The Big Screen (39 page)

William S. Paley proceeded to gather in more radio stations, and in 1928 he changed his business name to the Columbia Broadcasting System. CBS enjoyed early success, but Paley was ambitious to become bigger, so he was in constant need of fresh funding. That left him open to a first approach from Paramount, the movie empire, which was intrigued by radio as a public show and as a means of advertising, and which had heard about the experiments toward television, though they were being led by David Sarnoff's RCA, which already had some investment in RKO, or Radio-Keith-Orpheum.

When asked about television himself, in 1929, Paley said it was hard to know how it would be handled, but he predicted it would have to play in theaters, “because of the size of the theatre screen…Perfections in the projection of motion pictures will play a large part in making television applicable to theater, rather than home.” That seemed like the right hunch: audiences were so accustomed to sitting at the foot of a screen as big as a wall or a building radiant with light. But Paley was wrong, and in time he resisted television as it intruded on radio. Then he changed his mind, and rewrote the publicity. By 1948 he was on board, proclaiming, “Television offers keener insights than printed or spoken words alone can provide.” So he was wrong again. It is the one reliable trait in hucksters.

But Paley always put his soul into negotiating, and gambling. In that respect he was ready for the movie tycoons. The Fox Studio was interested in Columbia, too. In 1929, William Fox himself invited Paley to dinner, patronized him, and promised to “make something of him.” He offered to buy Columbia for whatever sum Paley had paid to put it together. Paley took umbrage and went to meet Adolph Zukor at Paramount. He conducted himself like a powerhouse: he would grant Paramount a half share in CBS, for $5 million. Zukor agreed, though his deal was tough: Paramount paid not cash but its own stock, to be redeemed in three years. In addition, it secured six hours a week of free advertising on the radio and the obligation on CBS to be in profit before Paramount would buy back its stock.

With the Crash of 1929, Paramount stock fell from $85 a share to $10. In advance of that, Paley had sold $1 million worth of his Paramount stock. The movie business faltered. But radio soared in the years of the Depression; CBS's advertising revenue was up to $14.5 million in 1931. So Paramount owed CBS $4.0 million for its old stock. It couldn't pay, so Zukor offered to trade back the CBS stock he had acquired for $5.2 million; $4.0 million of that would go back to CBS, which would once again be controlled by Paley. But to get the $5.2 million, Paley had to go to Wall Street in a fund-raising operation brokered by Prescott Bush (the father and grandfather of future presidents) and Averell Harriman. And so politics and old money entered the mass media in its early days.

This is movie business, of course, with television some way away still, but it is also the thing Noah Cross (John Huston) swears to protect and possess in the movie
Chinatown
(1974): “the future.” It is also a portrait of a great operator: in the same years, Paley finessed a Crossley opinion poll that said NBC was doing far better with the listening public than CBS by mounting his own write-in response (in his favor). By the early 1950s, Paley was a more important leader for American culture than any of the movie moguls, most of whom were his friends, obliged to suffer his condescending talk.

This history is also a guide to the driving force of advertising in these American media. Paley had been in advertising before he was a broadcaster, and so he took it for granted. How else was the public going to pay for its media? And here we should observe a contrast with what I have previously called “state cinema.”

It was in 1922 that the British Broadcasting Company was founded. By 1927 it had become the British Broadcasting Corporation, with a royal charter defining its structure and ethos. Its chief purpose was to “Inform, educate and entertain,” to represent the different areas and voices of Britain, and to address the whole world in its own languages. It was to be funded on a license fee required of all citizens and companies possessing a radio receiver. Later that fee was changed to apply to television reception, and it stood in 2011 at £145.50 a year.

As general manager first and then director-general, John Reith, a Scottish Presbyterian of forbidding austerity and moral principle, led the BBC until 1938. It was the Reithian insistence that the BBC, though funded by state order and policing, was to function as an independent entity, conceiving and making radio as its employees saw fit. Reith was compelled to observe government control during the General Strike of 1926: he was not allowed to air trade union or Labour Party views. He was forced out of the BBC in 1938 because of pressure from the Conservative government. But the principle of an independent broadcasting entity, funded by the public, held.

BBC radio always had its faults and it preferred the un-American attitude that viewers were at liberty to turn off if they wished. That much discrimination could seem elitist—the BBC spoke with an Oxbridge accent for decades—but its reliability as a source of information was not questioned during the Second World War. (Charles de Gaulle was one of many people who spoke to their occupied peoples from London.) It catered to many fringe interests; it calmly refused to be overwhelmed by majority tastes; it had a whole range of services—Home, Light and the Third, which went from mainstream, to entertainment, to intellectual—and it observed those distinctions without any shame. It carried no advertising. It still doesn't, on radio or television, though the pressures to pay its way mount all the time. Britain conceived and carried forward a kind of broadcasting that is self-sufficient and free from commercial pleas, interruption, and the demented noise of the pitch. It has regularly broadcast things that many people disapprove of, and it has usually resisted that resistance. It has been in trouble with governments. For decades, this bred a mood that cannot be underestimated: that our discourse and our scrutiny deserve to be uninterrupted. Attention deficit was not a common concept in that era, but we struggle with it now and sharp kids use it in their own defense as they snatch glances at screens Bill Paley would have deemed hopelessly small.

This book is not interrupted every sixteen pages by a cluster of advertisements.

I hope you are startled to think that the bound signatures of books might be intruded on by advertisements. Isn't it just as ridiculous that on a CD of a symphony, an opera, or a jazz session there could be commercials separating the tracks, or that when you went to see a movie there would be advertising interludes every twenty minutes? We are not minds and beings ready for that sort of crass interruption—are we? And yet we are accustomed to newspapers where the text is mixed in with advertisements. On the Internet, we have to submit to ads to gain access to an item of interest, and we may realize that “interest” begins to be dependent on the necessary push of the advertising. In its first appearance, television assumed our minds were fit to be interrupted. It made a habit.

We have never given enough time to a consideration of the basic experience of television. By the end of the 1950s, it was clearly a force or a wan light shaping children's minds, yet the subject rarely penetrated our educational system to sit beside reading and writing as a fit part of the curriculum. In that same period, research discovered that most children were spending more time watching moving imagery than they were working with words.

In one way, television was less a departure than a return to something Thomas Edison foresaw and which was ignored or bypassed by theatrical movies. In the earliest days, Edison built kinetoscope parlors where single individuals looked into view-finding devices and turned a handle so they had a film show all to themselves. Edison thought it was the future—and he was correct, but not immediately. The first interaction between technology and audience preferred projection, though “preferred” suggests there was a conscious choice or a vote. Instead, the development speaks to the underground urging that will always occur in these things. So, in the first decades of the twentieth century, people elected to see projected movies in large groups. A hundred years later we are watching images nearly too small to see, in an isolation bordering on secrecy. The question hanging over these changes is whether we ever had a choice, or are we just helpless victims of the light?

Television had a way of presenting itself as just for us. “We'll come to you!” It seemed like a rare facility that meant we had no need to go out at night, get a babysitter, or be presentable in public. It was just one more household service to make life easier. Did that smooth assurance distract us from the way the screen was tiny, the sound dreadful, and the picture quality enfeebled? Did it also prevent us from seeing how the shape and atmosphere of the home were being revised?

The television set was a light source and a piece of furniture reorganizing rooms and domestic patterns. It was placed in a focal or dominant position, and it is chance that the onset of television coincides with the decisions to reduce or stop domestic fires (especially coal burning) for some kind of central heating. So where people had once sat in front of a fire, a table, a piano, or a view, now the television set took over that place of honor or command. Many domestic pursuits, from music to game playing to conversation, suffered in the process. The television screen was not kindly served by being placed opposite windows or lights; such reflections confused or obscured the image. So the set was sometimes placed in front of a window (blocking some of that view) and so much in front of a light that the real light might be redundant.

In the early days of television, there was some confusion as to whether it was better, or safer, to watch with the room lights on or off. Folklore thought turning the lights off was dangerous to the eyes, but it hardly ever realized that television required our looking directly at the light (within the cathode ray tube), whereas in moviegoing we are looking at light that is reflected back from the screen, and therefore softer or kinder. To this day, this is seldom remarked on, yet if you tell people they spend hours in a half-darkened room staring into an artificial light source (through a passing veil of imagery) they are alarmed. There may be no need for that, but do not underestimate the primitive light worship that is involved and that has always been part of film and television. We love the light, even when it is artificial, and we cannot help the irrational assumption that insight and enlightenment may come from it. One thrill gone from theatrical moviegoing now is the beam of the projector, a seemingly solid wedge alive with the writhing smoke that came up from the crowd. As kids, we sometimes watched the flickering of the movie in that swirl if the stuff on the screen seemed tame. A theater was cavern-like, with spells working in the air.

Television had so much more domestic a place; the way it occupied our time made it as constant as the sofa. Movies gave us wondrous or insane people, paragons and demons. Television offered familiars who came by at the same time, the same night.
I Love Lucy
ran for six seasons, 181 episodes in all, at twenty-five minutes each. For the 1950s that was approximately fifty movies. In six years, that's over eight a year, a rate only small-part movie actors equaled in that decade. The work rate in television was extraordinary (it still is), and it exhausted Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. But a similar intensity gripped audiences. In 1945–47, a moviegoer might visit the theater twice a week. Allow him or her a double feature, and that is six hours of screen time in a week. By the late 1950s and into the 1960s there were plenty of viewers (especially young people) who clocked up that many hours in a day. Looking at the screen had shifted from being a specific entertainment to a habit in which we might fail to notice or follow what was playing. We put the television “on” in the way we turned the lights on.

On its arrival, television seemed to foster company. The first families with a television set would invite neighbors in to watch. On Main Street, you saw clusters of strangers watching a television playing in a shop window. At home, the family group might be seeing more of one another than they had for years. The best shows (or the worst) sparked talk and argument, and there were events in current affairs (minor and major) that became perceived and understood in terms of the television coverage: in Britain, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, in 1953; in Europe, the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the building of the Berlin Wall; in America, Nixon's Checkers speech, the Army-McCarthy hearings, the Nixon-Kennedy debates; and all over the world, the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Such things were covered in newsprint and on radio, too, but screen attention met the urgency of the moment, and newspapers were hurt. If the world was going to end, people wondered if they wanted to see the mushroom cloud. Sometimes the medium simply stared at the waiting. And if Nixon had won that key debate on radio or in press reports (as many claimed), he lost it on live television. He seemed to be exaggerating, or striving. It started an imperative for media ease in politicians that would find its hero in a former actor. Where had that illusion of comfort come from but the movies?