Television

“The future of television is no longer a question of what we can invent. It is a question of what we want.”

I know what you’re thinking, but no, this was not said by Mad Men’s Don Draper. Instead, it’s a quote from Nicolas Johnson of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from the November 30, 1968 Saturday Evening Post. The special television issue focused on new technological innovations set to hit the market, and highlighted the anxieties of a looming couch potato culture.

Motorola’s future television would be the “electronic heart of the home, dispensing a wide range of goods and services” – essentially an anticipation of personal computers and the Internet. RCA boasted it could build a television with an eight-foot picture, with “the quality of a travel poster and a three-dimensional effect.” Other companies promised future televisions that would be color, or battery-operated, or flat-screened.  (Nobody said anything about future televisions being built in Asia.)

In his article “Tomorrow’s Many-Splendored Tune-In,” Sandford Brown pointed out that these companies shared one common goal: “the re-creation of reality in the living room,” with a picture so clear and information so instantaneous you would never have to leave your house.  With riots, assassinations, and war in Vietnam–not to mention the ever-present fear of mushroom cloud–staying inside may have sounded pretty good to 1968’s Americans.

Yet what would a cutting-edge television be without top-notch programming? The so-called “Golden Age of Television” was quickly dying out as the Boomers came of age looking for more than family sitcoms, Westerns, or other escapist fare. By providing edgier, niche-oriented entertainment, it was forecast that Community Antenna Television (read: cable TV) would quickly fill the “entertainment vacuum” of the networks.

As you can imagine, the networks, who had been an oligarchy for two decades, were none too happy about this development, and neither were other more conservative Americans who feared that the advent of more sophisticated technology and programming would become the new “opiate of the masses.” Of course, backlashes against technology – even television – were nothing new, but the seemingly high-speed rate of new innovations was particularly troubling.

Wallace Markfield addressed these fears in his self-ironic essay, “Oh, mass man! Oh lumpen lug! Why Do You Watch TV?” His essay humorously recounts his fall from a culturally literate (okay, pretentious) intellectual to a lowly mass consumer who writes postcards to try to save Star Trek.

At first Markfield defends his obsession because of the “democratic potential” of television. Everyone could be there to witness the birth of little Ricky, and everyone could mourn the deaths of beloved national heroes. Indeed, everyone could experience everything together, but remain (conveniently) physically apart.

Yet on the rare occasions when Markfield leaves his comfortable abode, he finds himself unable to escape TV Land. He speculates about the thirty-minute sitcom that could be made about every person on the street, and he sees Walter Cronkite everywhere, watching over him like Big Brother, jumping for the chance to interpret reality in the comfortable nightly news package with a beginning, middle, and end.

Feeling himself being almost literally sucked into TV Land, he swears:  “I would become my own man again, a vertical man. I would cut no more conversations to the length of a station break and pick up a phone even if it rang during prime time.”

With thanks to guest blogger Jen Kalaidis

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Movie mags: the more things change, the more they stay the same

Movie magazines–filled with gossip, pictures, and ads–have been around just about as long as the movies themselves. (Photoplay and Motion Picture each began publication–amazingly–in 1911, and both continued for nearly 70 more years.)  The formula remained virtually unchanged for decades: “behind-the-scenes” backlot stories; gossip columns; candid shots of movie stars at parties and at home; relentless reportage on marriages, divorces, and love affairs.  My guess is that they were most popular when the movies themselves most intensely commanded the public’s leisure hours, that is, Hollywood’s “Golden Age,” between about 1920 and 1945 or so.  When TV came along in the late 1940s, the magazines were forced to accommodate whole new boatloads of “stars.”  This particular rag may be called Movie Mirror, but look who’s on the cover in 1968:  America’s sweethearts, the squeaky-clean Lennon Sisters singing group from television’s wildly popular Lawrence Welk Show.   (This was a big year for the Lennons, who were now mostly grown-up Mommies, as evidenced in this cover photo.  1968 was the year they left the show to start work on a variety series of their own.)

Liz and Dick and Eddie and Debbie and Jackie and Mia and Frank and…..

In the 1960s, there were several public “stars” who were mainstays for the gossip rags:  Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton; Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds; Elvis; Jackie Kennedy.  Liz Taylor was a nearly monthly fixture on movie-mag covers beginning about 1950; First Lady Jackie Kennedy–”America’s Newest Star”–began appearing on the cover of Photoplay in 1962.  They remained in the public eye for what seems, in retrospect, to be close to forever.  With the exception of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, it’s hard to think of stars today who have quite that endurance.  The half-life of the gossip-worthy tabloid figure has shortened considerably.  One cannot imagine, for example, that five years from now that the tabloids–or their more “upscale” equivalents, such as People–will be paying much attention to Jon and Kate Gosselin.   And movie magazines themselves, for that matter, have all but disappeared, replaced by the ever-popular tabloids and by People and US Weekly and other rags following not just movie stars, but socialites, millionaires, reality-TV and talk-show stars, and endless personalities who are famous for being famous– you know who I mean.

“Do you want a dream figure?”

So here, in January 1968’s Movie Mirror are the usual suspects:  paparazzi photos of Liz and Dick on vacation with boatloads (literally) of their kids; Eddie Fisher (cuckolded former husband of Liz, looking a little worse for wear) and his current celebrity girlfriend, songstress Connie Stevens; Jackie Kennedy, romantically linked with the titled, hyphenated British diplomat David Ormsby-Gore; Elvis tiffing with wife Priscilla; Mia Farrow, unhappily married to Frank Sinatra, and heading off to India to see the Mararishi Mahesh Yogi (”What personal demons pursue her halfway around the world to a Shangri-La?”).  And the usual ads, overwhelmingly aimed at women, mostly for products promising personal transformation: girdles (”Compreso-Belt”); push-up bras, wigs, diet aids, teeth and skin whiteners, acne creams, varicose vein removers, and alcoholism cures.

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Forty-one years ago:  the Soviets’ crushing of the “Prague Spring,” the “brave rebirth of national pride and expectation”

Forty-one years ago today, LIFE published an extraordinary 19-page story, with the magazine’s vivid trademark photographs, on the crushing of the “Prague Spring,” the Czechoslovakian experiment with openness and Socialist liberalism that LIFE called a “brief idyl of liberation, the brave rebirth of national pride and expectation.” The invasion of Czechoslovakia by nearly 5,000 Soviet tanks and 165,000 troops (along with forces from four other Soviet-bloc countries) had begun 10 days earlier, on Tuesday, August 20th.  The invaders were met by thousands of mostly youthful street-protesters, and though the confrontations turned violent–thirty-eight protesters were killed–there was no massive or official retaliation.

Meanwhile, in Chicago….

Halfway around the world, in Chicago, thousands of politicians and protesters were beginning to gather in anticipation of the Democratic Party’s national nominating convention.  And the events in Czechoslovakia weighed very heavily on both sides.  Senator George McGovern, a trailing candidate for the nomination that would eventually be won by Hubert Humphrey, lashed out at the Johnson administration, saying it must “bear a considerable part of the blame of the Soviet Union’s military takeover of Czechoslovakia.”  McGovern’s and others’ efforts to obtain an antiwar plank in the party’s platform were crumbling in the face of the Soviet actions.   The story in Czechoslovakia was, in America, refracted through the lens of the ongoing American debacle in Vietnam. McGovern spoke for many when he said: “You cannot justify intervention in Vietnam on the grounds that our security is threatened by a government 10,000 miles away without inviting the Russians to intervene because they feel threatened by a government on their own border.” (NYT 8/24/68).

Czechoslovakia and Vietnam: a 1968 linkage

In a lengthy editorial in this issue of LIFE, Thomas Griffith also made the linkage between the Soviet invasion and the war in Vietnam, especially the effect of the invasion on American politicians’ constantly shifting stances on the war.  ”In the past year, this nation has undergone a remarkable swing of opinion about the war in Vietnam–so much so that names like hawk and dove no longer fit.  The longing to get out is widespread, and peace with honor the common cry.”  Still, the “tanks of Prague” made it much less likely that Americans would look favorably on an end to the Vietnam war that entailed substantial concessions to the Communist North.

Covering Prague in 1968

The convergence of events in Prague and Chicago would have another, unexpected result in the way that 1968 was “covered.”  As reported by New York Times TV critic Jack Gould on August 23, 1968, The CBS Evening News expanded the night before from a half hour (it had been a 15-minute show only 5 years earlier) to a full hour “because of the heavy volume of news,” and said that the format afforded “a less hurried presentation of the day’s developments,” and lessened “the need for the compression of stories into cryptic bulletins.”  Walter Cronkite presided over an hour of news that focused in its first half on Czechoslovakia and world reaction, and in the 2nd half to developments at the DNC in Chicago, as well as to stories from Vietnam and Bogotá (a visit by Pope Paul VI). “Easing the tyranny of time that always hangs so heavily over electronic journalists might have interesting and fruitful consequences,” Gould concluded.  The expansion of the nightly news to a full hour did not last, but exactly a month later, CBS would launch a one-hour news program called 60 Minutes.  More on the debut of that durable show in a later post.

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“Laugh-In.”  All by itself, the word conjures a cascade of 1960s images and memories.

Even more specifically, this incredibly popular television show has for decades been a stand-in for 1968– or perhaps better, “1968″: the pervasive mythologizing of the Sixties’ most notorious single year, a required clip in every “Sixties montage” (or even lampoons of “Sixties montages,” as can be seen on The Simpsons.)

1968’s Top-Rated TV Show

Conveniently launching at the beginning of the year (January 22) as NBC’s mid-season replacement for The Man from U.N.C.L.E.–the spy-caper series that had run out of steam–Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In soon rocketed to the top of the ratings charts and stayed there for the rest of the season and again for the next (1968-69). (Amazingly, two other shows–both on CBS–that overlapped with Laugh-In on Monday nights were also in the top ten that year:  Gunsmoke and Here’s Lucy.)

“Revolutionary”?  Maybe not.

With its vibrant, pulsating colors; the raunchy or topical joke-making; the blindingly quick cuts (over 300 separate segments in each one-hour show, according to Steven Stark’s 1997 book, Glued to the Set), Laugh-In certainly looked and sounded revolutionary and transgressive, at least on the surface.  But down deep (if that’s not an oxymoron in this context), it adhered to formulas familiar to anyone who had been watching TV since its Milton Berle beginnings 20 years earlier.  It was a variety show, with a strong stock company of players (Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin being the show’s most famous alumnae); a pair of urbane, tuxedoed hosts; musical acts (the “psychedelic” band Strawberry Alarm Clock appeared in the opening night’s lineup); comic sketches that were long on slapstick and pratfalls; and a boatload of guest stars doing embarrassing things.

A record of zaniness

In the absence of home VHS or DVDs, how were the producers going to keep the show’s fans pumped up, beyond the expectation of summer re-runs?  This record album, issued as the show’s first half-season ended, was one solution. The colorful cover features cut-outs with the show’s stars peeping through–just like the trademark “Joke Wall” that ended every episode.   ”Dan and Dick” (i.e., Rowan and Martin) provide the rationale, such as it is, for the album in the liner notes:  ”Since we are constantly being stopped on the street by the people who tell us that ‘Laugh-In’ moves to fast they don’t get all the jokes, we decided to put out this album to further confuse them. . . . Here, then, at last for home consumption is some of the madness for you to play and replay until you figure it out.”    The 1960s were the heyday of comedy record albums–one only has to think of “The First Family,” or Bill Cosby’s records, or Bob Newhart’s, or — on the smuttier side– the records put out by black comics Moms Mabley and Redd Foxx.  But a Laugh-In record?  Even the show’s producer, George Schlatter, was quoted in a magazine interview that Laugh-In was “all visual.  You can listen to other TV shows and get the drift, but you have to watch this.”  (Glued to the Set, p. 144)

Do you have a favorite Laugh-In moment?

What does Laugh-In have to do with the Sixties?

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“Covering 1968″ will not strive to adhere to an “on this day in 1968″ pattern–but this particular cover of TV Guide just fell into my lap, and the coincidence of dates was irresistible.  Exactly 41 years ago, delegates to the Republican National Convention in Miami nominated Richard Nixon to be their candidate for president, setting into motion a tumultuous cascade of events that we will no doubt revisit again in later posts.

We will also come back to TV Guide itself again (and again) in future posts, and we’ll no doubt also revisit the two major political conventions of 1968.  For the moment, let’s just consider this image and what’s behind it– made perhaps all the more timely since the recent death of Walter Cronkite, the last survivor of this foursome.

The cover depicts the four anchor men of the three major television news shows:  David Brinkley and Chet Huntley of NBC; Cronkite of CBS; and Howard K. Smith of ABC.  In the context of TV Guide, this photo itself is extraordinary. In 1968, TV Guide was essentially the only popular magazine devoted to television–its business, programming, and celebrities.  Cover acreage was thus valuable real estate, and–not surprisingly–it usually went to television stars, often in groups, smiling and upbeat and appealing (and salesworthy).  Appearing on other summer 1968 TV Guide covers were Barbara Eden (”I Dream of Jeannie”); Johnny Carson; the stars of the various Andy Griffith shows and spinoffs; the “Gentle Ben” stars (including the eponymous bear); the “Star Trek” stars; the “Gunsmoke” stars.  Here, by contrast, is a cover with four dark-suited, middle-aged men, not looking at the camera, not particularly dour, but serious nonetheless.  In my memory (I was not quite 18 that summer), the anchors were all old men.  In fact, in August 1968, Huntley was 56; Brinkley 48; Cronkite 51; and Smith 54.  All middle-aged, male, white, World War II veterans–words that could also describe most members of Congress and anybody running for president.   These four men would be leading (”anchoring,” in the newly coined terminology) the coverage of the August conventions for the three (and only) national TV networks.  All of the networks would be liberally larding their coverage with comments from pundits– Gore Vidal, Art Buchwald, William F. Buckley, Eric Sevareid, Edwin Newman.  These four men and their acolytes were incredibly powerful cultural figures, but had become so only recently; the half-hour “CBS Nightly New with Walter Cronkite” had debuted just five years earlier.

An ad in this issue for the CBS coverage of the convention starting that week in Miami said that it would be “the most significant Republican convention of our generation.”    Television had been covering (to some extent) the national nominating conventions since 1948, and this year they would be broadcasting in color for the first time.  CBS and NBC would be offering “gavel-to-gavel” coverage, as had become their practice, and ABC would offer 90-minute nightly reports (with the option of pre-empting shows if something big happened).  As the lead article in this issue pointed out, “national political conventions are rapidly being calcified (thanks partly to TV) into ritual four-day affairs into fewer and fewer surprises”– a remarkable statement to anybody who thinks that pre-ordained, stultifying conventions are a recent phenomenon.

I was struck by the fact that ABC had already started opting out of wall-to-wall coverage of convention proceedings (or maybe they never opted in).  Surely they hoped this would be good for ratings, since ABC was always a distant third behind the two other networks.  This was also good news for TV watchers who were not fans of calcification.  On August 8, 1968, the night of Nixon’s acceptance speech in Miami (six years to the day before his resignation speech at the White House), viewers in the Twin Cities TV market could avoid NBC and CBS convention filler and catch ABC’s “Bewitched” and “That Girl” before tuning into convention coverage.  Or could flip over to NET (National Educational Television, the precursor of PBS) and watch “The French Chef” with Julia Child, followed by a show called “Yard ‘N Garden.”  Or, in Minneapolis, you could keep the dial on the local “independent” station and skip Nixon’s speech entirely by watching a 1959 movie starring Paul Muni: “The Last Angry Man.”   Talk about coincidences.

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THE COVER:  THE FRENCH CHEF COOKBOOK, by Julia Child.  Published 1968

The publicity bandwagon for the new movie Julie & Julia has been rolling out for a few weeks, so I’ve decided to jump on it.  Julia Child may seem an odd choice as a 1968 cultural figure, but that year she was approaching the apex of her brilliant career.  Note:  ”approaching” the apex, not yet at the pinnacle. Though she had already been on the cover of TIME (1966), she was not yet a parodied figure on Saturday Night Live or Sesame Street. In 1968, if you were a viewer of public television (still called “educational TV” back then), you would have known right away that something called The French Chef Cookbook would be related to the TV show of the same name: “The French Chef,” which debuted on WGBH in Boston in 1963 when she was 50 years old.  This was her second book; her first, great book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1, had been published in 1961.   The 1968 book was what would be instantly recognized today as a “TV tie-in” book:  it took all of the recipes from the 119 black-and-white episodes of the show and laid them out “as they were shown on the air, in order and without further comment,” as she later wrote.  (The next series of 72 shows were in color, and gave rise to what is, in my view, her best book,  From Julia Child’s Kitchen).  The cover of this 1968 book is thus appropriate:  a black-and-white photograph, framed as it it were a rounded television screen, depicting the gleeful and substantial (6′2″) Mrs. Child wielding a mallet, about to smash into what appears to be a turkey carcass.

That this book should emerge in 1968 is a useful reminder of more than the fact that most Americans still watched black-and-white TVs that year.     It reminds us of the diversity of the cultural landscape in that phenomenal year.  A cookbook (Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook) topped the non-fiction bestseller lists that year.  Julia Child’s popularity could be seen as echoing or presaging other cultural markers:  the rise of a new “middle-brow” culture, symbolized by the rise of the Public Broadcasting Service (Masterpiece Theatre’s debut was barely 2 years away); the rise of a consumer-driven food revolution, which led to the eruption of fancy cheese stores and bakeries, trendy wine shops, and high-priced imported food equipment (the Cuisinart debuted in 1971); and the boom in jet-travel tourism that reached into the middle classes (especially Boomer college students) beginning in the 1960s, as millions of Americans jetted off to discover “real” French cuisine, “authentic” Tuscan farmhouses, and the like.

Are “the Sixties” unthinkable without Julia Child?  Well, the history of PART of the Sixties–the part that embraces Janis, Jimi, Fillmore West, dope-smoking, race riots and rebellion–can certainly be told without her.  But for a picture of ALL of the Sixties, she’s an essential piece of the jigsaw.

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