People don’t gather for “Event Television” anymore. TV shows can be taped, TiVoed, or rented on DVD, but the miniseries didn’t die—it still lives on cable. Since 2000, HBO, Showtime, and the Sci-Fi Channel have produced many acclaimed miniseries on par with Roots, including Band of Brothers, From the Earth to the Moon, and Angels in America. The secret to their success? Frequent re-airings.
MINI-DISASTERS
Not all miniseries attracted record-breaking audiences and truck-loads of Emmys. Here are a few clunkers.
• Beulah Land (1980). Life on a pre–Civil War Southern plantation, viewed through rose-colored glasses. Features many extremely happy and satisfied slaves.
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• The Last Days of Pompeii (1984). Ancient Rome meets Peyton Place. People engage in lurid behavior of all kinds until the volcano instantly kills them all. One of Sir Laurence Olivier’s last roles.
• Amerika: It Can’t Happen Here (1987). Russian communists take over the United States. Over the two years it took to film Amerika, U.S.-Russia tensions had thawed so considerably that the miniseries was irrelevant by the time it aired.
• Fresno (1986). A comic send-up of 1980s TV soaps like Dallas, starring Carol Burnett and Dabney Coleman as the heads of two rival, raisin-growing families in “America’s 64th largest city.”
• Sins (1986). Joan Collins (Dynasty) produced it and played the lead role, a woman separated from her family by death and war. (Collins was twice the character’s age.)
• Scarlett (1994). In this Gone With the Wind sequel, Timothy Dalton and Joanne Whalley stand in for the long-dead Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh.
• The 10th Kingdom (2000). A man and his daughter are trapped in an alternate universe where trolls and giants threaten the kingdoms of Snow White, Cinderella, and Little Red Riding Hood.
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POT LUCK
On July 23, 2005, Leah Robles and her husband Richard spent five hours at the Presbyterian Intercommunity Hospital in Whittier, California. Leah was more than nine months pregnant and thought she was about to have her baby. But hospital staff told her no, she wasn’t ready to deliver and sent her home. Less than an hour later the mom-to-be went to the toilet and her husband heard her yell, “I’m having the baby!” He said “No you’re not, honey. Come back to bed.” Then Leah looked down—and saw Richard Robles III in the toilet. Dad ran in, scooped the baby out, dried him off, and called 911. Firefighters said the boy was fine. (The parents said they’d be talking to the hospital staff again.)
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PHONOGRAPH WARS
Remember when people listened to records? How about when the records were shaped like toilet paper rolls? This is the story of how a handful of innovators battled each other to dominate the industry they were creating.
THE WIZARD OF MENLO PARK
Although he’s best known for his work on the lightbulb, Thomas Edison was also driven by a desire to develop the technological ability to record and play back sound. But it wasn’t so he could listen to music—he had no particular interest in music. When he invented the phonograph in 1877, he saw it as a new office tool for secretaries to use when taking dictation. In fact, he didn’t even think there would be much of a market for the new contraption, and he shelved it for ten years while he worked on more lucrative projects (like the lightbulb). Then in 1887 he got word that a rival research lab was trying to steal his idea.
HOW IT WORKED
Edison’s phonograph recorded sound onto a tinfoil cylinder—about the shape and size of an empty toilet-paper tube. The cylinder was mounted on a hand-cranked screw shaft. The rest of the machine consisted of a steel needle, or stylus, attached by a wooden arm to a large speaker cone. Cranking the screw shaft while speaking directly into the speaker caused the arm to vibrate and the stylus to move up and down through the rotating tinfoil cylinder. Putting the needle back at the beginning of the cylinder and cranking at the same speed reproduced the recorded sound.
In 1887 a rival company, Volta Labs, received patents on a machine they called a graphophone. It was exactly like the phonograph except that it used a waxed paper cylinder in place of Edison’s tinfoil. Unwilling to stand by while another company brought his invention to market, Edison bought them out, incorporated the wax cylinder into his design, and released his Perfect Phonograph in 1888 to wide acclaim. People bought it for business use, but also for the novelty of hearing their own voices come out of a machine. Edison had won the opening skirmish of the phonograph wars.
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ANOTHER RIVAL
While Edison was busy buying out Volta Labs, a German American named Emile Berliner was quietly developing an alternative to the phonograph. Patented in 1887, Berliner’s gramophone was quite different from the phonograph. For starters, it played flat disc records instead of cylinders. They also featured a new type of sound groove: lateral grooves that caused the stylus to vibrate from side to side at a uniform depth—instead of up and down, like Edison’s vertical “hill and dale” grooves. The most important difference, however, was that Berliner’s machine did not record sound. All it could do was play pre-recorded records. While Edison’s phonograph was an office tool, the gramophone was designed for home entertainment.
To make a gramophone recording, a zinc master disc was coated with a mixture of beeswax and jellied gasoline. After a recording stylus carved lateral grooves into the mixture, the disc was submerged in a vat of acid, which etched the grooves into the zinc. The master was used to cast a metal negative, which was then used to press the grooves into a hard rubber disc. One negative could be used to stamp out hundreds or thousands of identical copies of the original record.
In 1890 Berliner started the U.S. Gramophone Company, at first selling records, but no players. His first customers: toy companies that sold nursery rhyme records with “talking dolls.” The dolls had small gramophones built into them. Then he introduced an adult version. Those first records were seven inches in diameter and only had sound on one side. They played at a speed of 30 revolutions per minute, and like Edison’s cylinders, held two minutes of sound.
THE BIRTH OF THE MUSIC INDUSTRY
While Berliner was putting the finishing touches on the gramophone, Edison was running into difficulties. As much as he wanted to see his invention put to serious use as a business tool, he was soon forced to concede that the public wanted to entertain themselves with it. Right from the start, enterprising saloonkeepers and shop owners installed phonographs to attract customers. If ready-to-play recordings of popular music were made available, people would buy them in droves.
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In response to this demand, Edison developed a way to mass-produce pre-recorded cylinders and introduced the first coin-operated jukeboxes in the early 1890s. Edison was clueless, though, when it came to show business: he believed that the technology was the selling point, and he viewed pre-recorded music as a demonstration tool or novelty product. He wouldn’t even print song titles on his cylinders.
ROLL ON COLUMBIA
Edison clearly didn’t appreciate the possibilities presented by growing demand for pre-recorded music. Inevitably, one of his regional distributors became fed up and split off from him to better serve that market. Columbia Records, today the oldest brand name in continual use in the recording industry, severed all ties with Edison in 1893 and soon became his closest rival. In going head to head with Edison, Columbia had one distinct advantage: it recognized that the selling point was the music, not the brand name. By catering to the customers’ musical tastes and by promoting specific singers and songs, Columbia was able to outflank Edison. These cylinders were sold in cardboard cans and gave rise to the term “canned music.”
Edison
responded with technical improvements. Early cylinders could only be played a few dozen times before the phonograph’s heavy steel stylus wore out the grooves. Edison developed a more durable cylinder that could be played over 100 times, but Columbia trumped him by introducing a line of “indestructible” celluloid plastic cylinders. But by 1901 Columbia was losing interest in cylindrical records. Why? Emile Berliner’s gramophone was beginning to catch their attention.
EMILE BERLINER VS. THE WORLD
After selling more than 1,000 gramophones and 25,000 records in 1894, Berliner was poised to challenge Edison and Columbia for a place at the top of the young industry. Instead, he was kept sidelined for the rest of the decade by a series of vicious legal battles.
Businessmen from all over saw the profitability of the new “talking machines,” and many tried to move in and dominate the market. First, an outfit calling itself the Standard Talking Machine Company introduced a line of records that were direct copies of Berliner’s originals. No sooner had Berliner succeeded in shutting them down when another group—the American Talking Machine Company—came along selling Berliner’s patented technology under the rights of the old Volta Labs “graphophone” patents. Berliner sued and eventually won (based on the difference between his lateral groove system and the vertical cut grooves described in the graphophone patent), but he had spent more time in the courtroom than the boardroom and his profits were dwindling.
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Before he had a chance to take a breath, Berliner found himself in court again. This time he was being sued by the National Talking Machine Company, which produced records under the brand name Zonophone. Universal was started by a man named Frank Seaman, one of Berliner’s distributors. Using Columbia’s cylindrical record patents, Seaman’s group managed to get a federal injunction forcing Berliner to stop production in 1900.
But Berliner wouldn’t give up.
In 1901 he joined forces with a fourth company, the Consolidated Talking Machine Company, and countersued with a vengeance. When the dust settled, the impostors were shut down and Berliner and his new partners won all of National’s assets—including the right to use the name Zonophone. In honor of the victory, Berliner’s new company called itself the Victor Talking Machine Company.
PRESSING ON
Victor now set out to become the most popular brand of records and players on the market. It became the first company to sign top singing stars such as Enrico Caruso, Jimmie Rodgers, and Dame Nellie Melba to exclusive contracts—using their star power to sell Victor records. In addition, they introduced the Victrola line—record players built into fancy wooden cabinets that became status symbols in American living rooms.
Columbia, meanwhile, started producing flat disc records alongside their cylinder catalogue. Why were flat discs better?
• They took up less storage space than cylinders.
• They could be kept in “albums” that fit neatly on bookshelves.
• The uniform depth of their lateral grooves prevented them from skipping as easily as cylinders.
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• They had better sound quality, especially after Victor switched from rubber discs to a material called shellac.
The way was clear for flat records to dominate the market.
AND THE WINNER WAS…
Not Edison. One of his greatest attributes as an inventor was his stubbornness to see a project through to completion. But it was a bad quality for a businessman who needed to cater to his customers’ changing tastes. Edison clung to the cylinders for so long that soon his only sales were to older customers who were as stubborn as he was and refused to purchase new record players.
In 1912 Columbia ceded what little remained of the cylinder market to Edison and put all their efforts into discs. In a move that came too late, that same year Edison introduced the Edison Diamond Disc system, the finest-sounding—and most expensive—system of its day. The sound quality was so good that during barnstorming demonstration tours, audiences were often unable to tell the difference between the record and the real thing.
The problem, however, was that his new system was incompatible with any other company’s records. Diamond Discs were a quarter-inch thick and continued to make use of vertical “hill and dale” grooves. And Edison still hadn’t grasped that it was the music that sold records. Nobody wanted the best player money could buy if it limited their record selection to Edison’s inferior music catalog. Though he eventually developed an adaptor that could be used to play other companies’ records, Edison simply did not have the show business savvy to compete with Columbia and Victor.
SWAN SONG
Finally, in 1929 Edison made a feeble effort to begin producing what, by then, had become the standard record format: a 10-inch, 78 rpm record with lateral grooves that held four minutes of sound. These “Edison Needle Cut” records were of good quality, but his heart wasn’t in it. Later that year, America’s greatest inventor admitted defeat and withdrew from the record business once and for all. The Edison phonograph factory was converted to produce radio receivers. His only victory in the record wars was a symbolic one: by the time he quit the business, “phonograph” had become the standard American term for any type of record player.
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THE BATTLE RAGES ON
Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, Columbia and Victor (which had merged with the Radio Corporation of America to become RCA Victor) fought for technical supremacy. Speeds of 331/3 and 45 rpm replaced the 78; vinyl replaced shellac as the material from which records were made; and in 1951, the first “stereophonic” records were introduced.
Grooved records that produced sound by causing a stylus to vibrate would remain the dominant recorded music format until 1983. That year, magnetic tape cassettes outsold disc records for the first time. In 1988—exactly 100 years after Edison sold his first phonograph—digital compact discs outsold vinyl records for the first time and condemned them forever after to antique or novelty status.
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MORE DUMB CROOKS
• Ear It Is. “German police charged a man with drug possession when he entered a police station to check if he was on their wanted list. ‘I suppose he may have heard he was wanted for some offense and just wanted to see if the police had anything on him,’ said Volker Pieper, a spokesman for police in the city of Kassel. ‘It didn’t go quite as he had planned.’ As the 33-year-old man, a known drug abuser, questioned police, an officer noticed a suspicious lump stuck in his ear which turned out to be a gram of heroin. Police confiscated the drug before filing charges.” (Reuters)
• Did I Say That? “Dennis Newton was on trial for the armed robbery of a convenience store when he decided to fire his attorney and represent himself. Oklahoma City District Attorney said Newton was doing a decent job until the store manager testified that Newton was indeed the robber. Newton jumped up, accused the woman of lying and said, ‘I should have blown your [expletive] head off.’ The defendant paused, then added, ‘If I had been the one that was there.’ The jury deliberated for 20 minutes before returning a verdict of guilty, recommending a sentence of 30 years.” (Deseret News)
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THE LITTLE RASCALS HALL OF FAME
More than 175 kids appeared in the Our Gang films between 1922 and 1944. Only 41 had major roles and even fewer became famous. Here are some of our favorites.
PETE THE PUP
• The dog you remember as Pete, the one with the circle around his eye, was actually the third dog to be featured in the Our Gang series. The first was also named Pete (no circle); he appeared in the 1923 film The Cobbler. A dog named Pal appeared in several Our Gang films in the mid-1920s.
• When Pal left the series, producer Hal Roach selected one of Pal’s
puppies to replace him. That dog was the one who became famous as Pete. How’d he get a circle around his eye? Purely by chance: before starring in the Our Gang series, he played a dog named Tige with a circle around his eye in the Buster Brown children’s film series. When Roach selected Pete for the Our Gang cast, he told the film crew to wash off the circle, but it wouldn’t come off—it had been painted on with permanent dye. “What the hell,” Roach replied, “leave it on.”
• Since the dogs that played Pete could be replaced every few years, he became the longest-running character in the film series, lasting from 1927 until 1938.
ALLEN “FARINA” HOSKINS (105 Our Gang films from 1922–1931—more than any other kid in the series)
• Farina got his name because a studio executive thought he was as “chubby and agreeable as breakfast mush.” The character that William “Buckwheat” Thomas made famous is modeled after Farina, and he was named after a cereal grain, too.
• Farina isn’t as well known as Spanky, Alfalfa, or Buckwheat are today, but in his day he was the most popular Our Gang character. His salary showed it, too—at his peak he made $250 a week, more than any of the other kids, who started out at $40 a week.
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JOE COBB (86 films, 1922–1929)
The original fat kid in the series, Joe stumbled into show business while vacationing in Los Angeles with his family in 1922. He and his dad decided to visit Hal Roach Studios one afternoon. Joe caught the eye of the casting people as they were heading off for lunch; they cast him right on the spot and he began working in his first silent movie that afternoon. He made his first Our Gang short, The Big Show, shortly thereafter.
ERNIE “SUNSHINE SAMMY” MORRISON (28 films, 1922–1924)
Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader Page 57