioned as a kind of "local live" that markedly enhanced the regional allure and esteem of KTLA and television in general. More importantly, it seems to have hastened a more pervasive, affective "liveness" that would have presumably taken years of growth and development to achieve: the telecast represents an inaugural local example of television, in Claus-Dieter Rath's phrase, "endowed with the special notion of an encounter with the 'real' • 11 27 While most all programming at this time was "live" (especially non-network programming), the "liveness" of this event was not of a "regularized" sort: unscheduled, and broadcast in an 143 improvised way, it held what Rath refers to as an attraction "that lies in the promise of the unforeseeable.n28 But more than this, the Fiscus telecast offered the aura of the "inaccessible," that which can be imagined, yet--due to subjective and social censorship--is not actually perceived. 29 Television's coverage of individuals who are trapped in an enclosure such as a cave or mine are, for Rath, extraordinary situations in that they "prohibit visual access," in which case live television works like an epiphany: the appearance of a hidden or lost, a desired object. . . . What we are facing here are facts (birth and death) which can be dealt with in terms of stories. Birth and death cannot "tell themselves" since they are hypolinguistic phenomena .• Thus, the events themselves .•• in a particular socio-political situation • trigger phantasms of universal or at least broad cultural range. They become local, regional, national, or even planetary affairs which we face privately in our cosy living rooms.30 Certainly this dynamic is applicable to the Fiscus telecast (which Rath mentions specifically), although the range of interest in the event exceeded the geographic limits of the extant broadcast technology, and, more importantly, the broadcast was not experienced only in private domestic spaces. 144 Nevertheless, the Fiscus telecast can be placed within a larger tradition involving broadcasting and life/death situations--or, rather, the use of these situations to popularize broadcast media, by introducing the dramatic potential of distant, perilous immediacy: the mythic David Sarnoff wireless link to the sinking Titanic in 1912,31 the coverage on radio of Floyd Collins trapped in a Kentucky cave in 1925, 32 etc. It can also be positioned in line with similar subsequent broadcasts--for example, the October, 1987 national television coverage of another young girl trapped in a well, Jessica McClure of Midland, Texas. 33 But the central tenet of Rath's observation should be emphasized--if "liveness" is an effect of broadcasting's unique relationship to time and space, "liveness" endowed with the "real," as was the case of the Fiscus telecast, is one function of a broadcast's proximity to and symbolization of events charged by the "inaccessible," the most broadly engaging of which entail birth or death. It is from this premise that recent work by Mary Ann Doane and Patricia Mellencamp can be utilized to more fully understand the widespread impact of the Fiscus event, and its relation to the other "remote" broadcasts to be considered in this chapter. 145 In her essay "Information, Crisis, Catastrophe, 1134 Doane applies three modes of apprehending temporality to the television apparatus: 1) Information as a steady stream of newsworthy events, regular, even predictable, its "content" ever changing but always "there" as a constant and steady presence--time as flow (related to a show like ~ A:t Night); 2) Crisis as a condensation of temporality, naming an event of duration and demanding a resolution in a limited period of time; compressing time, making its limitations ~; and 3) catastrophe as the most critical of crises, with momentary and instantaneous timing, happening "all at once" with no extended duration, and related to death. As Doane points out, these three modes are only tenuously separable, and in fact television tends to blur their differences. They are nevertheless useful in isolating a primary dichotomy of the apparatus: between flow and discontinuity, banality and terror, information and catastrophe. While crisis is seen as the most effective dramatization of flow/information--signifying urgency--catastrophe, or the unexpected discontinuity of an otherwise continuous system, guarantees what Feuer has identified as American television's ideology of 146 "liveness," affording via its shock value and proximity to death the impression that TV's technological capacity for simultaneous broadcast provides at least the potential for access to the Real in "real time." [C]atastrophe's discontinuity is embraced as the mirror of television's own functioning • . • discontinuity and indeterminacy ensure the activation of the lure of referentiality. In this sense, television is a kind of catastrophe machine • • • which strives to mimic the experience of the real, a real which in its turn is guaranteed by the contact with death.35 The Fiscus telecast provides an opportunity to place Deane's conclusions about TV temporality into historical context. The terms of her analysis are readily applicable to this incident, but the "lure of referentiality" that she assumes for television was only becoming recognized, rather than reaffirmed. For Doane, "catastrophe" on contemporary American television ultimately has become expected and predictable, as an ideal way to insure that television is experienced as having an immediate collision with the Real, therefore functioning as a denial of the processes of television's economic project to sell audiences to advertisers. The Fiscus telecast, in establishing an alleged access to the Real, led to a popular reassessment of television as a humanistic, civic- minded "good object," able to offer an array of topicalities and identifications--even those that are most 147 involving and personal--and demonstrated television to be topical in a socially-sanctioned, even prestigious way. It helped to establish for local LA television a promise to be an eye on the world (or at least the region)--an important underpinning to television's already assumed function of providing entertainment and diversion. The telecast functioned not to "solve" television's paradoxes of discontinuity, but to help establish them and their allure. The "discontinuity" particular to the Fiscus telecast must also be positioned historically, for it was not especially enhanced by its interruption of the regular TV programming schedule, as Doane suggests is true today. The "continuous system" so important to delineating catastrophe should be understood in this case to be tied primarily to the social order rather than to the apparatus, since the extant TV schedule--television's continuity--was experienced by too few and was too partial and undeveloped to be considered, in Nick Browne's important formulation, as a "supertext": 36 TV's "logic and rhythm" had not yet significantly impacted on (that is, had only begun to "naturalize") that of the social order. Television's relationship to the larger social Symbolic was only partial and fragmentary; nevertheless, the impact from the disruption of this social logic and rhythm during the Fiscus event merged with that of the newly experienced capabilities and topicality of television. 148 The characteristics of the event's "discontinuity," and television's relation to them, can be seen to involve significant temporal, spatial, and symbolic registers. Applying Doane's categories, I would position the Fiscus telecast as principally consisting of crisis coverage, especially in its duration--fighting against the clock to save the little girl--yet with significant catastrophic aspects to its start, finish, and overall impact. Duration was centrally important to this impact, allowing for a growth and depth of interest that became community wide. It is ironic to note, for example, that the sudden death by drowning of another young child the same weekend was page three news in the Los Angeles Times, represented by two brief paragraphs and a dramatic, grief-stricken photo of the girl's father as resuscitation is attempted on the child.37 The Fiscus event, prolonged and procedural, offered continual opportunities for identification and empathy. The audience involvement grew over time, for, in terms suggested by Rath, while they could not "see" what was most desired, they did have access to the surrounding activities, to descriptions and 149 views of the rescue operation and interviews with the participants. But the duration of the event, while crucial to its impact, does not account for the duration of the audience's involvement. I would suggest that what kept the viewers watching, what maintained their fascination overall, were the catastrophic aspects of the event-- aspects which were not physically and spatially expansive but which nevertheless held this audience enthralled over a considerable period of time. Doane suggests that One distinctive feature of the catastrophe is that of the scale of the disaster in question--a scale often measured through a body count . . . 3S Doane notes, however, that events with a relatively small number of fatalities often receive as much or more attention than those with more numerous deaths (e.g., the Challenger explosion vs. the Detroit Northwest Airlines crash of August, 1987). "Evidently," she concludes, "the scale which is crucial is not that of the quantification of death (or at least not that alone) . n39 The "scale" of the Fiscus catastrophe quite obviously entailed a great deal more than quantification. One aspect of this scale would seem to be the event's symbolic qualities within its historical context--what Doane would refer to as its relationship to the "social imagination." She notes Slavoj Zizek's analysis of the sinking of the Titanic, which examines that event's cultural and psychical significance: At the end of the nineteenth century, "civilized" Europe perceived itself as on the brink of extinction, its values threatened by revolutionary workers' movements, the rise of nationalism and anti-Semitism, and diverse signs indicating the decay of morals. The grand luxury transatlantic voyage incarnated a generalized nostalgia for a disappearing Europe in so far as it signified technological progress, victory over nature, and also a condensed image of a social world based on class divisions elsewhere threatened with dissolution. The shipwreck of the Titanic hence represented for the social imagination the collapse of European civilization, the destruction of an entire social edifice. • 40 150 The Fiscus incident occurred within a historical context virtually opposite to that of the Titanic--Los Angeles was the U.S. epitome of post-war opportunity and growth--and involved the death of one child. It nevertheless can also be seen to represent similarly wide-ranging cultural and psychical dynamics of the society in which it occurred. As a symbolic locus in the public imagination, the Fiscus incident and its telecast can be seen to have literally represented and brought into view repressed and dreaded possibilities hidden among visions of "promised land" suburbanization in post-war Los Angeles. A sudden interruption in the pervasive transformation of an expanding, more populous LA, it occurred at a site both 151 representative of and exceptional to this transformation: affluent, established San Marino, in which a once-spacious old ranchero had been developed into suburban residences. The well itself was a vestige of a previous era and lifestyle, rusted and ignored (and so seemingly "primed" for a return of the repressed). What made this even more poignant--but also more "personalized," and therefore potentially less recognized as "historical"--was the reported fact that Kathy's father worked for the California Water and Telephone Company, which had originally sunk the well in 1903 and abandoned it in 1932. What's more, Mr. Fiscus had just returned from a trip to Sacramento, where he had been seeking legislation to provide for the registration and surveying of water sources, including the cementing of abandoned wells.41 Such a convolution of the personal, the familial, and the socio-political Symbolic lends an expansive sense of tragic irony to the incident, but one laced with unrecognized fears and doubts about the residue of this new evocation of a Los Angeles "boom," especially in its disclosure of signal gaps in the veneer of patriarchal security. (Also notable, for example, was the foregrounded presence of Kelly, a tireless, skilled volunteer who was otherwise unemployed.) The rescue effort, then, represented not only the empirical efforts 152 of many volunteers working with donated equipment and materials, but also a concerted yet contradictory, more symbolic "defense" against this rupture to the social imagination. The "scale" of this rescue response, however, and that of the Fiscus "catastrophe" in general, seem additionally, perhaps even primarily determined by more psychical and ideological aspects of the event, all directed toward the child as a focus of attention, concern, and ultimately anguish. The duration of viewers' interest in the event therefore entailed continued and yet problematic registers of involvement and identification. Television maintained contact with the rescue effort, active in its discursive construction of the event but ultimately as helpless as any person there. John Polich, who was part of KTLA's telecast crew, recalls that spectator involvement was an interior and largely passive experience: You're getting inside yourself ••• "Jeez, I could do it with my hands • I could go in there and just dig this dirt up with my hands." You felt so ••• so helpless. And jeez, they had hundreds of people there, and of course a lot of the public was way on the outside. It was such a helpless thing. 42 This kind of split identification--a desire to be actively engaged, as the workers were; a realization that you were an outsider, as the other observers were; a feeling of 153 helplessness overlaying the active concern but physical passivity experienced in the social sphere--characterized the quasi-paralysis and strong empathy shared by those in the television audience. It also must have been experienced as a deeply ironic incident, involving a demonstration of the awe-inspiring potential of television at this moment, yet also a recognition that it could not save a human life. For Patricia Mellencamp, such a schema is crucial to television's relationship to catastrophe, which she suggests can be seen as aligned with Freud's model of anxiety. Anxiety, both as an affect (a remembrance) and as freshly created out of a particular situation, was seen by Freud as a reaction to a situation of danger, predicated on the fear of being abandoned: longing turns into anxiety. 43 In this model "beyond the pleasure principle," the situation to be safeguarded against is "non-satisfaction," a quality which Mellencamp suggests is precisely what television preys on and creates as it stays on the air during catastrophe coverage. Mellencamp suggests that Freud's anxiety model "snugly adheres to a catastrophe model n44: I can find no better description of catastrophe coverage than "anxiety is . an expectation of a trauma, and ... a repetition of it in a mitigated form . • . expectation belongs to the danger situation, whereas its indefiniteness and lack of object belong to the traumatic situation of helplessness. • . . The ego . • • repeats it actively in a weakened version . . • what is of decisive importance is the first displacement of the anxiety-reaction from its origin in the situation of helplessness" .... ~ 154 For Mellencamp, television has become an essential site of traumatic expectation--like Doane, she suggests that contemporary television's relationship to catastrophe appears to be as "fixed" as Browne's "supertext" is to the social order. (Indeed, this order and catastrophe seem to define one another, as mediated by TV.) The Fiscus event, again, should be understood as a progenitor to these contemporary dynamics and effects: not inclusive of their characteristics yet instructive as to their development. Certainly, as Freud suggests is true of the expectation of trauma in general, anxiety within the Fiscus telecast was experienced as a repetition of the original trauma of separation from the maternal, the original "situation of helplessness." But television's position as a banal and diverting "guarantor" of its constructed, interruptive "social order" was, as I have argued, still evolving and still at issue. Writing about the McClure incident, which resembled the Fiscus event in many ways, Mellencamp observes that There was little to see except the same cable and the passage of time; little to tell except the local story of the uncanny accident. • Drilling miscalculations were delays prolonging the suspense and time of the coverage •..• The coverage and events were the made-for-TV reenactment of Inhibitions. Symptoms. and Anxiety. . • . Along with helplessness, there was no visible object, only waiting, indefiniteness, and the expectation of either alive or dead. 46 While the McClure incident occurred within a wholly 155 different relationship between television and the social symbolic, the dynamics she describes probably parallel those during the course of the Fiscus telecast: temporal lags within the crisis, that accentuated the helplessness underlying the emotional involvement in the hidden object, etc. A central difference between the events and their respective managements of anxiety, however, points up an important historical parameter to Mellencamp's study of televisual catastrophe. An essential tenet of her analysis is that TV is both shock gng therapy, that it produces and discharges anxiety as a means of "containing'' the possible effects and reactions to moments of radical discontinuity. The Fiscus incident demonstrates that the dynamic she describes has developed across time, especially as regards both the discharging of anxiety, and the historical positioning of "catastrophes" as safely "remembered" examples of TV's social coverage. (The Fiscus event itself was so considered during the McClure incident.) The Fiscus telecast occurred pre-videotape and pre-national link, and in any case prior to TV's capacity to replay the rescue 156 attempt itself or its catastrophic precursors. It ended soon after the announcement of the child's death, offering only brief discursive closure, and no continued figural "containment," as would be expected today. Perhaps as a result of this lack of sustained closure, the experience proved so indelible for some in the audience that they were compelled to continue to share it, or perhaps to attempt an acknowledgment of their experience--specif ically to recount it in detailed letters to their televisual "correspondents." Bill Welsh recalls that several viewers subsequently wrote him, describing their experience of watching the telecast, and thereby documenting the liminality and still-vivid activities by which the event broke from "everyday" practices and cognitions. They sent me some of the wildest letters I ever received from people. They would run to several pages, telling me everything they did. You know, "Tom and I tuned you in at 6 o'clock on Saturday night, and we called George and Mary across the street and said 'You ought to come over and watch this.' And pretty quick Harry and Alice from down the street, they had heard about it and they came up, and we three girls cooked some dinner at 10 o'clock at night, and then the guys took naps after that, and then they got up around midnight to watch again and we went back to sleep, and then they cooked some breakfast for us about 2." They'd give me the whole detail of their life through this whole thing. It was amazing. And as I've always said, that was the turning point of television: it stopped being home movies that you tuned in for fun, and you suddenly realized the impact that television was going to have on your life when the people saw that telecast. 4 7 157 The actual letters have not been available for study, but nevertheless serve as a sign of the foreign, extraordinary impact that the event had on its audience. They also are another indication of the affective "intimacy" and interactivity rendered between the audience and the reporters--they, like the Fiscus family, felt they "knew" Welsh, and were compelled to carry out their side of an imagined "conversation" or interactivity. Besides serving as a continuation of their experience of Welsh and the event, one could further suggest that such an attempted interactivity was desired as a possible means to have their experiences validated or recognized by this now personalized spokesperson and surrogate for the television eye: viewers had lived through the social liminality and irregularity of the event, but precisely these qualities made it necessary for their experiences to be "confirmed." In other words, the event's liminality (regarding both the social sphere and television's role within it) by definition refused the kind of ready reference to already understood and experienced subjectivity that "the everyday" tends to represent and allegedly insure. Certainly this liminality was a key determinant in the popular impact of the event, as individuals city-wide discussed and shared and confirmed the progress of the rescue effort and their reactions to it. That such a 158 confirmation process expanded to include the television reporter--that his awareness and "participation" in these viewers' experiences was apparently of immediate and pressing importance to them--indicates as well the liminal and newly experienced positioning of the television apparatus as a source of confirmation of the impact of unsettling and discontinuous personal experience. In "The Invisible Network," Rath considers the process and impact of television's intrusion on the "everyday," suggesting that new communications technologies present themselves as bearers of new forms of socio-cultural reality, which touch upon traditional boundaries. • • • Their location is • . . within the tensions between the public sphere and private daily life, between the idea of a collective life and the rituals of the TV viewer. 48 The Fiscus event, in its social/community liminality but also its newly experienced configuration of television as a link to the Real and a site of strong empathy and identification, signals and initiates just such a shift in "boundaries." Rath quotes H. Bausinger to suggest that "everyday domestic life" is a "structure of inertia" that is "on the surface weak, but in fact can hardly be 159 disturbed," but which, according to Rath, "becomes the projection room for the synthetic, spatial, temporal, and social structures of television."~ The Fiscus telecast, I would suggest, in its sudden yet prolonged, anxiety-ridden coverage, dimmed the lights and opened the curtains for just such a continued projection, coalescing a liminal audience in at least occasionally rapt attention, by providing access to an event the impact of which can be seen to involve significant symbolic and personal/identif icatory registers. In her survey of televisual catastrophes, Mellencamp suggests that, at a national level, the coverage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy was also such a turning point: The assassination • • • and its coverage marked the passage from experience to information (the physical to simulation), from the public crowd as the source of shock • • • to the private audience of television: in the 60s, we were still on the threshold.so The Fiscus event, especially in its liminality, represents a regional precursor to this passage between public and private. Partially because of the smaller geographic area involved and smaller percentage of TV sets per neighborhood, and also because local television (especially at the time) affected a relationship to its 160 viewers that seemed less distanced and more "interactive," the Fiscus telecast was especially "on the threshold." The "scale" of the catastrophes, in terms of the numbers of people affected, is certainly not equivalent. But the differences between the Fiscus and JFK "catastrophes" entail more than only empirical and historical conditions, and point to significant aspects of their respective social impacts. The JFK assassination represented a sudden rupture of the national Symbolic--Oliver stone and countless others have referred to it in such nostalgic and hyperbolic terms as the death of a King--literally and figuratively the loss of a Father, with all of the social and psychic impact that his position in the Symbolic entailed. Not surprisingly, the shock of such an event near the moment of television's recently achieved domestic "saturation" of sets led to new experiences of TV and its relation to such a shock. As Mellencamp suggests, It could be argued that the assassination, not initially covered by the networks, was the first and last time for a united television audience: everyone compulsively remembered and minutely described, again and again, like reruns, where they were in real life, and where they were in relation to television, representation, a cultural moment when television and our daily lives were still separate but merging. While our emotional experience of the event came from television, our bodies remained distinct from television: "meaning" occurred to us in specific places.M Certainly the Fiscus event represents a similar 161 transition point for its LA audience, though the kind and degree of its Symbolic crisis was less pronounced, and the gap between TV and everyday life was more ·evident in every way. As in the JFK event, television was "cited as realizing television's potential for collective identification--television's democratic dream. n52 But the dynamics of this identification seem to me markedly different, especially as regards the "lost object" specific to the Fiscus event. The Fiscus incident is part of an important and cross-cultural "sub-genre" of the "catastrophe" broadcasts studied by Rath, Doane, and Mellencamp: the child in a well scenario. The McClure rescue in Texas is the most recent example of this scenario, and is considered by Rath and Mellencamp. (Another, "fictional" contemporary rendering occurred in an episode of The Simpsons.) During the course of the Fiscus event, media recalled a tragic incident in Fresno, California the previous November, when a 4-year-old boy had perished after a fall down a well. A similar incident involving a young boy took place in Italy in 1981. Margaret Morse has remarked on the nature of this sub-genre in a review of a video installation piece by Peter D'Agostino that was inspired by the Italian 162 incident. Recalling both the Fiscus and McClure examples, she suggests that The idea of a child falling into a well appears to have deep psychological resonance. Something symbolic, beyond the individual fate of the child, appears to be at stake in attracting a massive and live presence of the media and the widest concern and sympathy in the public imagination. The tragic outcome of the rescue attempt in Italy was widely regarded as a symbolic point in the life of a country, helpless at an economic nad_ ir--nothing could get worse. • • • D'Agostino's installation ••• constructs different images of what is essentially inaccessible and as incomprehensible as the death of a child always is.53 What I find fascinating and suggestive in such a scenario are the identif icatory aspects mentioned in these discussions--the psychological resonance that intimates concern beyond the fate of the child, the inaccessibility and incomprehensibility of the child's death, and the activation of the anxiety model. The child in a well appears to be, across its historical and cultural boundaries, an enduring but floating signifier of catastrophe, at once anonymous, insistently personal, and potently engaging of the widest concern and sympathy. Indeed, part of its ideological power is as a scenario of subjectivity itself--rife with Imaginary underpinnings and figurations, yet surrounded by discursive attempts at "containment." 163 Mellencamp touches on these aspects in her discussion of the McClure incident, which she calls an "uncanny accident," ultimately a "drama of the separation of mother and child." The configuration of the child deep inside the buried well suggests almost surreally Oedipal connotations, what Mellencamp refers to as "Baby Jessica's (and our) Freudian nightmare. n54 such a psychically charged scene undoubtedly accounts for some degree of the audience's continued interest level in the event. The scenario represents configurations that can be understood to resonate with a potentially strong pre-Oedipal charge. Here the hidden, lost, desired object mentioned by Rath figuratively connotes both life and death, poised deep within a shaft both phallic and womb like: her fate would determine either a reappearance and seeming rebirth, or a final, fatal closure of the imagined maternal separation--the end of desire. 55 I would suggest that the response to and involvement in the telecasting of the Fiscus rescue effort can be seen to correspond to several of the at once liberating and terrifying aspects of this pre-Oedipal "scene"--as it is understood or conceived by (necessarily) post-Oedipal subjects. This suggests that onlookers to the rescue effort were engaged in a kind of "fantasy" scenario (for retrospective evocations of plenitude cart only be 164 experienced as such), the terms of which are more empirically evident. As Linda Williams points out, the term "fantasy" in this psychological usage does not refer to a hallucination of some kind, and is not merely a vision or spectacle: [F]antasies are not, as is sometimes thought, wish-fulfilling linear narratives of mastery and control leading to closure and the attainment of desire. They are marked, rather, by the lack of fixed position with respect to the objects and events fantasized. . . • Jean Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis argue that fantasy is not so much a narrative that enacts the quest for an object of desire as it is a setting for desire, a place where conscious and unconscious, self and other, part and whole meet. Fantasy is the place where "desubjectified" subjectivities oscillate between self and other occupying no fixed place in the scenario.56 From this perspective, the physically passive yet emotionally active "participation" of the rescue effort audience can be more readily understood. The entire operation, as a "setting for desire," can be seen to represent a kind of "fantasy of origins," a fantasy which can be seen to incorporate equally the mystery of the beginnings of subjectivity but also its end. As Williams notes, one characteristic of the fantasy structure is the divided and alternating identifications that are played out, both consciously and unconsciously. In the Fiscus scenario, the audience quite consciously identified with both the rescue workers and the Fiscus 165 family. These identifications oscillated with more obvious ones--those with other onlookers, and, of course, the televisual correspondents and production personnel. Central to the structure of this fantasy, however, was the child--unseen, hidden, and hoped to be alive. It is this locus of identification which demarcates this sub-genre of catastrophe, and determines its particular subjective registers. The child's body, potentially traumatized and yet imagined and desired to be whole and unified, can be seen to be positioned at a threshold point itself unimaginable, yet understood in terms of the Imaginary dyad between child and mother. The child, in this scenario, represents not only her own body and fate, but also, psychically, our own--invested with our desires and energies, yet also defensively insisted as Other, and imagined at the threshold of anarchic, pre-symbolic jouissance. Both temporally and spatially, the Fiscus fantasy scenario resembles Williams' observations on the melodrama as a "body" genre, a phrase she borrows from Carol Clover's work on horror and pornography films. Williams suggests that body genres, one characteristic feature of which is "the spectacle of a body caught in the grip of an intense sensation and emotion, 11 57 "correspond in important ways to ••• original fantasies," to Laplanche and Pontalis's structural understanding of fantasies _ as myths of origins which try to cover the discrepancy between two moments in time .••• Laplanche and Pontalis maintain that the most basic fantasies are located at the juncture of an irrecoverable real event that took place somewhere in the past and a totally imaginary event that never took place. The "event" whose temporal and spatial existence can never be fixed is thus ultimately, according to Laplanche and Pontalis, that of "the origin of the subject". • • • It is this contradictory temporal structure of being situated somewhere between the "too early" and the "too late" of the knowledge of difference that generates desire that is most characteristic of fantasy.~ 166 The temporal discrepancy that Williams suggests is aligned with the melodrama is categorized as "too late," involving the quest to return to and discover the origin of the self • • • origins are already lost, the encounters always take place too late.~ Representative of "the pathos of loss," the repetitions and variations of this temporal schema constitute the melodrama genre--the emotional identification and reaction to which I would suggest parallel that of the popular response to the Fiscus event. [The] melodramatic weepie is the genre that seems to endlessly repeat our melancholic sense of the loss of origins- impossibly hoping to return to an earlier state which is perhaps most fundamentally represented by the body of the mother.60 The fantasies activated by genres, Williams points out, are repetitious but not fixed and eternal--they change 167 over time, in relation to historical conditions. I would posit that the child in the well scenario also changes over time, though an analysis of such changes across various historical incidences of this scenario is beyond the scope of the present study. What distinguishes the Fiscus incident from the object of Williams' analysis- melodramas--is the "fictive" status of those representations: the "totally imaginary event" of melodrama is here an empirical event that engages Imaginary longings and fears. This more "real" representation also distinguishes the Fiscus telecast from melodrama's social positioning as "mass culture": the response to the Fiscus incident, as opposed to that of melodrama, was not coded as "excessive," and entailing "over-involvement," but was socially sanctioned and even seen as ethical and civic-minded. Nevertheless, the melodramatic trope of "too late" and its relation to fantasies of origins corresponds precisely to the crisis and catastrophe aspects of the Fiscus rescue effort (but not, for example, to the JFK assassination), and also to its figuration of the body's relation to subjectivity. Culling both the longing for a return to origins and the dread of such a return, the Fiscus incident is exemplary of the potential psychic aspects of the child in a well scenario--a race against 168 the clock which has at stake the contradictory desires of post-Oedipal subjects as regards the origins of subjectivity, represented by the body of the child. It should be mentioned that the child's own social status probably enters into this fantasy of identifications at some level: the fact that Kathy was white and middle-class certainly would not preclude the wide-spread concern for her condition among an LA population (and TV set ownership) which was predominantly also white. That the child was female seems to have engaged a certain additional protective level of the Symbolic (patriarchal) aspects of the rescue effort, and also may have supplemented the Imaginary aspects of the identificatory processes, since, especially within patriarchy, young girls are "understood" to be closer to, less distinct from the maternal, and therefore from the Imaginary and pre-Symbolic. But whether involving a boy or girl, the child in a well scenario opens a gap in our socialized, rational experience of the "everyday," introducing a fantasy of origins which taps into longings for those origins but also the dread of anarchy which our introduction to the Symbolic insists on. 169 To some degree this is perfectly in keeping with all of catastrophe coverage, perhaps even emblematic of it, for as Mellencamp suggests, television operates particularly during catastrophe coverage- "the configuration of shock"--"as if" there might be a revolutionary chance. Catastrophe coverage, "the time of the now," is represented as a moment when thinking stops, a moment of danger that might portend change. . . • 61 Catastrophes, and especially the child in a well sub- genre, can be seen to offer the potential for anti- symbolic, even revolutionary configurations of identification and socio-political mobilization: a kind of avant-garde of the "real." But the experience of the Fiscus "fantasy scenario," in its oscillating and de- centered identifications, should be recognized to also include significant and ultimately overriding defensive postures and identifications. Doane and Mellencamp both suggest, for example, that within the experience of catastrophe coverage is the relief of awareness that the individuals involved are not you, an alternating but especially "protective" identification that is discursively "centering," reinforcing the self/other divisions that less defensive identificatory registers of this scenario problematize. Similarly, the 'iarger Symbolic threats that the Fiscus incident may also have tapped were also "contained" 170 by ideologically "naturalized" means. These potential threats, which I have suggested entailed the surfacing of doubts regarding familial and societal (patriarchal) security, could also include less incident-specific anxieties. For example, the sudden interruption and threatened destruction of the Fiscus' participation in the socially-prescribed ideal of LA's suburban, family centered "tomorrow" doubtless engaged associated but commonly repressed fears about the future. Topics ranging from financial obligations (particularly in the form of mortgages, but also other aspects of the growing credit system of consumerism), to socio~spatial topics such as the demographics of one's neighborhood, the effects of growth on the city and its environs, even the burgeoning fears about national "others" and nuclear escalation, could also arise, incurring defensive postures and identifications. (A study of the historical differences between assignations of such symbolic meanings in various catastrophes would doubtless prove enlightening.) As Rath suggests, the charged symbolic value of such a collectively experienced event can be observed in the public discourse that follows such an event. 62 He points to a response concerning the Fiscus event which appeared on the other side of the continent immediately upon the event's conclusion, a New York Times editorial which I also find remarkable and will quote in toto: ONE LITTLE GIRL A little girl was dead. That was the news--just one little girl. Three days ago only a few people knew the name of this little girl. Yesterday there was no one in this country and few in other civilized countries who had not heard of 3-year-old Kathy Fiscus of San Marino, Calif. Millions upon millions followed this heartbreaking story as they did no other news of the day. This morning those millions share the grief of Kathy's parents. Yet even Kathy's father and mother must have felt that something like a miracle of human compassion had taken place. Their little daughter had suddenly become a symbol of something precious in all our lives. The world is overladen with great problems. Two great wars and many smaller ones have cost the lives of multitudes, including little girls as dear to their parents as Kathy was. But we still know, even if the mad theorists at the other side of the world do not, that one life- one tiny life--is beyond price. Kathy . came close to our hearts and made us one. A splendor of unselfish emotion lit her path as she went from this earth.63 171 What the concern and identification with the child and her family's plight come to represent in this interpretation is a nationalistic and morally superior spectacle of ideology-in-practice, a demonstration that Americans especially value individual human life, and will protect it at any cost. The variety and scale of anxieties occasioned by the Fiscus incident are implicit 172 here in the contextualization of the event: it is positioned vis-a-vis two world wars, the demarcation lines of world "civilization," and what is positioned as the distant, foreign threat of Communism. The degree and range of popular attention and concern during the Fiscus rescue is seen not to have been excessive or beyond reason, not as an anomaly of broadcasting's social impact, not as a sign of how rarely a community cooperates toward a non-economic goal, but as a wholly and readily understandable response, and one which the "mad theorists" of Communism apparently would not be capable of. The event's potential to subvert Symbolic registers, as work on catastrophe television suggests, is "contained" by a hyperbolic inflation in value of standard bourgeois individualism, which is positioned securely within the rhetoric of patriotic nationalism. The telecast itself--of course, experienced only locally--offered a very different and more limited discursive "containment." The audio excerpts of the Fiscus coverage that I have heard suggest that the termination of coverage was flavored by more intersocial registers of the Symbolic, rather than bald nationalistic posturing. It represents an alternative, doubtless historically-determined sense of the "ethics" of such 173 catastrophic coverage, closely linked to the etiquette of TV's nascent interactivity. Some of the closing remarks captured on the recording employ expected strategies of closure--the assignation of heroes (those continually and physically active), and the approval of larger social cooperation overcoming extant municipal divisions (the rescue effort "shows how people can work together when they want to," etc.). The final remarks of Bill Welsh and Stan Chambers, however, represent a demeanor that was unassuming and yet civil, though occasionally unpolished. (The following transcription is necessarily incomplete, based on the quality and ellipses of the recording.) BW: "· •• of my entire life, being asked to prepare this official announcement on behalf of the Fiscus family. I had no idea that this was to be my most unpleasant duty to this, Stan. I think that you can appreciate how I felt under the situation. It would certainly be in very poor taste for me to say anything further, except that I do know that this was an official announcement, and that it was authorized by everybody from Mr. Hill on down, and was delivered by Dr. Hansen exactly as given. It confirms our worst fears, something that makes me very sorry. And all I can say is that in line with the courageous men who have carried on here so well, we have also had the opportunity for ••• to see an American family, the Fiscus family, bearing up equally well under this terrific ordeal. Stan, I think you're going to have to carry on." SC: "Bill, I can't add anything to that. Well, you just can't add anything to that. Because, ladies and gentlemen, it's just about over. We don't know just what we can say. Because, well I know I ..• find it pretty difficult • . . And now it is 9 o'clock Sunday night, probably the longest television broadcast in history. And we're sorry that this is the way we have to sign off, because we always hoped that we would have had a happy ending. We want to thank you for staying with us during these long, long hours, and for being with us. I know the family feels the same way, and appreciates the sorrow as you've expressed. And so, ladies and gentlemen, we leave San Marino . . . hoping to have given you the service that we wanted to. And now we return you to our studio. n64 174 These remarks do approach a consensual kind of closure to the trauma of the event, especially in their attention to the family and to socially-guided manners and consideration. But opposed to the techniques described by Doane and Mellencamp, they refuse the extended, lingering attempts at "therapy" and veiled paeans to televisual ritual characteristic of contemporary catastrophe coverage. Instead, the coverage seems to shift categorically away from anxiety toward a kind of mourning. In another regard, however, an awareness of the soon- discovered impact of the Fiscus event on the actual and potential television audience made it one in a series of attempted duplications of such a crisis/catastrophe remote--what Mellencamp would call part of the "repetition compulsion" of such telecasts. For example, Stan Chambers told me that the very morning after the Fiscus event, KTLA 175 attempted to cover a social disturbance in Pacific Palisades, but could not relay their signal to Mt. Wilson. More dramatically, KTTV and KTLA both offered substantial coverage of the search for Patty Jean Hull in 1951, a little girl suspected of being kidnapped from a .movie theater. Referred to in the press as "probably the second most audience-galvanizing spot news event in LA video history, 116 5 the two stations reportedly took very different approaches to the event--KTTV more "sensational" (rushing cameramen to take photographs of the body, and televising them some four hours after the discovery of the little girl's corpse), and KTLA more temperately dealing with the "human interest" and tragic aspects of the events. 66 Breaking news had become an important paradigm within Landsberg's schema of live TV: the Fiscus rescue attempt, by introducing death and mourning to Los Angeles television as part of a germinal moment in its rise to popularity, left a lingering affect of the "real" in its remote wake. But equally necessary to Landsberg's "realist" schema--indeed, necessary to the economic stability of the medium--were more regularly-scheduled shows, what Doane would cal'i "information" shows, orie of the most prominent of which was City at Night. 176 An early TV magazine show, City at Night seems to me to have been one of the most interesting formats in early television history: travelling to a different and unannounced location of interest every week, the show presented a "live," behind-the-scenes look at the activity taking place at these various locales. Within the context of the "catastrophe" theories of television, this program, especially in conjunction with the A-bomb tests covered in 1952, can be seen to offer further insights concerning strategies of early Los Angeles television's growth--its simultaneity at a distance affording and providing access to a more ostensibly complete "real," a kind of "total television" myth. These telecasts, seen within their industrial and social context, demonstrate a symbiotic relationship between important social ideologies circulating at the time (including certain visions of scientific progress and their relationship to the post-war economy) and the continued efforts to transform television into a regular part of everyday life. So as not to overstate my case: KTLA was certainly not the only station on the air, and many other avenues of entry were regularly available to potential television audience members. Children's shows, movies, programs directed to women in the home, and other non-remote fare were regularly telecast. But the overall tendency to tune 177 in KTLA (called at the time "the KTLA habit"), seems to have been determined to some degree by Landsberg's devotion to various uses of the remote telecast mode of address--what I am calling "remote possibilities". One account of this dynamic contemporary to the period under study is found in the January, 1950 "KTLA Anniversary Issue" of Tele-Views magazine (a local newspaper insert). An article entitled "KTLA ... in the public service" claims that No other station concentrates so heavily- or effectively--on the Los Angeles scene. . . . It's virtually an adage by now: "If anything happens, KTLA will cover it." From train wrecks to Sunrise Services at the Hollywood Bowl, from reservoir cave ins to visits from aircraft carriers, from Solemn Pontifical Masses to the public appearances of Gorgeous George--the KTLA remote trucks invariably are there.67 In a talk delivered at a BMI seminar in May, 1952, Landsberg detailed some of the reasons for his tele programming practices.68 Among the various notable topics in his discussion is an acknowledgment of the importance of scheduling and dayparts to the success of a show ("The time slot that you select is the most critical thing in television"), these divisions already recognized by this early point--less then three years after the Fiscus incident. Landsberg suggests that the schedule of programs should correspond to the imagined dynamics of "family life": children's shows until 7 or 8 o'clock, a 178 variety of increasingly "intoxicating" shows thereafter.~ His more general conceptualization of television, however, concerns the distinctions between television and both motion pictures and radio. Landsberg suggests that whereas motion pictures (or the theater, or concerts), are experienced in the public sphere, with an expectant audience ("in a mood to receive the vibrations"), but also in a social or group setting (feeling "the psychology of that whole house"), television is watched at home, where make-believe • . . is not possible; because you cannot forget the everyday things that are around you. You are in your own atmosphere, you are at ease, you are critical, you don't have an audience around you to stimulate you.m Landsberg further suggests that TV is also unlike radio, which he notes "appeals primarily to the imagination," so that each one of the people [the listeners] not only imagines the performers as totally different from what they really are; but the story really develops in the person's own mind, along the lines of his [sic] own experience.71 "Television," on the other hand, according to Landsberg, hits you with a stark realism that has never been found before ..•• It's a window on the world, it's a window to look out of, it's a window to observe things; but, it is not imagination, it is seeing, it is real. 72 179 Although employing the metaphor of the window (which he apparently borrowed from a TV network promotion), and more importantly invoking an active, critical viewer, Landsberg's theorization of realistic representation strategies is considerably less nuanced than that of Andre Bazin--apparently refusing any notion of the constructedness of "realism," and indicating no ambiguity of the "real." Nevertheless, his conceptualization of the TV viewer resonates with a still-debated methodological underpinning which Landsberg may have arrived at based on certain of his personal experiences: refuting a "hypodermic" (monolithic, automatic, universal) impact of the text or message--as the Frankfurt School theories have been interpreted--Landsberg suggests that the home viewer maintains a critical distance from what information is disseminated via the media. This of course readily co exists with an ideology of humanistic individualism, which he more-or-less paraphrases later in the talk, as an aside ("No two people in this world are alike. That's the wonderful thing in our world. n73) • But I would suggest that the place and manner of reception--the terms by which he distinguishes television from other "visual" media--are most central to his conceptualization: domestic familiarity and isolation, he suggests, offer a potentially more resistant and less "predetermined" vantage point toward the medium. 180 This is especially striking in contrast to the group television viewing configurations preferred by the Nazis in their .Fascist configuration of the apparatus7 4 - characterized by centralized, public screenings, with seating from 40 to 400--a configuration with which Landsberg had first-hand familiarity. It is also wholly commensurate with the post-war ethic of nuclear-family single homes and domestic consumption, which, seen from this perspective, can be cast as a kind of anti-Fascist .project--a repositioning not entirely without merit,75 though such a stark binary opposition cannot encompass the various and nuanced determinations and effects of the U.S. commercial television apparatus. Nevertheless, Landsberg's "observations" can be seen to be ideologically complicit with the times: by denying any possibility of influencing or persuading the isolated home viewer, he presents television as providing a decidedly new, pragmatic, and "untainted'. ' vision of the world, important qualities to promote in a climate of post-war prosperity and Cold War paranoia. But Landsberg's remarks concerning TV's "stark realism" seem to me an early adoption of what Feuer calls the ideology of "liveness": he is suggesting that 181 television favors a seemingly "direct" form of representation, broadcast simultaneously (as was most any non-film program of the time), and affording an access to the world that is the more striking because unornamented. Indeed, at one point he claims that "the show business idea and theory of the land of make believe is wrong when we get into television. 11 76 A great deal of self-interest can be recognized in these remarks. First, Landsberg is distinguishing his station's product from those of established and powerful media industries. (Indeed, his remarks about motion pictures are one sign of how he positioned himself and the station as autonomous from Paramount.) What's more, he is distinguishing KTLA's shows from the "quality" dramatic fare "imported" from monied Eastern TV network sites of production, taking swipes at any tendencies of television programming which he feels smack of pretension: programming needn't be elaborate. The oriental rugs, the chandeliers, they are not a bridge, they're a block. The people look at those lavish furnishings and they feel blocked. They don't belong to them. They don't feel at home, they'd much rather find a warm, friendly personality on the air that's considered one of them-- one they welcome in their homes--and there's far greater appeal in that than in all the lavishness.TI These remarks reflect Landsberg's differentiation of KTLA's station "personality" from the networks and their 182 local affiliates, but also from other Los Angeles independent stations such as KCOP, channel 13-- specifically their hit program featuring Liberace (whose show Landsberg reportedly refused), which regularly featured chandeliers, etc. But his ideas for catering to the local audience carried beyond entertainment programs: he also takes the opportunity to suggest that even the limited sources of "news" programming common to other stations is wholly inferior to KTLA's practices: newsreel coverage we have received so far, and I have viewed Telenews, UP and AP, are by no means satisfactory as a solution for local programming. . • • your mobile unit, even if you have only one, is ten times as valuable as three film news services. We have not, until this time, invested in a newsreel unit to cover local news. Yes, there are film cameras available; and if something big happens we can get there; but generally . . . local news coverage isn't important on film. It's important if it's live, because again, you're taking people there. You are really furnishing a window; but if it's canned, it shows up as canned on television. And you can't get away from it. The audience does not want it; they don't like it. 78 Landsberg's ideas about news are conditioned not only by his advocacy of remote telecasts, but also by the general and specific practices he considers suitable for the local broadcaster. Timeliness, he suggests, is even more important for local news--a historically derived conclusion which seems to have been reversed as the U.S. 183 television apparatus encroaches on/becomes symbiotic with our national Symbolic. As to his own station's "locality," he suggests that the Los Angeles audience had a different regional relationship to news than that of East coast audiences: I've worked in television in the East, and found that news is hot all day, all night. People are anxious to receive news, people are much more a part of the news world than they are out in the West. The interest in news here is very casual·~ Such an "understanding" of his audience led Landsberg to emphasize breaking local stories (the lesson of the Fiscus event), but less so the national and international beats that the newsreels and teletypes provided. In addition to determining this regional focus, however, Landsberg's assumptions about the Los Angeles audience also led to his preference for regular televisual counterparts to what newspaper paradigms ref er to as "feature" or "soft" news: If you take feature material and take your mobile unit to the feature news, where it is happening and when it is happening, you then give the audience something to see and something they want to see. The curiosity of intruding, and forgive the word, on other people's lives, of seeing other people in the same difficulties that they have experienced at one time or another ••. people enjoy seeing it.80 In part, Landsberg is referring here to a civic- minded type of show which examines common misbehaviors and 184 discomforts ("be it only a man in a streetcar blowing smoke • • • in his neighbor's face. This is, you may say, a perversion, and shouldn't be shown on television. Yes, it should be shown; and what to do about it should be shown. 11 81). But his observations here also provide an important historical perspective on this period of post-war Los Angeles: growing at an enormous rate, attracting new investment and industry, soon to include major network television production facilities, LA's economic and media-industry power base, already substantial, was literally booming. But the physical (and temporal) displacement of this power base from the traditional centers of power and finance in the East (especially at this point of trucking-and-railroad dependent transportations systems, and relatively undeveloped electronic communications) contributed to what was apparently experienced as a kind of estrangement from the experiences and ways of life in the East. In particular, from Landsberg's perspective, the populace of LA had yet to feel as though they were largely "a part of the news world"--the dynamics and effects of the world of "news" were apparently not yet recognized or experienced as directly impacting on everyday life. What this suggests to me is a kind of delay or uneven development between the actual financial, industrial, and 185 commercial growth of the region and its perception by the population at large. Landsberg suggests that television, as a social "mirror" which critically active audience members will accept or ignore (depending on its correspondence to their personal experiences) has a predilection as well as an obligation to cater to those localized perspectives. This intended use and conceptualization of television are inherently significant aspects of a program like City at Night, especially as regards the depiction of Los Angeles' socio-economic sphere and its relationship to both regional self- definition and interpersonal practices. This show was a personal favorite of Landsberg, and proved to be a recognized success (it was produced on-and- off until the mid-1960s). It is one of the few programs which he described in some detail during the BMI talk: On this program we take the cameras into factories, night clubs, hotels, to show the operation of that place. We cover any type of activity that takes place at night. We never announce where we're going to go. Now, this is one of the first and basic things about that program. If we told you that tomorrow night, or Wednesday night, that we were going to Douglas Aircraft to show the manufacture of airplanes, there would be a good number of people who'd say, "Now, that ought to be interesting," and there would be a tremendous number of people who would say, "Gosh, I don't want to see the factories. Why?" So we don't tell them where we're going. Once you have the audience, they're so fascinated they won't turn away. 82 186 As even this cursory overview suggests, City at Night offers many potential levels of interest for early television study, both in its coverage and in its format: the show represents a potential "map" of a socially- conditioned, market-driven survey of "attractions" in post-war Los Angeles. While precise records of the show do not exist, and specific information about its production is disappointingly scarce, some local press coverage is available and has been supplemented for this study by information from oral histories. Developed within months after the Fiscus incident, and running off and on for the next fifteen years, the show initially featured station announcer Keith Hetherington and KTLA's chief female personality, Dorothy Gardiner (whose career is discussed in more detail in chapter 4); later, Ken Graue hosted for the bulk of the show's run, sometimes accompanied by Stan Chambers; they were followed by Bill Stout and others. The program's distinctive appeal was described in Radio-Television Life: Almost daily you can hear some Angeleno, either native or adopted, lament to fellow dwellers . • • "We never get out and really see the city unless we are taking visitors around the sights." KTLA wisely began last summer to take advantage of this desire to see, coupled with a seeming inability on the part of dwellers to make the various treks. They started bringing the city, by means of telecasts, to the dwellers. 83 The article goes on to describe the program as "a documentary of Los Angeles," designed to cover the City of Angels for the televiewer; to stimulate his interest in his own city and take him places he has never been before; to interest him in night-operating places of business and tourist attractions; and to show him that his city never sleeps. 84 Among the locations described in the article as already visited are Olvera Street, the Griffith Park 187 Observatory and Planetarium, International Airport at Lockheed Terminal, the annual PTA Carnival, the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, a rehearsal of the "Ice Follies," and the first annual Television Exposition; to come will be "factories, nightclubs, printing plants, and other special attractions. 1185 Presented to LA's increasingly decentralized, suburban populace, whose less-frequent participation in the public sphere was indicative of 1) this sprawl and fragmentation, but also 2) the rise of home-based uses of "leisure time" and spending on domestic goods (TV itself an important example), City at Night varied its "genres" of locations between industrial, entertainment, public service, etc. This variety was essential for Landsberg, as a means of maximizing the allure of the show's format-- both demonstrating the range and flexibility of the 188 station's coverage of Los Angeles, and insuring the most advantageous negotiation of flow and discontinuity. Called "your surprise program of the week," the show relied on this premise to lure and hold viewers--curious about the show's location, and then how that location operates. Most valuable for this study's analysis of City at Night is the kinescope of one show (to my knowledge, the only pre-videotape show that has survived)--a 1949 remote telecast from the set of Destination Moon (1950), the George Pal-produced landmark science fiction film noted for its early significance in the post-war rise of that genre. As opposed to the "absent" telecast of the Fiscus rescue effort, this kinescope provides an opportunity to examine some of the discourses surrounding issues contemporary to its production: discourses endemic to the show, its format, and its positioning of such a topical and futuristic subject matter. Not surprisingly, it also deflates most of Landsberg's claims about television's stark, unmediated reality. Industrially and institutionally, it is important to note that Destination Hoon was not a Paramount film: the film was released through Eagle Lion, an independent distribution company active in the immediate post-war period. The set's availability as a remote television 189 location, especially in this era of motion picture paranoia regarding TV, is perhaps a sign of the alternative practices and policies of the more independent productions on the rise in Hollywood at this time. (The film was promoted on other Los Angeles TV shows as well.8 6 ) Pal's prior association with Paramount may have played a determining role in KTLA's access; his Hungarian heritage may also have predisposed an acquaintanceship with fellow emigre Landsberg. But to my knowledge, ~ at Night did not visit the set of any Paramount films. Before proceeding with the analysis of this program, it is important to acknowledge the difficulty in somehow "representing" the program texts to be considered in this written study, a project which is further compounded by the need to select representative clips of the shows. In the case of City at Night, this entails trying to capture its sometimes markedly entropic coverage and pace, and its array of subject matter (including interviews with Pal, director Irving Piche!, writer Robert Heinlein, artistic advisor and creator of the astronomical art Chesley Bonestell, artistic director Ernst Fegte, other production personnel, as well as military-industrial guests to the set). My discussion is tempered by the inadequacies of such an attempt, especially regarding how and to what degree I will be delimiting the text and its reading 190 possibilities in my descriptions of it. The task of merely "transcribing" the show will necessarily impose a system of paradigms and syntagmatic units and breaks anterior to the interpretive analysis. What I hope my selection of clips and discussion of them will suggest is the overall scope and tone of the show, as well as certain constraints and directions of its discourse. This particular episode of City at Night runs approximately 47 minutes, with no apparent commercial breaks, indicating by its irregular length the less codified scheduling pressures of this era of television, but also the early stages of the show's development, apparently prior to its attracting a sponsor. Based on information discussed within the program, I have deduced that it was telecast on October 11, 1949. Since this program, unlike the others to be discussed in my study, is not among the KTLA tapes collected in the Museum of Radio and Television, a more detailed description of at least some sections of the program is called for. A short breakdown of the program's opening follows: 1) A slide of the show's logo opens the program, consisting of the show's title overlaying a dramatic nighttime cityscape, which is punctuated with still klieg light beams. This slide is accompanied by a brief musical intro and a voice-over: "We now present City at Night, which finds Keith and Dorothy on an unusual trip." 2) Cut to a close-up of a sphere resembling the moon, cast half in shadow, on which the cloud-covered North American continent is barely discernible. As the camera slowly pulls back, we begin to hear offscreen dialogue (hosts Keith Hetherington and Dorothy Gardiner): KH: "Well, we're on our way--away from the earth." DG: "Look how small it's getting, Keith." KH: "Yeah, I wonder how fast we're going." 191 The camera pulls back further and begins to tilt down to reveal what appear to be distant mountain ranges, then closer terrain, as we hear a series of "thuds" to approximate a "landing." The offscreen dialogue continues: KH: "Well, I think we've landed somewhere." DG: "Whoa, that was a fast trip. Let's get out." KH: 11 0.K. 11 Then the camera slowly pans the rugged landscape, as noises from shifting microphones and other equipment are heard. Finally it arrives at the foot of a large metallic object, with steps made of bars on its exterior; Dorothy is glimpsed backing down these steps. (Nearly a full minute has passed before a person is seen.) A cut to a new angle reveals Dorothy making her way down the ladder extension from these steps, and then Keith, who carries a corded mike. KH: "How is it down there?" DG: (unintelligible reply--not miked) KH: "Whew! Boy, I never took such a fast trip in my life." DG: "Look, though!" KH: "Isn't this a beautiful ••• but there are no trees! Mountains, desert." DG: "It's scary." KH: "Yeah, it is. Where do you think we are, huh?" DG: "I don't know." 3) After feigning the rocket trip, and suggesting they have no knowledge of the location, they are startled by the appearance in the mid-background of four ominously suited creatures (astronauts), slowly approaching • Their concerned and worried responses to these beings is interrupted by an . additional off-screen voice, who asks whether they are frightened. As the camera cuts away from the astronauts to a two-shot of Keith and Dorothy, they are joined by Irving Piche!, who continues his questioning: IP: "Do you come from the earth?" KH: "Yes, and a very, very quick trip." IP: "So did these gentlemen. They came from the same place you did. If they took those helmets off, we'd probably recognize them. You might have seen them before." 192 Cut to a view of the helmets being removed. The following dialogue begins here, from offscreen, then cuts back to the three-shot. KH: "Pardon me, this is Miss Gardiner • • " IP: "How do you do Miss Gardiner." KH: " • and I'm Keith Hetherington." IP: "Mr. Hetherington." DG: "And you're Irving Piche!, right?" IP: "That's right." DG: "You're the director of the picture." IP: "The picture?" (polite laughter, as the ruse is broken) "Do you know where you are? You're on the surface of the moon." KH: "What?" DG: "We are?" IP: "You're in the middle of the crater Harpalus, on the moon, and these gentlemen have also come from the earth, in a spaceship, the same spaceship here." KH: "They did." IP: "This is Mr. John Archer, who helped to build the ship •••• " 4) The introductions continue, and Piche! begins to explain the space suits and their devices (oxygen tanks, walkie-talkies, air-intake valves, flashlight, safety line, even a wrench attached to the belt). Dorothy asks about the different colors of the suits, which Piche! explains are for identification, both from one another and from the landscape. Keith makes a remark about men from Mars, but Piche! corrects him--these are men from earth. Piche! also discusses how some of the plot of the film revolves around the suits: the safety line becomes needed. But Piche! won't disclose how that situation is resolved. 5) (Seven minutes in) Keith asks Piche! to face · the television camera, and asks the name of the film: 193 Destination Moon. Piche! suggests they meet the person who originated the idea for the picture, but Keith suggests they learn more about Piche! first: KH: "I'd like to find out something about the picture. Are you getting any particular 'kick,' you might say, out of this picture over any other picture that you've directed?" IP: "Kick? Since I graduated from college I haven't had as much education as I've had on this one picture. I've read books about rocketry, rocket flight; I've brushed up on astronomy; I know more about the laws of gravity now, the law of gravity, than I ever dreamed I would have to know. • . • " After a joking discussion about directing actors, Keith asks KH: "Have you ever directed a picture that was even approaching this in sensationalism?" IP: "No. I've directed one other picture in which the principal characters had to get along without air, because they operated under water: a picture called Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid, an underwater picture. This is my first space picture. As a matter of fact, to the best of my knowledge, this is the first serious space picture that's been made in the United States. Way back in 1902, in France they made a picture about a trip to the moon. And in 1928, they made one in Germany.87 But to the best of my knowledge, this is the first one to be made in this country. More than that, it's the first picture made about a trip to the moon in which they didn't find pretty girls there." (laughs) Several aspects of the show's opening seem to me representative of City at Night's "informational" mode and its relation to Landsberg's constructed "real" of post-war Los Angeles. From the very start, the episode establishes 194 a playful, performative tone, especially in its "puzzling" opening shots and somewhat awkward but potentially charming handling of a fictive facade. Not entirely "make believe," it indicates the range of address and creative leeway that this more informative mode might employ. Specifically, the opening demonstrates a willingness toward spectacle drawn from the location itself. Partially used as a ploy to invoke audience interest (a temporary "mystery," at first specular), it suggests a larger trope of the show's address: to take advantage of the setting, by "propping" onto its coverage certain attributes endemic to or "natural" to the location. (Later, for example, the KTLA cameras are placed on cranes used for the shooting of the film.) Less playful and more centrally characteristic is the iterative process of explaining what we see, which initiates a linear, rational understanding of the process examined. True to television form, but less dramatically than in crisis or catastrophe coverage, this linearity is "interrupted," or at least diverted, by other processes both social and televisual, while its supposedly concomitant rationality is undercut, especially from our contemporary perspective, by inclusions such as a piece of archaic hardware included within their mission of the future: the single-headed end wrench on the belt, etc. 195 Most interesting to me in this segment are certain of the social aspects of the show--for example, the formal introductions and polite deference on display in response to even Irving Pichel's rather starched and ill-at-ease presence (more apparent in his body language and vocal delivery). One of the potential nodes of information here, I would suggest, is a demonstration of social graces (white, middle-class) and "comfortable" behavior, especially in the instance of meeting people of non threatening but still differing social contexts and experiences--a not uncommon situation within the mobilized and in many cases newly-enfranchised Los Angeles population, for which class, ethnicity, and regional background were often dissimilar. More obvious at this socio-ideological level is the gendered positioning of knowledge and science: Pichel's description of the film's "serious" aspirations is suggested to be proven by the exclusion of the apparently frivolous presence of women, especially · as they may signify spectacle. (Indeed, there is only one female character in the finished film: a brief appearance of farewell by one scientist's wife.) This masculinization of knowledge is supplemented by Pichel's extoling his own educational experience in preparing for the picture, a personalized advertisement for the film's claims of 196 authenticity. (In a later article in Astounding Science Fiction about the production of the film, Heinlein credited Piche! as the chief reason that the film was not contaminated by Hollywood fancy and imprecision.SS} The gendering of information is consistent within the socially-defined range of knowledges addressed in the program, the focus of which ultimately is "new" knowledge- -about the movies, about science and technology, about the future, even about television. Later in the program, during a long transitional period between sets on different soundstages, casual patter among the participants indicates the sliding relationships between these knowledges, as well as some important historical contexts in which to place them. Keith and Dorothy, temporarily caught between locations they are to describe, remark on the precedents being set in the telecast, and are soon introduced to Robert Brower, the film's Technicolor advisor, who discusses the challenges and rewards of color as one aspect of the film's spectacle. KH: (looking about} "This is, this is quite a place too, isn't it?" DG: "It is. Look." KH: "All of the things that go into making a motion picture that, uh, well you people out there that have never had the opportunity to visit a motion picture set, you're gonna see a lot of things tonight that will amaze you and may fool you just a bit, too." DG: "Why, I think this is the first time this has ever been televised, inside a studio, right?" KH: "As far as we know it is. n89 197 Piche! then arrives, and points out to them the nearby Technicolor camera: a larger than usual apparatus which, he explains, must move all about the set. He then introduces Lionel Lindon, the director of photography on the picture, and after a short discussion about Lindon's duties, introduces Brower. IP: "And this is Mr. Robert Brower •.• DG and KH: "How do you do ••• " IP: "· •• who's the color consultant on the picture, and keeps us straight about what can be photographed in Technicolor." KH: "You mean you have difficulties there, too." IP: "Indeed we do ••. " RB: "This is an especially interesting job, however, this picture." KH: (positioning Brower) "Would you turn around and take a look at our camera?" DG: "· •• turn around a little bit and take a look at our friends in the audience?" RB: (referring to someone offscreen, perhaps Lindon) "With 'Curly' over here, we've done some things that have act.ually never been done before, in a Technicolor picture, and it's been tremendously interesting for all of us." DG: "The sets are really beautiful." RB: "Yeah, they're terrific." DG: "They're so real-like." KH: "Do the colors come out true, on Technicolor?" RB: (nodding) "Oh yes, yes. " KH: "In other words, the blouse that Dorothy is wearing would come out that same shade of green?" RB: "This would come out green; unfortunately our present audience can't see that . . . " KH: "No." RB: "· .• beautiful green. We hope by the time this picture's out--you see this picture is in 1960. And by that time maybe television will be color, and we'll be able to get some good color on the television screen, as well as on the motion picture screen." KH: "Well, we hope so, too. Here comes another camera; let's move out of the way." 198 An awkward interruption ensues, as a KTLA camera--itself an unwieldy apparatus--is wheeled through the place they were standing. As it passes, Keith and Dorothy offer "filler" commentary: KH: "This just gives you a little idea of what the cameraman ... " DG: "One of our cameramen • . " (inaudible) KH: "Well, as we put it here, it isn't exactly trouble, it's just plain, hard work." DG: "Hard labor! Hard labor . • " They look around for the next topic to discuss. DG: "I wonder, uh •.• " KH: "Where did Mr. Piche! go? Mr. Piche!!" IP: (offscreen) "Yes!" Several important aspects of the show seem to me notable in this transitional, "interruptive" segment. First of all is the now apparent trio of spectacles conjoined within the telecast--the spectacle or aura of the set, and motion pictures in general; the spectacle of a behind-the-scenes perspective on the motion picture industry and its production; and likewise the spectacle of a behind-the-scenes perspective on television. This latter focus allows the show's often unpolished, even haphazard structure to become a code of the "reality" it purports to communicate (a sign of the "pioneering" endeavors of the station), that works to contain the 199 potentially too-disruptive negotiation of flow and discontinuity (which by contemporary standards are set at a decidedly gradual pace). Within this dynamic of spectacles, women tend to be relegated to a seemingly necessary yet devalued role vis-a-vis science, technology, and knowledge, as the discussion of Gardiner's blouse indicates: though co-host, she often serves a "phatic" function, helping to maintain the conditions necessary for steady discursive exchange, rather than actively moving the discussions forward on the show.90 The "knowledges" themselves can be seen to wrap around one another. Brower's easy transition from discussing 1) the film (at first confusing its futuristic 1960 setting with the release date), and 2) the potentialities of television, reveals the easy slippage of socially-determined ideas about "progress" onto the future of/the future according to television. As a means of delivering such new and topical subject matters, TV is positioned to be not only a conduit, but an important component of the "future." Such a slippage is integral to City at Night's overall project, which to some extent can be seen as confirming itself within a regular examination and display of Fordist production methods and consumer leisure attractions. The general design of the program was itself 200 a Fordist model, following a perceived "assembly line" of the industrialized production of mass goods. Supplying linear and rational understandings and meanings for these "attractions," the show had a great potential to spur the markets for products on view (including television), therefore assuming an overdetermined position as disseminator of knowledge about the use and exchange value of post-war goods and services, especially those that were locally-produced. The project of City at Night, which is particularly indicative of this episode but also overall, can be seen not to only "document" LA, but to cover it in such a way as to subscribe to what Pam Rosenthal has described as "the populism of the technofuture." This depiction of technology and industrialization has roots in the "fantastic" magazine literature of the 1920's and 19JO's, the maven of which was Hugo Gernsback, who published several of these magazines for decades. 91 Rosenthal suggests that The liberating technofuture was • . • an intrinsic element in a spread of progressive to pseudo-progressive ideologies of the first half of the twentieth century, from Keynesian liberalism to socialism to futurism. In varying ways, all of these ideologies (socialism perhaps most of all) posited a progressive integration of the working class into industrialism, and all of them assumed that what integrated the workers into industrialism was some causal relationship between labor and the quality of life. The technofuture was a simple, sensible dialectical idea--one worked in order to create a world that would make work less necessary •.•. Moreover, one also worked in order to earn money to buy commodities that would help create a richer personal life. • The Gernsbackian view of the future, then, was right at home within the popular imagination of Fordism. Fordism could sell its forward-looking vision to masses of people because that vision included concerns both for the redemption of work and for the improved quality of personal life. And it needed to sell that vision because, as Ford contended and as Reynes and the Great Depression proved, you could not have functioning capitalism without the dependable participation of the large majority of the work force, both as producers and as consumers.92 201 By 1949, the strategic importance of consumerism was positioned wi.thin less utopian, more threatening contexts. From this perspective, Gardiner's joke reference to "hard labor" (KH: "· .• it's just plain, hard work." DG: "Hard labor! Hard labor •.• ") takes on an interesting potential significance. Rhyming an earlier playful use of that phrase by one of the men in charge of painting the enormous moonscape set, its reappearance here can be understood as a similarly ironic reference to the work involved in producing early TV, or remote telecasts (since it occurs ·as a TV camera is wheeled by)--this work is jokingly implied to be prison-like. An additional potential level of meaning for the phrase is as a marking of the term "labor"--a parodic emphasis placed so as to 202 single it out as pretentious or otherwise socially unacceptable. Such a level of meaning would be fully in keeping with Los Angeles' long history as an open-shop city, particularly stressed in this anti-labor, red baiting, strike-laden period. A survey of public discourse at the time of the telecast supports such a potential level of meaning, as does the show's emphases- indeed, if the project of City at Night can be seen to accommodate itself to a vision of "progressive" consumerism, part of this project is in promoting Los Angeles as a city that "works" (in the sense of the title of rival station KTTV's similarly-formatted show, success Story), rather than a city that "labors." The LoS Angeles Times, for example, always anti union, was highlighting strike coverage of national and local significance during this period. Headline topics from the front section of the October 1 and 2 papers include the steel workers' strike centered in Pittsburgh (mediated by President Truman) which impacted on four local plants and some 3,000 LA workers; the Goodrich strike centered in Dayton, which closed the local LA plant that employed 750; the United Auto workers debate in Detroit about whether to strike Ford over pension benefits; and the proposed end of a two-week strike by the United Mine Workers (also centered in Pittsburgh). By 203 October 10, the page one headline indicated that some 2 million workers were on strike nationwide. Anti-labor sentiments, masked during the war as a position upholding the selfless unity and patriotism necessary to victory, were in this post-war period more directly tied to virulent reactions to the perceived threat of Communism. Perhaps best embodied by the procedures of the House Un-American Activities Committee (which, in part as a publicity device, had begun investigating Hollywood in 1947), the fear of a red taint also registered across various local and regional strata. For example, Mike Davis has indicated the "witch-hunting" activities of the Roman Catholic leader of Los Angeles in this period-- Archbishop (later Cardinal) Francis Mcintyre.93 More specific to the historical moment of this telecast of city at Night, the Regents of the University of California had recently demanded an anti communist declaration from the more than 11,000 employees of that institution's eight campuses.94 This fear of Communist subversion, fueled by various "spy trials" in the news, 9 5 was especially pronounced due to the recent disclosure that the Soviet Union had detonated its own atomic bomb (President Truman announced this on September 23, 1949), leading to widespread speculation about the means and terms of future, 204 anticipated warfare. This topic is implicitly related to the episode of city at Night analyzed here. In one article contemporary to this telecast, military scientists were predicting "push-button" warfare by use of "robot" (electronically controlled) rocket weapons that would replace guns and bombs, all before the apparently pivotal year of 1960. Those are the predictions of military scientists working under intense secrecy rules on a whole galaxy of robot weapons which may someday reduce warfare to the child's play of button pushing ••.• Theoretically, the scientists add, it is possible to build a rocket which will fly to the moon, or escape the earth's gravity and circle endlessly around the globe as a space ship ready to strike at a push button signal ••.• The air-borne robot weapon appears to be the most practical development of a long range missile at this time • • .% This overview of public concerns indicates the range of socio-political levels latent among the social graces in evidence on the telecast. Such a political context is itself somewhat overdetermined in the program text. Destination Moon, for example, as a direct tangent, if not a kind of textual Unconscious of the telecast, represents one "pragmatic" response to these hotly discussed "threats." The film is a significant reworking of its source material, Heinlein's juvenile space novel Rocket Ship Galileo (1947). As H. Bruce Franklin has noted in 205 his study of Heinlein, whereas the juvenile novel evidenced an enthusiasm for amateur science and a fantasy about undermining Nazis on the moon, it was transformed by 1949 into a salute to the military-industrial complex, portrayed as serving the nation in both its dogged commitment to research and development and its protectionist attitude toward the moon, which is positioned as a crucial site of military strategy.97 Gone are the adventurous, science-loving teenaged boys of Rocket Ship Galileo. The crew of the rocket now consists of the inventor, "the General," a big industrialist, and an assistant engineer. Their flight represents the triumph of the military-industrial complex--portrayed as an all-star cast of heroes who are the only possible saviors of American society. The technocratic boys of Heinlein's youth have grown up, becoming the technocratic men projected as our true elite. Heinlein's screenplay describes "the dominant group" in the shot of assembled industrialists as "the just past young, energetic, far-sighted and dynamic men who are the backbone of American industry. n98 Franklin goes on to report that the first three drafts of Heinlein's script contained a "thinly disguised Communist plot," with "atomic rockets" aimed at U.S. cities and an enemy General who "sneers at the 'decadent democracies' and whose own nation has the 'efficiency • • • of a solidified state.' n99 While the final film does not contain such an overt threat, Peter Biskind has referred to it as politically "centrist": Centrist science fiction adopted an Us/Them framework, whereby that which threatened consensus was simply derogated as "Other." The Other was indeed communism, but it was also ·everything the center was not .••• Centrist science fiction films • • • were expansion- and exploration-oriented, imperialist rather than paranoid. In Destination Moon, the moon is regarded as a potential military base, and "others" must be prevented from exploiting it. The American astronaut takes possession "by the grace of God and in the name of the United States. 11 100 206 While the level of paranoia in this film may not be extreme, it does position the future as clearly threatened by "other" forces, suggesting that we are reliant on the leaders of industry to innovate appropriate and clearly advantageous strategies of production and growth which will serve as our best defense versus these "others." While such details and premises of the film's plot are never discussed during the episode of City at Night- indeed, Pichel seems to offer only partial, cliff-hanger details--the program shifts subtly away from a purely fictive emphasis to one which is in many ways equally futuristic but decidedly more empirical. Among the people on the Destination Moon set whom Pichel introduces is Gene May, the top test pilot for Douglas aircraft, recently in the news for his speed-breaking flights at Muroc Air Force BaselOl and intimately involved in the Douglas Navy jet ("Skyrocket") program. Just after the conversation with Brower, Keith and Dorothy hail Pichel: KH: "Well, what are you going to show us now?" IP: "A gentleman I know you'd like to meet." (looking offscreen) "Where's Gene May?" (May approaches from offscreen) "Mr. May." (to Keith and Dorothy) "Did you read about the pilot who flew faster than the speed of sound? (unintelligible) feet above the ground?" KH: "I certainly did." (they shake hands) IP: "This is he." KH: "That was just last week, wasn't it Gene?" GM: "Yes. A week ago last Thursday." KH: "Uh-huh. That was piercing the supersonic wall, huh?" GM: "Well, that's what they say. As far as I am concerned, I don't know." KH: "I want you to turn around and take a look at the camera for a minute. How long you been flying, Gene?" GM: Well, the first flight I made was in 1926. So that adds up to be approximately 23 years." KH: "And how about your family status--9© are you a married man?" GM: "Oh yes, yes I'm married and I have three children besides. In addition to that about six months ago I was presented with a lovely granddaughter." KH: "Is that right?" DG: "Well!" KH: "Imagine a grandpa flying faster than sound!" GM: "Well, it isn't so much of a trick." KH: "It isn't, huh? You've pierced that wall several times though I understand, in the past." GM: "As a matter of fact, with the Navy's Douglas Skyrocket, piercing the so-called sonic wall is sort of an everyday routine." KH: "Mm-hmmm." GM: "That particular airplane was designed that way, and there is just nothing to it." KH: "Do you get any particular sensations of speed in that plane?" GM: "Well, Keith, at higher altitudes obviously, there is so much space beneath 207 you that the illusion of speed just doesn't happen to be there." (Keith and Dorothy are distracted by something offscreen.) "But if you're travelling anywhere near that speed close to the ground, I dare say that the ground looks like the edge of a high-speed grinding wheel being held immediately before your eyes." 208 After a discussion of attempts to photograph the plane as Mr. May flew it, Hetherington asks about the velocity of the plane. KH: "And at a speed of well over what?" GM: "Uh, I • • • " KH: "We don't want to give away any military secrets here!" (laughs) GM: "No, I'm sorry Keith, I cannot in any way quote any speed--any information coming forth about the performance of this aircraft will have to come from the proper sources, and I assure you it's not me." Piche! quickly re-enters during the muff led acknowledgments of May's hesitancy. Piche! gestures off screen. KH: "We'd like to see a model of that ship." IP: "This is Commander Rice of the Navy Bureau of Information." DG: (shaking his hand) "How do you do?" KH: "How are you, Commander?" Piche! also calls to a Navy Lieutenant (whose name is unintelligible) who maintains a profile just outside of camera range. IP: "I think Commander Rice has a model of the plane that Mr. May flew ... " The Commander holds forth a 10-12 inch model plane. DG: "Oh, this is a model? May I?" (Dorothy holds the plane for all to see, especially the camera.) CR: "That is the Navy Douglas Skyrocket." Cut to closer view of the model, Gardiner and May in the background. KH: "Say, that's a sweet-lookin' little job, isn't it?" CR: "The wing span would fit in your living room: about 25 feet." KH: "25 feet. And what's the overall length of the ship?" CR: "About 45 .feet." KH: "And this is the latest design, this swept-back wing?" CR: "That's right." IP: {from offscreen) "You think that's fast? Look at this." 209 Cut to a slightly more distant angle, and a register of great surprise on Gardiner's face as they all begin to laugh. Piche! enters with a model of the film's rocket that is some 4 feet long, dwarfing the other model. IP: "This goes seven miles a second." KH: "It does, does it." DG: "Seven miles a second." The angle changes to a five-shot, with Piche! holding his model rocket. The military men are silent. He goes on to detail the various compartments inside the rocket, finally claiming as a joke that the engine is even more secret than the speed of the Skyrocket. The unanticipated yet by no means accidental inclusion of military and military-industrial figures and discourses is most significant to this episode, and what it implies about Landsberg's "remote" tendencies. Extremely topical, especially in this region, the exploits of pilot Gene May introduce, from a "pragmatic" vantage point, both the promise of future technology and the potential security that this technology might afford. Security, from this regional perspective, was tied not only to technological advances in weaponry and defense systems, but also to the local economy. As Roger Lotchin has pointed out in his study of the military-industrial I I · I 210 complex in California,102 defense industries (aircraft, space, electronics) had begun to impact on the Southern California economy as early as the end of World War I, and grew in importance via spurts of investment until reaching a point of saturation in the 1970's. The post-World War II period represented one of these key spurts (a dynamic I will discuss in more detail later in this chapter). By the mid-1950's, according to Lotchin, 55% of manufacturing employment in Los Angeles County depended directly or indirectly on government aerospace contracts.103 The presence of the Naval officers on the Destination MQQ.n set, unmotivated and certainly "staged" or prearranged, serves to connote a kind of "realist" gloss over these underlying economic dynamics--a metonymic extension of the futuristic scenario to include an interested though not centrally-determining military observation. The officers are later suggested to be acting on their personal curiosity about the project, though also serving in an occasional, casual advisory role--explanations which nevertheless also serve as signs of complicity with the regional and state project Lotchin describes. Especially the appearance (and prominence) of Gene May, the Douglas test pilot, who was wholly unrelated to the film project, demonstrates a fluidity of 211 "topicalities" commensurate with the various advantages seen to coincide with the military-industrial rise in the area. City at Night becomes something like an "envoy" from the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, promoting ambiguous but related ties between various Southern California industries: beneficial to the local economy; at work to preserve America's leading position in technology, scientific knowledge, and the relation of these to national security; and even just good clean fun. The limited information about the program suggests that this was not an entirely isolated topic for the show. As indicated in Landsberg's remarks at the BMI seminar, for example, Douglas Aircraft was highlighted as one of the many manufacturing concerns ultimately visited by City at Night. As an empirical representative of the military industrial complex so important to LA's post-war economy, Gene May is on a personal level also emblematic of the kind of ideological shift implied by Heinlein's adaptation: a strong patriarchal presence, covering over the newness of boyish technological enthusiasm with a grandfatherly aplomb. Such an attempted patriarchal "cover" over boyish bravado is suggested as well by the duelling speed phalluses ultimately presented by Piche! 212 and the Navy Commander. Hetherington's description of the Skyrocket model as "a sweet lookin' little job" corresponds with other cultural examples of men feminizing their desired objects of speed and power (cars, guns, etc.). But Pichel's blatantly suggestive comparison of the two models reveals them for the fetish objects that they are--within the telecast, jet airplanes, rocketry, and television (as immediate vision at a distance) are in some ways collapsed within the overall masculinist discourse of the future. Such a collapsing of technologies is even more evident in the coverage of the A-bomb tests near Las Vegas in the spring of 1952. While an exhaustive account of these telecasts will not be approached here, an attention to various foreclosures and contradictions within the discourses employed is instructive in the context of the tropes already evidenced in this chapter. The A-bomb coverage incorporates both televison's access to crisis and catastrophe, and its imbrication within concepts of "progress" and a technologically-advanced future. But the excesses in the coverage, much of it directly ideological (infused with discourse from the Atomic Energy Commission, etc.) and also ardently masculinist, indicate the level of genuine threat that the bomb tests represented. The Nevada A-Bomb Tests The April and May, 1952 telecasts of A-bomb detonations, though the first sanctioned by the Atomic 213 Energy Commission, were not the first to be attempted on local Los Angeles television. In February, 1951, over a year earlier, KTLA and KTTV had placed cameras atop Mt. Wilson to catch a glimpse of an atomic flash from Las Vegas. Atomic testing had begun at the Nevada Test Site on January 27, 1951, as the first of the "Ranger Series" of A-bombs was detonated. Four other bombs were tested in less than two weeks, the last of which, early on the morning of February 6, was seen on local television. Pointing their cameras to the horizon line northeast, KTLA began broadcasting at 4:30 am, while KTTV began at about 5:00 am.104 Both stations electronically darkened their picture, to increase contrast for the initial flash. KTTv was broadcasting without sound, while KTLA was in radio contact with Gil Martyn in Las Vegas, who was watching for the flash from atop the Flamingo Hotel. KLAC, channel 13, sent a film crew to Nevada for footage of the test, to be used on Clete Roberts' evening newscast.lOS KTLA also had a film crew accompanying Martyn. Shortly after sunrise, the blast occurred: The seconds ticked by and suddenly out of the east a blinding flash erupted on the screens. The mountains disappeared as if by magic. For what seemed like minutes the television screen was a ball of brilliant fire. Then, again as if by magic, the valleys of the mountains in the lower portions of the screen began to take shape, moving quickly up the sides of the hills as the glow subsided.106 214 coverage of the aftermath was apparently short-lived and anti-climactic, as KTTV stayed on the air for seven minutes in the futile hope of registering a sound or shock wave, while on KTLA, Gil Martyn attempted to interview people on the street in downtown Las Vegas. (The only reported interviewee was a weary croupier who hadn't seen the test.107) But footage from the KTLA and KLAC coverage was coveted by the networks and wire services, who had sent only still photographers to cover the test. KTLA scheduled telecasts of its films of the blast (which included a kinescope of the Mt. Wilson coverage) several times that evening .108 Meager though this coverage apparently was, it points out 1) the great interest concerning the atomic tests in LA, particularly the desire to "see" a test, and 2) the very different conditions of station competition which were rapidly becoming apparent in the Los Angeles television market. It is important to emphasize that the context of the 1952 A-bomb test coverage was considerably changed from that of either the Fiscus telecast or the episode of City at Night considered above. Institutional, 215 technological, and programming developments had transformed much of the early television landscape, and KTLA's position within it. In addition, regional socio economic developments (and associated ideological parameters) are ·important to consider in contextualizing the A-bomb telecasts, which contained both celebration and wariness toward these spectacles of power. Not surprisingly, the discursive structures pervading these telecasts evidence many of the contradictions inherent to atomic culture and what it seemed to represent. By spring of 1952, all seven local stations were fully functional and competitive, including three popular network affiliates. (Many of DuMont's programs had been carried by the Los Angeles Times station KTTV since CBS ended its affiliation with channel 11 in April, 1951. DuMont hoped to originate programs from the West Coast via KTTV, but the station remained largely an independent and local station rather than a network affiliate.) Although KTLA remained the most popular station overall, the encroaching threat of network domination in the Los Angeles market was enhanced by the recently completed coast-to-coast link-up, as well as the current construction of large state-of-the-art West coast production facilities by both NBC and CBs·109 These developments meant fewer (and ultimately zero) kinescoped 216 Eastern shows, but also more numerous network shows originating from LA. What's more, the competition for local news coverage had grown considerably, the result of the local TV industry's development, and an increased awareness o· f and demand for TV news--a condition more ideological than merely industrial. According to a study conducted by James Rue for the Department of Radio-Television at USC, the "spark" for this interest was the outbreak of the Korean War in late June, 1950110 (nine months after Truman had announced the USSR's atomic capabilities). Rue's analysis of TV news techniques in Los Angeles was carried out during most of 1950, and he determined that the war induced an almost immediate increase in the number of TV news programs and news personnel. Radio, according to Rue, was clearly "the 'Goliath' of communications as it flashed 'on the spot' war news direct from the battlefronts. 11 111 Television news (which relied on teletype, wirephoto, and less immediate film and newsreel coverage of non-local events), though at a temporal disadvantage, grew at a speed much accelerated from that of the rest of local television. At the time the war began, only two independent stations, KFI (channel 9) and KLAC (channel 13), programmed shows during the morning, afternoon, and evening. All other stations broadcast only in the evening, though schedules of many were set to expand in the fall. 112 Nevertheless, Rue reported an empirical jump in the number of newscasts: During the week of June 18, 1950, three of the seven TV stations in the Los Angeles area had no regularly scheduled news programs on the air. One week later the Korean war broke out and the nation became news conscious. Clete Roberts joined the staff of KLAC-TV that week with a nightly five-minute commentary. Each week saw new faces on the screen: Bob Hartman, the Korean Correspondent, reported for KTTV; Fleetwood Lawton and Lee Wood presented the news nightly over KTSL; and Harry w. Flannary arrived on the scene at KLAC-TV with his analysis of the days happenings. All seven outlets frequently supplied war news headlines. During the week of August 27, 1950, eighty-seven news presentations were available as compared to fifty-six before the war.113 217 Local interest in the Korean effort was pervasive, as it impacted on not only nationalistic sentiments but various regional economic and security concerns. Many troops and reserves lived in southern California, and the ports in Long Beach and San Diego were active points of departure and arrival during the war. Anti-red sentiments and suspicions, already prevalent, were newly fueled and expanded upon. A related, growing fear of nuclear attack and devastation was promulgated by leaders such as Mayor Fletcher .Bowron, who coined the phrase "Target Los Angeles" in a 1950 speech calling for "more drastic and effective action in stamping out Communism. 11 11 4 According to Lotchin, such imagery was common as "Califonia - witnessed a resurgence of the 'science' of military disaster prediction" in the post-WWII era.115 These predictions were part of a larger civic and 218 socio-economic contradiction, whereby California cities courted new military-industrial investments while decrying the threat such investments incurred. Bowron's speech described the Los Angeles area: [It] contained five million people; it was a center for the dispensation of information through the media; it contained huge aircraft and "allied industries" capable of delivering or deterring an atomic attack; and "here, too close for comfort are oil refineries producirig high octane aviation gasoline. 11116 But if such a description might benefit attempts to promote civil defense programs (and also gain federal assistance for them), it also points toward a prominent direction in which the local economy was to continue. Lotchin argues that the rise of the military industrial complex in California, initiated during the period between the world wars, was determined more by the efforts of city boosters than by a "natural" industrial expansion westward, or some centralized bureaucratic design. First and foremost, in California, what is called the military-industrial complex, initially involved cities more than industries. The coalitions mobilized to promote military growth in Urban California were organized on urban rather than industrial bases, and, indeed, military investment was specifically designed to compensate for the Western industrial lag •••• In other words, Urban California initially chose defense investment as a growth strategy precisely because it had not captured enough industry, civilian or military. Thus, the term "metropolitan military complex" would seem more appropriate than military-industrial complex. Its origins stemmed from metropolitan anxiety rather than from industrial necessity.ll1 219 Nevertheless, the growth of this sector in post-WWII Los Angeles involved both a popular participation in defense industry investments and more rarefied forms of this investment. Lotchin, for example, details the rise of the California Institute of Technology in the 1920's, which was largely due to the hire of physicist Robert Millikan by the then-minor institution's board of trustees--whose membership was a virtual "who's who" of LA boosterism.ll 8 Millikan, in joint effort with Hungarian- German emigre aerodynamicist Theodore von Karman, soon created "an interface between the ivory tower and the world of industry,nll9 which resulted in the creation of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT), and the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), helping substantially to transform southern California into the center of the aircraft and aerospace industries. 220 A notable military investment in the post-WWII Los Angeles economy--one which featured a different, though complementary mode of "prediction science"--had been instituted in 1946 when General Henry H. ("Hap") Arnold, head of the Army Air Force, established the RAND Project at Douglas Aircraft, based on von Karman's plans. Emphasizing research and development (what the acronym RAND stands for), Arnold invested funds remaining from his WWII budget in order to expand upon the military-civilian collaboration which had proven to be so effective in wartime operations research. In 1948, RAND was incorporated and, with support from the Ford Foundation, became "an independent institute for ·futures research,"uo supplying technical plans to the newly-configured U.S. Air Force, and eventually branching into weapons procurement. In the early 1950's RAND also lobbied itself into an advisory position with the federal government, by which it offered the primary interpretations of atomic weaponry, "explaining the destructive connotations of the new weapon. n121 Thus was established in Los Angeles key facilities for classified speculation and "futurology" (Andrew Ross' term for the bureaucratic form of the appropriation of traditionally left futurism122), one with military roots that set out a significant trope in the rise of the 221 "technocratic elite" in the U.S. Ross suggests that this branch of the technocracy continued to bear the mark of their origin in military operations research since they appealed to a process of elite decision making whose automatic command structure was aimed at executing planned objectives with maximum efficiency. In the elite milieu of these institutes and think tanks, there was no role for popular or democratic decision-making about the future.1 23 A certain level of investment and bureaucratic decision-making for the military-industrial complex did, then, exist in a privileged, top-down configuration-- though significantly located among the interests of power- brokers in southern California, rather than in Washington D.C. More conte~porary to the A-bomb tests, the Korean War renewal of military and munitions ·manufacturing proved a more widespread boon to local Los Angeles industry. In September, 1951 the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce sponsored a four-day "Military Opportunity Display" at the Hollywood Turf Club in order to "aquaint businessmen fully with the possibilities of military sales during the Korean War and to speed up the buildup of contracts between supplier and service purchasing agents. nl24 Now, instead of a few large contractors like Douglas and Lockheed, the area was literally covered with businessmen who had a stake in preserving the · metropolitan share of government contracts, a vested interest in promoting defense spending, and a compelling reason to prevent a thoroughgoing dispersal of defense installations.I~ 1951 was also a period of renewed anti-red activities, as the House Committee on Un-American 222 Activities (HUAC) began in the spring their second, more- sweeping probe of the motion picture industry. Whereas the 1947 hearings had led to the incarceration of the Hollywood Ten, this investigation by HUAC resulted in the unofficial blacklisting of dozens in the entertainment industry. By February, 1952, the Committee was announcing that Hollywood was "the Communists' greatest financial angel," and was cautioning the television industry against similar "infiltration": Noting the effect of Hollywood on television, the committee hoped that its inquiries among film figures "will have a far-reaching effect and prevent a large scale future Communist infiltration of the television industry." "It is logical to assume that the Communists will endeavor to infiltrate television on a large scale because it is rapidly becoming an important entertainment medium in the United States," the Committee asserted .126 Apparently as a public response to such charged implications, Landsberg--who of course worked for a television station owned and operated by a movie studio- distanced television from motion pictures by offering an industrially-based rationale to deflect the Committee's suspicions. Suggesting that "the very nature" of the television industry would act as a "safeguard" against such political infiltration, he added that "We don't employ people just for one show . . • • Our producers, directors and writers are part of a permanent staff, and therefore better known to us than Eeople in a media who are hired per job." 27 The telecasts of the Nevada A-bomb tests (the 223 planning of which began about five weeks after Landsberg's comments) fit squarely within all of the above dynamics: providing KTLA a newsworthy coup, by which the station transcended local and network competition (furnishing the "feed" for every LA station and all three major networks); serving as a nationalistic bellwether in its demonstration of U.S. prowess during a wartime political environment128; celebrating U.S. defense interests and developments, which were important to the region's economy as well as its clout in Washington; and also providing the ultimate imagery for dystopic fears and Los Angeles' catastrophic imaginary. Especially regarding this latter point, the telecasts can be seen to parallel the spectacles of air power that were prevalent in California in the 1920's and 1930's, which served to publicize the aircraft industry.129 Incorporating air races, endurance flights, maneuvers by Arnold's squadrons from March Field in Riverside, and special craft such as dirigibles--not to mention social activities such as dances--these aerial spectaculars 224 ultimately took the form of "theoretical" tests designed to emulate attacks on the three major California coastal cities (San Francisco, San Diego, and LA), developing into what Lotchin calls "a kind of urban 'air power theater,' designed both to 'educate' and entertain a frightened metropolitan public."130 The A-bomb telecasts were of course more extreme in their display of both dread and military superiority. The bomb's capacity for widespread destruction was genuine and awe-inspiring--very real and yet too much to imagine. In addition, there existed deep ambivalence pervading the spectacle of the mushroom cloud--an image so ominous and yet so nebulous as to allow any number of potential (and contradictory) meanings to be aligned with it. As Vincent Leo points out, the image of the cloud had at first indicated, on one level, American military primacy: However, this new American primacy was not the only message carried by the mushroom cloud photographs in the American picture press of 1945. On a deeper pictorial level, these photographs manifested the swiftness of this American rise to ascendancy. . • • [they] gave new meaning to the term "historical turning point"--as if the American rise to power happened within the temporal boundaries of the photograph, as if the world had changed in one moment of photographic description .131 Paul Boyer and Bruce Franklin have detailed many other responses to these first public and wartime uses of atomic weaponry, which were understandably more 225 apprehensive and even apocalyptic.132 Many called for the use of atomic power for beneficial means; others suggested that the Bomb had brought an end to traditional, self interested politics. But the Soviet A-bomb test in 1949 and the outbreak of the Korean conflict seem to have quelled these passions into a Cold War temperament. According to Boyer, By 1950, the obsessive post-Hiroshima awareness of the horror of the atomic bomb had given away to an interval of diminished cultural attention and uneasy acquiescence in the goal of maintaining atomic superiority over the Russians.133 A persistent strain of public discourse continued a more assertive and celebratory use of the mushroom cloud image. Many of these uses related directly to television, particularly in emphasizing the meteoric growth of the industry in this critical period of post-war consumer expansion. For example, an advertisement for Du Mont in the April, 1949 issue of Television magazine--the same month as the Fiscus incident, and prior to the soviet tests--utilizes a sketch of a mushroom cloud (so large as to be seen next to Saturn and various stars) in order to represent the company's 10-year investment and growth in television broadcasting: "First in all phases of television. nl34 The March, 1950 cover of Radio and Television Retailing magazine is more explicit in its constructed relationship between the Bomb (as sign of the 226 immediacy of U.S. might) and the indomitable might of U.S. consumerism: a 1947-1950 sales growth chart for various household appliances overlays the image of an atomic blast at Bikini Atoll.135 The line representing television sales is the only one depicted in red, shooting up at a slope far outpacing washing machines, refrigerators, and passenger autos. The skyrocketing sales of consumer goods, and especially television {another seemingly "uncontrollable" yet beneficial technology) are allied with the Bomb, ostensibly as twin means of continuing the ascendancy of the U.S. way of life. However, particularly in retrospect, the ambivalence and pervasiveness of the mushroom cloud image during this period can be seen as contributing to a less-celebratory and more ironic dynamic of post-war consumerism--an almost nihilistic flip-side to the "immediacy" of U.S. ascendancy--one to which the A-bomb test telecasts certainly would have contributed. Ross suggests that the more genuine consequences of the promotion of this image were confined to a wholly abstract picture of instantaneous annihilation. U.S. Army ground footage of the real effects of the bomb on survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was suppressed. Public consumption was limited instead to those aesthetically fascinating images of distant mushroom clouds that so quickly became naturalized as part of the future's domestic fantasy-landscape .•.. This is not to say that the abstract, aestheticized imagery had no deep purchase upon popular fears and anxieties about the short-term futures of daily life. The corporate state's attempts to depict a nuclear threat was all too successful in this respect, establishing a pervasive sense of determined pessimism while reinforcing, through the spectator's sheer remoteness from the nuclear images, the belief that decisions about this future were always made elsewhere, by people who lived in a cloud of nebulous reason.136 For the Los Angeles populace, "decisions" such as these doubtless seemed to have been made "elsewhere"-- especially as to their inherent national attention and impact--but also inflected by local self-interest, as indicated by the development of military investments 227 surveyed above. The first sanctioned television coverage of an A-bomb test on April 22, 1952, which would not have been possible at that time without the determined intervention of Landsberg and KTLA, mirrored this dynamic in many ways. Positioned centrally within both the local and national broadcasts of the tests, KTLA occupied a unique televisual role--a kind of technological/industrial discursive "shifter, 11 137 since its "feed" was employed in every possible communicative act of the blanketed regional and network televising of this event. Landsberg and the station reached a pinnacle of apparatus-hood that day, their "remote" possibilities auspicious indeed, and at the 228 cutting edge of most all that television as an industry and as an emerging cultural institution could hope to be. Certainly this is the profile of the incident still carried forth by the station in its self-histories and publicity materials. I do not discount the considerable efforts of Landsberg, et al, which evidenced an ingenuity and determination remarkable for its time or any other. But neither do the concerns of this study rest with these achievements. Indeed, such an emphasis on the act of "communicating"--on the technological and discursive processes and accomplishments in "covering" the tests--can be seen to suffuse this coverage, and to serve as one important mode of "containing" the underlying threats and contradictions that the tests made manifest. The historical significance of KTLA's activities that day exceeds the phatic role that the station played, and resonates with the ideological charge that almost all of the television industry was both tapping into and helping to disseminate. The marked public interest in the A-bomb tests was of course the primary determinant of the telecast's impact, so much so that the first broadcast might be considered a nascent "media event," in the terms of Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz's study of this television genre .13 8 For Dayan and Katz, media events consist of particular configurations of "the festive viewing of television," those historic occasions--mostly occasions of state--that are televised as they take place and transfix a nation or the world • 139 This first A-bomb telecast conforms to many of the 229 criteria found in the Dayan and Katz studies: the event to be represented was widely anticipated and pre-arranged; its importance was seen to be sufficient to dominate and preempt regular broadcast practices and schedules; the success of the staged act was historically and socially charged. But Dayan and Katz's methodology is actually most useful in this instance for helping to isolate what seems to disqualify the A-bomb test from their categorization as a "media event," qualities which I find to be defining of the event and worthy of further consideration. Most important from this perspective, the test and its telecast were resolutely "spectacular," and the insistent spectacle nature of them refused any participatory, communal, or interactive response--save the awe/pessimism that Ross suggests above. Narrow in focus, essentially destructive in its "performance," and varied in response only to the extent of cultural contradiction, the A-bomb telecast ultimately is akin to media events 230 only in its apparent ideological intentions. Dayan and Katz explain that media events generally are salutes to the status quo, legitimations of elites, and reiterations of the national well-being ••.• The reverence with which media events are presented ••. [is] undoubtedly reinforcing of the existing power structure, even if they open delicatef potentially subversive questions •.• 40 As close analysis of key sections of both A-bomb test telecasts reveals, these "questions" indeed arise in the course of even supportive (read, "objective") coverage. The fact that these tests were "staged" and pre- arranged complicates and blurs the assignation to them of Doane's triad of television temporality. As ploys for publicity and ideology-dissemination by the AEC, the telecasts certainly qualify, in at least their intended purpose, as "information." Like most television coverage, even that of catastrophes, the telecasts were characterized by their duration (which, Doane suggests, seems to compensate for the suddenness and unexpectedness of catastrophe events141)--the first telecast began at about 9:15 am, and lasted two hours or so. Although fully "expected," the performance of the tests themselves mixed "crisis" and "catastrophe" modes of temporality. Prior to the countdown to explosion (itself a crisis-laden temporality, emphasizing limited amounts of time), the coverage consists largely of surveying the 231 tools and preparations for the tests and the telecasts- underscoring the deadline-like qualities of this event and its coverage. The crucial moment of detonation can be seen to evoke catastrophe not only by its characteristic "instantaneous" occurrence, but also of course by its spectacle of devastating power. Unlike genuine catastrophe coverage, these telecasts did not entail an instant that unexpectedly interrupted the everyday, and therefore allowed the potential for new configurations of meaning. They nevertheless displayed and considered at length the "sign" of a genuine threat of catastrophe--one with the capacity to destabilize comfortable everyday "knowledges"--and ultimately treated that sign as a fetish in an effort to contain and control its meaning. The first telecast was hosted locally by newsmen Grant Holcomb and Fred Henry, who provided brief but telling commentary for this landmark event. The handling of the actual blast, however, belied the sense of professionalism they were to have provided the telecast, and indicated the unpracticed if not primitive nature of this coverage. (As in the case of the City at Night excerpts, the descriptions of these scenes are in my own words.) As the cameras focus on a blurry terrain, Holcomb announces "Bombs away." He counts off increments of five seconds in a regular, metric pacing. General 232 announcements from a loudspeaker in the distance can be faintly heard. This distant voice counts down from the number five. Suddenly, the sight of the explosion briefly overexposes and blacks out the entire screen. Soon a ball of white near the horizon line peers out from within the black circle enshrouding it. Another faint announcement reports that a shock wave will arrive in thirty seconds. Only then, a full half-minute or more after the detonation, does Grant Holcomb offer a laconic comment: GH: "Well, there it is. The first public demonstration, and the biggest continental atomic detonation in the history of the world." As if in ironic response, the shock wave almost immediately follows his final phrase, registering an aural "boom" which acts as a kind of comic punctuation, accenting the frustration of dramatic "crisis" coverage that was intended. Shortly thereafter, Fred Henry begins to describe the mushroom cloud which the detonation has produced--a description which, in its stream of metaphors and projections, begins to reveal the underlying ambivalences pervading the tests. Henry's remarks are followed by those of Grant Holcomb, who adopts a much more pessimistic and defensive posture, obviously influenced by the AEC's prepared directives. (The following quotes are excerpted from the telecast, but maintain the continuity of the commentaries; breaks indicated are breaks in the correspondents' own speech.) FH: "· •• exploded into not the flashy red, brilliant red that we had been led to believe. But it just seemed to hover there for a moment, and then it went up and now it is pouring into the • . • like a donut completely unfolding itself ... a huge puff on a pipe almost, and the red and the brown is now tumbling under, as white smoke comes down from the top, and the dust across this entire basin goes up almost like a battleship. It looks very much like there's a battleship in this basin, with a huge white smoketrail above it, and then this tremendous donut up there that goes higher and higher--it's an absolutely fabulous sight." GH: "Fred, just looking away from the beautiful mushroom that's turning into that fabulous white now, and down to that ugly grey all across the floor of this valley, you can't help but realize that you could put--right inside this proving ground, from where we are--the entire island of Manhattan, New York City. And if you look at that dirty, ugly grey base, you see what that particular weapon can do. And certainly as we've been told here many times during the past few days by Mr. Gordon Dean, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission [and] General Joseph Mills, who is in charge of the air-drop today, the enemy certainly has similar weapons." 233 The binary division evident in these accounts- between a rambling, sequential aesthetic description and an already-determined projection of a final result--is emblematic of the interpretive constraints proposed during the coverage. Resembling a kind of "good cop/bad cop" response, which implicitly establishes the "range" of possible readings or interpretations of the imagery (in this case, between aesthetic beauty and devastating effects), it nevertheless also indicates the futility of such an attempted semantic containment. 234 Henry's description in particular, with its almost surreal juxtapositions of images and metaphors (e.g., a donut and a battleship) but also its evocation of fluidity and ephemerality, emphasizes the event's refusal of concrete and universal meanings. Important in this regard is how several ambiguous yet acculturated gender codes can be seen to underlie this more "aesthetic" rendering of the mushroom cloud: daunting in size and extremely colorful, the cloud is described as "unfolding itself," "tumbling under," and perhaps most evocatively as "a huge puff on a pipe." (Gil Martyn's description of the second blast suggests that the cloud resembles a "giant stalk" as well as "a big ball of cotton.") Such a combination of latent female and phallic imagery, plus some imagery which is merely incongruous, reveals the Imaginary threat that the bomb instills. The description's eroticized register can maintain neither a "purely" separate sexual identity nor a particularly rational one, since tapping into receded, pre-Oedipal fears and anxieties. Quite expectedly, this degree of ambiguity is not maintained, as Holcomb's employment of AEC-directed discourse occupies a defensive posture more aligned with the super-ego. Consciously protective, rendering his interpretation in more literal and Symbolic terms, and positing unidentified others ("the enemy") who serve to 235 reconfirm a nationalistic resolve, his response opposes even the aesthetic appreciation of Henry's description-- emphasizing the "dirty, ugly grey base," etc. This, too, has an underlying gender basis, which seems to me quite "masculine" (if adolescent) in its unflinching and matter- of-fact suggestion of a devastatin~ attack. Such a masculinist perspective is even more apparent in Holcomb's subsequent discussion/interview with United Press correspondent Hugh Baillie, who was covering the test for that organization. Notable here is an emphasis on the physical experience of the event, which is placed into terms resonant with hard-boiled literature: an act of "witnessing" that reeks of bravado. The clip begins with both Holcomb and Baillie looking off toward the distance, surveying what is left of the mushroom cloud. GH: "Still a lot of dirty dust out there, isn't there, Hugh?" They turn toward the camera. HB: "Yes, I've seen a lot of bombardments, but nothing like that." GH: "Well ladies and gentlemen, this is Mr. Hugh Baillie, a gentleman that I'm apt to run into most anyplace in the world. (Baillie smiles] His byline is familiar to all of you--he's the president of the United Press. And like yourself and myself, he, too, saw his first atomic detonation this morning. Hugh, what did you think of it?" HB: "Well, it was of course one of the most tremendous things the eye of man could witness. And if we were sitting out there now [he looks back], intead of just being a few smoke plumes here and there it would be devastated--filled with dead people. Not many dying people, most of them would be dead, I expect." GH: "That's right. What did you think of that shock wave? Did that catch you unawares, as it did me?" (Laughs) HB: "The heat wave did. That was the first one. Because that came almost immediately after the fireball. I expected to feel the shock shortly after the fireball, but you remember we saw the f irebal 1 • . " GH: "Yes." HB: "· •• and almost at the same time, it was just like opening the door of a furnace, and you felt yourself slapped in the face of that heat wave." GH: "Well after that heat wave, I forgot all about the shock wave, and it really caught me unawares ..• " (Laughs) HB: "Yes, if you weren't looking for it, it might give you quite a shove. It did me--I sat back up against the table there, and most of [us] were pretty well braced around where I was sitting, and of course they gave us a warning of its arrival over the loudspeaker here, down where I was, but when it came it was as if someone had given you a combination shove and slap." The implicit gendering of discourse is more 236 excessively marked in this dialogue than it was in the earlier comments. My analysis here is augmented by the physical appearance and vocal inflections of the televisual reporters--especially that of Baillie, who is 237 positioned as the veteran "witness," with respected and worthy insights. While Holcomb is rather slight, Baillie is squat and muscularly stout, his hair in a crew-cut.142 Whereas Holcomb has a pleasant though reedy voice, Baillie's voice is terse and dramatically restrained, as if practiced in holding back the emotions instilled by the event. His "speculation" about a not-too-distant, imagined scene of nuclear devastation (filled with dead people, not dying ones, etc.) evidences a flair for Hemingwayesque distinctions: figured by a sense of familiarity with the axis of death, again cool but direct in putting forth such an abject topic. Lastly, the presence of a joking, yet "professional" camaraderie between the two reporters seals a kind of Hemingway/Howard Hawks ethic of masculine conduct and perspective. The bomb is represented by them, first. of all, as an impressive object to be seen by "the eyes of man." The physicality of its effects renders an opposing "body," constructed in counterpoint to the masculinist discourse that describes it. Ultimately the bomb is discussed as if a kind .of "femme fatale"--duplicitous yet powerful, slapping and shoving the (male) reporters sent to witness it. In this implicit figuration of the bomb as "female," the terms of analysis reveal a somewhat standard masculinist dichotomy between technology and nature, a 238 dichotomy commonly employed in descriptions of catastrophe. Doane suggests that catastrophe, especially in the postindustrial age, always has to do with technology and its potential collapse, "the failure of the escalating technological desire to conquer nature. 11143 As such, catastrophe has a signal relationship to the ideological notion of "Progress," since the time of technological progress is always felt as linear and fundamentally irreversible--technological change is almost by definition an "advance" •... Hence, technological evolution is perceived as unflinching progress toward a total state of control over nature.144 In the case of catastrophes, she points out in a footnote, these terms can resonate with culturally gendered assignations, as a masculinist discourse "attempts to reestablish control over a failed masculinized technology." In this sense, catastrophe is feminized insofar as it designates the reemergence of the nature technology attempts to repress and contro1.l6 Gendered "informational" discourse, employed in the attempt to contain the threats endemic to the A-bomb tests, is key to understanding the depth and specific characteristics of these threats. If the goal of technology is to master nature, the poles of this linear narrative of mastery are transposed and blurred in the 239 case of these tests. The bomb, as an "advance" in technological evolution, suggests in its moment of detonation the potential instant eradication of that historical line. Its "technology" works not to control nature so much as to "unleash" it, since the bomb's power paradoxically resides in the most basic energy of nature itself. The bomb seems in some sense unrepresentable, as if anti-matter or negative space. The symbolic positionings of this device are therefore fraught with contradictions--trying to transform the threats that the bombs represent into "defense," etc. The most prevalent means employed to allay these threats and contradictions is discursive: the "informational" description and commentary engenders the bomb, and attempts to turn the unknown and uncontrollable into the merely new and different (the "news"). Concentrating on the process of covering the event, mastering their own discourse (or at least its dissemination) by establishing a linearity of response and understanding, the reporters shift their focus to the information system of which they are a part. Nevertheless, the remnants of the mushroom cloud, now apparently "calmed" and innocent, draw their continued interest, and serve to compel a discursive return of the repressed. 240 This excerpt continues from the end of the last excerpt, with the same camera placement as before--in front of the two reporters and at their level. GH: "Well one thing that interests me a lot about your coverage here--how are you getting your copy out of here?" HB: "The copy goes out of here over the Signal Corps circuit to Las Vegas, where it is hooked up with our bureau over there, and goes right on the United Press lease wire." Holcomb turns and points off, beyond screen left; Baillie does also. GH: "That's from right over there with the Signal Corps." HB: "Right over here where this GI is sitting, punching that teletype, is where our copy goes out." [New shot: soldiers near the press area, bustling with activity.] "By wireless, down to Las Vegas, and then onto the United Press lease wire there and right into New York and around the world." GH: "Well, they'd never expect to see this in the middle of the desert." HB: "No, I guess not." [New angle: several soldiers seated before placards which are labelled according to different press services.] "No, just looking at that atomic cloud still floating away over there, it now looks as innocent as any other cloud in the sky. Doesn't it?" GH: "It certainly does." [Shot of white cloud up in the sky.] HB: "You can't tell it from the other clouds. Even if you're a scientist, I ... don't suppose. All the color has gone out of it. All those strange shades of orange and red • • • " [Cut to an angle above and slightly behind them, framing them in a 2-shot.] "· .• and the glow is all gone, so it floats along quite harmlessly. I wonder what would happen if somebody flew an airplane through that by mistake?" [Back to original 2-shot of them, in front of them and at their level.] 241 Holcomb smiles in response to Bailie's rhetorical question. Baillie chuckles. They both are drawn to something offscreen as an awkward beat passes. The tone of their voices changes to an admonishing one. GH: "I don't know whether they do that or not." HB: "Maybe it's too high. Maybe it's too high; I suppose it's considerably higher." GH: "I do know that they track that cloud with B-29's all over the United States, until it dissipates itself." HB: "Well, it's well on its way now away from us. I'm glad to see that. For a while, it took a turn in our direction there, do you remember?" They exchange broad smiles. Then Holcomb quickly interjects: GH: "It sure did. Well Mr. Baillie, it's been very pleasant chatting with you here, it's good .to see you again and I hope to see you later in the day ••. " This "unforced error" in describing the staged bomb test--indicating the potential for radioactive fallout, which the AEC wished to avoid and downplay--points out how tenuous the "proper" and ideologically-supportive 242 discourse could be. Like the threatening connotations found within the stream-of-consciousness commentary that accompanies the blasts themselves, such an extended, open- ended dialogue could be expected to inevitably raise a point or an observation which was less than fully "secure" or recuperable. On occasion, these moments took the form of inadvertent jokes, as when, at the start of the second telecast, Gil Martyn becomes unwittingly suggestive in describing the extra-long "Zoomar" television camera lenses to be used: "this is quite an accomplishment here, these boys have to practically get down on their knees and point it." Apart from reinforcing the masculinist excesses already demonstrated in this analysis, such ideological "leakage" indicates an important aspect of the marked interest in the tests. One quality pervading the tests and telecasts--easy to ignore from our contemporary perspective--is how secretive and mysterious the development of the bomb had been. Evelyn Fox Keller suggests that the "making of the bomb was perhaps the biggest and best-kept secret that science ever harbored. 11 14 6 Secrets are important social constructs, according to Keller, since they function to articulate a boundary: an interior not visible to outsiders, the demarcation of a separate domain, a sphere of autonomous power.147 243 Certainly such a description is apt concerning the AEC, and the nationalistic security surrounding its activities. In the case of the bomb test telecasts, it also applies marginally to most of the correspondents involved, who clearly were revelling in their access to such a covert and confidential operation. But, as Keller suggests, there are two sets of secrets in operation, and their line of separation is once again socially coded according to gender. As demonstrated above, the atomic bomb and its technology are positioned as the secrets of men. This is fully in keeping with most scientific research, which sees as its task the attempt to "solve" its opposite: the secrets of nature. Nature's secrets, equated with the secrets of life, are traditionally seen, especially within a patriarchy, as the secrets of women (and hence a secret fi:.Qm men ) .148 throughout most cultural traditions, the secrets of women, like the secrets of nature, are and have traditionally been seen by men as potentially either threatening--or alluring--simply by virtue of the fact that they articulate a boundary that excludes them.149 All of this is consistent with the analysis of gender-coding within the bomb test telecasts, especially shedding light on the more excessive figuration of the mushroom cloud as a (female) body: the detonation, or at 244 least its effects, can be seen yet not fully "known" and controlled, and these residual mysteries of nature are characterized as female. But Keller's discussion of "secrecy" and science, which specifically addresses aspects of nuclear research, offers an additional insight to this dynamic of gendered discourse. Carrying further the "boundary" of interior/exterior suggested by secrets, she suggests that science's "ferreting out of nature's secrets," which is from this perspective "understood as the illumination of a female interior, or the tearing of nature's veil," reveals scientific enlightenment to be in this sense a drama between visibility and invisibility, between light and dark, and also, between female~rocreativity and male productivity ..•. 1 The making of the A-bomb, then, represents one special instance of this "productivity," and a polar extreme of this drama: a "calculated assault on the secret of death. 11151 In an elegant analysis which relates 1) science fiction stories concerning secret laboratories and the pursuit of the secret of life (Frankenstein as the most famous example), 2) boy scientists, producing "stink bombs" in basement labs, only to grow up to work in "places like MIT or Cal Tech," and contribute to the research and development of "bigger and more spectacular explosions, n152 and 3) certain male "rites du passage" which resemble one another in form and function across 245 cultures, Keller suggests how the A-bomb and its development (inflected by masculinist Cold War rhetoric) represents an ultimate attempted male appropriation of the birthing process: the "secret of life" most biologically- determined (and therefore acculturated as gender- determined) • All of these listed processes and stories effectively revolve around the exclusion of or replacement of women in creative and transformative endeavors. The ritualistic aspects of the "rites du passage" scenario serve to indicate the Ur-narrative of this appropriation: [O]ne important difference that marks the emergence of the adult male in many cultures • • • is precisely his ability to assume reponsibility as an effective hunter and/or warrior, i.e., as a competent master of death. In this ritualized script, the boy undergoes a symbolic death in order to be reborn with a new kind of power--a form of protection against the vicissitudes of life and death that is radically different from the protection promised by maternal power. It is the power to arbitrate over life and death not through the generation (or sustenance) of life, but through the capacity to legislate death. Fertility is countered by virility, measured now in its death-dealing prowess.~3 The experience of the A-bomb tests was neither as active nor as wholly visceral a rite as this decription suggests--perhaps one reason for the on-site surrogates to emphasize the physical sensations of the blasts. Experiences of spectacle, the tests indeed involved only 246 "symbolic" deaths, understood here to render the fear of annihilation that the bomb evoked as a kind of supreme castration anxiety. The masculinist identification with the bomb's destructive powers, then, is an attempt to position this fear within the socio-cultural scenario of achieving manhood (and excluding non-"men"): a virility- check. On a discursive level, Keller details how the nuclear industry has co-opted the terms of procreativity to employ them "in a provocative mix of phallic and birth imagery." These include not only Helen Caldicott's infamous phrase "missile envy," but .•. talk of "penetration aids," "big bangs," and "orgasmic whumps"--talk that has by now become routine in the rhetoric of nuclear weapons. And almost equally familiar is the joining of phallic to birth imagery- as illustrated by the example ~ • • where a bomb with "thrust" is identified as a boy baby, while a girl is clearly understood as a dud.154 The one moment of "maternal" reference I found in the telecasts occurs within Gil Martyn's wandering description of the second blast. It serves here as an attempted means to Oedipalize and render harmless the aftermath of the detonation. After characterizing the mushroom cloud as "Dante's inferno," an "awe-inspiring" and "fearsome" sight, even as an "animal of science, unleashed in all its fury," Martyn projects a scene of separation onto the kaleidoscope of imagery: GM: "Some of that fury's gone now, as we see it, the cloud's taking on an umbrella shape, sort of like a claw shape, and dismembering itself, like the child of mother, is now on its own. This is the cloud that will disintegrate. • • " 247 Once again implicitly contradictory, this "scenario" works both to recuperate the fear of residual radioactivity (reducing the expended power of the bomb to that of a child) and again to betray the Imaginary threat the bomb instills, by representing the maternal dyad as the scene of separation anxiety and the loss of plenitude. As to the importance of the "secrecy" indicated above, Keller suggests that it functions in the "rites" scenario not simply to protect an autonomous domain. Rather ••• it functions additionally as a necessary mechanism of containment; it serves to circumscribe the domain of the destructive powers unleashed • 155 The impact of the tests--and the containment of that impact--can therefore be seen to rely in part on the "secrecy" of their previous history. They offered a newly emergent opportunity to tap into this magically powerful, yet previously clandestine "heritage," as well as a forbidden, voyeuristic register with which to supplement 248 the dread and awe that the tests continued to inspire. Prior to detonation, for example, the focus on how successful the TV apparatus might be is not only crisis like (e.g.,"Will it work at the time we need it?") but also fetishistic, constructing a temporal and visual "keyhole effect" in its suggestion that the much-desired view we anticipate is so "charged" as to potentially obscure itself from our access. Rooted in previously forbidden spectacle, the tests were ideal events for early television and especially for KTLA, which was reconfirming itself as the most important provider of televisual access to the immediate and topical. Joyce Nelson has suggested that the telecasts of A-bomb tests were in part a public relations ploy by the AEC to capitalize on television's tremendous growth and popularity: "its pleasurable entertainment function in the home could 'rub off,' so to speak, onto the spectacle of bomb-blasts imaged on its screens. 111 5 6 While such a dynamic is conceivable, at least in the homes of those enthralled by nuclear detonations, the reverse impact seems to me more likely. Certainly the AEC was attempting by these tests to instill renewed popularity for its programs in the light of comparatively waning interest and potential budget cuts. But the impact was more dependent on secrecy and danger than a simplistic favorable gloss. 249 Not unlike the television cameras at Eniwetok for previous, non-public A-bomb testing, the TV apparatus provided visual access to this menacing and unknowable, destructively powerful device, but from a position that insured a fetishistic pleasure: close enough to appreciate its threatening splendor, yet far enough away to both preclude any real danger, and to maintain a prolonged visual contact. This fetishistic dynamic of course enhanced the "spectacle" qualities of the tests, and reinforced their "gendered" positioning. It also could be employed to sustain their mystery and allure, as is evidenced in Holcomb's inteview with New York Times reporter William L. Laurence during the aftermath of the first televised test. The only reporter present at the initial A-bomb detonation at Alamogordo in 1945, Laurence had been a consistent promoter of nuclear power and nuclear weapons since 1940 .1 57 suggested by Boyer to be "in effect functioning as the Manhattan Project's public-relations man," he had become the most prominent (and cheerleading) correspondent on the "atomic" beat, even writing The Hell Bomb in 1950- a book widely excerpted in popular magazines--in support of expanded weapons testing as a means of speeding development of the more powerful hydrogen bomb.158 In conversation with Holcomb, his "seasoned" description of the test blast positions it classically as a fetish, before drifting into a more rational scientific explanation of the explosion: GH: "Tell me, what's your reaction having seen the first atomic detonation in history, the first nuclear detonation, and then the preceeding ones and then this final one today--what's ... " WL: "Well, my reaction, Grant, is really that you never see a second atomic blast. You always, it's always a first. No matter, I think, how many you see, you always have a new experience, as though you have never seen it before. And you stand there, and you gaze at it, and you look at it, and you say, 'Am I seeing things, am I dreaming? Is this real, is this possible?' Your senses tell you that it is, but when you think •.• what there is in it. Inside the bomb is a very small amount of material, either plutonium (which is a man-made material, it doesn't exist in nature), or a natural material that exists in nature in very small amounts, called uranium 235. Now the amount actually exploded is so small . . • " 250 The lethal irony of Laurence's first statement ("you never see a second atomic blast") emphasizes the importance of positionality regarding the viewing of the tests: in the case of a nuclear attack, one indeed never sees a second blast. That this irony goes unrecognized is a sign of the haphazardly foreclosed effects of nuclear devices in this coverage. Whereas Holcomb and Baillie only "imagine" scenes of destruction, Laurence fixates on 251 the spectacle of the device and its detonation, virtually ignoring potential effects. The most extreme example of foreclosure in the telecasts is Martyn's statement from the second test: GM: "[W]ords almost fail to describe what we see, and it is with the most inadequate words that we pay tribute to this fearsome creature that we sincerely hope will be used only in a peaceful effort, and not in other ways." Not only words fail in this instance, but memory and history as well. Laurence's description of the blast as dream-like and fantastic relates not only to the empirical experience of those present at the test. It also renders a most obvious culmination of the gendering of the bomb, figuring it literally as a psychic fetish in its magical balancing of knowledge and belief. on one level, this balance seems to suggest a "belief" in the bomb's nationalistic symbolic qualitites, at the cost of the "knowledge" of the many lives A-bombs had already taken. on another level of Laurence's description, the bomb is a fetish in its metaphoric association with the mother's (castrated) body. Positioning the bomb as yet one more masculinist substitute for what is perceived as woman's "lack," Laurence reconfirms the "secretive" boundary-line, maintaining the bomb's (female) mystery even as he goes on to explain its scientific principles. 252 As he continues his discussion, Laurence's technical emphasis allows for a displaced attention to potential nuclear energy resources, rather than the bomb's prior destructive history: Laurence goes on to explain some of the physics involved in the explosion. WL: "· .• the smallest particles in nature. Very small. And they start splitting the atoms. Nowin those atoms is an energy millions of times greater than there is in coal, let's say, or in gasoline, or in any fuel that we know." GH: the "That's the energy that holds . . . " WL: "That's the energy that holds the nucleus of the atom together, which means, really, the energy that holds the universe together. Because the universe is made of atoms, and if the atoms were not held together there would be no universe, and there'd be no human beings and no atomic bombs, or anything. So .•• " GH: "Did they split a little piece of the universe this morning?" WL: "They did. A little piece of the universe--the universe we knew of, we know as, we know it. As we know it. Is made up of two forms: matter and energy. Matter is mass . " Reinvoking the "tearing of nature's veil" --as well, perhaps, as the separation scenario--this attempt to bring some kind of poetry to Laurence's physics lesson expands the parameters of the appropriation of procreativity to include nuclear energy as well. Laurence's difficulty in 253 ascribing the proper tense to this process is probably a speaking "tick" of some kind, but does correspond temporally to the visual fetish he earlier described. The "changes" allowed from such a ~niversal perspective seem monumental, but also so endistanced as to vanish away. Such are the boundaries ascribed toward atomic weapons and power in these broadcasts, boundaries that induce both a fascination that limits questions of personal and social agency regarding this "power," and an effacement of its history. In a process opposite to that of nuclear culture, though nearly simultaneous with it, television has in a seemingly passive way, gradually imbricated itself into our social sense of the real. The telecasts considered in this chapter suggest significant tropes in the establishment of television as an important part of everyday life in Los Angeles. Providing information about the LA community, its socio-industrial dynamics, and television's place within and alongside them; exposing, in a naturalized way, "newsworthy" (i.e., culturally determined) threats to personal, regional, and national registers of identification; promising to be a part of, and even to help determine the future--these telecasts afford much room for speculation about the changes in subjectivity wrought by and through this apparatus. As a 254 final condition on some of the assumptions made for these conclusions, it is important to reemphasize that these broadcasts and experiences are especially open to a repositioning by television's own attempts at history, which ·of course privilege these "remote possibilities" as pioneer technical achievements in the public service. 1 For an excellent summary of these debates, see David Morley, "Changing paradigms in audience studies," in Remote Control: Television, Audiences, and Cultural Power, ed. by Ellen Seiter, Hans Borchers, Gabrielle Kreutzner, and Eva-Maria Warth (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 16-43. 255 2 Diane Macdonell, Theories of Discourse: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 11. 3 See "Television Has 27-Hour Fire Trial," Los Angeles Times, 11 April 1949, p. 2. 4 The Los Angeles Times restricts most of their files to researchers within their own staff, especially files concerning their own history. While some of the KTTV personnel involved in the telecast may still be available for interviews, I have not yet located them nor talked to them. 5 Stan Chambers, interview with author, 26 January 1989. 6 "Record Video Newscast," Daily Variety, 11 April 1949, reprinted in Variety Television Reviews, 1923-1988, vol. 1, ed. Howard H. Prouty (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988-1991). 7 "A Plaque for KTLA," paily Variety, 12 April 1949, reprinted in Variety Television Reviews, 1923-1988, vol. 1, ed. Howard H. Prouty (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988-1991). 8 See Evelyn De Wolfe, "The Day Live TV coverage Was Born," Los Angeles Times, 17 October 1987, sec. VI, p. 1, and Stan Chambers "The Kathy Fiscus story: Turning Point in TV News," Los Angeles Times, 7 April 1989, sec. VI, p. 1. 9 The following synopsis is culled from personal interviews with KTLA personnel and from newspaper reports in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and Daily Variety. 10 John Polich recalls that, ironically, the rescue site was so close that an intervening mountain peak was in the way, necessitating a relay from a point near the Griffith Park Observatory. John Polich, interview with author, 2 March 1989. 11 Recollections that the telecast interrupted a movie, which was never resumed, are not corroborated by the 256 station's program schedule printed in the Los Angeles Times that day: KTLA was not to begin programming until 5:30 pm, and did not have a movie scheduled until 7:30 pm. 12 Stan Chambers, interview with author, 26 January 1989. D "Breakdown of Station Operations," Television (April 1949): 40, and "Breakdown of station Operations," Television (May 1949): 32. 14 Bill Welsh, interview with author, 13 August 1990. 15 Ibid. H De Wolfe, op. cit. 1 7 Chambers' presence has become such a regular part of breaking local television news that KTLA's 1987 promotional special half-jokingly claims that "when disaster strikes, it just doesn't seem to be real without Stan Chambers being on the scene." KTLA 40th Anniversary Special, 1987. 18 Chambers, op. cit. H Welsh, op. cit. 20 Cecil Smith, "West Coast Pioneer," in KTLA: West Coast Pioneer (New York: The Museum of Broadcasting, 1985), p. 14. 2l KTLA 40th Anniversary Special, 1987. 2 2 See "Passages, Margins, and Poverty: Religious Symbols of Communitas," in Victor Turner, Dramas. Fields. and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), pp. 231-271. 2 3 Ib 0 d 2 1 ., p. 32. 24 It has not been a project of the present study to more thoroughly investigate the empirical social experience of the Fiscus telecast--as previously noted, historical audience analysis is at this time beyond my practical limits--though such a study would I think prove enlightening, potentially revisionist, and quite valuable. 25 Robert Vianello, "The Power Politics of 'Live' Television," Journal of Film and Video 37, No. 3 (Summer 1985): 26-40. 257 2 6 Jane Feuer, "The Concept of Live Television: ontology as Ideology," in Regarding Television; critical Approaches--An Anthology, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Frederick, Maryland: University Publications of America, Inc., 1983), pp. 12-22. 27 Claus-Dieter Rath, "Live television and its audiences; Challenges of media reality," in Remote Control; Television, Audiences, and Cultural Power, ed. by Ellen Seiter, Hans Borchers, Gabrielle Kreutzner, and Eva-Maria Warth (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 85. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. I p. 8 7 • ~ Ib~d., pp. 87-88. 31 See Laurence Bergreen, Look Now, Pay Later; The Rise of Network Broadcasting (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1980), especially pp. 10-13. 32 One reference of note here is that the Floyd Collins event is mentioned in Billy Wilder's film Ace in the Hole (1951), released by Paramount just two years after the Fiscus tragedy. 33 In unrelated texts, both Stan Chambers and Claus-Dieter Rath have remarked on this lineage. See De Wolfe, op. cit., and Rath, op. cit., p. 95. 34 Mary Ann Doane, "Information, Crisis, Catastrophe," in Logics of Teleyision: Essays in Cultural CZ:iticism, ed. by Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 222-239. Doane's essay was recommended to me by Margaret Morse, and has been most important in formulating and organizing my discussion of these remote telecasts. Professor Doane was kind enough to send me a draft version of the essay well before its publication in the Mellencamp anthology. 35 Ibid. I p. 234. 36 Nick . Browne, "The Political Economy of the Television (Super) Text," in Quarterly Review of Film studies 9, No. 3 (Summer 1984): 174-183. 37 Los Angeles Times, 9 April 1949, p. 3. Issues of class may also have entered into this disparity of coverage, since the parents of the drowned child lived in Santa Monica, rather than affluent San Marino. ~Doane, op. cit., p. 229. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. I p. 235. 258 41 See articles in the New York Times, 10 April 1949, p. 55. 42 Polich, op. cit. 43 Patricia Mellencamp, "TV Time and Catastrophe, or Beyond the Pleasure Principle of Television," in Logics of Television, ed. by Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 246. 44 Ibid. I p. 245. 45 Ibid. I p. 248. 46 Ibid. I pp. 249-250. 47 Welsh, op. cit. 48 Claus-Dieter Rath, "The Invisible Network: Television as an Institution in Everyday Life," in Television In Transition: Papers From the First International Television Stu<iies Conference, ed. by Phillip Drummond and Richard Patterson (London: British Film Institute, 1986), p. 199. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. I p. 254. 51 Ibid. I p. 253. 52 Ibid. I p. 254. 53 Margaret Morse, "Staging Scenes of Loss, " Video Networks 14, No. 5/6 (October/November 1990): 11. 54 Mellencamp, op. cit. , pp. 249-250. 55 I would note that the child in a well scenario, in its physicality as well as its evocation of a child's spatially undefined body, suggests the Imaginary geography of Julia Kristeva's notion of the "chora, 11 that space or locus in which she ascribes the "semiotic," or pre symbolic energies and impulses. See Julia Kristeva, 259 Revolution in Poetic Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), and Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: . Columbia University Press, 1982). ~ Linda Williams, "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess," Film Quarterly 44, No. 4 (Summer 1991): 10. 57 Ibid. I p. 4. 58 Ibid. I p. 10. 59 Ibid. I p. 11. 60 Ibid. The masochistic aspects of the Fiscus event (involving the desire to return to the maternal) seem to me especially worthy of analysis, perhaps involving aural aspects of the coverage--the absent voice down the well, shrouded by the din of the rescue effort, etc. 61 Mellencamp, op. cit. , p. 243. 62 Rath, "Live television and its audiences, 11 op. cit. , p. 88. 63 New York Times, 11 April 1949, p. 24. 64 Uncatalogued recording of Fiscus rescue effort. 65 "TV Coverage of Tot Tragedy Grips LA," Daily Variety, 25 May 1951, reprinted in variety Television Reviews. 1923-1988, vol. 1, ed. Howard H. Prouty (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988-1991). 66 Ibid. 67 11 KTLA . • • in the public service, 11 Tele-Views ( 20 January 1950): 8. 68 Klaus Landsberg, "Knowing the Pulse of Your TV Audience," in Twenty-Two Television Talks (New York: Broadcast Music, Inc., 1953), pp. 136-152. 69 Ibid. I pp. 138-139, 142. 70 Ibid. I p. 137. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid. I p. 141. 260 74 See William Uricchio, "Rituals of Reception, Patterns of Neglect: Nazi Television and its Postwar Representation," Wide Angle 11, No. 1 (1989): 48-66, and "Germany and the Nationalization of Early Television," paper delivered at 1992 Society for Cinema Studies Conference, Pittsburgh, Panel on "The Myth of Total Television." 75 Thomas Elsaesser, for example, suggests that within a "fascist public sphere • . . the mass media can be used to gather audiences, consolidate ideological communities and generate desiring power without directing this power to commodity consumption regulated by a market economy," but "instead, towards a world war." Thomas Elsaesser, "TV Through the Looking Glass," Quarterly Review of Film and Video 14, Nos. 1-2 (1992): 24. 76 Landsberg, op. Cit. I p. 136. 77 Ibid. I p. 141. 78 Ibid. I p. 139. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. I p. 140. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid., p. 143. 8 3 Jane Pel gram, "City at Night, 11 Radio-Television Life ( 6 January 1950): 40. 8 4 Ibid. 85 Ibid. 86 See Pichel's appearance as a guest judge on Lights, Camera. Action (local air date 14 August 1950), a KNBH amateur talent program hosted by Warner Wolf King and syndicated via kinescope to other NBC affiliates. For this program, Piche! brought along a model of the rocketship for promotional display. 16mm prints of several episodes of this program are found in the Walter Grauman collection in the Special Collections of the Cinema-Television Library at the University of Southern California. 87 Pichel is probably ref erring to A Trip to the Moon (Melies, 1902), and Woman in the Moon (Lang, 1929). 261 8 8 "The second biggest hurdle to producing an accurate and convincing science fiction picture is the 'Hollywood' frame of mind--in this case, people in authority who either don't know or don't care about scientific correctness and plausibility. • • • That the picture did not end up as a piece of fantasy, having only a comic-book relation to real science fiction, can be attributed to the integrity and good taste of Irving . Piche!, the director. Mr. Pichel is not a scientist, but he is intelligent and honest. He believed what Mr. [Chesley] Bonestell and I told him and saw to it that what went on the screen was as accurate as budget and ingenuity would permit." Robert A. Heinlein, "Shooting Destination Moon," Astounding Science Fiction (July 1950), reprinted in Focus on the Science Fiction Film, ed. William Johnson (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1972), pp. 52-65. 8 9 This may have been true of commercial television; Landsberg had telecast from the set of Paramount's This Gun For Hire (1942) when the station was still in its experimental status. 90 Ms. Gardiner indicated to me that she was occasionally uncomfortable on City at Night, especially when the locations were more industrial and less traditionally female-centered. After she left as co-host, she served as spokesperson for the show's sponsor, the Santa Fe Railroad, extoling the virtues of their comfortable--and at the time still available--passenger service. Dorothy Gardiner, interview with author, 12 February 1990. 91 For background and contemporary repositionings of Gernsback, see Joseph J. corn and Brian Horrigan, Yesterday's Tomorrow's: Past Visions of the American Future (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Culture. Science. and Technology in the Age of Limits (New York: Verso, 1991), and Pam Rosenthal, "Jacked In: Fordism, Cyberpunk, Marxism," Socialist Review 21, No. 1 (January-March, 1991): 79-103. ~Ibid., Rosenthal, pp. 87-88. 93 Mike Davis, City of Quartz {New York: Verso, 1990), p. 332. 94 "UC Regents Want Specific Anti-Red oath," Los Angeles Times, 3 October 1949, p. 2. 262 95 The most prominent locally was the case of Dr. Joseph Weinberg, a professor in the Midwest but formerly employed at the University of California, who was accused by HUAC of trading war-time atomic secrets. See "'Scientist X' Named in Atom Spy Case," Los Angeles Times, 1 October 1949, p. 1. 9 6 "Push-Button War Still Far in Future," Los Angeles Times, 2 October 1949, p. 32. 97 H. Bruce Franklin, Robert A. Heinlein: Anierica as Science Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 73-76, 96-97. 98 Ibid . I p • 9 7 • 99 Ibid. 100 Peter Biskind, "Pods, Blobs, and Ideology in American Films of the Fifties," in Shadows of tbe Magis; Lamp; Fantasy apg ~~i~DCG Fiction in Film, ed. by George Slusser and Eric s. Rabkin (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), pp. 59, 62. 101 "Navy's Jet-Rocket Plane Scores Speed Between 730 and 740 m.p.h," Los Angeles Times, 2 October, 1949, p. 1; "New Record Speed at Sea Level Seen," New York Times, 2 October, 1949. 10 2 Roger w. Lotchin, Fortress California 1910-1961; From Warfare to Welfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 103 Ibid • I p • 6 5 • 104 Walter Ames, "Blast of Atom Bomb Thrills Television Audience; Ferrer, Swanson Talk Radio Series," Los Aogeles Times, 7 February 1951, p. 26. 105 "Associated Press Carries KTLA Clips of Atomic Blast," Daily Variety, 7 February 1951, reprinted in variety Teleyision Reyiews, 1923-19A8, vol. 1, ed. Howard H. Prouty (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988-1991.). 106 •t Ames, op. c1 • 107 "Associated Press • • . " op. cit. 108 "KTLA Bills Bomb Film Telecast," Los Angeles Mirror, 6 February 1951, p. 23. To my knowledge· , footage from 263 neither the kinescope nor the two stations' film crews is available for study. lM The CBS studio, located at Beverly and Fairfax, and deemed "Television City," was estimated to be over 30 percent complete in February, 1952. The actual construction of NBC's new studio was begun on July 7, but was more quickly completed by using "tilt-up slab techniques." Each was partially operational and in use by October, 1952, in time for the fall season. See "Teevee Plant Opens Oct. 1 11 Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 5 February 1952, and "Southland Gains as Tele Center for U.S." Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 5 October 1952. 110 James Joseph Rue, "Analysis of Television News Techniques in the Los Angeles Area," Master's thesis, University of Southern California, January, 1951. 111 b"d . I 1 ., p. 3. 112 Ibid., p. 4. Rue also details the procedures of independent TV newsproducer Sam Hayes, who prepared complete nightly or weekly news packages on a free-lance basis. The extent to which his material was aired is unclear. 113 Ibid. I p. 54. 114 Lotchin, op. Cit. I p. 188. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid. 117 Ibid. I pp. 15-16. Emphasis in the original. 118 Ibid. I pp. 96-105. 119 Ibid. I p. 207. 1 ~ Ross, op. cit., p. 173. See also Lotchin, op. cit., pp. 209-210. Ul Lotchin, p. 210. 122 R 't OSS, op. C1 ., pp. 172-181. 1n Ibid., p. 174. 1~ Lotchin, op. cit., p. 204. 264 U5 Ibid., p. 205. 126 "House Group Asks Spy Death Penalty In Time of Peace," New York Times, 17 February 1952, p. 1. l27 Ibid., p. 4. A related response from Harry Ackerman, vice president in charge of CBS television, confirmed that his network employed a loyalty questionnaire for each prospective employee. 12 8 Truman's approval of domestic testing of atomic bombs had occurred only after the Korean conflict began. See Howard Ball, Justice Downwind; Ainerica's Atomic Testing Program in the 1950's (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 20-31. U9 Lotchin, op. cit., pp. 74-80. 130 Ibid. I p. 77. 13l Vincent Leo, "The Mushroom Cloud Photograph: From Fact to Symbol," Afterimage 13, No. 1 & 2 (Summer 1985); 9. 132 See Paul Boyer, by the Bo1Jlb's Early Light: Anierican Thought and culture at the Pawn of the Atomic Age (New York; Pantheon Books, 1985), and H. Bruce Franklin, ~ Stars; The Superweapon and the A1Uerican Imagination (New York; Oxford University Press, 1988) for excellent overviews of the contradictory reactions to atomic weapons in the U.S. l33 Boyer, p. 352. He goes on to describe the new stage of activism which arose in the mid-1950s surrounding the fear of radioactive fallout from domestic A-bomb testing. 1 ~ Television 6, No. 4 (April 1949): 13. 135 Radio and Television Retailing (March, 1950). This magazine was part of an exhibit concerning the rise of television and television culture at the Smithsonian Institute in 1990. 136 't Ross, op. c1 ., p. 140. 137 Shifters are linguistic units, the meaning of which depends upon the situation of address or the context of utterance--such as the words "I" and "you," which "shift" in meaning depending on who is speaking. The term is employed here to emphasize both the historical specificity of this unprecedented configuration and its geographical and industrial characteristics. 265 138 See Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, "Electronic Ceremonies: Television Performs a Royal Wedding," in On Signs, ed. by Marshall Blonsky (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 16-32, and Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). 1 3 9 Dayan and Katz, Media Events, p. 1. 140 Ibid. I pp. 224-225. 141 Doane, op. cit. , p. 2 3 2 . 14 2 He very much resembles the members of a popular professional wrestling team in the 1960's and 1970's: The Crusher and Dick the Bruiser. 1 4 3 Doane, op. cit. , p. 2 31 • 14 4 Ibid. I pp. 230-231. 145 Ibid. I p. 2 3 9 • 146 Evelyn Fox Keller, "From Secrets of Life to Secrets of Death," in Body/Politics: Women .and the Discourses of Science, ed. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 180. 147 Ibid, p. 178. 148 Ibid. 149 Ibid. 150 Ibid. I pp. 178-179. 151 Ibid. I p. 182. 152 Ibid. I p. 185. 153 Ibid. I p. 184. 154 Ibid. I p. 186. 155 Ibid. 1 5 6 Joyce Nelson, The Perfect Machine: TV in the Nuclear Agg (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1987), p. 42. 266 15? See William L. Laurence, "The Atom Gives Up," Saturday Evening Post 213, No. 10 (7 September 1940): 12-13, 60- 63. 1 5 s William L. Laurence, The Hell Bomb (New York: Knopf, 1951). Chapter Four Section I: Entertaining "Difference": Representations of Race and Ethnicity in Early Los Angeles Television This section will examine an aspect of early 267 television history that has been marginalized in perhaps every way: the representation of non-white and non- American performers. Although Los Angeles has been, and continues to grow more culturally diverse, the address toward and representation of this cultural diversity have been little discussed and little regarded. In this section I will not be able to detail many specifics of the culturally diverse viewership among the early Los Angeles television audience--to my knowledge, material of this nature is largely unavailable, though certainly it would greatly supplement the goals and intentions of this chapter. Neither will I presume to offer en exhaustive account of ethnic and racial representation in early Los Angeles television--a task well beyond the methodological and practical parameters of this study. What this section will address are the textual questions and potential viewing positions afforded by three examples of programming that feature non-white and non-American performers: an episode each of Musical Aciventure with Korla Pandit, The Continental, and Harry Qwens and His 268 Royal Hawaiians. These programs share similarities in the representation of race and ethnicity but also differences, often in terms of mode of address and resultant viewer positions. Examined together, the shows are representative of many of the issues surrounding the representation of social "difference" in this period. Special attention will be given to those aspects of this topic which most effectively reveal the contradictions and problematics of the representation of race and ethnicity in early Los Angeles television. Central to the conceptualization of these positions will be the consideration of "ambivalence" in these representations, an aspect of racial representation important to work in this area by both Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha.1 While Hall and Bhabha raise issues surrounding the quality of "ambivalence" in different contexts (as will be discussed below), the applications of this concept by each have been important to my conceptualization of the related and yet distinct modes of address of each show, and the problematic opportunities for marginalized discourse (within paradigms of "entertainment" and "performance") that these shows provided. 269 Musical Adventure with Korla Pandit Korla Pandit was a surprise phenomenon of early Los Angeles television, prodigiously talented as a keyboard performer but also mysterious and exotic in his self presentation. Always attired in a turban, Pandit was best known for his silent direct address to the camera. In the various programs he performed in for different television stations and also syndicated films, over a period of several years, he allegedly never spoke. Details about his career are also somewhat mysterious, and my information is based largely on publicity articles in Radio-Television Life and a fan magazine article.2 I once met Pandit, and made several attempts to interview him but did not succeed. According to these sources, Pandit was born in New Delhi to one of India's upper-caste families: his father a scholar of English and history, converted to Christianity; his mother a singer of French descent. Recognizing their son's musical abilities at a young age, they sent him to England for tutoring; he later continued his education at the University of Chicago. Throughout his education he appeared in concerts in the U.K., Europe, and the U.S. While attending college, he learned to play the organ (reportedly not a common instrument in India). 270 In the mid-1940's he came to Los Angeles and worked as a staff musician for NBC radio, but also worked on other networks, for example providing musical accompaniment on Mutual's Chandu. the Magician (appearing as "Juan Rolando"). 3 He worked in support of a wide spectrum of musical styles, including big band and country western performers. While performing on Hollywood Holiday, broadcast from Tom Breneman's restaurant at Hollywood and Vine, he was spotted by Landsberg, who featured him as a guest on a variety show. The response to this appearance was favorable; in addition, Pandit had conceived of a format for a JO-minute program of his own. NBC-TV was also courting him, offering much greater exposure but only a provisional 12-week series. KTLA offered a one-year contract for his own show, provided he score music for other of the station's shows: he would receive more work and more money. (His music was heard regularly on Time for Beany, and reportedly also on ~ continental.) After establishing a following for his 15- minute shows during KTLA's weekday evening schedule, Pandit began an additional 2-hour Sunday afternoon show- the first LA program to air in this weekend daypart. Although staffed by only one technician for the entire two hours (as opposed to the camera and lighting crew, narrator, etc. for the evening show), the show was a 271 popular success. Pandit recorded albums and performed in concerts. His popularity reportedly increased, but his television opportunities seemed to recede: when his contract at KTLA expired he moved to KECA, channel 7 for about six months, and then KTTV, channel 11 for five months. This pattern was apparently due to problems in continuing sponsorship for his shows, a seemingly odd circumstance for a performer with so popular a following. The episode of Musical Adventure with Korla Pandit to be considered here is an example of his evening KTLA program, the only episode of which I am aware. Featuring several numbers of varied musical and performance styles (using different keyboard instruments and diverse percussive techniques), the voice-over narrator (Ken Graue), visual effects such as dissolves and overhead shots, and a guest appearance by singer Geraldine Garcia, it will serve as a paradigmatic example of Pandit's format and address. The issues raised in this representation foreground issues which are specific as well to the other two programs to be discussed. This program both demonstrates and makes problematic discursive and representational strategies revolving around questions and problems of race, particularly in their resemblance to those found within the strategies of colonialism. Although it clearly provides opportunities 272 for the representation and enunciation of culturally diverse images and discourses, privileging the abilities of a third world performer, the program adheres to cultural stereotypes and, perhaps most important, does not provide Pandit an opportunity to "speak": while the music performed represents one level of interplay of cultural "voices," supplemented by the also "performed" voice of female singer Geraldine Garcia, the only direct verbal discourse offered is the program's "framed" address of the disembodied station announcer's introductions and descriptions. such a positioning of Pandit's discursivity is centrally important to the overall address of the program, and indicative of the strategies of colonial discourse. Nevertheless, as Hall points out, the media are not simply the ventriloquists of a unified and racist "ruling class" conception of the world. . . . neither a unifiedly conspiratorial media nor indeed a unified racist "ruling class" exist in anything like that simple way • . • the task of a critical theory is to produce as accurate a knowledge of complex social processes as the complexity of their functioning requires.4 Hall begins to investigate the features of this complexity by distinguishing between "overt" racism-- openly racist arguments or policies--and "inferential" racism--apparently naturalized representations of events and situations related to race, whether "factual" or 273 "fictiona1. 11 5 This latter division--inferential racism- comprised of racist premises and propositions inscribed as a set of unquestioned assumptions rather than conscious intentions, seems more germane to the discursive address of the Pandit show, which evidences a more subtle subordination or sense of ("effortless") superiority toward ethnic and racial difference: Pandit is "spoken for," his expressions of culturally derived entertainment are described and contained within Western definitions of primitivism and exoticism, etc. Additionally, the "adventure" promised in the show's title connotes what Hall identifies as the literature of imperialism, "the male-dominated world of imperial adventure, which takes empire ..• as its microcosm. 116 Adventure, he explains, is one of the principal categories of this literature, which is somewhat endistanced from contemporary audiences but establishes and employs what Hall delineates as some of the "base-images" of "the grammar of race," important to the literature of adventure and imperialism in general. Not surprisingly, the representations of a post-World War II Los Angeles television program do not strictly conform to the codes of classical British imperialist literature--the conditions of history and context are very different.7 At the same time, the show's evocation of 274 these codes and approximation of them are instructive. The Pandit show does not evidence the first of these base- images ("the familiar slave-figure"), since Pandit more nearly resembles the base-image of the "Native"-- especially the "good side" of this figure, "portrayed in a certain primitive nobility and simple dignity. 11 8 Part of what complicates this aspect of the representation is Pandit's attire: his natty Western suit, shirt, and tie would seem to indicate non-"native" connotations. But the presence and visual .emphasis on his turban and jewel-- "native" and yet upper class accoutrements--predominate. The show and Pandit's representation seem most closely aligned with Hall's third base-image, that of the "entertainer" or "clown": This captures the "innate" humour, as well as the physical grace of the licensed entertainer--putting on a show for ·The Others. It is never quite clear whether we are laughing with or at this figure: admiring the physical and rhythmic grace, the open expressivity and emotionality of the "entertainer," or put off by the clown's stupidity.9 Pandit's presentation and performance do not, it seems to me, entail any qualities of stupidity--the maintenance of his "native" nobility and dignity eclipses such a connotation. But the admiration of his musical abilities and simultaneous distancing afforded by the cultural otherness of his representation involve us in 275 just such an ambivalent position as Hall describes: even today, ·the show is received as entailing a complex allure of mysticism, camp, and genuine achievement of performance.lo Hall goes on to suggest that deep ambivalence is ultimately characteristic of all of the base-images described, the result of the double-vision of the white eye through which they are seen. The primitive nobility of the ageing tribesman or chief, and the native's rhythmic grace, always contain both a nostalgia for an innocence lost forever to the civilized, and the threat of civilization being over-run or undermined by the recurrence of savagery, which is lurking just below the surface; or by an untutored sexuality, threatening to "break out." Both are aspects--the good and the bad sides--of primitivism. In these images, "primitivism" is defined by the fixed proximity of such people to Nature. 1 1 The Pandit show, as indicated by its half approximations of the base-images discussed above, has an ambivalent relationship to even this description: the figure of Pandit combines both nobility ·rulil rhythmic grace. More important, the show attempts to engage a kind of (psychic) "primitivism," corresponding to longings not foregrounded in "civilized" everyday life: the songs, we are told, convey states and emotions more accustomed to the Imaginary realm--taboo, envy, sweet melancholy, accelerated passion. But Pandit's access to "savagery" seems resolutely cultured--closer to Nature perhaps, yet 276 hardly untutored or unmannered. Indeed, the connotation of "adventure" registered in the show's title seems more related to a travelogue than some charged exploration involving physical risks and thrills. The more passive and contemplative engagement of the program both allows for and is allowed by the less stridently threatening representation of Pandit. Nevertheless, the ultimate function of the show's depiction and evocation of race and ethnicity is allied to that of the adventure genre. As Hall suggests, "Adventure" is one way in which we encounter race without having to confront the racism of the perspective in use. Another, even more complex one is "entertainment" . . . which we watch because it is pleasurable.12 The ambivalence of this suggested dynamic- consciously evoking racial/ethnic difference but not actually recognizing the means or the implications of this representation--is indeed complex in the case of the "entertainment" and pleasure provided by the Pandit show, and key to understanding the "inferential" racism at play within what might appear to be "overt." The work of Edward Said and its critique by Homi Bhabha offer avenues by which to more fully investigate this dynamic. In Orientalism, his study of American and European figurings of Eastern and Arab cultures, Said suggests a dichotomy between overt and inferential modes of racism, 277 describing "manifest Orientalism" as "the various stated views about Oriental society" (the changes in the West's "knowledge" of the Orient), and "latent Orientalism" as "an almost unconscious (and certainly an untouchable) positivity. 11 13 These latent attributes are more or less constant: what remains intact are the separateness of the Orient, its eccentricity, its backwardness, its silent indifference, its feminine penetrability, its supine malleability ••.. the Orient as a locale requiring Western attention, reconstruction, even redemption ••.• Thus whatever good or bad values were imputed to the Orient appeared to be functions of some highly specialized Western interest in the Orient.14 These aspects of latent Orientalism agree with what has already been suggested as a preferred "reading" of the discursive frame of the Pandit show: Pandit's silence, the voice-over's (Western) description of and interpretation of the music, the loose national and ethnic boundaries between the songs that are featured in the show (from the Orient, to Western Island culture, to Spanish and South American cultures, the principle of inclusion for the music is some u.s.-derived connotation of foreign- ness or exoticism), and even Pandit's androgyny can be seen as congruent with the more unconscious aspects of colonialism Said defines as Orientalism. In addition, the show is manifestly presentational: it seems to offer itself as a conduit to exotic culture in 278 action (or at least performance). The voice-over invites the viewer, at the show's start, to come with us through melody to the four corners of the earth. Hear music exotic and familiar spring from the amazing hands of Korla Pandit, on a musical adventure. Such an address is fully in agreement with Said's concept of Orientalism, in which, as James Clifford suggests, the Orient functions as a theater, a stage on which a performance is repeated, to be seen from a privileged standpoint. • . • For Said, the orient is "textualized": its multiple, divergent stories and existential predicaments are woven as a body of signs susceptible of virtuoso reading •••• occulted and fragile ••• 15 But, as Homi Bhabha suggests, the security of the privileged vantage point of this reading--even the stability of the continually employed stereotypes--should not be assumed. While many of Said's observations and interpretations are sound (for example, he rejects any notion that orientalism is the misrepresentation of an oriental essence), the system he derives is a static one: for Bhabha, Said "contains," via the binarism of manifest/latent, the threat which the stereotype functions to disavow. Bhabha emphasizes the dynamism and repetition of Hall's ambivalences and Said's poles of racism, suggesting that stereotypes should be recognized as fetishes, "affixing the unfamiliar to something established, in a 279 form repetitious, vacillating between delight and fear. 11 16 Ethnic and racial stereotypes are not the same as sexual fetishes, but "within the apparatus of colonial power, the discourses of sexuality and race relate in a process of functional overdetermination ••• 11 17 The stereotype, functioning as the primary point of subjectif ication in colonial discourse, is the scene of a similar fantasy and defense [to that of the scene of sexual fetishism]--the desire for an originality which is again threatened by the differences of race, color, and culture.18 The stereotype is an arrested, fixated form of representation, denying the play of difference. In this act of disavowal, according to Bhabha, the colonial subject is "returned to the narcissism of the Imaginary and its identification of an ideal ego that is white and whole. 11 19 The stereotype functions, in other words, as part of the hegemonic process by which dominant, white subjectivity is continually reinscribed. As Bhabha points out, the shifting fixity and phantasmatic qualities of the stereotype are generally "caught in the Imaginary," existing to exercise dominant power relations by containing an arranged and manageable threat to them. Nevertheless, especially because fetishes of this type must be "seen," rather than hidden or made secret (a quality of many sexual fetishes), they participate in a 280 "regime of visibility" deployed in colonialism: the visibility of the racial/colonial other is at once a point of identity and a problem for attempted closure within discourse= The taking up of any one position, within a specific discursive form, in a particular historical conjuncture, is thus always problematic--the site of both fixity and fantasy •••• The process by which the metaphoric "masking" is inscribed on a lack which must then be concealed gives the stereotype both its fixity and its phantasmatic quality--the same old stories of the Negro's animality, the Coolie's inscrutability or the stupidity of the Irish mY§.:t be told (compulsively) again and afresh, and are differently gratifying and terrifying every time.20 It is within this regime of visibility that the Pandit show becomes untraditional, and potentially less recuperable. Despite the discursive containment of his performance, and beyond the adherence of much of the program's format to colonialism and Orientalism, the show disrupts one of the primary subjective tendencies of these discourses in its excessive employment of visual direct address. As Said points out, Orientalism has an important specular aspect: Orientals were rarely seen or looked at; they were seen through, analyzed not as citizens, or even people, but as problems to be solved or confined ·or--as the colonial powers openly coveted their territory--taken over.21 281 Clifford picks up on the voyeuristic implications of this colonialist regime when he notes, in reference to Said's study, that The effect of domination in such spatial/temporal deployments (not limited, of course to Orientalism proper} is that they confer on the other a discrete identity, while also providing the knowing observer with a standpoint from which to see without being seen, to read without interruption.22 The visual framing device which opened all of the Pandit shows--the camera pulling back from the shimmering, blurred circles of dancing light on the jewel affixed to his turban, into a focused medium shot of Pandit, who stares in direct address throughout--evokes a desire to "see" which is met by the uninterrupted gaze of the other. The voyeuristic regime more typical of the representation of racial and ethnic difference is refused, and the privileged viewer position that usually allows for a reading or analysis of the other is frustrated. To be sure, the subject position offered by the direct address of an other is variable (depending on the degree of attention of the viewer, any variety of social factors impinging on the viewing, the viewer's own subjective determinants, etc.}, and even possibly fully recuperable (read as merely the "inscrutability" of the other). But this variability is not so easily managed as are most depictions of stereotypes. The specular arrangement 282 indeed confers on the other a discrete identity, but not one that can be "read" through and "known" as a stable recognition of the other. The disavowal of the fetish of the stereotyped other is not securely masked, and the underlying Imaginary threat is not so immediately contained. As Bhabha points out, in the objectification of the scopic drive there is always the threatened return of the look . • . in that form of substitution and fixation that is fetishism there is always the trace of loss, absence.23 The direct address of Pandit in these sequences-- heightened, I think, because he does not speak, and undisturbed by any other visual information in the shot, further aestheticized by the smooth trucking motion of the camera--forces a potential confrontation with the desire of an other. The "inscrutability" of this gaze is less recuperable because it plays on television's more traditional use of direct address to offer the impression of a subjective presence.24 Pandit's direct address, which meets the erotic investment of the viewer's gaze instilled by the fetish of the jewel, compounds the regularized system of subjective crises that stereotypes usually disavow. The desire of the viewer's gaze, trained within the traditional regimes of colonialism, is confronted by a mirror of the racial, ethnic, gendered (androgynous) other (is this gaze one of desire? 283 identity? hypnotic control?), so that the viewer may recognize and experience difference without the closure insured by positioning the other as fetishized object. Whatever threat this address may entail is not maintained, however, and the renegotiation of Pandit's gaze takes on significantly gendered aspects. In evidence of Bhabha's claim that the fetish of the stereotype is not congruous with that of the sexual object, Pandit's gaze becomes regularized in terms of the representation of a woman. Bhabha suggests that colonial discourse employs a complex, four-term strategy in articulating the tropes of the stereotype fetish. The metaphoric or masking function of the fetish is allied with the narcissistic object choice available to the Imaginary; while the metonymic figuring of lack is allied with the aggressive phase of the Imaginary. The Pandit show, by offering a regularized access to the more Imaginary, exotic, primitive aspects of subjectivity not seen as readily accessible in everyday "civilized" life, codes these Imaginary attractions within the more "primitive" cultures the show presumes to survey. The show's Imaginary attractiveness is supplemented by its focus on the less rigidly Symbolic realm of music, and its mobile relations to emotion and subjectivity. It is within the context of a song devoted to the Imaginary 284 called "Envy" {described by the announcer as "An emotion which is black, a mood that twists the spirit, that makes a lover suffer and wonder if love is worth the price") that the image of a woman enters the frame--signif icantly fragmented and hovering above Pandit like a thought balloon or an apparition. But rather than engage in the traditional heterosexual scopic regime anticipated by such an arrangement--the aggressive or even possessive gaze toward this gendered object of desire--Pandit's gaze becomes increasingly unfocused and undirected. As Garcia sings the words to the song ("I envy anyone you happen to meet ••• "), the grounding of her discursive relation to Pandit--the positionality of the shifters "I" and "you"- is left nebulous and unestablished. It remains unclear to whom and about whom she is singing {is she supposed to be an acquaintance of Pandit? a memory? part of his consciousness? ours?) Rather than partake in the gendered position offered by such a visual schema, Pandit's gaze is passionate but furtive, gazing at Garcia no more than he does at the audience or, perhaps more importantly, an unfocused somewhere which indicates his self-absorption within his own performance. Bhabha suggests that the metaphoric and metonymic tropes of the stereotype fetish function simultaneously, in strategic 285 relation to one another. In this case, when the prospect of a more gendered animalistic desire presents itself, Pandit's gaze--which introduces him to us in a potentially problematic way--refuses a metonymic schema of aggressive heterosexual address, and is positioned instead as engaged within a more narcissistic object choice. We are presented with two fetishes, one sexual and one colonial, in a relationship which positions them as dual metaphors (engaged in their own Imaginaries) rather than a metonymic exchange of desire. Such a recuperation of the potentially radical otherness of Pandit's opening gaze repositions the impact of his closing gaze (the show ends with the obverse of its opening: slow truck in to Pandit's stoic, direct gaze, then unfocus on the jewel in his turban). The open-ended otherness of his gaze remains, but is inflected by his apparent narcissism. His relation to desirej and especially to sexual aggressivity, is more securely contained. The Continental In contrast, the stereotypical swarthiness and suggestiveness of the direct address by Renzo Cesana, as The continental, are virtually unchecked. I have had little success researching his early career, which was 286 decidedly varied. Originally from Rome, Italy, Cesana worked in experimental theater and came to the U.S. in 1938, reportedly to assist in MGM's foreign distribution practices.25 He was a seasoned radio performer, starting in that medium in San Francisco. Finding work as an advertising director for an Italian wine company, Cesana temporarily established his own advertising agency, but gave it up when his schoolboy friend, Roberto Rosselini, cast him as the priest in Stromboli (1950). Returning to the U.S., he was typecast as a priest, and searched for a new role. Locally, he had adopted the persona of ~ Continental as a kind of male radio counterpart to popular KHJ and nationally-syndicated personality Jean King, known as The Lonesome Gal. King had developed a most distinctive format of plaintively addressing the home listener as though she was a faithful but undemanding, largely ignored girlfriend, appreciative of the time she had to share with the listener and always available for company (during her scheduled appearances).26 Cesana, as The Continental, briefly followed The Lonesome Gal late at night on KHJ, premiering in February of 1951 but lasting only a few weeks. Later that same year, however, he convinced station KNBH, channel 4 to try the format visually, and a minor phenomenon resulted. 287 Airing for 15 minutes twice a week on local TV, ~ continental was a sensation, attracting national attention by November, 1951.27 Picked up by the CBS television network in January of 1952, the program again aired twice weekly for 15 minutes. The show's immediately recognizable format was spoofed by most every comedian working in television at the time.28 After a 4-month run on CBS, Cesana shifted to ABC for a different program, First Date, which ran from 11 October 1952 to 6 January 1953, and featured Cesana greeting couples on their first date together. He did not return to Los Angeles television until 1961 for a KTLA program, Ladies. The Continental, an advice show directed to the female audience. He also appeared as a character actor in many films and television programs. The episode of The Continental discussed below is a kinescope from the CBS network rendition. As a result, its format (especially the show's setting, etc.) probably does not correspond precisely to what LA audiences had reacted to so forcefully in 1951, though the characteristics of Cesana's persona and his manner of address are doubtless the .same. Most important from the perspective of my discussion, the "stereotype" employed by Cesana is Western and European, and does not incur the sophisticated defenses and disavowals involved with 288 colonialism and Orientalism, as on the Pandit program. Cesana speaks for himself (and for his "guest"}, and tempers his aggressivity only as it approaches a limit point of taste and propriety (he embarrasses "her"). Whereas the Pandit show is engaged in the construction of the performer as racial other and fetish, The Continental more directly attempts to induce a f etishization of women in their social existence via an evocation of some ideal, Imaginary construct of the woman-as-fetish. Rather than directing the dual functions of narcissism/metaphor and aggressivity/metonymy toward Cesana, these functions are redirected toward the implied female viewer. The program has a very different and important "frame" than the Pandit show: it is sponsored by Cameo stockings, which offer "the fashion advantage of face powder finish." While we never see Cesana's "date" during the show, we do see fetishized models raising a skirt, blowing on a powder puff, and exhibiting clothes before and after his address, suggesting how a viewer might approximate the ideal fetish that the show evokes. Within the show, Cesana details his modes and practices of fetishization (saving lost gloves, charting the length of skirts, etc.), offering to the implied female viewer an identification with them: he offers an imaginary construct of his "guest" in a strapless, sleeveless, 289 backless, "slightly frontless" gown, in a progressively shorter skirt, with exquisitely sized and formed hands, etc. In his address, he creates a space for women's sexuality, but assigns it to the purpose of male desire: he opens the "process" of fetishization, but presents it as a double-bind of women's intentionality. Cesana's opening remarks in this episode indicate that a woman's acceptance of a position of fetishization should be seen as a "gift" to men, that men have misunderstood as narcissism: You know, I've always wanted to thank you for making me so happy--with the pains you take to always look your best: so well dressed, well-groomed, well-coiffed. And all for me. Oh yes, [there are] others that say that women are supposed to dress to please themselves. But you and I know better. That probably must have been started by a man, who wanted to blame you instead of himself for those little charge accounts you open with such gay abandon. A woman's sexuality is flattered into a position of object status, and also related to her activity to spend and consume--to actively pursue making herself into a fetish by investing monetarily into the suggested libidinal economy (for example, to buy Cameo stockings). Any contradiction or difficulty in assuming or maintaining this object status--especially in the form of traditional male complaints of feminine "irrationality"--is similarly flattered away. After Cesana breeches the assumed limit 290 point of tact in his address, by virtually implying his "guest" is naked, he apologizes: Oh darling, now you're unhappy? Oh, I've embarrassed you; I'm sorry. Well then, you know, you might be unhappy for no reason at all. That's what makes you women so fascinating. You see, to have a reason for being happy or unhappy, well, that is a superfluidity that I, a mere man, still cling. But you--you're a woman darling, you are above all sorts of reasons or causes or anything. While I do not have figures that describe the viewership of this program, it seems especially interesting when placed in relation to the post-war generation of married couples who were progenitors of the baby boom: addressing housewives tied to and largely defined by their (asexual) domestic responsibilities. I did find one article in the issues of TV-Radio Life which suggested a decidedly gendered split of affection for Cesana. In the article, Cesana is described as evidencing during an interview an awareness of and appreciation for the domestic chores mentioned above: Renzo, with great waving of hands and in his inimitable and fascinating accent, carried the typical American housewife through a whole day's activities. And very accurately done it was. He finished with a beam of pride for all American femininity . • • "and at the end of this day's work they are as gracious and lovely as no other woman in the world can hope to be!" Certainly the husbands of America can't disagree with him on this. But while they are out working calculators, riveting with machines, or swinging golf clubs, Renzo is working in TV toward entertaininq their wives. And they loathe him for it! 29 291 Those husbands reportedly off ended and enraged were doubtless disturbed by the show's offering to women the opportunity to identify with the position of a mistress in an extra-marital if not adulterous affair (at the show's end, when Cesana requests that his "guest" bring a friend along next time to accompany a friend of his--"He's not particular, as long as it's a woman"--he does stipulate she should be "unattached"). This reaction to a program so thoroughly engrained in patriarchal positionings of women is a sign of just how repressive this system can be regarding female sexuality. Unlike the Pandit show, however, the margin for potential subversion of this system seems to me limited. Positions of resistance to those offered in the show are of course possible, and any real engagement of female desire is not wholly recuperable. The dynamics of the representation of Cesana's "otherness" are for the most part complicit with the overall address toward gender construction and commercial consumption of television in general. 292 Harry Owens and His Royal Hawaiians Harry Owens had established himself as a bandleader, composer, and radio and motion picture performer for many years prior to his television show debut on KTLA in 1949. Employed in and in front of bands since the 1920's (he wrote the hit "Linger Awhile" in 1923), he was working in Hollywood in the early 1930's when he capriciously decided to add "Aloha Oe" to his band's musical venue. The visiting manager of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel was so impressed that he invited Owens to organize the resort's house orchestra, which he did in 1933. Owens soon became the chief exponent of Hawaiian music in the U.S., writing and adapting ballads based on traditional Hawaiian songs. Perhaps most important to this popularization was the radio program Hawaii Calls, broadcast from Waikiki Beach on Saturdays, before a live audience. Burt Folkart, in his Los Angeles Times obituary of Owens, recalls that When Owens left the show just before World War II to tour with Hilo Hattie and the band on the Mainland, Hawaii Calls and its signature "as the sun sinks slowly in the west," was being credited with sparking a tourist interest in those then-remote islands that continues into the Jet Age. 3 0 Owens also worked in motion pictures, composing songs for films such as Waikiki Wedding (1937} and Cocoanut Groye (1938), which was also one of several films in which 293 he appeared. As indicated in the above quote, the Royal Hawaiian band, accompanied by Hilo Hattie, toured during World War II, and one important context in which to understand the success of Owens' television show is the familiarity of its performers and nostalgic resonance for many ex-GI's and their families in the post-WWII Los Angeles audience. Both in its evocation of Hawaii--quite literally the U.S. base of Pacific operations, and also of entertainment for the servicemen--and in the vaudevillian array of specialty acts it assembled, the Owens TV show registered a special appeal to this audience. 3 1 This program represents a hybrid of sorts between the allure of the two shows discussed above, although much more safely "contained" within the discursive centrality of Owens as mediator to foreign culture and master of ceremonies. Addressed to both a surrogate studio audience and the home viewer--which lends the program a more social sense of "liveness" and charge of "live" performance--the show offers a survey of Oriental talent and culture (as does Pandit) but also a firmly patriarchal address which allows for some latitude in the degree of its "primitiveness" (e.g., the women dancing the hula, the man dancing with the sword). The Owens show is allied with the more traditional notions of spectacle and entertainment programming: the utilization of radio and 294 vaudeville formats; the "containment" of/presentation of the exotic, in the show's "access" to the Orient; the combination of almost all of Hall's racial "types" (native, clown, and entertainer, though again not the slave figure). This more vaudevillian presentation offers Said's "staged" access to the Orient, coded by the dissolves to breaking waves that separate Owens from the native performers, even though their actual distance from one another is a few feet. This practice appears to be an adaptation of a characteristic feature of the Hawaii Calls radio show, which featured sounds of the surf accompanying Owens' music. The ocean's roar was considered so vital to the program's authenticity that one sound engineer was stationed at water's edge with a microphone.32 The presentation of the program is coordinated and centered around Owens himself, who offers a different kind of direct address than either Pandit or Cesana--inflected by differences in class, race, and gender. He possesses a comfortable combination of qualities which allow for an assured degree of mastery over the program's flow: these qualities include his access to the phrases and language of Hawaii; his own performing talent, especially as a bandleader (playing trumpet and conducting) but also as an egalitarian part of an ensemble; his friendly composure 295 when introducing and addressing both performers and the station's liaison to the sponsor; his genuine affection for his "family" of performers (especially Hilo Hattie, the only "native" to span the full space of the stage with Owens), and also KTLA and Landsberg. In short, he is the ideal great white father, and the show is significantly framed by the performance of "Sweet Leilani," named after his daughter (whose name is obviously drawn from the island culture), and his biggest hit as a songwriter. This stable positioning of "difference" within the show allows it to become imbued with a romanticism and nostalgia for the exotic idealization of Hawaii that its sponsor, United Airlines, hoped to promote. Couched as a populist and humanist effacement of cultural "differences," yet relying on coded character "types" that Western culture has promulgated, the show unashamedly foregrounds its economic agendas: Owens discusses his past and impending trips to the islands; among many phrases used to evoke the yearning for the other, the one which recurs most often is that of "the trade winds." The show functions as a romanticized commercial for not only the tourism that Hawaii's economy was at this time heavily promoting, but also its efforts to finally achieve statehood. (Hearings toward this end had been in process since 1935, threatened by the race and class structure of 296 the islands: a large non-white population, and labor unrest that led to a restructuring of the dominant economic superstructure in the late 1940 1 s.33) The impression emphasized on the show is that of a most calm and relaxing paradise, a "natural" site for business and pleasure, unaffected by the upheavals of the rest of the world. Owens even presents a scenario of benevolence in his recounting of the monies he will be able to personally deliver to "Little Blind Sammy," a leper on Molokai whose song the band has recorded. situating the indigenous culture as passive and innocent, in Said's terms, as feminine and penetrable in its "primitive" beauty and allure, the program positions Hawaii as an ideal and accommodating site for both personal (especially male) hedonism and commercial exploitation. In conclusion, let me reiterate that this analysis does not presume to be exhaustive nor totalizing about these issues--there were additional non-white and non Anglo performers in this period of Los Angeles television. (Indeed, some of whom I may not yet be aware of.) Variety shows occasionally featured "guest" appearances by performers of color, when they were in town. A few other performers appeared with some regularity on local Los Angeles shows. 297 Scatman Crothers, for example, played guitar and sang on KTLA's Dixie Showboat, and on Larry Finley's Sell-a- 11lQn (a precursor to the Home Shopping Network). Iron Eyes Cody was a regular on Tim McCoy's Western program, which of course revolved around McCoy's old movies but reportedly also focused on American Indian culture and folklore, in order to dispel the inaccuracies of its portrayal in many of the Western TV shows and films so popular at the time.34 In a more anticipated (and perhaps compromised) vein, Leo Carillo hosted a variety show on KCOP, channel 13, on which he would deliver a closing monologue directed to "mom and dad," that on occasion reportedly included HUAC-inflected discourse ("the Russian bear with its slimy claw," etc.).35 At a more general level, William Stulla (best known as the host of Engineer Bill, a popular kids show on channel 9 after it became KHJ) related to me his shock and embarrassment at the racist imagery found in the old cartoons purchased to be telecast in those days.36 As is true for so many aspects of early television study, access to print and especially program materials featuring these performers is at best limited and partial. It is important to point out, for example, that the analysis above is directed toward what are to my knowledge the only kinescopes of these performers' programs. (Many other shows, of course, are not at all available on kinescope.) 298 I also am not trying to preclude oppositional readings, nor the potential in these shows for empowerment to suppressed or repressed social voices--these performers are represented. George Lipsitz points out, for example, that early television did, in some instances, actually contribute to the cultural pluralism of postwar Los Angeles, particularly in sports and music programs, such as the one hosted by deejay Johnny Otis.3 7 My intention is to point out the essentially "safe" positioning of these alternative discourses, as represented by the three programs considered in this chapter. These shows are indicative of a displacement in the local representation of empirical race relations in Los Angeles during this period. In 1950, with an area population of some 4.6 million people, the non-white population numbered about 580,000. over 300,000 of these were Hispanics, and over 200,000 were blacks. Less than one percent made up the remaining population, and most of these were of Japanese descent. Hispanics and blacks, the most numerous of non-Anglo groups in the city, were rarely seen on television at this time, corresponding in a casual, effortless way to the housing and real estate restrictions so prevalent in the burgeoning LA county and 299 metropolitan areas. These shows help to demonstrate that if Los Angeles television history is itself marginalized within the larger discourse of media history, in matters of race and ethnicity LA was as Anglo-centered, that is to say was itself as "marginalizing," as any region in the country. The regional issues raised here relate more to the social and industrial history of Los Angeles than to a regionally specific discursive or linguistic function. Pandit and Cesana were in Los Angeles as part of the network radio talent concentration of this period; Owens was an LA regular because of the city's proximity to Hawaii, and also because of its plentiful post-war live music audiences. Nevertheless, I would suggest that the representation of racial minorities on these shows--as well as their somewhat surprising, and by contemporary standards even bizarre qualities of address, etc.--were related to, or at least "allowed" by their displacement away from national network practices. (All three performers actually had some subsequent experience in attempting to become "national" television personae, although for only temporary periods.) My analysis is an attempt to introduce both the range of questions and the complications inherent to work in these previously under recognized areas of this history. Section II: Oral Histories of Women on Early Local Television By including a section about women in early local 300 television as part of a chapter focusing on margins and aporias, I am not suggesting that questions regarding women and television are actually in any way "marginal." Indeed, much of the best work in television studies addresses issues of the industry's and apparatus's address and positioning of gendered spectators, and the centrality of these questions to understanding television as a socio- political and ideological force. These questions have not been central to some of the work in television history, however, and especially not to what work exists in Los Angeles television history. In addition, the literature on women and television has also not addressed to any great degree questions related to local on-air women performers and personalities, the focus of this section. While I strongly intend a feminist presentation and analysis, I hope the issues and questions raised here will be taken up by feminist scholars informed by gendered and racial social experiences differing from those of my own white, heterosexual male positioning, in order to question and expand upon my analysis. For, as Joan Copjec states, "No political truth can ever be reached alone. This is a matter of definition. The resistance and doubt of others does not interfere with the logical process of solution, it exfoliates it."~ These interviews/oral histories are an attempt to approach questions of women in early Los Angeles television from the perspective of lived social experiences. In this effort, it will be important to 301 acknowledge these women's ~ stories of their experiences and, to respect their understanding of those experiences. But it is also important to attempt to see them in larger contexts than individualized experience--to see them, as we must see all experience, as subject to larger discourses, power dynamics, and inscriptions. Because of the marginalization of women working in the television industry, the details of these women's careers and their relating of their own "histories" will be given greater weight than others interviewed for this study. But the value of their "stories" will be enlarged by a historical and discursive contextualization of them, in order to recognize the contradictions and ambivalences they evidence. Women, of course, had a considerable presence in early television--network and local--as performers in prime-time narratives and variety shows, etc. The women whose careers are covered here, however, worked in daytime v" and (to a limited extent) evening "domestic" or "service- oriented" programming, as producers and writers in 302 addition to their role as hosts. Women were generally outnumbered by men in the industry, and most were relegated largely to secretarial and clerk positions: in a 1951 study of the Los Angeles radio-television advertising industries, Margaret Wade reported over 50 percent of women employees had clerical jobs, and that while some women served as producers, there were no female directors in television and only one in radio.39 But the early television industry needed to create enough programming to fill the number of on-air hours required to build a habitual and loyal audience. This demand allowed for a relatively generous window of opportunity for potential on-air personalities--particularly for (white) women and even inexperienced (white) men. Radio had already set a precedent in the broadcast industry for hiring women as writers, producers, and hosts, especially in daytime programming which was assumed to appeal to women in the home. Cooking, helpful hints, and inspirational-themed shows, as well as the better known "soap operas," were created in national and local broadcasting contexts to capture a female audience. The midwestern region's various "radio homemakers" cooking/chat shows, for example, were so popular and so successful at creating a sense of intimacy between listener and host that they continued to be aired some 303 fifteen to twenty years after the decline of network radio in the 19 50 's. 40 Both the domestic, service-oriented show and the daytime serial/soap opera had been created out of a tradition of women's fiction and journalism which spoke to women as a subculture, or as part of a "separate sphere" from the masculine culture represented in public institutions such as businesses and politics. Robert Allen and others have argued that this philosophy of "separate spheres" spoke to concerns of women in the home as it simultaneously supported a capitalist, patriarchal society--women in the separate sphere of the home were supposed to discover their true role by transforming the home environment into a haven from the ruthless world of big business. 4 1 Along with Tania Modleski and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Allen has also argued that broadcast programming carried on the "domestic fiction" tradition by emphasizing a rhetorical strategy that invited participation and connectedness to others--an interpersonal emphasis--yet was formally fragmented so as to accommodate the conflicting, interruptible, distracted viewing habits of the presumed female daytime audience.42 What these scholars have not pointed out is how important such an interpersonal address might be for creating a loyal audience, characterized by its sharing of 304 geographical space (and the problems common to that space), as well as gendered positioning within the home. The suburbanization characteristic of so much of post-war America--and the resultant exacerbation of the male and female "separate spheres"--was epitomized in the Los Angeles sprawl, so that this regional television industry had both an audience (positioned to be mainly white and middle-class) that was arguably predisposed to such programming, and a financial stake in bringing this audience together as Angelenos. The programs produced, written, and hosted by Lenore Kingston Jensen, Dorothy Gardiner, and Monty Margetts contributed to the Los Angeles television industry in this significant way. Opportunities to interview women performers from early television, whose numbers were already few, are becoming increasingly rare due to their age. These three women are considered together based in part on this scarcity, but more directly because of their participation in television programming formats directed toward female audiences, as described above. My knowledge of these programs is derived primarily from the interviews themselves, as no kinescopes of their work was available to me. (The one exception is Dorothy Gardiner's work on City at Night, one episode of which exists. It is discussed in detail in chapter three.) I found surprisingly little concerning them in the issues of Radio-Television Life. 305 My intention in this chapter is to allow these women to, for the most part, speak for themselves. While a fair amount of editing of our discussions has been necessary, and my own comments frame the report of our discussions, I am relying on a methodology of oral history important to recent work in women's history, which has "heavily valorized" women's own narratives. As discussed by Ruth Roach Pierson, this valorization has urged women's historians in the direction of oral history as the methodology, next to autobiography, promising to bring the researcher closest to the "reality" of women's lives. We have valorized oral history because it validates women's lives.'3 Pierson goes to suggest, however, that oral testimony should not be accepted "at face value," and that these recollections cannot be considered "uncritically, that is, as unmediated by cultural/historical context. n44 But such a positioning of oral histories is not itself innocent of cultural/historical context, which raises important issues concerning the present study. My attempts to contextually and analytically situate the testimonies considered in this chapter are conditioned by a conflict between my belief in the value and integrity of these women's personal understandings of their own lives, 306 and their joint lack of enthusiasm for the kind of feminist concepts on whi ch my methodology is rooted. This conflict, in addition to the question concerning my own male social experiences , has further persuaded me to quote at length from these interviews. The documentation of their careers, and their own comments regarding these careers, serves an important historical purpose. Their common resistance to "feminism" is also historically significant. My principal aim will be to provide these testimonies as "texts" unto themselves, though an analysis of them will be suggested. Lenore Kingston Jensen Lenore Kingston Jensen was born and raised in Los Angeles, and gained some local experience in dramatic radio on KFAC before deciding to move to New York "to become the world's greatest Broadway actress. 114 5 on her way, she took some advice and stopped in Chicago, which had become the nexus for radio soap operas. She began working on these programs in 1937 for NBc. 46 She appeared in these shows for three years before marrying an NBC engineer named Joe Conn, whom she had met in the network radio organization in Chicago but who now worked as a television engineer for the network in New York. Joe Conn 307 was in fact one of the three cameramen for NBC's debut of television at the 1939 World's Fair. After their marriage, Kingston Jensen moved to New York, where she gained her first experience with television. Although primarily an actress, Kingston Jensen became, during her stay in Chicago, expert in the technical side of radio, gaining personal control and satisfaction from the apparatus by becoming an amateur radio enthusiast--a somewhat unusual practice in the largely male world of radio amateurs and enthusiasts. She began teaching classes in radio code for the American Women Voluntary Services in New York. Her introduction to television, however, came as a home viewer: sometime in 1940 Conn brought home and installed an early version of a receiving set (with a rather small picture tube). Since there was no daytime programming or signal, he could not tell whether the tube was rightside up. Kingston Jensen's first evening watching television was thus spent standing on her head. But she became "an absolute, complete fan of television," and began to consider methods to get on the air. Unlike her radio work, she began in television as a producer and writer as well as an actress and performer. Her first inspiration came as she perused a museum display on the first floor level of the RCA Building: mannequins 308 showcased uniforms and costumes of those in the British voluntary services and military. Kingston Jensen proposed to program director Warren Wade that she hire some actor friends to wear these outfits and appear in a show explaining the British war effort, particularly the volunteer efforts. On the show, she "interviewed" the actors about their duties, etc. The idea was received enthusiastically, and she received $50 for her efforts. (According to Kingston Jensen, this was quite a sum in 1940, especially in early television; it was not matched for a number of years thereafter.) NBC asked her to continue producing civil defense programs, and she subsequently interviewed police and fire department chiefs, local civil defense organizers, etc. After the U.S. became involved in the war, television production was severely curtailed. But NBC convinced the government to install receiving sets in Air Raid Warden training facilities, so that the network could help to provide instruction. Kingston Jensen worked as an actress in a 20-minute show presented seven times a day for seven weeks: an air raid warden knocked on a door, was invited in by a husband and wife (her role), and explained to them how one becomes an air raid warden. 309 This episode was the extent of Kingston Jensen's wartime television work. Joe Conn was recruited by the U.S. Navy to work on a project in the Oklahoma dustbowl, attempting to drop bombs via television. This involved a drone plane flying apart from a control plane ("the mother plane"), in which engineers would try to locate the bomb site via television cameras in the drone, and then trigger the simulated bomb's release from the drone. To her knowledge, the project never came to fruition, possibly due in part to the pervasive internal struggles between the Reserve Navy (which Joe and other engineers were recruited into) and the regular Navy. Joe remained in the service for three years, and Kingston Jensen was allowed to stay with him during this time. She returned to the New York NBC station in 1946 to produce a local shopping show, among other activities. She also did some broadcasting work in Washington, D.C. The growing independent television scene in Los Angeles led the couple back to California in 1947: Joe had been hired by Ray Monfort, another New York NBC television engineer, to help put the Los Angeles Times' new television station KTTV on the air. While the Times had a construction permit to build the station, they were in no hurry to begin broadcasting until more of the organization and experience necessary to broadcasting were put into 310 place. With the cooperation of David Crandell, who had worked in both prewar and postwar television, and also taught admittedly primitive television courses at the Pasadena Playhouse, the Times ordered a "camera chain of equipment" (two cameras and a full control room), and installed at the Playhouse a closed circuit television system for training and experimental purposes. Joe eventually trained the first five KTTV engineers at this facility, where the Playhouse put on a series of live shows and plays. One was written and produced by Kingston Jensen--a 40 minute, 17-act play--at the performance of which an NBC executive up in the control booth said to her about the new medium, "My God, it's going to be omnivorous ! " 47 Kingston Jensen had a considerable television career in Los Angeles. Although she continued her work in radio, and eventually appeared in some filmed television programs, she primarily wrote and produced her own shows for live local TV. She worked mostly at KTTV, but also KFI and KNBH. Her first on-air Los Angeles television show was in 1949 on KFI, channel 9, where daytime programming had been inaugurated locally. Much of her television work helped to establish the modes of "domestic" and "service-oriented" programming now recognized as indicative of daytime programming. 311 She knew the KFI program director from New York, and suggested to him a show called Mailbag of Household Tricks. Once or twice a week for a year, actors would demonstrate the various hints and tricks supposedly sent in by the viewers (those actually submitted were too few, and often not appropriate). She and her co-host split the weekly salary of $20, which meant they virtually "broke even" after paying for their telephone calls and gasoline. Kingston Jensen also performed commercials on the show, for which she acquired a fine reputation. Another of her shows was called Classified Column, on air for 30 minutes, five days per week on KTTV. A kind of video bulletin board, the program was inspired by just such a public installation at the local Boys Market. These markets became the show's sponsor as well, and parties interested in appearing on the show would pick up a form at the market to fill in and submit to Kingston Jensen. The set was a replica of a newspaper "want ad" page, with two windows cut out. The visitors to the program appeared in these windows: looking for work, selling crafted or previously owned items, etc. She needed 17 people for each program (indicative of the fragmentation of these types of shows), and her chief difficulty was when scheduled applicants did not show up. She had little or no help in producing these shows. 312 "There was nothing easy about television in those days," according to Kingston Jensen. "You had to work hard. And there was no money for secretaries or anything like that- you just did everything." The show ran for about two years, she suggests, since it was so human and personal. She later adapted the format of this show to radio, on a KFWB program called Purely Personal (suggesting the importance of interpersonal address in programming addressed primarily to women), which also was successful for a number of years. On KNBH, channel 4, Kingston Jensen had a cooking show for some 17 months. While admittedly not a great cook, she was accomplished at delivering commercials, which was ultimately more important to the show's financial success. Within the 29 minutes of airtime, she needed to do five live commercials, picking up the various items being sold and delivering an assured patter of salesmanship, based on notes taped to the back of the items but mostly on memorized and ad-libbed information and observations. In addition, she prepared two recipes, interviewed a guest, and ran a contest. She learned that when a commercial did not go as planned (e.g., the "unbreakable" baby bottle which did not live up to its billing), it was better to make a joke than to become flustered or confused. She had great admiration for Monty 313 Margetts, whose own cooking show was filled with even more mishaps, but who handled them with great aplomb and a ready sense of humor. In Kingston Jensen's words, "People began to level with the audiences." Just the same, her delivery of the ads was subject to pressure from the sponsors themselves: I always had great respect for the audience. And I wasn't going to stand up there and beat them over the head to come and buy this whatever-it-was [that] was being sold--a kitchen towel or something. So I would do [it] the way I would like to hear it. I would say "This is really a beautiful towel, and I think if you rub it like this and you try it on the glass . . . ," and I did it very lady-like. Then, that night or the next morning, I would hear from the so-called producer, who would say "Well! They did that same spot over on KTLA, and they got 52 calls and we only got 6. Now try harder." So, the next time I would push it a little harder, and then it would turn out yes, indeed, I got more calls. Until I was practically screaming up there, "Go this minute!" It works. I learned it the hard way; it does works. Which came to me as a great blow. I didn't care for it. The determination of, and propriety of, a woman's discourse in early television is an important motif in these interviews. One interesting aspect of this quote is Kingston Jensen's initial, friendly or respectful address to the audience which, I would suggest, is related to the interpersonal mode emphasized in the ideological construction of femininity, and central to the address of television. At odds with the brazenly pragmatic, purely 314 capitalistic mode of address preferred by the sponsor, it seems to suggest for this period a possible line of demarcation between "show" and "commercial" in certain program texts. It also may indicate a difference from radio discourse, in which a capitalistic mode of address was regularly, if covertly, present in the friendliness of traditional femininity, especially in the practiced traditions of Irna Phillips, who wrote product placements into soaps by having characters use them. The local and "live" characteristics of Los Angeles television began to change in the mid-1950's, due to the national microwave and coaxial cable links, and then the invention of videotape. The budgets increased, and shows were taken much more seriously. Kingston Jensen feels that the production and even the attitudes surrounding the work in television began to change. Even on the national "live" network shows produced from Hollywood, the productions had been characterized by a sense of teamwork and professional regard: the shows were by necessity intricately coordinated and imbued with the charge of a one-time performance. After videotape, "everyone became a prima donna: I want to do it over," etc. The pressure of live performance was displaced by escalating personal interest and idiosyncrasies, often masked by a call for perfectionism. Again, budgets went up as productions escalated in time and trouble. This aspect of her experience--a preference for, even nostalgia for the strenuous but close-knit interpersonal processes of production--recurs in all of these interviews. 315 The final topic of our interview concerned Kingston Jensen's experiences as a woman working in the early television industry, a topic toward which she has strong feelings. Q: Lastly, I was curious about whether you found there to be any special considerations or any difficulties working as a woman in the industry. No; I didn't know there was a problem. You know, all this woman stuff--they act like they discovered it or something, you know. No, it's that • • • the women didn't push themselves. Now we had this organization, the Radio and Television Women of Southern California [formed around 1950 or 1951, Kingston Jensen one of the active members], but its idea was to help each other. It wasn't to go out and say "We're better than the men." That was never thought of •.•• The basic idea was to help each other and exchange information •••• You became friends, and if somebody knew of a job, they would tell people. Then that was merged into the American Women in Radio and Television, which is a national organization. But basically, I don't remember any "pushing" of women as such. Just the good ones were noticed. You don't have to go out and hit the society over the head; you do a real good job, and you'll be noticed. Now of course there always were women who were secretaries, who felt that they knew more than their bosses. That's classic, and it's true. Now a lot of those women have become executives, by pushing. But it was just sort of common knowledge that three quarters of the secretaries knew more than their bosses. And of course the secretaries guarded their bosses with f erociousness--trying to get past the secretary to see the boss was a tremendous undertaking. Because these gals knew how to screen out people. That's about all I can say about women. • • • In my personal case--and you don't even have to mention me in all this--I always felt that if I had been more pushy, I would have made a lot more money and I would have done things that I considered more important. But it was not in my nature to be pushy. And I had a very happy life, an· yway; I had a good time. But in order to succeed in show business, you have to be very clever and very pushy. That just goes with it. Except for the rare talent, that people take care of and nurture. But basically, there's so much competition that you've really got to push and shove if you want to get there, and I never felt it was worth it. But I wouldn't trade my early days in television for anything. 316 Like many women of her generation, especially working women, she holds little regard for the women's movement and the implicit feminist bias of my question. This position seems due in part to the potential slight toward her career and those of most working women before the 1960's and 1970's, but more generally to a difference in tolerance for behavior considered appropriate for women. (Indicative of her preference is her suggestion that she not be included by name in this study.) And yet a certain ambivalence becomes apparent in her answer: while there is an individualized context for "success" implicit to her 317 judgments that is compatible with traditional populist beliefs in a capitalist culture (her belief that "women didn't push themselves"), there is also an awareness of the importance for support for and from other women. Her participation in networking organizations, while similar in some ways to collective activities of the early women's movement, are considered by her as practices of "friendliness" rather than any kind of political activity. In other words, she disregards any potential for utilizing these groups to gain collective power in a political sense, although it seems clear that she is responsible for such undertakings in a social sense. Dorothy Gardiner Dorothy Gardiner was the sole woman among Landsberg's troupe of announcer-performers and hosts at KTLA.48 With little broadcast experience, she became involved at the station when a friend who had a show (Beryl Wallace of ~ Sky's the Limit) asked her to help out. The station needed someone to work with former radio announcer Keith Hetherington. But since he was 6'4", they needed someone tall enough to allow for one camera to shoot close-ups. He and Gardiner began together on one of the station's earliest shows, Sho~ping at Home, a fifteen minute program 318 consisting of three commercials (three minutes each) plus "chitchat" in between. She recalls that she started working three nights per week, then five, and stayed 20 years. The show soon expanded to a half-hour format called Handy Hints, adding viewers' household suggestions for entertainment between the plugs. This addition, common to many shows with similar formats in this period, can be seen as representative of the potential for interpersonal address important to the sense of "community" that early local television provided. Unlike Kingston Jensen, Gardiner found the items sent in by the viewers to be useful and plentiful: They started just by writing them [the "hints"] in, and then I would try to find the things and do them. Then people were so gracious, they would send in the package, you see, with the actual hint, and tell you how to do it. These were people obviously that had a set (it was early), and they were thrilled to see their item on television. You know, "I made that." . And you announced their name and where they live (naturally, you didn't give their address), and they loved that, you see. And so the simple little idea of showing things made a nice program, I guess, because it lasted so long. Gardiner was on this show for many years, co-hosting with Hetherington, Ken Graue, and Dick Garten. For each of them, the endeavor to create an interpersonal mode of 319 address was a priority, and unrelated to any particular program format. She recalls Landsberg's sole piece of advice before putting them on the air: Television is a new medium. But remember one thing: it's an intimate medium,· because it goes into the home. And when a person turns the dial to channel 5, they are inviting you like a guest to be in their home. So conduct yourself that way. Period. Within the interview, it became clear that the interpersonal aspects of early television were also important to Gardiner in terms of the production process involved. On the Handy Hints show, for example, she had her mother help open and sort through the mail. Often writing and producing shows herself, including writing her own commercials, Gardiner eventually came to work in every kind of program format for the station (aside from dramatic acting). She was especially important because she was the only woman in KTLA's group of "remote" personnel, co-hosting programs such as City at Night, or Fun on the Beach (in which several KTLA personalities literally surveyed activities at Santa Monica Beach for two to three hours on Sunday afternoons). This troupe helped to develop KTLA's community "profile," and Gardiner recalls that Landsberg believed in his group of people. I'd say we were like staff announcer-performers. And whenever a show would come up, he would draw within his five or six people. And I was just very, very lucky because I was the only girl. So whenever he wanted a boy and a girl doing it, I did it, you see. Despite the limited resources and primitive conditions of early television, or perhaps because of them, the relationships among cast and crew were 320 foregrounded by Gardiner as important. She recalled that in doing ~ .at. Night: You didn't know where you were going, you just followed the camera, and you talked about what the camera was doing, you see. And we'd do these shows, like the opening of the home show or the ice shows, or all these openings of shows, and you'd be standing there talking about something and all of a sudden it's gone. And then on to something else. And you just go on to something else like nothing happened. Cable all over the place. You'd be walking, and you're tripping over cable. It was early television. But I wouldn't trade it for the world. It's something that I am so fortunate that I grew up in. Because we talk about it. The crew for the whole years I was there--we all got married, they have children, I'd hear about their problems and this and that. And I can remember one fellow always told me, "You know Dorothy, we spend more time with you everyday than we do our own wives." And, you know, when you figure three or four hours an afternoon. So there was always a closeness: "I'm going for coffee, want a cup?" They'd bring you back a cup. I mean it was a warm, friendly group, because we all started and grew up together •••. We see each other so rarely, but when we do--you'd think, you know, that was our brother •• Nevertheless, certain shows appealed to her more than others. City at Night, for example, was not a favorite of hers, for reasons which reflect the private/public dichotomy within social spheres of gendered experience (which television was complicit with): It was an excellent show. I did not particularly [enjoy it], to be honest, because you never knew where you were going until the very night, so you couldn't prepare. And for a young girl, that's kind of • . • I mean they'd go to a defense plant, and all these [kinds of places]. And I'd stand there like "What do I ask," you know. Because you didn't have a chance to read up on it, or prepare anything. It was all strictly spontaneous. And I didn't like it for that reason, because •.• I didn't want to ask a dumb question that would show off my age. You know, I wanted to be very experienced. 321 Even though City at Night did visit locations which were more comfortable for her (primarily "entertainment" sites, such as the Ice Follies, etc.), Gardiner left the show after a short period of time in order to become the spokesperson for its sponsor, the Santa Fe railway-- advocating their passenger service, from a set in the studio. Her abilities delivering ads were notable, having developed on the early Shopping at Home and Handy Hints programs. When those ended, she hosted an afternoon movie, called The Dorothy Gardiner Show, as well as Milady, a JO-minute "women's program" that directly followed. This show featured decorating ideas, fashion 322 and gardening tips, and interviews with authors--in her words, "like a women's magazine." The remembered quality of closeness and family was prominent throughout my interview with Gardiner, and was included in her response to my question about her experiences as a woman in early television. Interesting to me was that she seems to have interpreted the question as implying competition between women. Q: Was it at all difficult or peculiar for you working as a woman in early television? A: No, not at all. Not at all, in fact- of course don't forget we were all very young. And they couldn't have been more gracious. There was no competition between women. Oh occasionally some performers would not let you talk much (laughs) .•• I've done some parades and things (when this happened], but not [with] Stan and the regulars. Some of the people--every time you open your mouth to say something they take it right away. But I've never looked at them as saying "You're a ham," or anything. I really think it was because they were used to working alone. But with our little staff of people it was never like that. We'd work together. There is a chemistry. To be successful when two people--a man and a woman--work together, there has to be a chemistry, or it doesn't work. I mean you truly have to like the person, because on television it shows. . • • They called it the family. We were the KTLA family. Don't forget, the cameramen, the stage crew, all of us--we were all about the same age. We grew up together, so there was a warmth, a friendliness. They'd do anything for you. I can remember on my afternoon show--with the movie and everything, and Milady--! always had two cameras. But if something exciting would happen and they needed a camera, they'd pull mine. And I remember saying "You mean I'm only going to have one camera?" And the cameraman, Ed Resnick, or any of them, whoever the cameraman was [said], "Dorothy, don't worry about a thing. I'll make it look like there are two cameras." And they did. They'd dolly in as tight, and pull back--beautiful camera work, and you didn't know • . • But you see, that's what you had, a warmth and a friendship. Everybody really liked each other. I mean they were all working in a new industry, and learning too, you see. That group at KTLA: not just the performers, but I'm talking about the real staff people--the cameramen, all of them. Again, talking about what a warm and friendly atmosphere it was: I'd be getting ready to go home, and a director would come in the back [and say], "Dorothy, do .YOU ·have to dash, are you leaving right now?" And I'd say "Why?" "Would you stay around an · hour, and would you take your hand and pour some coffee into a cup"--not being on camera, just a hand insert, you see. I said "Sure~" And you would wait, and you'd come in, do your little thing. "Thanks Dorothy." "Okay, good night, .. .. and off you'd go. You never were ~ for that. You couldn't do it today, they wouldn't allow it. But you would do it, and you didn't think anything about it. Monty Margetts 323 Monty Margetts began her career as an actress in 1929 in Seattle, became an accomplished stage and radio 324 performer in San Francisco, and moved to Los Angeles in 1945 to appear in the radio show "This Woman's Secret. 11 49 Most of her radio experience was in dramatic programs, but she also appeared regularly on Ralph Edwards' "Truth or Consequences" as one of the performers arranged to be nearby during the gags. Her first experience on television was in the 1948 KFI Christmas Show, written by a friend from radio, Peggy Webber. In early 1949, that station's director of radio called, to inquire about her appearing in a new show. In her recounting of the story, her charm and sense of humor are quite evident, as well as some of the "untraditional" aspects of her persona and life experiences: He said "I understand, Monty, you've done a lot of ad-lib shows on radio." I had come down here from San Francisco radio in '45 for General Mills, to do a regular daily show. So I just knew Ken very lightly--I'd done a couple of dramatic shows for him--so he called me about this. And I said "Well, what is it?" He said "Well, what I want to know is, can you cook?" And I said "Is this sort of a new switch on the casting couch?" (laughs) There was a long silence. He said "Now let's be business-like!" (laughs) He was a marvelous man. He said "No, we are starting television here • • • and we want to get commercials on it, 11 naturally, something that will pay money. So he said "We've been trying out home economists in a cooking set, and they are rather dull. I thought, you're never at a loss for a word." I said "Thank you, sir." (laughs) And I said "But I don't know a damned thing about cooking." I was an only child, whose father was a newspaperman and we lived in apartments or hotels, and my mother didn't want me under her feet. That was fine with me, I just liked to read, and so I knew from nothing. I had lost one husband, and I think that was probably the reason. Because he said to me one day--I had learned in Seattle, because I liked it so much, how to do a very simple thing with filet of sole--and he said "Monty, we've had this four times this week." Well, it was the only thing I knew how to fix! {laughs) I realize I should have known more. But fools walk in I SO• • • • The cooking show was an almost immediate success, highlighted by the fact that Margetts had little or no 325 familiarity with what was expected to occur in this traditional feminine domestic locale and practice. What also seems integral to its success was her respect for and uniquely frank address to her audience: the interpersonal aspects of the show's address became increasingly inter- discursive as well. Well, I'm not very good, not only at cooking but at mechanical things. So just opening the damned can on camera led to rather a predicament. {laughs) But I rose above it, and talked my way through. And as my later husband said: "Stand you in front of a camera and you'll tell everything you know, and enjoy yourself thoroughly." And I'm afraid that's true. But then people started writing in. When I got them [the letters], then I made a habit of taking maybe the worst one • the first one I read, I remember, was a woman who said what a mess I made of things--just awful! Just absolutely awful. So I read it, and I said, "You know the terrible trouble about this is it's all true. I do make a mess because as I've told you, I don't know about cooking. But sometime in your life you've got to learn. So I've decided to learn." I didn't say [it was] because ·I was getting paid for it--but I wasn't getting paid so much that it mattered a great deal anyway. Well then they started writing in, these nice people, telling me how to do things. So I started reading their letters, and taking their advice. Because I figured, if you're smart enough to take their advice, and tell the world that you're taking it, they will buy anything you sell them. And that was true. And that's what made the show turn very successful. I took the right to turn down sponsors that I couldn't [believe in]- because I did all the commercials ad~lib, I just worked it in, and worked the show around them, used them, you see. And as I said, if the things don't turn out, it's not the fault of any product, it's yours truly here, who doesn't know how to go about it. 326 Unlike Kingston Jensen and Gardiner, Margetts became popular partly because she did not fit into prevalent cultural paradigms of femininity--especially the domestic model--that other women on television were upholding. At the same time, her show is indicative of what feminist critics like Tania Modleski and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis50 have argued about television's gendered spectators: that television's mode of address (interpersonal, with a connotation of "averageness"), and programming (genres and schedules)--its flow--make it possible for women to find or recognize points of resistance at the same time that it co-opts them as consumers.51 This latter aspect seems implicit in her awareness of the commercial leverage that her overall address afforded. 327 The degree and pervasiveness of the inter-discursive aspects of her show make Margetts a singularly interesting site for such resistance, and for speculation about its ultimate cooptation. (Since none of her shows exist on kinescope, the analysis presented here is based on descriptions within oral histories, primarily that of Margetts.) She opened the address of her show to include 1) the crew, who occasionally responding audibly to her efforts and suggestions; 2) the reading of letters of criticism from viewers, sponsors, etc. on the air; 3) letters of encouragement and counter-criticism from other of her viewers. In this way, Margetts mildly deconstructed many of the discursive regimes of television discourse and address, including those of production. These characteristics of the program's address were evident from the beginning: I didn't have an agent; there was no need for an agent in radio, or in early television. Or a manager, looking out for ~ angle on the thing. So all of a sudden, before it had settled into a half hour show--it was the first couple of weeks--! looked at the monitor, and it's showing what's going "out," you see, and I see this--what the hell was it--"Mary something-or-other in Cook's Corner." I said "What's that?" And this ·is on the air! (laughs) And the show started: I said "I am Monty Margetts! I'm an actress! I'm no cook! That's the last thing you've got to think." I said "This is not Cook's Corner, this is Monty Margetts, who is a self-respecting actress trying to learn to cook and get a little paid for it, and I don't know why I'm here but here I am." And I said "That's just a lot of nonsense!" And I looked at the crew, and said "Don't show that again. I want my own name up there." (laughs) •• • I had never inquired into this, you see. So the show opens with me looking at the monitor and just furious. (laughs) Also important to this effect was the strongly 328 interpersonal aspect of her address, entailing not only her regard for the audience when on the air, but also off the air: she often phoned viewers who had written in with especially good suggestions or recipes, or offered a solid defense from her critics. The "communal" aspects of local television were an important, material aspect of her success and overall experience with the medium. Her show developed a reputation for raising expectations that something odd, if not crazy, would happen (though never on purpose). But the show was couched in empathetic terms of address rather than a purely comical or cynical tone. I tried to plan it so that I would do it properly, and do good commercials, and have the s~ow go smoothly. And yet be able to talk about interesting things. My God, I was perfectly capable, if something was dull--you know, while I'm trying to beat it up--of giving, not a book review, but talking about what I was reading, or something that had happened at home, or some funny thing I'd run into. I would talk about a million things--just as you would with a friend. There was the thing I established early on. To this day, it annoys the hell out of me--I'm not talking about audience shows, those are different, where you're doing ·it in front of an audience, and you speak--but when a person is on by themselves, and you're talking to whoever is watching you, my attitude is "That's my friend there." Just one person. And I got in the habit of saying, you know, something when I opened, "Oh, I'm glad you could make it, I've been looking forward to seeing you. I'm kind of lonely." Or something asinine like that, you know. But strictly between two people. Because most people do watch alone. And the mail reflected they liked that. And that's the way I treated it. A lot of them [her audience] I met. Because occasionally I would have occasion to phone somebody--their letter had been very interesting, and they'd sent me a good idea or a recipe. And I would talk about them, and I would phone them. And I made some good friends. I got a lot of letters from bartenders. (laughs) Because in those days, you know, if you didn't have a TV, you went to the bar to watch it. One day at the Hollywood Athletic Club, this actor I knew, Ed McDonald--oh God, he was a character--but we used to work together on Rocky Jordan. And he said, "Monty, one day you've got to come with me down to the Hollywood Athletic Club" that was on sunset. It's a Jewish thing now, I think. "Because the bartender," he said, "he never misses you, and he doesn't like any interruptions when you're on, which makes it a little difficult." So, anyway, one day I arranged to meet him. I was all ready for my show and I had enough time to go over and spend maybe 15 or 20 minutes and then get back in plenty of time to do my show. So I met Ed and we went into the bar there. And the bartender came to see what Ed wanted, and Ed said, "Well, Monty what do you want?" The bartender looked at me, and said "Oh my God!" He was wonderful. You'd have thought, I don't know (pause) well, it was the greatest reception I've ever had in my life. (laughs) We tickled the pie out of him. He was so cute. Then he proceeded to tell me about every damned show I had done. (laughs) And I said "Well, I was there, so ••• " 329 330 Despite the marked interest of bartenders (who also, it should be recognized, work at the service of others and are expected to shift attention and sympathy according to the demands of others),52 the inter-discursive and interpersonal dimensions of the show were centered on and directed toward women, which Margetts recognizes. While not precisely aware of the political implications of her format and address, the results and social effects of the show were obvious to her. Because of the local context, these effects were able to manifest themselves in two-way interactions, as well. Many personal things came out of it. It was such a (pause) it was very strange, because radio was not like that at all. You got letters • • . just nice housewives, and a lot of children. Oh my God, I must have had the intellectual appeal to a ten year old. or smaller. . • • I've always got along with women, all my life. I like men tremendously, but I mean, you hear women: "I like men, but I don't care for women." Well, I've always had loads of friends. And I'm a friendly sort of gal. So I think that was it: especially housewives who were tied down with children and that. The attitude seemed to be, they were so glad to have a friend to talk to them for half an hour. That's sounds kind of silly, but that's about what it amounted to. In this comment, Margetts shows an awareness of not only the discursive pressures on female discourse in early television, but of the social pressures on the typical female viewer of her show. She attributes her non- traditional social experience as a woman to be in part responsible for the "natural" resistance to these pressures on her own show. There was an awful lot--in daytime--of women's shows like that. There were women who interviewed other women about politics, and stuff like that: Mary McAdoo was one. The funny part about those--this sounds very nasty of me--but they were always so "nice". Now Norma Gilchrest is a dear, darling friend of mine; we are pals. But Norma's vocabulary is even rougher than mine, at times. Well, when she would get on camera, you see, she would be riding such tight herd on herself. It's never bothered ·me--my mind kind of switches when I get on camera; I know that I've got to speak the way my mother would rather I did. It's just like going from one room into the other, you know--this is the way life is going to be there. I used a lot of slang, but no swearing. But Norma lost all her- and so did Mary McAdoo--lost all their personality, because they were crossing the "t"'s and dotting the "i"'s, and watching for the swear words that were verboten. I dori't know why I make such a thing of this, but it was something that was very common in those days. Q: I think that's really interesting. It seems to go along with the format of your show, as not exactly "proper." Right. (laughs) Q: I'm sure that was very refreshing. To see people not being so prim and proper. Well, yes. That's why I think I got such [a] friendly response. Because many times the letters were sort of "Oh, let me tell you about the time when I really made a boo-boo," you know. The most awful disasters. Because they happen to everybody. 331 Never in my life did I think--as most healthy, normal girls do--about getting married, or having children. I just never, ever thought about it. Anymore than I ever thought about cooking: my mother got the meals, or else we ate in restaurants. Well, nobody was more surprised than I when I got married--the first time, or the second time (I've been married three times). And when I found out, or thought I was pregnant, I went to the doctor. I said "Isn't this amazing?" Well, he said "You know what causes it, don't you, Mrs. Hobbs (I was at that time)?" I said "Well, of course, but that's not the point. I just never have thought about it." Well, the same way with the damned cooking. You know I knew how to make toast, and stuff, but these things just seem to happen, and I have to do something about them, and somehow the Lord sees I get through it all right. But that's about as good an explanation as I can give you. Despite the "untraditional" characteristics of 332 Margetts' television show, and their apparent basis in her social life, she responded very similarly to Kingston Jensen and Gardiner when asked directly about gendered televisual experiences. Nevertheless, her response also indicates an ambivalence about patriarchal or masculinist positioning of women's "proper place." Significant here is a nostalgia for her father, who was supportive and even insistent about her not accepting traditional women's roles, and therefore important to her own self- understanding. This relationship is contrasted by an anonymous male response to her mere appearance in the public sphere--a telling and unprovoked scolding that reveals a distaste or even a threat in attempting to position Margetts as an object. Q: Was it at all difficult or challenging in any way to be a woman in early television? No! You see, (pause) how shall I put this? When all this women's lib came along ••• I've never truly (pause) I sort of wondered what the hell all the fuss was about. And I think, really, Mark, it's because I had a remarkable father. He was a darling man, an Oxford man, Christ's Church. But he, along with Mr. Robert Cromey, a Scot--with Mr. cromey's money, he founded The Vancouver ,Syn, which is still the leading paper there. But my father just took it for granted that I would get "A"'s in school. He could not bear it when my mother's sisters, my aunts, used to talk baby talk to me, and he told them so, plainly. My mother was a marvelous mother. And I think I grew up in such a secure thing, that nothing has really bothered me that much. And I well remember, one of these days, coming home from the show when it was still at KFI. And for years, I didn't drive--! hated the thought of driving. And I was walking up the street on Cole Avenue, where we lived (this is before I married Harold), and the phone rang when I got in the house, and I answered it. Well, for years when I first came down here from San Francisco, I would wear a hat and gloves, like we did in San Francisco. And I was dressed that way, and I had my briefcase with all my papers for the show. And this masculine voice said to me, "I would like to paint your portrait." Well, I said, "How charming." I said "Why?" "Because," he said, "I will name it Madame Importance. That's what you look like." And he banged up the phone--it must have been one of my neighbors. Well, I thought it was too funny for words. I loved it, and I told everybody I knew. But then when I began 333 to think it over, I thought, well, I guess I must seem very, you know, self important, or something. But it didn't bother me in the least. And finally, I got to the point where I became something I had never been bef ore--not introspective, but sort of (pause) looking at myself a little more closely. And I realized that my reaction at times--talk about fools walk in--but I would def end anybody to the death if I thought they should be defended. It never occurred to me not to stick my neck out. So perhaps that has something to do with it. I don't know whether this is answering your question or not. Q: Yeah, it is. It's interesting, because as you say, some of the women that you knew did feel certain pressures--on their persona and how they could present themselves--that you didn't particularly feel. Yes, that's right. It's never occurred to me. And I just ..• well it never occurs to me to say about something--unless I know perfectly well I can't--that I can't do it. There are plenty of things I can't do, and I'm not even interested in trying. But if it's anything to do with a show, I'll have a go at it. So maybe • I'm not really good at self-analysis, I'm really not. It seems fair to suggest that none of the women interviewed for this chapter evidences an interest in self-analysis, at least regarding their television 334 careers. But certain contexts of analysis are clearly relevant. Even at this early stage of TV's development (perhaps especially at this stage), television was helping to disseminate the ideology of separate worlds of gendered activities and interests, evident in terms of both genres 335 (program types) and mode of address. Recognizing this, it is important to avoid an implicitly masculinist denigration of those forms and aesthetics coded to be "female." Interpersonal address, for example, sometimes positioned as a debasement or sentimentalization of "serious" culture, should be seen instead as an approximation of the discourses and identif icatory registers that configure important and prevalent aspects of female subjectivity within a patriarchy. The pioneers of early "women's television" formats considered in this chapter demonstrated a forthrightness guiding their work ethic, tempered by a recognition of and appeal to the significant interpersonal aspects of their programs. Nevertheless, the ambivalences and contradictions indicated here are many. The deserved self-esteem of these women, based on their efforts and success, is cordoned within socially-determined rules of female behavior (with which they are complicit). They actively participated in formal and informal women's groups, recognizing the importance of such support but refusing any political efficacy in these groups. While they had empathy for secretaries and housewives--as hard-working and underappreciated laborers whom their own efforts assuaged--they also acted on the opportunity to position this audience as key domestic consumers, thus reinforcing 336 women's roles in patriarchal private spheres. Finally, the (marginally) communal and deconstructive production practices they employed were considered by them in the context of nostalgic memories and "pioneer" conditions, rather than potentially progressive and alternative methods. The negotiation of their roles as women, especially in the Symbolic sphere of television, can thus be seen to parallel and to be conditioned by the larger paradoxes surrounding women's culture. As Allen points out, in his discussion of women's literature, the very size of the female subculture, along with its status as the primary consumer group in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century, predisposed its fictional expression toward accommodation with the status quo .and toward commercial exploitation, while the exclusion of women from the centers of cultural power precluded the emergence of a fictional literature of revolt as anything more than a marginalized discourse. 53 This positioning within structures of dominance does not preclude further study of these women, or many others working in early television. My own interviews, for example, only partially address the relation of the personal lives of these women to their careers--an important component in much of the contemporary historical work concerned with women's own narratives, which is interested in how public and private concerns are 337 intertwined.54 Also of great interest and value would be autobiographical recollections by the women themselves. Additional women performers working in early Los Angeles television include those in "entertainment" format shows, such as Ina Ray Hutton and Ada Leonard, who headlined all-girl orchestras; women of color such as Hilo Hattie from the Harry Owens program; women who worked in news and public service programming, such as Ruth Ashton Taylor at CBS and channel 2; women directors, such as Betty Turbiville, a graduate of the Pasadena Playhouse who worked at channel 13; women whose notoriety seemed to emanate from their "object" status, such as Dagmar or Zsa Zsa Gabor.55 All of these women and many others would provide additional details and perspectives related to the working conditions, social experiences, and cultural contradictions involved in early Los Angeles television. My own work is a first step in the direction toward such an overview and analysis. 338 1 See Stuart Hall, "The Whites of Their Eyes," in~ Media Reader, ed. by Manuel Alvarado and John o. Thompson (London: British Film Institute, 1990), pp. 7-23, and Homi K. Bhabha· , "The Other Question ••• ," Screen 24, No. 6 (November-December, 1983): 18-36. 2 Leo Gavallete, "The Mysterious Korla Pandit," Videosonic Art§. No. 2 (n.d.): 10-16. After a career overview, including excerpts from an alleged interview with Pandit, the article .discusses Pandit's experiences with "the science of induction," which Pandit denied was a brand of hypnosis. I should also mention that one individual I talked to during my research questioned Pandit's backqround, and even his ethnicity. But this was the least corroborated perspective on Pandit, and in any case demonstrates one aspect of the "ambivalence" projected onto his representation. 3 "Men of Music" Radio-Television Life (21 November 1948): 37. 4 Ibid. I p. 12. 5 Ibid. I p. 13. 6 Ibid. I p. 15. 7 Nevertheless, one intertextual consideration to be mentioned is the considerable number of older British films being televised at this time, since most American films, especially from the major studios, were not yet licensed for television use. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. I p. 16. lO A June, 1987 Pandit concert that I attended at the Park Plaza Hotel in downtown Los Angeles (sponsored by the AMOK bookstore in Silver Lake, known nationally for their catalogue ·of the bizarre) brought together a genuinely eclectic audience: a variety of New Age followers, Melrose hipsters, many older fans, and the occasional early television historian. Pandit also sometimes accompanies silent films at special screenings in Southern California. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. I p. 17. 339 13 Edward w. Said, orientalism {New York: Vintage Books, 1978) I P• 206. 14 Ibid. 15 James Clifford, "Introduction: Partial Truths," in Writing Culture ed. by James Clifford and George E. Marcus {Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 12. 16 Bhabha, op. cit., p. 26. 1 7 Ibid. lS Ibid. I p. 27. 19 Ibid. I p. 2 8 • 20 Ibid. I p. 29 n said, op. cit., p. 207. n Clifford, op. cit. 23 Bhabha , op. cit • , p. 3 3 • 24 See Margaret Morse, "Talk, Talk, Talk, " Screen 2 6 , No. 2 (March- April, 1985): 2-15. 2 5 "Give Him Paradise, " Fortnight { 2 4 December 19 51 ) • 26 See Mary Desjardins and Mark Williams, "Are You Lonesome Tonight?: Gendered Address in 'The Lonesome Gal' and 'The Continental'" unpublished paper delivered at the "Console-ing Passions" Conference, Iowa City, 1992. 27 See "Latin Lover," ~ 58, No. 19 { 5 November 1951): 104-105, and "Lonesome Guy," Newsweek 38, No. 19 (5 November 1951): 58. 28 See ''Woo-Pitcher Gets Network,"~ {11 February 1952) and "Kidding the Continental," I&Qk (22 April 1952). 2 9 Jane Pelgram, "Husbands Loathe Him!" TV-Radio Life ( 14 September 1951): 39. 30 Burt A. Folkart, "Harry Owens of 'Hawaii Calls' Dies at 84," Los Angeles Times (13 December 1986). 31 For an extensive overview of the u.s.o. entertainment provided during the war, and its potential conditioning of 340 the serviceman audience for post-war television variety/vaudeville formats, see Teresa D. Tynes, "A Theater Worth Fighting For: The Stage and American Democracy in world War II" unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (forthcoming) Department of American Civilization, University of Texas. n Folkart, op. cit. 33 For an overview of this process, see Roger Bell, ~ Among Eguals: Hawaiian Statehood and A1Derican Politics (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984), especially chapter 5, "Issues Confused, 1946-1950: Civil Rights, Party Politics, and Communism," pp. 120-179. Much of the Congressional resistance to statehood was from the South, which saw Hawaii as threatening not only because of its racial composition (arguing that such a "mixed" population could not be assimilated into "American" society), but because Hawaii would probably supplement the challenge to the South's segregation laws, which were under contention in the post-war Congress. Nevertheless, such resistance to Hawaiian statehood, rooted in racial intolerance, was not restricted to this region. 34 See Jane Pelgram, "A Colonel Calls the General Wrong!" Radio-TY Life (16 November 1951): 35. 35 Rudy Behlmer, interview with author, 9 November 1990. 36 William Stulla, interview with author, 26 October 1989. 37 George Lipsitz, "From Chester Himes to Nursery Rhymes: Local Television and the Politics of ·cultural Space in Postwar Los Angeles," unpublished paper, n.d. 38 "Individual Responses: Joan Copjec," Camera Obscura Nos. 20-21 (May-September, 1989), p. 123. 39 Margaret Helen Wade, "A Descriptive Study of the Jobs Held By Women in the Radio-Television Industry in Los Angeles," Master's Thesis, Department of Radio-Television, University of southern California (August, 1951), pp. 50- 53. 4 0 See Evelyn Birkby, Neigbboring on the Air: cooking with the KHA Radio Homemakers (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), and Jane and Michael Stern, "Neighboring," The New Yorker 67 (April 15, 1991): 78-93. 41 Robert c. Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), pp. 133-151. 341 42 These concepts are discussed thoroughly in Tania Modleski, "The Rhythms of Reception: Daytime Television and Women's Work" in Regarding Television, E. Ann Kaplan editor (Frederick, Maryland: University Publications of America, Inc., 1983), pp. 67 - 75 and sandy Flitterman Lewis, "The Real Soap Operas: TV Commercials" in Regarding Television, E. Ann Kaplan editor (Frederick, Maryland: University Publications of America, Inc., 1983), pp. 84-96. Modleski in particular points out the ideological consequences of such fragmentation. 43 Ruth Roach Pierson, "Experience, Difference, Dominance and Voice in the Writing of Canadian Women's History," in Writing Women's History: International Perspectives ed. by Karen Offen, Ruth Roach Pierson, and Jane Rendall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 90-91. 44 Ibid., p. 91. 45 This information is taken primarily from an interview with Lenore Kingston Jensen on 2 February 1989. 46 Kingston Jensen received another piece .of advice: When you go to Chicago, say you're from Hollywood; when you go to New York, say you're from Los Angeles. 47 This remark was mirrored by another story Kingston Jensen recalled: at a party, an MGM publicity executive once declared to her, "We will close the doors of MGM before we allow one frame of our film to be on television." 48 This information was taken primarily from an interview with Dorothy Gardiner on 12 February, 1990. 4 9 This information is taken primarily from an interview with Monty Margetts on 20 February 1990. ~ Modleski, op. cit., and Flitterman-Lewis, op. cit. 51 As discussed in Chapter 2, Margetts was one of the KFI performers who were Hpackaged" by Jack Douglas to rival station KNBH (the Los Angeles NBC affiliate) in the wake of an AFTRA .strike at independent station KFI-TV. This move, which did not impact on her show's format, may have contributed to a dynamic of resistance/cooptation in the public perception of her career. 52 I am grateful to Mary Desjardins for this insight. 342 53 Allen, op. cit., p. 149. 54 See Kathryn Anderson, Susan Armitage, Dana Jack, and Judith Wittner, "Beginning Where We Are: Feminist Methodology in Oral History," Oral History Reyiew 15 (Spring, 1987): 103-127, and Pierson, op. cit., pp. 79- 106. 5S See excerpts of my oral history with Betty White in the appendix. 343 Conclusions and Further Questions This study hopes to indicate and examine many of the distinctive and challenging aspects of early Los Angeles television history, resisting traditional historical paradigms and goals in order to foreground the principle methodological problems and issues germane to such a study. As such, it suggests not only further avenues of research toward the study of this object, but also toward the larger fields of television history and television studies. Each of the areas of emphasis within the preceeding chapters are due continued and considered attention. The . problematics of method in early television history must be recognized and re-negotiated as more "evidence" in the form of kinescopes, station files, autobiographies, oral histories, etc. become available (as many surely will). The narratives of this history must also be continually interrogated and challenged for relying on "naturalized" modes of understanding which work to repress or elide the material and ideological determinants of this history. Many other questions are still to be addressed regarding the industrial strategies and programming dynamics of early Los Angeles television. One emphasis of this study has been the independent or non-affiliated 344 stations in Los Angeles, especially KTLA, partially in recognition of the lack of attention and consideration given these stations in most work on television history, but also because network shows did not maintain a dominance over this market as they did in the East. The network affiliates were the last stations on the air in LA, and because of their contracts with the networks were at least somewhat less reliant on indigenous and local programming. Nevertheless, their contributions to television in Los Angeles should be further examined, perhaps as sites of conflict and potential contradiction between the prevailing agendas and practices in Los Angeles television versus the strategies and practices of their respective networks. Each of the other independent stations is also worthy of continued study, especially as to whether they developed distinctive practices, personalities, or affiliations--in short, to what extent the station established a local "identity," and what this identity entailed. Central to. these studies will be questions related to the subject positions afforded by early programs and modes of address; the sites of identification that were "discovered," and their proliferation and metamorphoses; and the degree to which whatever sense of station identification that existed was maintained or 345 usurped. The fluctuating station and network affiliations of channels 9, 2, and 11, for example, would merit case studies, while Don Fedderson's national syndication of locally-discovered talent is a notable topic for further research. The most obvious sites of continued research involve subsequent chronological periods. The complex restructuring of dominant practices (both in programming and viewing) after the introduction of the nationwide microwave and coaxial cable links are certainly important areas for further work. Conditioned by the influx of network programs from the East, the shift from predominantly "live" programming to filmed shows (and then videotape), and also the migration West of the network personnel themselves, this aspect of Los Angeles television history seems to me especially intriguing, since its local specificity should provide points of contradiction and resistance ignored in most historical overviews. Station KTLA, although foregrounded in this study, also deserves further analysis, not only in terms of its indigenous practices but also its ties and potential impact outside of Los Angeles. Certainly there is more to say about the various programs and formats employed by that station. In particular, the dynamic which emerged 346 around big bands--in decline as popular touring acts, though still viable in Los Angeles--which conveniently melded with KTLA's reliance on them for prime time programming, seems to me a potentially fruitful site for analysis concerning shifting paradigms of popular entertainment and their modes of reception. Also interesting within the realm of local television would be the analysis of changes in format or overall reception of those performers who moved to other stations (sometimes even networks) after first establishing themselves on KTLA. How were these shows and personalities further invested, colonized, displaced, extended, etc? The station's affiliation with Paramount Pictures of course requires further research: the studio's interests in television were clearly overdetermined, so that attempting to figure the role of KTLA within these goals and endeavors might lead to especially incisive details concerning the relation between these two media and the private and public determinants affecting them. Another area of interest not specific to Los Angeles proper, but nevertheless important to research, would be the reception of the station's kinescoped shows distributed to various regions of the country: these analyses might indicate how different or similar the Los Angeles appropriation of television was compared to the indigenous appropriation of 347 television in other regions of the country. Such a study would of course entail research toward an understanding of these other local markets, and questions concerning how these types of programs and program sources figured in the rise of television in these areas. This latter type of study would represent the most readily applicable extension of the methods and assumptions of this dissertation: the analysis of other local and regional television histories. These analyses would hopefully also endeavor to locate and emphasize margins and contradictions in this history, while examining television's growth into an everyday medium. This work would probably be divided into two emphases--the investigation of independent stations and local aspects of network affiliates in network-centered television regions, and studies of additional "independent" markets (i.e., other markets not linked "live" to the networks: additional markets in the West, but also in the South, etc.). studies within each of these emphases would contribute to the further pluralization of early television history, a project that only continued research into local and regional appropriations of television can readily afford. Other sets of questions related to institutional or industry studies need to be addressed. One area that I 348 feel is overdue for extensive research and analysis is the history and development of advertising and talent agencies. Especially from a contemporary vantage point, since agencies have become so powerful in both the television and film industries, this topic seems strangely neglected. This area of research would also be especially informed by a regional study of Los Angeles--perhaps charting the rise of advertising agencies indigenous to this city, the emigration of Eastern agencies to LA, the relation of these latter moves to the shift of first radio and then television production to Los Angeles, the relative interest in and control of local television by each of these variable concerns, etc. The same questions can also be asked of talent agencies. All of the industrial studies mentioned above can be employed to contribute to a greater understanding of the broader social, economic, political, and ideological impacts of the emerging television apparatus. The question of television's colonization of some quantity or aspect of the social Imaginary is only introduced in the present study, and clearly demands further research and theorization. A good deal more research is to be done concerning specific genres and modes of address, and the range of their Imaginary appeal at various historical moments. The rise of local and national television news, 349 especially in its relation to perceived social threats and dangers, is a centrally important aspect of the politically-charged era in which commercial television arose. Topics of interest in this regard suggested by the present study include the regional inflections on what determines the "newsworthy," and the role and effect of "crisis" and "catastrophe" broadcasts, both regionally and nationally. The theorizations of Rath, Doane, and Mellencamp deserve further attention, as well as further historicization. Less sober modes of programming ripe for analysis include that of local children's shows, and their emergence as economic and ideological forces in the growth of television as an everyday medium (e.g., the popularity of the medium among children as inducement for the parents to buy a set; the impact of the programming schedule around patterns of family behavior, etc.). Another would be sports programming, introducing many similar issues as children's shows do, but for a very different audience, and determined by different socio-economic registers and relations to the family. The questions of gender, race, and ethnicity introduced in the present study also demand considerable future attention. This research and analysis should not only seek out examples of programming which did represent 350 marginalized groups, but also consider the complex social and ideological dynamics which resisted or prevented the representation of women, people of color, and non Americans. As the present study also indicates, the representation of these groups involves the potential if not the inevitability of contradictions and cross-purposes arising within representations of social "difference." Important to these analyses will be the contributions of performers, audience members, and researchers whose lived social experience mirrors the registers of marginalization under study. The overall project of these suggested avenues of research can be positioned in response to the pervasive role of television in contemporary society (especially within the U.S., but also in the expansion of U.S. television throughout world markets). Research and analysis of early television history provides a geneaology for our understanding of television as a part of everyday life, but also a variety of anomalous and discontinuous antecedents within this genealogy. While these historical details are potentially the trivia of media fetishists, they also can possess a more radical potential. The perspectives toward television that can result from them- allowing, for example, an awareness that ·TV does not exist in a "natural" or predetermined system of address and 351 organization--can inform our social, political, economic, and ideological responses to the television apparatus. By providing significant ruptures to an already-understood relationship to television (which tirelessly promotes "already understood" relationships about itself and the world it represents, as part of its promise of "immediacy"), work in early television history can render a critically reflexive position regarding TV which seems increasingly difficult to attain in an age of media superfluity. The regional focus suggested here serves a dual purpose in this regard. It first of all resists the legitimation of network or conglomerate control and ownership of television--which the proponents of such control tend to position as the fulfillment of an economic or technological "destiny." At the same time, however, regional study averts simplistic "top-down" configurations of media influence, by examining the diffuse exercise and appropriation of power at local levels, rather than assuming controls disseminated by a distant central authority. 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New vocabularies in Film Semiotics; Structuralism. Post-Structuralism and Beyond. New York: Routledge, 1992. Sterling, Christopher H. Electronic Media; A Guide to Trends in Broadcasting and Newer Technologies 1920-1983. New York: Praeger, 1984. Sterling, Christopher, and Kittross, John M. Stay Tuned: A concise History of A1Derican Broadcasting. Belmont, Californi. a: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1978. Television Broadcasters Association, Inc. Proceedings of the Second Teleyision Conference and Exbibition. New York: Television Broadcasters Association, Inc., 1946. Tichi, Cecelia. Electronic Hearthi Creating American Television Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Torrence, Bruce T. Hollywood; The First Hundred Years. New York: New York Zoetrope, 1982. Townsend, Charles R. Music of Bob Wills. Press, 1976. San Antonio Bose: The Life and Urbana: University of Illinois Turner, · Victor. Dramas. Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974. Twenty-Two Television Talks. Transcribed from BMI Television Clinics. New York: Broadcast Music, Inc., 1953. Udelson, Joseph H. The Great Teleyision Race; A History of the American Television Industry 1925-1941. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 1982. Waldrop, Frank c. and Borkin, Joseph. Television: A Struggle for Power. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1938. White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse; Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. 361 Williamson, Judith. Decoding Advertisements; Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. London: Marion Boyars, 1978. Woodbury Television Ratings. Los Angeles: Woodbury College, 1949-1952. Writers Program of the Work Projects Administration in Southern California. Los Angeles: A Guide to the City and Its Environs. New York: Hastings House, 1941. Newspaper. Kagazine. and Journal Articles Ames, Walter. "Blast of Atom Bomb Thrills Television Audience." Los Angeles Times (7 February 1951). Anderson, Kathryn; Armitage, Susan; Jack, Dana; and Wittner, Judith. "Beginning Where We Are: Feminist Methodology in Oral History." Oral History Review 15 (Spring 1987). Bhabha, Homi K. "The Other Question • No. 6 (November-December, 1983 ) .• " Screen 24, Boddy, William. "The Rhetoric and the Economic Roots of the American Broadcasting System." Cinetracts (Spring 1979). Browne, Nick. "The Political Economy of the Television (Super) Text." Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9, No. 3 (Summer 1984). Chambers, Stan. "The Kathy Fiscus Story: Turning Point in TV News." Los Angeles Times (7 April 1989). Desjardins, Mary and Williams, Mark. "Are. You Lonesome Tonight?; Gendered Address in 'The Lonesome Gal' and 'The Continental'." Paper delivered at 1992 "Console-ing Passions" Conference, Iowa City. De Wolfe, Evelyn. "The Day Live TV Coverage Was Born." Los Angeles Times (17 October 1987). Elsaesser, Thomas. "TV Through the Looking Glass." Quarterly Review of Film and Yideo 14, No. 1-2 (1992). "Firm Security Interest Under Scrutiny by FCC." Broadcasting 31 (1 July 1946). 362 Folkart, Burt A. "Harry OWens of 'Hawaii Calls' Dies at 84." Los Angeles Times (13 December 1986). Gavallete, Leo. "The Mytserious Korla Pandit." Yideosonic Arts No. 2 (n.d.). "Giant Television Images." Everyday Science and Mechanics 2, No. 12 (November 1931). "Give Him Paradise." Fortnight (24 December 1951). "Hou·se Group Asks Spy Death Penalty In Time of Peace." New York Times (17 February 1952). Hunt, Lynn. "French History in the Last Twenty Years: The Rise and Fall of the Annales Paradigm." Journal of Contemporary History 21, No. 2 (April 1986). Humphrey, Hal. Television Column. Los Angeles Mirror (1949-1952). "Individual Responses: Joan Copjec. 11 Camera Obscura Nos. 20-21 (May-September, 1989). "Kidding the Continental." LQQk (22 April 1952). "KTLA Bills Bomb Film Telecast." Los Angeles Mirror (6 February 1951). "KTLA •.• in the public service." Tele-Views (20 January 1950). "Latin Lover." ~ 58, No. 19 (5 November 1951). Laurence, William L. "The Atom Gives Up." Saturday Evening Post 213, No. 10 (7 September 1940). Leo, Vincent. to Symbol." "The Mushroom Cloud Photograph: From Fact Afterimage 13, Nos. 1 & 2 (Summer 1985). Lipsitz, George. "From Chester Himes to Nursery Rhymes: Local Television and the Politics of Cultural Space in Postwar Los Angeles." Unpublished paper, n.d. "Lonesome Guy." Newsweek 38, No. 19 (5 November 1951). Lubcke, Harry. "Film is Most Valuable in Television." AD\erican Cinematographer (November 1937). Mahoney, John c. "Setting the TV Record Straight." Performing Arts 6, No. 12 (December 1972). Mazingo, Sherrie. "Home of programming 'firsts'." Television/Radio Age (March 1987). · Morse, Margaret. "Staging Scenes of Loss." Video Networks 14, No. 5/6 (October/November, 1990). 363 Morse, Margaret. "Talk, Talk, Talk." Screen 26, No. 2 (March-April, 1985). "Navy's Jet-Rocket Plane Scores Speed Between 730 and 740 m.p.h." Los Angeles Times (2 October 1949). "New Record Speed at Sea Level seen." New York Times (2 October 1949). "Paramount TV." Broadcasting 34 (28 June 1948). "Paramount Enters Television; Would Utilize Motion Pictures." Motion Picture Herald (13 August 1938). Pickering, Robert L. "Eight Years of Television in California." California Magazine of the pacific 24 (June 1939). "Push-Button War Still Far in Future." Los Angeles Times (2 October 1949). Radio-Television Life (1940-1952). Rosenthal, Pam. "Jacked In: Fordism, Cyberpunk, Marxism." Socialist Review 21, No. 1 (January-March 1991). "'Scientist X' Named in Atom Spy Case." Los Angeles Times (1 October 1949). Smith, Bernard. "Station KECA--Los Angeles." California Magazine of the Pacific 23 (July 1938). "Southland Gains as Tele Center for U.S." Los Angeles Herald Examiner (5 October 1952). Stern, Jane and Michael. "Neighboring." The New Yorker 67 (15 April 1991). "TBA Awards Given to Nine for Notable Achievements." Broadcasting 31 (14 October 1946). "Teevee Plant Opens Oct. 1. 11 Los Angeles Herald Examiner (5 February 1952). 364 "Tele-File: A Non-Network station in Los Angeles Passes the Competitive Test With Flying Colors." Broadcasting 38 (20 February 1950). "Tele-File: Don Lee's KTSL (TV) Marks 18 Years in Television." Broadcasting 38 (2 January 1950). "Telestatus Report: Program Analysis." Broadcasting 34 (26 April 1948). Television 1-9 . (1944-1952). "Television Getting Pictures But Nearly All Are Dated." Motion Picture Herald (4 April 1942). "Television Has 27-Hour Fire Trial." Los Angeles Times (11 April 1949). "Television Week Opening Fete to Be Held Today." L2§. Angeles Times (10 March 1947). "UC Regents Want Specific Anti-Red Oath." Los Angeles Times (3 October 1949). Uricchio, William. "Germany and the Nationalization of Early Television." Paper delivered at 1992 Society for Cinema Studies Conference, Pittsburgh. Panel on "The Myth of Total Television." Uricchio, William. "Rituals of Reception, Patterns of Neglect: Nazi Television and Its Postwar Representation." Wide Angle 11, No. 1 (1989). Vianello, Robert. "The Power Politics of 'Live' Television." Journal of Film and Video 37, No. 3 (Summer 1985). White, Mimi. "Television: A Narrative--A History." Cultural Studies 3, No. 3 (October 1989). Wilbur, Susan K. "The History of Television in Los Angeles, 1931.-1952: Part I, The Infant Years." Southern California Ouarterly 60, No. 1 (Spring 1978). Wilbur, Susan K. "The History of Television in Los Angeles, 1931-1952: Part II, The Boom Years." Southern California Quarterly 60, No. 2 (Summer 1978). Wilbur, Susan K. "The History of Television in Los Angeles, 1931-1952: Part III, Television During the Freeze." Southern California Quarterly 60, No. 3 (Fall 1978). Williams, Linda. "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess." Film Quarterly 44, No. 4 (Summer 1991). "Woo-Pitcher Gets Network." Li.lit (11 February 1952). Dissertations and Theses 365 Bagdonas, Joseph M. "A Comparative Analysis of Television Station KTLA, April 1950 and February 1951." Master's thesis, University of Southern California, May, 1952. Barto, Gordon E. "An Investigation into the Limitations of the Stage Area as Imposed by the Television camera." Master's thesis, University of Southern California, June, 1950. Carlson, Glenn Chester. "A Manual for the Operation of a National Broadcasting Company Owned and Operated Television Station." Master's thesis, University of Southern California, June, 1951. Creasy, Jr., William N. "Survey of the Programming of Television Station KTTV During the Months November 1952 - February 1953." Master's thesis, University of Southern California, June, 1953. Dimon, Richard B. "A Descriptive Study of the Status of Subscription Television." Master's thesis, University of Southern California, June, 1954. Di Sarro, John Thomas. "A study of Selected Problems of Television commercials (January 1947 - July 1949)." Master's thesis, University of Southern California, August, 1949. Drake, Robert o. "A Survey of the Effectiveness of Retail Advertising Via Television in the Los Angeles Marketing Area January 1947 to December 1, 1949." Master's thesis, University of Southern California, January, 1950. de Graaf, Lawrence Brooks. "Negro Migration to Los Angeles, 1930 to 1950." Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1962. 366 Greer, Scott. "The Participation of Ethnic Minorities in the Labor Unions of Los Angeles County." Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, June, 1952. Hines, William Everett. "A Survey of Television Viewing Habits and Influences in an Industrial-Residential Area." Master's thesis, University of Southern California, April, 1951. Hubbard, David Fred. "Radio-Television Listening Preference City of San Bernardino." Master's thesis, University of Southern California, May, 1950. Knudson, Ellsworth La Verne. "A Comparative Analysis of Television Programming of Station KLAC-TV, April 1950 and Feb. 1951." Master's thesis, University of Southern California, June, 1953. McGrath, Robert Lee. "A study of Television Preferences in Low Income Homes." Master's thesis, University of Southern California, May, 1951. Rue, James Joseph. "Analysis of Television News Techniques in the Los Angeles Area." Master's thesis, University of Southern California, January, 1951. Runciman, Alexamnder P. "A Study of Television Camera Placement." Master's thesis, University of Southern California, May, 1951. Saettler, L. Paul. "A Comparative study of Frequency Modulation Programs in Los Angeles." Master's thesis, University of Southern California, June, 1949. Slocum, Bettie Sacre. "A Comparative Analysis of Television Programming of Station KFI-TV, April 1950 and Feb. 1951." Master's thesis, University of Southern California, May, 1952. Sova, Harry w. "A Descriptive and Historical Survey of American Television, 1937-1946. 11 Ph.D. diss., Ohio University, 1977. Tynes, Teresa D. "A Theater Worth Fighting For: Stage and American Democracy in World War II." diss., University of Texas, forthcoming. The Ph.D. 367 Wade, Margaret Helen. "A Descriptive Study of the Jobs Held by Women in the Radio-Television Industry in Los Angeles." Master's thesis, University of Southern California, August, 1951. White, Timothy R. "Holiywood's Attempt to Apprpriate Television: The Case of Paramount ·Pictures." Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1990. Wilbur, Susan Kresnicka. "The History of Television in Los Angeles: 1931-1952." Master's thesis, University of Southern California, January, 1976. Wood, Barbara Louise. "A Comparative Analysis of Children's Radio and Television Programs in the Los Angeles Area." Master's thesis, University of Southern California, June, 1950. Interviews and Oral Histories Behlmer, Rudy. Interview with Author. Los Angeles, California, 9 November 1990. Bolen, Murray. Interview with author. Los Angeles, California, 30 March 1989. Carr, Fred. Interview with Author. Riverside, California, 24 November 1989. Cassyd, Syd. Interview with author. Los Angeles, California, 23 June 1989. Chambers, Stan. Interview with author. Los Angeles, California, 26 January 1989. Clampett, Sody. Interview with Author. Los Angeles, California, 25 July 1990. Conte, Val. Interview with author. Westlake Village, California, 26 October 1989. Crandell, David. Interview with Author. Pasadena, California, 1 August 1990. Gardiner, Dorothy. Interview with Author. Los Angeles, California, 12 February, 1990. Graue, Ken. Interview with Author. Los Angeles, California, 10 September 1990. Hatten, Tom. Interview with Author. Los Angeles, California, 25 July 1990. 368 Jensen, Lenore Kingston. Interview with author. Sherman Oaks, California, 2 February 1989. Landsberg, Cleve. Inteview with author. Pacific Palisades, California, 19 January 1989. Lubcke, Harry. Interview with author. Los Angeles, California, 2 April 1989. Margetts, Monty. Interview with Author. Los Angeles, California, 20 February 1990. Meyers, Ted. Interview with Author. Los Angeles, California, 17 July 1991. Muller, Leland G. Interview with Author. Los Angeles, California, 12 February 1990. Polich, John. Interview with author. Los Angeles, California, 2 March 1989. Resnick, Ed. Interview with Author. Palm Springs, California, 12 August 1990. Silva, John. Interview with Author. Los Angeles, California, 26 · Febru· ary 1990. stulla, William. Interview with author·. Westlake Village, California, 26 October 1989. Tator, Joel. Interview with author. Los Angeles, California, 3 February 1989. Tobias, Milton. Interview with Author. Los Angeles, California, 29 April 1991. Wald, Malvin. Interview with Author. Los Angeles, California, 30 April 1991. Wells, Warren. Interview with Author. Los Angeles, California, 16 July 1991. Welsh, Bill. Interview with Author. Los Angeles, California, 13 August 1990. White, Betty. Interview with Author. Los Angeles, California, 4 June 1991. Wilson, Stu. Interview with Author. Los Angeles, California, 19 February 1990. Other Unpublished Material 369 Chambers, Stan. "News at Ten, Now and Then." Unpublished manuscript, n.d. Grauman, Walter. Lights. camera. Action (14 August 1950). Kinescope television program. Collection of television materials. Special Collections, USC Cinema-Television Library. Kathy Fiscus Rescue Effort. Audio recording (excerpts). KCBS 40th Anniversary Special. Television program, 1989. "Klaus Landsberg Biography," Paramount Television Productions, Inc. Press release, n.d. K~LA 2Qth AnniY~t:§Slt:Y Sp~QiAl· Television program, 1967. KTLA 30th Mniyersary Special. Television program, 1977. KTLA 40th Anniyei:sary Special. Television program, 1987. K~LA ~~th AnniYi\U:&Slt:Y Sp~cisil. Television program, 1992. "KTLA's Unmatched History of Television Firsts." KTLA Promotional Sheet, n.d. KTTV 35th Anniversa~y Special. Television program, 1984. Radio and Television Women of Southern California. Audiotape of meeting commemorating the History of Los Angeles Television, 25 September 1962. Times-Mirror Company Station Proposal. n.d. Appendix One Leland G. (Gerry) Muller Oral History 12 February 1990 Mark Williams: You started at KTLA in 1946? 370 Leland Muller: Yes, July 1946. I was the art director, the stage director, cameraman. I drew what they called the "tele-funnies." I wrote the scripts and directed the actors on the stage. There were slides, filmstrips. And I cued them, and was also the cameraman, and I also did the slides for the news, which were all furnished filmstrips by Paramount News and we made them into 35mm slides. There were only about five permanent employees: Landsberg; his secretary; Gordon Wright; myself; Eddie Resnick; and Charles Theodore. And then later, John Silva, and some part-time people--they had a soundman named Rex Kepple, and they had an engineer by the name of Ray Moore. We were on the air twice a week. Tele-funnies, and the news, and a variety show that was local talent. We could pack up our stuff, and if we did a remote, it would take two or three days to get set up, because the Du Mont cameras were so heavy. We'd have to put everything in "stationary" like the tennis matches. And we had to sit there all night to make sure the generator wouldn't go off. We took shifts, maybe I'd be there from six to eleven and then somebody else from eleven and so on. Then, I'd come back in the afternoon and do the tennis matches and then run over to the station and run the films and be the projectionist and the station manager. Finally we grew up and I got help. We ran the first full-length feature. It was Swiss Family Robinson with Thomas Mitchell and I think Freddy Bartholomew. It was such a big hit, we had to run it five times. Q: Do you remember when this was? Would it have been in 1946? This was around the end of 1947 or '48. Q: Was that a major studio that you were getting the print from? 371 No, we used to get them from distributors. In those days, a lot of the features we ran off of the cuff were not strictly cleared for television, but then no one had any legal knowledge of what was going on, and no one particularly cared. People used to crowd into the bars to watch the wrestling matches, the boxing, ~nd Sunday night movies. Standing in store windows, you'd see 15 to 20 people. There weren't that many sets around. My father, because of what I was doing, had one of the first focal projection screens [TV sets] in San Gabriel. Every night or so, there would be a whole living room full of people watching wrestling matches, boxing from Hollywood Stadium, and so on. Q: When did film become more of a staple in the programming of the station? Well, it was always one of the main sources, because in the early days of television, we used to run a lot of free industrial films just to show off the set. Just commercial films made for Ford Motor Company, General Foods, or whatever. Just to fill in. Q: Did you get those from the companies themselves? Sometimes, [like] Standard Oil. In those days, there used to be a lot of little film distribution companies in town where we could rent whole movies. There was one company called Ideal Pictures and another one called United and another called Real Art. Most of them were centered around Seventh and Alvarado--it used to be a nice part of town. The distributors would get so much from the companies for distributing their commercial films. They were glad to let us have them. A lot of them were very, very good. Q: So those were feature films? They were about a half-hour. Then, eventually, some of the distributors were able to get features that they could make lease-deals with the original producers. Our big catch was Hopalong Cassidy (movies]. Q: Were you aware that Hopalong Cassidy [movies] were going to be as popular as they turned out to be? Had the cowboy· fad already started? Yeah, we were running lots of westerns with Bob Steele and Ken Maynard and Hoot Gibson. I had known about Hopalong Cassidy because I'd seen him in a movie. When the 372 opportunity came around • • • it's a long story of how this all came about. There was a man I knew by the name of Toby Anguish--his off ices were on Seventh street in downtown LA. He had a friend by the name of George Herleman, who had known the wife of Harry Herman, the producer and director of these Hopalong Cassidy pictures. She was willing to sell the rights to Herleman and Anguish for a certain amount of money. I don't remember how much. Having dealt with Anguish for quite some time, he gave me first rights in LA. There were 16 to 18 pictures, and a series of newer ones featuring more up-to-date stars like Robert Mitchum, and people like that. He sold us the rights to run the first package, and they took off right away. They gave William Boyd a certain amount of money as well- -even though he had no ownership--plus rights to market his own [character]. He gave away cowboy guns and all those kind of things. And he made some personal appearances for KTLA. Then they came out with were able to get. Only were able to get them. until we just ran them them to NBC for two to [Anguish] retired, got now. a second, newer batch which we certain stations in the cities We had them locked up here in LA, out. Then the Anguish group sold three million dollars. Then he out out of the business. He's dead Someplace around here I have a Western belt buckle, sterling silver and 14-karat gold, with my initials on it, given to me by William Boyd. And a little wrist watch to match. He gave it to me. He used to do a lot of nice · thing for the kids: go to charity things, and personal appearances. In his day, he had been a big star, and then fell on hard times. He was one of Hollywood's biggest leading men. He had a traveling circus--this is how they all got together. He couldn't get his circus out of the steamship companies because he didn't have the money to get the animals off, mostly horses. These fellows [Anguish, et al.] came to his rescue and that's how they came close together. That was the early Sunday evening, I think, 7 to 8. It was sponsored by Barbara Ann Bread and Starkist Tuna. We had the 8 to 10 feature movie sponsored by the big Ford Chrysler Dealers. I think the only one that's still around is Fletcher Jones. We had a devil of a time keeping a first-run movie on Sunday night because there weren't that many. There were times as late as Friday where we'd be scratching around trying to get something. Fortunately, we came through. And they [the local 373 audience] didn't particularly like British films because people weren't up on British movies. Q: That's a lot of what was available, though, wasn't it? Yeah, J. Arthur Rank. Some of them were very good, but they were really too highbrow. And then gradually, people liked a producer by the name of Harry Popkin. We were able to get the rights to some of his features like D.O.A. with Edmund O'Brien and Champagne For Caesar with Ronald Colman. Then, things began to loosen up. A friend of mine, Elliot Hyman and his son bought Warner Brothers, and the gates just opened up for me. I was able to pick all the top Warner Brothers pictures of that time. Q: Do you remember when this was? About 1957, because I left in '58 or '59. Then we had big films every night. We had another popular series called ~Bowery Boys. They replaced [the] Hopalong [movies]. It was the sequel to The Dead End Kids. And they were quite popular. It was a switch from a Western character to a bunch of do-good kids from the bowery. Q: Those were shorts again? No, those were features. They weren't long features. They were what they used to call "second movies"--about 65 minutes. Sometimes, I'd have to edit them down due to commercials. It was a lot of work. Q: So, how did you finally become in charge of the films after being the person who did everything? Well, that was why I was hired in the first place. It was just that [early on] everybody just did everything. We started out with one 16mm projector, then we got two. Then we got a 35mm, and a second one. So we had four projectors. We'd have to stop the film and run the commercial on another projector. Sometimes even stapling the film together so that the end of one reel would go on the other, and just let it run until we could cut it off. These projectors were all on a track that the engineers designed wheels on. So, they tried to put a commercial break on slides so I could roll one of the two cameras up to the projector and run the commercial there. We also had a lot of film syndication. We used to edit kinescopes of Wrestling from Hollywood. Q: Were you in charge of that? I'm extremely interested in that. 374 Yes, I used to do most of the editing myself. And then like everything else, we began to grow up--they got Dick Vosburg to help me, and he had a girl assistant, whose name I don't remember. We'd be able to get editing space at Consolidated Lab. Q: What kind of editing were you doing? Were you taking the commercials out? We were taking the commercials out, shortening the whole programs from an hour to a half-hour. Sometimes they had variety shows they'd leave an hour, but we'd have to take all the commercials out. Lawrence Welk, Frosty Frolics and Spade Cooley--we'd cut him down to a half-hour. Usually there would be someone from the show, like Spade Cooley to tell you what they wanted to take out, but they all had to be able to fit. So we devised some things with Consolidated's optical lab to be able to make dissolves and fades and cut them into the negative so that when they printed it, they looked like they [the ellipses] belonged there. We innovated a lot of this stuff. Q: Did that need some new kind of hardware to be developed? No, they were all done on 35mm kinescope. The lab would reduce them to 16mm [for the prints] and I'd go up there on a Sunday or so and look at the first screening of a particular show from Saturday or Friday night. Then they'd make about 10 to 15 prints and I'd box up and mail them off to Atlanta or Chicago or San Francisco, or wherever they had to go. Q: How did KTLA start getting interested in syndicating programs? Was that something Landsberg had in mind from the start? Yeah, I think so. Q: Do you remember the first show you syndicated? I believe it was Wrestling from Hollywood. Q: Did you have a basic route that the syndicated shows would go, or did each show have a specific following in different markets? We used to "bicycle" them around. Like if I sent one, say Wrestling, to Atlanta, they were supposed to send it on to say, st. Louis. But they were getting a new one every 375 week. Sometimes, they wouldn't send it and we'd have to rush through every air freight to get something there, overnight. Only once did I really throw up when I had a • . • this was the days of the old South. There was a black wrestler by the name of "Black Panther," a short fellow, built like an ox. He was wrestling "Gorgeous George" and his idea was to get on the ropes and start propelling himself, and he had a shaved head, and let himself go flying across the ring and belted "Gorgeous" in the middle and knocked him flat. This went down to the South, and they wouldn't run it because you weren't supposed to treat. • • • (Laughs) Out here, it didn't matter, everybody thought it was great. So, we had to get them a new series of matches flown from LA to Philly, then hire a flyer to get it to Atlanta that night. In those days it was all DC-6s or DC- 7s, and not too many flights going anyplace, except New York. That was the only big problem I ever had. Q: Were you syndicating primarily to other independents, or did you also syndicate to network affiliates? No, just independents. Like WBKB in Chicago. I don't remember the name of the station in Atlanta, [there was] one in Dallas. 12 to 15 stations. Time For Beany was a 5-day show and we'd send a box for a week. Q: Was Time For Beany considerably more successful than the other shows? Were you making a lot more prints? I don't remember, but I wouldn't be surprised, because it was big. A family show. Wasn't it Einstein who said that, "I have to take 15 minutes out from my scientific session because it's time for Beany?" Q: Are you aware of any records or logs of the kinescoping or the syndication? No, I am not. I used to keep ledgers for accounting. I would write down the date, the show, the cast and so on. When I left, I don't know who took it over. Q: Were you aware that Paramount was interested in starting their own TV Network? Was their activity at the station related to that proposal? Yes, they were going to have the Du Mont station in New York. I made a trip to San Francisco to see what was there. There was a similar station to KTLA up there doing baseball, etc. They were Channel 5, KPIX. Then Paramount just lost interest in TV, [it] got too expensive, and [they] just dropped the whole thing. They just didn't have the imagination. They were in motion pictures. Television didn't appeal to them. There were several times when Paramount was getting discouraged about the whole thing. 376 Q: What kinds of thing would lead you to believe that? There were rumors. They would send people out to go through the station. They had a kind of negative attitude towards things. And then they finally did sell it to Gene Autry. Their main business was motion pictures and theaters. Q: Did you have a big relationship with WBKB? Did you exchange a lot of programming and information? We had very little to do with them when I was there. I only knew the film director there, a woman. I never met her. I went to the NAB convention there [Chicago] three times and never went to the station. I had more contact with WGN, a girl named Elizabeth Bain, doing some syndicated things. ~ for Beany was one of them. Q: Were you involved at all in the Kathy Fiscus telecast? Not that much. Only that I lived in South Pasadena at the time and people would come over to my apartment and shower and get cleaned up, or get a cup of coffee. It was only about a quarter of a mile from San Marino High School. I was probably back at the station at the time. Portions of it were kinescoped for rebroadcast as a documentary about it. Q: What did you do with it? It was set out as a news highlight thing. Q: Was anything that the station ever did incorporated into something like Paramount's newsreel? Only that we would get news clips from Paramount News. They would send us tons of footage of Presidential Conventions and what not. We'd have to go to the old LAX around one or two in the morning, and stand around and wait for it [the footage]. Then we'd have to edit it out, ready for the afternoon. Those were really trying times because our staff room was so small, and we'd be working 24 to 26 hours. I had two assistants: Jerry Rogers and 377 Ned Kronk, and a new one named Ed Hunt--I think he just retired a year ago. Q: What was your experience of the first commercial telecast? We had to make some columns to put on the edge of the stage. We couldn't get any wood. My family was in the building business at the time; my father got me the wood to make the columns bend around to look like [they] had some kind of marble around them. We took the wood home and soaked it in the bathtub with string-like bows, so it could bend around. Then we got some marble wallpaper, made our columns. It looked just like marble columns. On that particular show, I was the stage manager. Q: I understand that they invited a lot of ad agency representatives that night. I think so. It was at the old KTLA stage and they had a small VIP room, with a statue, a TV, and a couple of couches. Sometimes a new sponsor would come in and we'd pipe in a movie to that room, so they could see the programs they were gonna get. Could be anything that they could preview, a kinescope or something. Q: That was one example of Paramount lending a big hand. Well, Bob Hope was the emcee. They had some other people out there--William Demarest. It was sponsored by Tupman Motors. That was the introduction of the first Lincoln Continental. Supposedly if you bought one of these they'd deliver it to you. I've forgotten the other people on the show. Q: Did you get much day-to-day cooperation from the studio? Not much. I used to get some props from them, furniture. They had loads of it in their warehouse. As far as name stars went, I remember Cecil B. DeMille congratulating some friend from Texas, a millionaire oilman, on his TV station in Fort Worth. Q: They didn't give you many films to run? None. Q: Not even shorts? Just newsreels? 378 My dealings [were] with my counterpart at Paramount Pictures in New York. He would ferret out films back east from New York distributors. I never met him, but I talked to him 2-3 times a week. Another fella I dealt with back there was Bert Balaban, whose father was Barney Balaban. Q: So they would help find films for programming. Feature films, if there were any. Q: What kind of things would go on when you were desperate for a movie at the zero-hour? What kind of strings would you pull? Anything I could think of. Q: Mostly local? or also back east? I'd call back east, I'd call local. It always seemed to ferret out of the woodwork someplace. They weren't always cleared for TV, but I didn't care. Q: Were they mostly from distributors, or did you ever use someone's private print? Mostly distributors. A couple of times I'd use somebody's private print. One was a picture with Charles Boyer--he seemed to have the only print locally, and he loaned it to me. Air travel from New York would be too slow. Sometimes a producer would loan us a print. In time, some of the stars would call up when they saw in the newspaper that their movie was going to be shown. They'd call and ask if they could count on their movie being shown- Gregory Peck, James Mason. Q: They'd phone the station to make sure their movie was going to be on? Uh-huh. One time, I forget who, maybe James Mason, was on the phone and I got another call. I asked the girl who was it--Louis B. Mayer?--and she said, yes, it's his office! (Laughs) They wanted to know if they could borrow a print of film that we had, produced by Alexander Korda. They wanted to borrow it to look at an actor by the name of George Sanders. Occasionally they would call up, borrow a print, and sign an actor to a contract. Q: Were you showing films in 16mm, or 35mm? 16mm originally, then 35mm. Better quality, better sound -but harder to handle. Because a 16mm print was often two 379 reels where a 35mm was four to six. When we only had one 35mm projector, we were really hustling. Q: With all the kinescoping going on, did you ever use them as your own reruns? Would you ever show one of your own kinescopes as part of the station's programming? Sometimes with somebody like Lawrence Welk, or Harry Owens, or an orchestra, which was going out of town. They would tape it in the afternoon on a Tuesday or Wednesday. Q: But not an actually rerun. They wouldn't show the same show twice? No. Q: Did you get a lot of syndicated programs from other stations too? Any exchange? We didn't get any that I know of. Q: You explained to me when we first set up about the tele-funnies format, but I wasn't quite clear. How did that operate? We would get once a week from the King Features .syndicate a regular, rough print from a comic strip. I would have to take out all the word balloons. Put in a piece [of filler in the] backgrounds. And then take all the dialogue and put it on a script. We'd have eight or ten (panels] and make individual slides out of each. There'd be a whole sequence. Instead of a daily, it'd be a whole week. They had two fellas and two girls [to enact them]. Q: Would this have already appeared in the paper? They were all fairly new. We'd have to paint in backgrounds: trees, flowers, autos, etc. And then make a script out of it. Paramount's photo library would make up all the tele-slides and filmstrips. We'd have to cut them up and make 35mm slides out of them. Then, the news was all on slides, too. Q: Those would be enlargements from the newsreels? No, their news was all 35mm. They would send us little clips with a caption sheet. About a dozen events or more, and we'd pick those to make slides out of. I think Keith Hetherington ran the news in those days. He'd just sit at his desk and look at a monitor with the slide. The script 380 was all written back east, from caption sheets. He'd pulse the slide, read down the sheet, then pulse it again. Q: Approximately how old would this news be? It'd be overnight. But then don't forget, we were only on twice a week. In those days, it really didn't matter, because anything with pictures was something new to see. You [would] get one picture in the newspaper. But here, you [would] get 10 or 12. Q: I'm a little surprised when you say the captions were prepared back east. It sounds like it was something prepared for you, for television to take advantage of. Any newsreel man· writes his caption sheets of what goes on. Every scene they shoot they write a caption sheet, and then they put it into script form. It was up to us to add a few more words. They do the same thing today. It's a regular form sheet. Tells you the day, cameraman, color or black and white, film or videotape, etc. Q: Did you have the capability to show filmed material? Could you show the newsreel itself? No, we didn't have any projection [in the original W6XYZ studio]. That was on a stage at Paramount, where KTLA started. Then when we went across the street, that's when we began to develop our kinescopes and projectors. It was a big day when we got the first RCA film projector in there. The first film we ever ran was a film I made in the service about recruiting WAACS for the military. We ran it and ran it and ran it. Used it as a test film. It was the only film we had. I happened to have a print of it. Q: A lot of the equipment you used was RCA? All of it. There wasn't such a thing as Sony, except Du Mont. Appendix Two Betty White Oral History 4 June 1991 Mark Williams: Did you start in radio? 381 Betty White: I started in television in November of '49, and I got my first radio job that [preceeding] summer. It was an American Airlines jingle that I sang. Then I had a one-word commercial. I just had to say the word "Parkay" -at least it got me my union card. In those days you couldn't get a job unless you were a member of the union; you couldn't be a member of the union unless you had a job--it was catch-22. Q: Had you been working in theater? I hadn't been working anywhere. Except I had done a couple of little theater things. Well, I got a raise doing that, because the first little theater show I did, I had to pay them fifty dollars a month. But by the second show, I got a raise--! didn't have to pay anything, I could just be in the show! Q: And that was because of the radio act? No. That was before I did anything. That was just the first thing out of high school. Then I got the one-word "Parkay" commercial • • • Q: Did you have an agent? No, I would just go around in casting offices--radio casting--and I would just sit there, · and pretty soon they'd look and they'd think they know me. They'd seen me in the waiting room so much that pretty soon they thought, "Yeah, well, we've used her." The first one [employer] was so dear. He was a man by the name of Fran Van Hardesvelt--he was a radio producer--and he said, "No, I'm sorry, you're not a member of the union, we can't use you." (This was my~ first job.) So I was going down in the elevator, and he was waiting to go to some other appointment, I guess, and he was coming down the same elevator, and he was looking at me, and said, "Look, it will cost you more to join the union than the 382 job will pay, but at least it will get you your union card. And I don't think you can do me too much harm with one word." So he gave me "Parkay" to say on this commercial--it was on The Great Gildersleeve Show. They did two broadcasts in those days, and I think I got thirty-six dollars for the job, and it cost me sixty to get into the union. So I went to my dad, and I said, "Could I borrow the sixty dollars, for my union card--at least I'll be in the union and I can get another job." And my dad was so thrilled. He said, "Listen, sure, and if you don't work too often we can almost afford it." (Laughs) So then I got the airlines jingle. Q: How did your career proceed from there? Then I went looking for a radio job, and a man by the name of Joe Landis said, "Would you like to be on television? It's a showcase--you know, you don't get paid anything. But can you sing?" Well in those days, you said, "Yes, I can sing, yes I can juggle, yes I can--whatever, yes!" So I sang "Slow Boat to China" on The Dick Haynes Show. I got a regular part on a show at KLAC [channel 13] on television. Q: Was The Dick Haynes Show a KLAC show as well? Yes. It was all KLAC. Haynes at the Reins. Q: I know you were on The Al Jarvis Show. . Well this was all before Al, but it was all within about a two month period. I went from that to Tom. Dick, and Harry, which was a variety show, and then I got a regular weekly show. It was four of us answering the phone, and I sat on the end and ad-libbed with the emcee--so I got ten dollars a week, the other girls got five. But the producer said, "Don't tell them!" They were probably getting twenty. Q: What was the format of the show? Was it an audience call-in show? Audience call-in, answering questions. The most basic kind of a game show in the world. For prizes. [It was called] Grab Your Phone. And again, my father said, "Grab your what?" (Laughs) But Al saw me on that one. Of course, Al was on all-day, every day on radio, and he was just starting his television show, which I didn't know. And I got a call from this familiar voice that I'd 383 heard on radio all my life, saying it was Al Jarvis and would I be interested in doing his show? And I thought, "Gee, that would be two shows each week. That's wonderful." Well it turned out he was asking if I'd do five-and-a-half hours a day, six days a week. It started at five hours, and then went to five-and-a-half immediately, and then Saturday came up right away. [The job] was to be his girl-Friday, and sit there and talk and fill in all that time and do live commercials, and interview guests. So I was sort of the the jack of all trades for Al, whatever he'd throw at me. We'd make up routines about things. He was a brilliant ad-lib artist. He got talking about my drama teacher, Madame Fahgell Bahgelmacher. Her real name was Madam Fagel Bagelmaker, but she changed it for the theater. (Laughs) And we would just ad-lib and paint this terrible picture of this woman who gave me drama lessons, supposedly. She lived in this house that had a glass-beaded curtain into her bedroom, and she'd send me off for cough medicine every once in awhile, to the corner. And of course it was for booze. It was just ridiculous but it was fun. So after two years, Al went over to ABC, to do his Make Believe Ballroom over there, and Eddie Albert came in--we worked together for six months. Q: In the same kind of program? Same format: Hollywood on Teleyision. And then Eddie left to do Roman Holiday, with Audrey Hepburn, and I inherited the show just because I had been around the longest. So all in all I was there for four years, and it was like going to Television College, because everything that happened, happened on camera. Q: Was the format of the Jarvis radio show identical to the television show? It started out that way. The first week, he was going to put his radio show on television. And we played records, had a little set--and the audience would go crazy because they'd see us talking to each other while the record was playing, and they couldn't hear what we said. So they kept calling in and calling in. By the end of the week, we scrubbed the records and ad-libbed. Q: Would you still play some music, or not at all? No, not really any at all, and then finally, when I inherited the show, we had a little band. For instance, 384 if we had a musical guest, they would play background. Or I would sing a song now and again. Q: This sounds like a pretty severe transformation- suddenly you had to come up with guests every day, as opposed to playing records? There were only two shows on in town: ours and [the one on] KTLA. So everybody who came through town--of course, all the musical people, the song-pluggers and [all], because Al was one of the biggest in the business on radio--all his friends [like] Peggy Lee, when [they] would come through town [they) would automatically do our show. So we were never really at a loss. And we would have features--various home service features, and things like that. We would just do a little bit of everything [with] that kind of time. When I moved to NBC, they asked me if I would do a five-a-week show, and they said, "It's a half-hour every day, do you think you can do that?" And I said, "Well after five-and-a-half hours, six days a week, that sounds like stealing." Q: That's an incredible amount of time to fill. It wasn't quite enough, because then Al started an hour evening show--we had an amateur show. And then he and I would do a sketch leading into commercials, or out of commercials, or into a song that I sang. And the sketch that seemed to please the people the most was a little sketch [called] "Alvin and Elizabeth." So when Al left and went over to ABC, the head of the station [KLAC], Don Fedderson, called us in one day--the man who wrote the sketches and me--and he asked if we would be interested in doing a half-hour show of those characters. I was doing five-and-a-half hours a day on the daytime show, so I scrubbed the amateur show and went to the half-hour situation comedy which George [Tibbles] wrote. We did 195--65 shows, but each one had three vignettes in it, to make up ·the half-hour. So we had 195 of those, which were later broken up as a library. We would rehearse one night, [and] do the show live on television in front of a studio audience the next [night]. So a lot of times on rehearsal night we would rehearse real late, and then I'd just go to the studio and do the [daytime] show. You're having such a good time, you don't know that's hard work. Q: Let me backtrack about a couple of different points. Jarvis went to ABC for another local show or a network show? A local show. 385 Q: And was there any discussion of taking you along? No, because he was going over there to do his Make-Believe Ballroom, and he put his wife on as his co-hostess. It was like a pre-Dick Clark dance-time--the kids would come over and dance, and that sort of thing. Q: And Eddie Albert came on. Had he already worked in motion pictures? Oh yes. He was a major star, so it was a real coup to get him. But he had never done television, so he just wanted to see what that was like. Q: That's an interesting point. What would have convinced him to come to TV, and particularly to a local station? He watched the show, and he thought it was fun, and he thought it would be fun to try to come up with (material] to ad-lib for that long everyday. Q: You know you read so much about motion picture people being condescending in their attitude toward television, it seems like a very different attitude that he might have had. They didn't really have that attitude then, because television was so new. I think the attitude rather developed when television became such a major competitor. Q: So this would have been around 1951? When Eddie came in it was 1951; he was there for six months. Life with Elizabeth was syndicated--we stopped doing it live after a year-and-a-half, and it went into syndication. That was all over the country, but it wasn't a network show. The first network I did was the daytime half-hour across the board on NBC, and that was 1954, so I guess this would put Eddie in late 1951 or early 1952. Q: You did a variety of sketches with Jarvis. I imagine there were other recurring sketches aside from what developed into Life With Elizabeth? Oh yes. For instance if I was to sing a Dutch song, we'd do a little Dutch scene first, and then I'd sing the song in costume--it was kids playing dress-up, but it was fun. 386 Q: How many writers did you have? This couldn't have all been ad-lib. It wasn't all ad-lib. [Some sketches were] out of Al's head and mine--he'd throw something at me, I'd throw something back, and we'd begin to get this picture and we'd each add to it. But the sketches into the songs, and then all the Life witb Elizabeth's, were [written by] one writer: George Tibbles. And when I won my first Emmy in 1952, for Life with Elizabeth, I introduced my staff of writer. Q: What was his background? George Tibbles was a fine songwriter and piano player, and the first show he ever produced was our show. He had started writing for television just as a sort of a hobby, because music was his background. He wrote the Woody Woodpecker song [and many others]. Q: Did he work in theater, or movies? Related to specific media or across the board? Mostly he would play in nightclubs or for celebrities. But he'd write songs and sell the songs. So he was not attached to any particular medium. Q: How did he come to be a television writer? He was playing piano for me, and when we decided to do the little lead-ins and lead-outs, he would just throw something down on paper. And then with Elizabeth, half the time we'd drive to and from work--he'd pick me up in the morning because we had a scene we had to work out. And we'd ad-lib the situation or tell an anecdote from our own lives, and he'd go to the typewriter and knock it out. Q: What was the format of the Life with Elizabeth show? Husband and wife. She was a very happy, not too swift, cockeyed optimist--she thought everything was fun, and they would [get involved in] minute situations. He was probably about one-sixteenth of an inch smarter than she was, but not any more than that. It was fun. Q: So they were daffy, everyday kinds of situations? Well we had three sketches in each show, and the announcer--Jack Narz was the announcer--would say, "Incident number one in the life with Elizabeth occurred in ••• " And we would jump around in time. We [went] 387 back a couple of times to before we were married. It was really a sketch, so you didn't have to have a beginning, middle, and end. But the first sketch always ended with [getting] themselves all wound up in some problem. And the announcer's voice would come in and say, "Elizabeth." And she was the only one who could hear him. And he'd say, "Aren't you ashamed?" And she'd shake her head vigorously, and that was how we'd get into the commercial after the first sketch. Well to this day, every once in a while, somebody will come up to me and say, "Elizabeth, aren't you ashamed?" And I'm supposed to shake my head like mad. The middle sketch was [similar to the first]. "Incident number two in the life with Elizabeth occurred," and such and such happened. Then [for] incident number three, sometimes if we could afford it [we] would have a guest. Either a guest star--Hal March did our show a lot, or Dick Garten. A lot of people would come in as the next-door neighbor, or somebody like that--as a running character, but not on every show. The third sketch always ended in chaos, with everybody talking at once, and we'd "dump" on that. It doesn't sound like much, but it worked. Q: Did the sketches have related themes within a show? Never. We'd jump around in time. We owned that format for a long time--nobody [else] could [seem to] do it. But then variety [shows] came along, and they started doing sketches, and it worked fine. Q: At first, Al Jarvis was your companion in that format? He was the first Alvin--that's where the name Alvin came from, to make it a little different from Al. And we didn't do very many of those. It would be one of several sketches in the hour format. But it was the one the audience kind of latched onto. Q: Who played opposite you later on? Del Moore, a wonderful man. Q: What was his background? Delvey was an actor, a radio actor and an "actor" actor. He went on to work with Jerry Lewis as kind of a man of all trades for years and years. We lost him a long time ago. But Life with Elizabeth was his main shot on television. 388 Q: Take me through the transformation of that program from being a local show into a filmed, syndicated show. Well we did [it] for a year live, in what is now the Fine Arts theater on Wilshire Boulevard. Q: Channel 13 did a number of telecasts from that theater, is that right? Yes, I think they did Liberace and Florian Zaybach. We would rehearse and put the show on its feet the night before. And then go over the next night and do it in front of a live audience. Q: This was after you had already been on for five-and-a half hours that day? Yes. But then afterwards we'd sing songs and answer questions from the audience. (Laughs) Q: Whose idea was it to try and syndicate the show? Don Fedderson, who was the station manager of KLAC at that point. He got the syndicator in: Guild Films. Rube Kaufman was the head of Guild films, and he set up a meeting with us. Then we went to one camera film. Which was absolute death as far as I was concerned--it was the worst way to do comedy in the world. You know, you do your master shot, then you do your two-shot, then you do your over-the shoulders, and you beat the same poor joke to death. And of course we didn't do it in front of a live audience. so then we would ~ it to a live audience--we'd go to a screening, show it to the live audience, and then let them laugh wherever it hit them funny. Well you were forever walking into laughs, because sometimes they'd laugh when you didn't expect them to. Q: Would they use a laugh track, based on that screening? I'm sure [that] after we were on awhile they probably sweetened the laughs, but we never really used a "laugh track" per se. Audience laughs were "natural" audience laughs. 389 Q: They showed the program to an audience for the purpose of recording laughs for the telecast? Yes. That's right. Q: This was syndicated to non-network stations? Yes, we syndicated all over the country. We were red-hot. We were on twice a week in New York--they ran us on the Du Mont network, and they'd run us on Monday nights and Friday nights. Q: The same show, or different shows? Same show. Q: How long did the syndication of the show last? Oh, I think we're still running somewhere in Australia. (Laughs) Q: How about your filming of the syndicated show? How long did that last? Let's see--we did 65 of them. When I counted up the 65, I was talking about just the shows we had on film; the year [that we produced the show] live we didn't [count]. But many of -those [live shows] we would repeat more-or-less- upgrade them a little bit, and then put them on film. Q: Had Feddersen been at the station when you started there? Oh, yes. He had been there for quite awhile. The next series, George and Don and I were also partners on: ~ with tbe Angels. By that time we were over at ABC, we were rietwork--Plymouth bought [that] one and sold us network. Q: So you went from channel 13 "live," to channel 13 filmed and syndicated, to NBC, to ABC. The NBC show lasted a year. We went on in January of 1954, went off in January of 1955. Date with the Angels brought me over to ABC after that. It was a series [in which] Bill Williams and I played honeymooners, newlyweds. Plymouth bought us and put us on. It was all wonderful. The only problem was, Bill was a dear man, but he was a cowboy actor, and comedy was not necessarily his forte. But we thought, with the same writer, if Delvey did the 390 show and I did the show it would come out pretty much the same show as Elizabeth. So we begged off the last 13 [episodes] of our year's contract, and packed pate with the Angels in, and did 13 [episodes] almost like the old variety thing--we got Delvey back, but by that time we could afford guest stars. so we had Charles Coburn and Boris Karloff and Basil Rathbone, Jack Carson--we had darned good people every week. Del and I would be the anchor couple, and George would write the sketches around whatever guest star we had on that week. Q: Was it different working at a local independent station, as opposed to a network affiliate or a bona fide network show? Were there differences in your experience of those working situations? Not really, because it still was a very personal medium for the individual. The difference was, I had a make-up man to put my make-up on when I was over at NBC, but I put my own make-up on when I was at KLAC • . As far as the syndication, we'd (produce] it in a studio with one camera, shoot it like a movie, really. And that I hated. I was so grateful when Lucy invented the three-camera system. Q: I was curious as to whether there were any particular pressures working as a woman in early television. It's my understanding that there weren't a lot of women working in early television. There weren't, but we were too dumb to know it, Mark. It never even occurred to us to think of a gender difference. Q: Are you familiar with Fedderson's move from channel 13 to become an independent television producer? We've stayed friends over the years. We still see each other socially, on occasion. For awhile, he had a love affair with CBS, with Family Affair and My Three Sons. Of course, George [Tibbles] was writer and producer on MY Three Sons. Q: . When did Fedderson actually leave 13? At the time of Date with the Angels? It was before that. I think it was about the time I went to the network [NBC]. Q: Was he involved in that transition, too? 391 Oh, yeah. We were a three-way partnership, on both the local Life with Elizabeth, then the daytime network NBC show, then the nighttime syndicated show, and then Date with the Angels. Q: I see . I didn't realize it was a partnership. Nice to be partners with two of your dearest friends. 392 Appendix Three David Crandell Oral History 1 August 1990 Mark Williams: What is your knowledge of the Pasadena Playhouse's activities in early television? Were you at the Playhouse from its first activity in television? David Crandell: I was the one who started it all. I had graduated in theater from Northwestern with a Masters degree. I attended the World's Fair in 1939, and when it closed, I decided that television was the thing for me, and I joined the page/guide staff at NBC in New York, which was then doing experimental television. The only hope to get into television there was through the page/guide staff. It meant wearing a uniform and giving tours of the facility--the messenger service, delivery, that sort of thing. I spent almost a year in New York, waiting for an opportunity to get into television there. It never materialized, so I said I'm not going to waste my time here, I think I will go to Hollywood and learn all about motion pictures, because that's got to be an important· stepping stone to television, too. So I came to Hollywood, and I had the gall to start a course at the Pasadena Playhouse in television--nobody knew anything about it [television], but the Playhouse was extremely interested in a course. I had two degrees in theater, so I felt I had the background for it. It was all so experimental in those days that you took any job you could get just to be close to the camera. It was the only way to learn the business. A few books had been written on television, and I had those, and that was the basis of the course that I brought to the Pasadena Playhouse. Q: Did you already have an association with the Playhouse? I went ringing doorbells. My thinking was this when I was out here: as you say, W6XAO, Don Lee, was on the mountain-top. A big studio and equipment. But, I thought, if they did drama from that theater and needed a prop--like a teacup--they would have to drive clear off the mountain to get it. A very hazardous road. And I 393 doubted that they would do that. So, I thought, if I were that television station, what would I do? I would send a mobile unit to the Pasadena Playhouse and pick up the programming, and not bother to produce it. So, I will go to the Pasadena Playhouse and be there waiting for the truck when it comes. (Laughs) Q: You were planning ahead. Everything was fine, and so I started this course--it was only for the staff, the faculty of the Playhouse. The beginning course. And little did I know what it was going to lead to. We got well into the course, and then December 7th (1941] happened, and everything closed down. Q: What had you been studying? What kind of curriculum? It was a training course [and] since I was a theater man it [was] basically directing. Adapting theater techniques to the television medium, which of course involved motion pictures and the use of a camera. But at that point, it was all experimental on everybody's part--including Don Lee up on the mountain top. Q: Did you have television equipment there to work with? Not at that point. I was just teaching a course to interested faculty members, as to what this could be, and eventually waiting for that truck to arrive, to pick up programs. But the war interrupted everything--when Pearl Harbor happened, everything went bla. ck. That ended the television course and everything else, and I, being draftable, went back east and joined the navy. I went to radar officers' school, because I had a choice of type ship or type-duty after midshipman's school in Chicago, and I decided to take type-duty rather than type-ship. In that way, I could pick up radar, figuring that I already had a theater background, and I might as well spend the war learning the engineering side of television. And then maybe I would be equipped for some type of executive position, knowing both sides of the field. That happened to work out also. When the war was over, after the signing of the armistice in Japan--I was in battleships at that point, on an admiral's staff, in charge of radar. When we got back to San Francisco with the return of the Third Fleet, there was a telegram waiting for me from Charles Prickley, Pasadena Playhouse, saying, "Get here as fast as you can. The Los Angeles Times is building a television station. We've seen the plans, and there isn't a door large enough to put a flat 394 through. They need help, they know about you, and want to talk to you." I caught the train, came to LA, met the Times people, and they said, "We are going to apply for one of the seven available channels in Los Angeles. However, we're not ready yet, but we would like to keep in touch with you, and wherever you may be when we're ready, we'll talk business." Q: This was what year? 1945. And I said, "I don't know where I'll be, but I will be someplace in television, and we'll stay in touch." So I went east, and I stopped off in Chicago, where Bill Eddy was running a television station there [WBKB]. And Bill said that he would like to have me join his staff, starting as dolly pusher and working on up to whatever. I said I wanted to look around f irst--I wanted to go to Schenectady [where the GE station was], and come back to New York. He said, "I'll match anything you can find anywhere else." So I did go to Schenectady, and I went to New York, and I looked around and decided I would like to go back to Chicago to WBKB, and I was hired. I advised the Times that I was working in television in Chicago, and I was only there about six months when the Times said, "We're ready, come west." And they hired me as program director for a non-existent television station. That lasted for three long years--they finally built the station, but first of course we had to get the license. Ray Monfort was in charge of engineering, and I was in charge of programming. We were operating out of the Times building. We made a deal, since the Times was not ready to build a transmitter--they didn't have a transmitter site yet--and they didn't want to build studios at that point. We made a deal with the Pasadena Playhouse in which they would allocate studio space, equipment, and engineers. And I would be the program to follow, and train the staff--the students as well as the faculty--in programming. The Times provided all the equipment--we had a control room, we had two cameras, all the lights we needed, sound equipment, etc. The Playhouse provided the sets, costumes, props, talent, directors, floor managers, etc. The Times provided the engineers who operated the cameras, control room, the whole business, and we operated on a 395 closed-circuit basis, sending our programs from the third floor studio down to the student union. People came from all around to see the programs, which we produced upstairs and sent downstairs. Occasionally we would move the equipment to the mainstage auditorium, and televise, live for training purposes, whatever happened to be playing on the main stage. It was a very well-rounded program. This was in '47, '48, and '49, primarily. Q: So this was done while you were waiting for the license? We already had the license, but nobody was under any pressure to build the station. We were building the transmitter site first, and then looking for a studio location, but taking our time doing it. Meanwhile, we were obviously busy, training engineers and training program personnel on this closed-circuit basis. It was very innovative, very creative, a very exciting time to be in the business. Q: What kind of an audience were you drawing? Was it a lot of people from Hollywood, or local Pasadena people, industry types? It was mixed. Industry types, because they were aware that we were doing closed-circuit television there, and they came over to see what it was all about. Hollywoood, of course, was very anxious and very protective of their turf, and didn't want to give you any assistance. That's justified, considering what happened. But broadcast people were keenly interested, particularly those who were coming into the business--the advertising field, and so on. So it was an exciting time. About 1948, the Times did take a lease on the top floor of the Bekins building, and operated there for about a year. At that point, we left the Pasadena Playhouse because all of the equipment was moved to Hollywood, to that studio, and at that point the station went on the air from the Bekins building. We took several people from the Playhouse, hired them on staff. At the same time, the Times suddenly decided that they really didn't want to be in the television business. They were in the newspaper business, and what were they doing in television? CBS had come to them and offered to buy them out, because they [CBS] had not applied for a television station, holding out for color. This left them out of the picture in Southern California, and they needed 396. an outlet, and so they approached the Times. And the Times' Norman Chandler said, "Okay, I will sell you 49% of the station and control of its operation, but not the total ownership. I will still retain 51%." They bought that. That's when I became · vulnerable, because CBS immediately moved all of the radio people that they wanted to get rid of over to the television operation. Q: Were these local radio people? Or from the network? People from CBS Hollywood. I shouldn't say, "want to get rid of," but they weren't the cream of the CBS staff. But they were sent over in charge of television operations. The Times said, very nicely, "We don't know what you're going to with Crandell, but you can't fire him." So, again, I was in a very vulnerable position. I was the program director of a non-existent television station for three years--suddenly I'm now running one, but I get demoted to Chief of Program Operations, which was nothing more than shuffling papers. I was pretty unhappy about it. As I say, CBS couldn't fire me, but they could make life pretty uncomfortable, and they did. ABC knew of my plight, and said to me, "We'll give you two alternatives: you can either open our station in Hollywood in two months, or our station in San Francisco in two weeks, which would you like?" [I said] "I'll take San Francisco," and we did eight programs from the [Pasadena] Playhouse at our studios in the Bekins [building]. (In] a repeat of a very successful closed circuit show we had done live, we recreated Macbeth from the Bekins studios in Hollywood. That was our opening program and my farewell to Times television, KTTV, and Los Angeles. I went to open KGO-TV for the American Broadcasting Company on Sutro in San Francisco two weeks later. Q: The Times decided they were going to merge with CBS- after the attempt to coordinate a network of television stations among newspaper owners? What year would that have been? I guess around 1948 that we conceived the idea, since television grants all over the country usually included a newspaper-owned television station--certainly true of all the major cities. We conceived the idea that it'd be very simple, in the best interests of all concerned to form a newspaper-owned network of those stations, and the [Los Angeles] Times station would be the program source, basically on film. At this point, the [co-axial] cable 397 had not come through--you are not doing anything but kinescopes coast to coast. Film was the obvious solution to the programming problem. Q: Using the one camera, motion-picture type filming, as opposed to kinescope? Yes. Or two cameras, or three, with editing. As long as you have it on film. Then send the film around to the member stations in the newspaper network. Later on, of course, the FCC was to take a dim view of newspaper-owned television stations, so they divested themselves. But at that time, there was considerable interest in it. We invited all the newspaper stations to meet with us in Chicago. They all came and were interested until they learned the cost. The programming cost frightened them. They had no idea television was that expensive. We had engaged Jack Chertok, who was the producer of The Lone Ranger series in Hollywood, a very talented and respected man, who agreed to be the television film producer for the network. But the cost scared everyone off. Q: This project was at KTTV's initiative? Yes. Q: I assume these other newspaper stations would have been sending them funds to produce programming for the whole network? Yes. Q: At the conference, it was pretty apparent it wouldn't fly? Yes, it didn't get any farther. Q: Was this part of the reason that Chandler decided to get out of television? Could be, although it was history repeating itself, because in years before that, the Times had owned an AM [radio] broadcasting station, and one morning woke up and said, "What are we doing in the broadcasting business? Let's divest ourselves." And they got rid of it. This [the television station] was the second time in broadcasting; [they said] "we had no business in this." This was a slightly different case, in that Chandler was smart enough to keep 51%, because one fine day, CBS came in with an ultimatum: "We will either buy 51% or you can 398 buy our 49%." Norman [Chandler] said, "Okay," and wrote a check for their 49%, and they went out with no television station.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Williams, Mark J. (author)

Core Title From "remote" possibilities to entertaining "difference": a regional study of the rise of the television industry in Los Angeles, 1930-1952

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television Critical Studies

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag OAI-PMH Harvest

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Digitized by the USC Digital Imaging Lab (provenance)

Advisor Renov, Michael (committee chair), Kinder, Marsha (committee member), Rogers, Everett (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-180852

Unique identifier UC11276221

Identifier etd-Williams-199209.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-180852 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Williams-199209.pdf

Dmrecord 180852

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Williams, Mark J.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA