Non-Demand Movies

Imagine you’re watching Double Indemnity.  Betty Davis appears at the top of the stairs, dressed in her bathrobe, and slowly descends, the camera lovingly focused on the glittering ankle bracelet.  Just as Fred McMurray is about to comment on it …

… the movie breaks for a commercial for Ivory Soap (99 and 44/100ths percent pure.)

Now, to get the full effect, imagine that the stunning, high-contrast black-and-white photography is speckled with electronic “snow”.  And, to make matters worse, the image keeps scrolling upward or distorting like hallucinations on an acid trip.

When they return, and McMurray and Davis begin their delicious, seductive banter (“What’s the speed limit?”  “Forty-five.”  “How fast was I going, Officer?”  “Oh, I’d say about 90”) the dialogue sounds like it’s being transmitted between two tin cans connected with a length of string.  Instead of seeing the two side-by-side, the camera focuses on whomever is speaking, one at a time (an editing technique called “pan and scan.”)

Despite all that, this was increasingly how we watched movies for the first few decades of television.  Fuzzy picture and all, we managed to panic and radically transform an entrenched, monolithic industry, all because it was far more convenient to stay home with a lousy image than to go out for a good one.

It happened so suddenly.  In 1943, Americans spent over a quarter of their entertainment budgets on movies; going to a theater was something you did just about every week.  Yet by 1960, we were spending only 5% of that budget on theaters.  Movie revenues dropped by a third in the 50s.  The hegemony of the Studio system collapsed, and despite desperate innovations like Cinerama, epic stories and even 3-D, the little box with the fuzzy picture took over.

The studios knew what was happening, and they did their best to boycott TV by refusing to release any but pre-1948 films to television distributors.  So my formative years, the years when I became a film lover, focused on gangster films, westerns, war movies, screwball comedies, horror films, and even musicals made decades before I was able to watch them.  They were butchered by local editors, cut into segments for the insertion of commercials with little regard for narrative logic.  Often they were introduced by local celebrities, sometimes dressed in bizarre costumes (remember Elvira, Mistress of the Dark?).  

And yet, somehow the magic remained.  Maybe there were even some advantages.  For one thing, they were free, so we could watch even more of them than our parents had in the theaters.  They were there when we were sick at home from school, or in the evening when we were supposed to be going to sleep.  They were easy to watch, “B” formula movies that were often predictable and reliable entertainment.  And, given the technological barriers, they demanded attention to watch, giving the lie to the prevailing argument that television was a passive medium.  Tough men and tough women, the protagonists of the Depression era, were our first role models.  

The boycott broke down gradually, but finally the studios had to give in. In 1961, NBC premiered Saturday Night at the Movies; for the first time, we could watch prime-time movies, increasingly in color, that were only about a year old.  And you know what?  As I grew into my teen years, I started going back to the theaters.  I was now a cinephile—and I wanted to see movies without commercials intruding into them!

The other night, I watched The Bourne Legacy on On Demand.  Fast Forward, Pause, and Rewind were disabled, and, although the commercials that had been inserted during its television broadcast had been removed, the breaks for them were still there.  It was annoying, but it was also strangely nostalgic.

This was how we learned to love film.

Dream Girl

Annette.

Psychologists posit something called the “cognitive schema.”  It’s a mental framework, a scaffolding, that we use for organizing our experiences and observations.  The framework, of course, forms in infancy, and new input is added to it throughout our lives.  If it doesn’t fit into the schema, we tend to discard it.

Annette.

We construct cognitive schema about people, events, roles, and even ourselves—they enable us to evaluate what’s happened and to predict what comes next.  They help us apply our values and to judge others’, and they make sense of the vast, chaotic mess of daily life.

Annette.

Behavioral scripts are learned through organizational socialization and on the job experience  According to Charles T. Schmidt of the University of Rhode Island, one of the ways we build this schema is to learns from “stories, myths, films, movies, conversations, role models.”  They even play a part in romance:  we tend to fall in love with the people who most closely match our cognitive schema for the “perfect” mate.

I built a huge chunk of mine from television.  And, as my schema of the ideal woman began to take shape, she looked and acted increasingly like one TV personality.

Annette. Annette Funicello.

I was seven.  She was twelve when the Mickey Mouse Club debuted in 1955.  Of course, millions of male baby boomers were around the same age, too, and subsequent experience tells me that many, if not most, of use developed a huge first crush on Annette.  She was the tallest of the Mouseketers  and arguably the most talented—a singer, a dancer, an outgoing extrovert.  Dark black hair, round face, ebullient personality and full of charm, she was the embodiment of the nascent bobby soxer of the ‘50s, and she even wore a rather tight turtleneck sweater as she grew and, um, developed.

And then, in the ‘60s, as I hit puberty, she hit the beach.  At first, Walt Disney insisted that she wear a demure, one-piece bathing suit for her “Beach Party” movies with Frankie Avalon, but she eventually donned a two-piece—still demure and modest, but a harbinger of the rebellions of the 1960s.  She exuded joy, good cheer, and the kind of innocent purity that the 1950s demanded of female role models.  And she held onto the complete image even after so many of use rejected it.

Then came the stunning part:  this avatar of energy and good, clean health had Multiple Sclerosis, the same disease my own mother had battled for over two decades and which finally killed her.  She faced it with dignity and courage, speaking publicly about her affliction, establishing a foundation to research neurological diseases, and providing a very different role model to both women and men.

Annette.  Like Ricky Nelson and Beaver Cleaver, she grew up on screens—and gave us a powerful framework to guide our own adolescence.

A ten-minute documentary about her life can be seen here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_hCCcCbY34

The Demise of Rapid Rudy

I took some old electronics to an electronics recycling station the other day:  a desktop computer, a dead monitor, and an analog, cathode ray television.  The TV still worked (although it needs a digital converter box to pick up a signal), but the color adjustment was off and it would have needed some work.  It wasn’t worth it.

On the way home, I drove through the neighborhood in which I grew up and discovered something shocking (and inevitable):  Rapid Rudy’s has closed for good.

This rickety shop (it always looked as if it had been built during the Depression) had been a fixture in North Seattle as long as I’d lived there; my dad bought our first TV there, and we took others there for repair through the years.  For over 60 years, it was the kind of small business, like independent barber shops and tiny taverns with kitschy names, which gave identity to neighborhoods. In this case, its neighbors included an Elks Lodge and a strip club. It had a web page (http://rapidrudys.com/index.html) and great customer ratings on Yelp.  What it no longer had, though, was a clientele.

Television was born in an era of sustainability.  The mantra of the Depression and World War generations had been “Use it up, wear it out, make it last, or do without.”  The image was brought to us with the help of vacuum tubes, condensors, resistors, and multi-colored wires, and the devices were maintained by technicians with much the same skills as watchmakers.

Now the mantra is “Costco has a deal on ..”

And, until it falls, a deteriorating sign out on Bothell Way stands as a monument to the old ways.