The Big Screen

by David Thomson

  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?

  With television, a new form of shock cutting entered our heads. It was insolent but arbitrary, startling then commonplace, outrageous and banal. So we put shock in its place. The breaking news could break your heart, as on November 22, 1963—but two days later, when Lee Harvey Oswald was shot, the possibility of plot, or story, started up. The structures in television programming, or service, often felt more affecting than the shows themselves. There on the sofa, you had to be ready for the sofa exploding. The world seemed to be within reach, but even in a family gathering people felt more alone. With so many people out there, how could you matter?

  David Riesman’s 1950 book The Lonely Crowd could have been inspired by watching people watch television. In Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman, an exhausted salesman, is a stranded American everyman who has such dreams of past happiness that he cannot see the living present of his family. We never know what he is selling. Could his suitcases of samples contain television sets? Remote controls? But when he talks about the great times, they are full of light. The play fixes on the idea of “attention,” and, in hindsight, it’s easy to realize how inattention had become a mounting concern in the most commanding country on earth. A Place in the Sun, the film based on Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy, was a key title of the early 1950s, and it asked that the humble be seen—for a moment. David Riesman talked about three human types—tradition-directed, inner-directed, and outer-directed—and there was a sense that victory, prosperity, anticlimax, and a lasting fear had left many Americans trying to decide which category fitted them best.

  By 1957 Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg had made A Face in the Crowd, in which a nobody, Larry Rhodes, becomes a monster on television under the name of “Lonesome” Rhodes. That sound had been there in “Willy Loman.” Miller admitted that the name was not a reminder of “low man” (as some commentators still suggest). It was remembered from Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), where Lohmann is a police inspector. The same character and actor (Otto Wernicke) had figured in M. “Loman” could also stand for “lonely man,” the melancholy that was finding form in film noir, and in Edward Hopper’s pictures of people alone in a room. As early as 1939, in his painting New York Movie, Hopper had bestowed that wistful mood on a movie theater usherette, a blonde, half asleep, half dreaming, wanting to be in the movie but stuck with her job. Photographers—Weegee and Diane Arbus—had noticed the fun of the movie crowd, its wild faces lit up by the screen, but Hopper knew that the theater was also a place where lonely people went, people like Hopper himself.

  On the opening night of Death of a Salesman (February 10, 1949), Miller began to feel lonely, watching the audience from a distance. He saw celebrities at his play: Florence Eldridge and Fredric March (March would play Loman in the very poor 1951 movie version), Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz (though no one had heard of I Love Lucy yet).

  But if that sounds downbeat, there were kids on the sofa who knew no other entertainment and who were captivated by a home screen and the prospect that it could reach anywhere. Why not dial up any show, any page of any book, and all the data in the world? Those kids grasped the power of the new medium, its surreal poetry in going from one channel to another, and they began to wonder about “the next big thing.” Larry Ellison was born in 1944, Steve Wozniak in 1950, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in 19
55. Of the four, Wozniak was the only one who graduated from college; the others were too busy watching and thinking.

  I Love Lucy is not just a production triumph and a classic show, but also something that embodied the need for comfort and glue available in television—and no one took the line that it might be art. The charm of comedy is that while you’re laughing, you don’t have to decide whether you’re watching a show or art. Americans have never been more themselves with the screen than in that precious state of relaxation or submission.

  Like the boss he was, William Paley enjoyed telling how a distraught Lucille Ball had come to him loaded with woes and worries and “What shall we do?” (it begins to be her show already), and he had calmed her down by saying, “Well, sure, we’ll do I Love Lucy.” But no one ever calmed Lucille Ball or took the desperate look out of her eyes.

  She was born outside Jamestown, New York, in 1911, and by the age of fifteen she was in show business, where she soon acquired the chutzpah to try anything and everything. It was her impact as a Chesterfield cigarette girl (a figure in ads) that got her into the Goldwyn Follies in 1933, working with Eddie Cantor, and so she began her attack on the movies. She was pretty and talented and possessed by need—as if those things are enough without luck. She also had a look that could not hide her need, and the camera prefers people who seem as if they couldn’t care less—so her pal Carole Lombard soared; and later on Ronald Reagan went so far just by seeming relaxed.

  Lucille Ball had her moments in pictures, in Stage Door (1937); Dance, Girl, Dance (1940); and The Big Street (1942), where her acting is pained and disturbing. She was under contract to Goldwyn and RKO, and she was known to the public. She came close to getting a part in Orson Welles’s first big project at RKO, before it was Citizen Kane. But she knew she had never quite made it, and the frustration showed. She worked with Groucho Marx in 1938 (in Room Service), and he reckoned she was working too hard to be a comedienne when she was really an actress. “I’ve never found her to be funny on her own,” he said.

  Company arrived in 1941 in the form of Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III. He was Cuban and six years younger than Ball, the son of a rich Havana politician, the mayor of Santiago. But when Batista came to power in 1933, the family fled to Florida. Desi Arnaz drove cabs, worked in a bird store, and did anything he had to before he formed a Cuban band. He and Ball had other relationships when they met (Desi always had other relationships), but their sexual connection was strong, even if he thought she looked “like a two-dollar whore who had been beaten up by a pimp.” They clicked, and she began to call him “Dizzy.”

  Lucille Ball never stopped working, and by the later 1940s she had modest successes—Easy Living (1949), The Fuller Brush Girl (1950), Fancy Pants (1950)—but the increasing use of slapstick was breaking her down physically. She and Desi were forever on the point of separating. And she was closing in on forty, that uninsurable accident for every actress. But she had a radio show, on CBS, My Favorite Husband (Richard Denning was the man), which ran from 1948 to 1951. It was about a happy marriage (with comedy), apparently cemented by her frequent line “Jell-O everybody!” a ticlike nod to the show’s sponsor. The writers were Bob Carroll, Jr., Madelyn Pugh, and Jess Oppenheimer and they were vital advisers to Lucy and Desi.

  Oppenheimer had graduated from Stanford and become a joke writer in Hollywood. It was he who had changed the woman in My Favorite Husband from being a serene manager to a rattled kook and pratfall housewife—inspired by Lucille Ball herself. And it was he who picked up on a comment in Variety: if only radio audiences could see Ball’s antic face. So he proposed a show to CBS television in which Ball would be a face.

  Desi Arnaz was not first choice to play the husband, because no one had seen him act much, few were sure the couple would stay together, and CBS was dubious about the public display of a mixed marriage. So Arnaz and Ball did a trial double act in variety that got good notices, and Oppenheimer schemed out a “situation” that he called I Love Lucy with Lucy and Ricky Ricardo:

  He is a Latin-American bandleader and singer. She is his wife. They are happily married and very much in love. The only bone of contention between them is her desire to go into show business, and his equally strong desire to keep her out of it. To Lucy, who was brought up in the humdrum sphere of a moderate, well-to-do, middle western, mercantile family, show business is the most glamorous field in the world. But Ricky, who was raised in show business, sees none of its glamour, only its deficiencies, and yearns to be an ordinary citizen, keeping regular hours and living a normal life.

  It’s striking how the show turned on the ambivalent relationship between the screen and the audience. The movies might be fading, ready to be supplanted by a new domestic version of screened entertainment, but the equation between movie fame and our nonexistence demanded attention. Nothing would be more influential about television than the suspicion that reality was being “disappeared,” or conjured with. So I Love Lucy made celebrities out of people struggling to reconcile normality and show business glamour.

  Susan Sontag does not seem like an obvious Lucy fan, but she got it:

  The show was built on an entrancing pseudo-effect of the real: that the very ordinary couple portrayed was played by a real couple, one of whom was extremely famous, successful, and rich. Lucille Ball, a real star, became a goofy housewife named Lucy Ricardo, but nobody was fooled…That was the fun of it—the confusion and mixture of televised fantasy and voyeuristically apprehended reality. A dose of fantasy. And the insinuation that we might be watching something real.

  CBS television was intrigued by the Lucy project, but unconvinced. This is where Desi took charge. The couple had formed their own company, Desilu, in 1950, and they were resolved that if I Love Lucy went ahead, it would be theirs. At every step that followed, Arnaz pursued that gamble. Told that CBS required an audition pilot, as a sample, he agreed to make it and pay for it himself. The audition was shot on March 2, 1951, and the wretched kinescope (it cost $19,000) was Desilu property.

  The kinescope was shopped around to advertisers, and the tobacco company Philip Morris bought into it for a first season (thirty-nine shows at $19,500 each). So they were ready to go, but Desi hated the picture quality of the kinescopes and he was warned they would not last. He took advice and resolved to put the show on film. He was not the only pioneer in this, but no other show put on film reaped such rewards. The price for film was $24,500 an episode, so Desi and Lucille had to take a pay cut. But Arnaz went further: he worked out a way of shooting with three cameras—it was like a business school analysis of the factory system of moviemaking (more or less, all shots in interior scenes are from one of three angles). He decided to shoot in Los Angeles, not New York, to maintain the chance of a film career for Ball. And he said they’d do it in front of a studio audience. The public became part of the show. He is a founding father in so many things, not least in foreseeing our urge to be on or with television ourselves. The studio audience is now a crucial ingredient of many reality shows: American Idol, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, The X Factor.

  Desi took a last gamble: he told CBS, okay, we’ve caved to you on so many things, so let us own the shows. The network, including the idiotic Paley, agreed. (Of course, Paley was a “genius,” too, but a lucky one.) Desi said later he thought CBS agreed because it believed the filming could not work! Instead, Desilu had what became a hit show on film, not perishable kinescope, ready for the big pay-off that would be called syndication. We are still watching I Love Lucy sixty years later.

  The studio audience helped the comics judge whether and when something was funny; it built in the laugh pauses so hard to calculate without that “live” response; it made the show a theatrical event in Los Angeles, a kind of word-of-mouth; and it meant that the audience, the huddled masses, was part of the show.

  Because it was film, Desi knew he needed a good cameraman, and he chose Karl Freund, someone we have met before. He shot The Last Laugh (1924) for Murnau and
Metropolis (1927) for Fritz Lang, as a master of shadow and the cold, threatened light. But he was a professional, too, so after he came to Hollywood in 1929 he shot not just Dracula (1931) and Murders in the Rue Morgue, (1932), but also Garbo in Camille (1936), Luise Rainer in The Good Earth (1937), and Olivier and Greer Garson in Pride and Prejudice (1940). Still, the photographer of Metropolis was hired to give America the radiant midwestern domestic bliss of the Ricardo household. Freund shot 149 of the episodes.

  That was just one sign of the teamwork on the show. It was not simply the leads who were always there, with Vivian Vance and William Frawley in support. There were only ever three directors, and one of them, William Asher, did 101 episodes. Jess Oppenheimer produced 153 episodes, and he, Pugh, and Carroll did all the writing. They worked about three times harder and faster than the teams that had once made movies. The “situation” in what came to be called sit-com television, or family shows, began with the factory family, and that tradition persists to this day. Television, good and bad, is made by close teams working very long days, often on standing sets and in conditions where the family story they are working on—whether it is Tony Soprano’s family or the grouping in Friends—may mean more to them than their real families. Television played in domestic places, but its fictional families might be more attractive than your own.