The Master Switch
Page 39
18. The NBC ran a full-page ad in various publications; it is reprinted online at http://earlyradiohistory.us/1926nbc.htm, and in Sterling and Kittross, Stay Tuned, 118.
19. The commissioner of the FRC in 1931, Henry Lafount, considered the radio to be a “wonderful instrument of commerce.” See Robert W. McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928–1935 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 34. Generally, the history of these crucial years.
20. On Hoover’s broader role in this era, see Richard N. Smith, An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984). Zenith company history is quoted in Barnouw, A Tower in Babel, 180. The case is United States v. Zenith Radio Corporation, 12 F.2d 614 (D.C.Ill. 1926).
21. This idea is emphasized in Philip T. Rosen, The Modern Stentors: Radio Broadcasters and the Federal Government, 1920–1934 (Westport, CT; Greenwood Press, 1980). Rosen believes that Hoover and the broadcasters agreed on the need for more federal power, but that Congress refused to vest that power in the executive branch and instead created an independent agency.
22. The issues surrounding the Zenith decision and the subsequent formation of the FRC in 1927 are highly contested and subject to numerous interpretations. In contemporary accounts the Radio Act was promoted as a beneficent government response to industry “chaos”; the first to challenge this view, as a normative matter, was the economist Ronald Coase. R. H. Coase, Journal of Law and Economics vol. 2 (October 1959), 1–40. As a descriptive matter, the communications historian Robert McChesney’s groundbreaking 1993 book Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy was among the first to present a highly critical history of the 1927 act, General Order 40, and all that followed—presenting the act as essentially a triumph of large corporate broadcasters. The economist Thomas W. Hazlett, meanwhile, offered one of the first public-choice explanations for the creation of the FRC. Hazlett argued that broadcasters wanted to limit market entry and government wanted to maximize its control, and that it was the prospect of state court recognition of common law rights that spurred Congress to regulate and preempt an emerging property scheme that would have deprived regulators of control. See “The Rationality of U.S. Regulation of the Broadcast Spectrum,” Journal of Law & Economics 33 (April 1990), 133–75. Hazlett’s account has been challenged; see Charlotte Twight, “What Congressmen Knew and When They Knew It: Further Evidence on the Origins of U.S. Broadcasting Regulation,” Public Choice 95 (June 1998), 247–76. Ultimately, the question of what motivated Congress to pass any law is difficult to answer.
23. The distinction between general public service stations and propaganda stations is described in McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy, 27.
24. From the FRC Third Annual Report, as quoted in Steven J. Simmons, The Fairness Doctrine and the Media (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 32. See also Robert S. McMahon, Federal Regulation of the Radio and Television Broadcast Industry in the United States 1927–1959 (New York: Arno Press, 1979), 59–60.
25. More information about the General Orders can be found in McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy, 24–26.
26. Ibid., 29. For Lafount’s view, see ibid., 25, 34. See also Steve J. Wurtzler, Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 61.
27. See, generally, David Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda (London/New York: Routledge, 1993), 38–45. The quotes are from Joseph Goebbels, “Der Rundfunk als achte Großmacht,” Signale der neuen Zeit. 25 ausgewählte Reden von Dr. Joseph Goebbels (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1938), 197–207.
28. The Sarnoff mythology is best understood by reading the published collections of his writings, which lend him the air of a prophet. See Sarnoff, Looking Ahead. Sarnoff also helped make himself the first volume of the “Wisdom encylopedia,” See, The Wisdom of Sarnoff and the World of RCA (Beverly Hills, CA: Wisdom Society, 1967).
CHAPTER 6: THE PARAMOUNT IDEAL
1. Thomas Tally opened Tally’s Broadway Theatre in 1909; it was demolished in 1929. Tally also operated Tally’s New Broadway Theatre in Los Angeles. This quote about the theater organ comes from David L. Smith and Orpha Ochse, Murray M. Harris and Organ Building in Los Angeles (Richmond, VA: Organ Historical Society, 2005), 87. Tally participated in film’s trajectory from “peep show to palace,” as David Robinson puts it in From Peep Show to Palace: The Birth of American Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). “Thomas L. Tally, Film Pioneer, Dies. Producer First Signed Mary Pickford, Chaplin. A Founder of First National Pictures,” New York Times, November 25, 1945, Obituaries.
2. For more information about Paramount’s block booking scheme and Tally, see Tino Balio, United Artists: The Company Built by the Stars (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976). On the star system, see David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kirstin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). See also Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
3. Adolph Zukor, The Public Is Never Wrong: The Autobiography of Adolph Zukor (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1953). An entertaining biography of Zukor and figures in the early film industry is Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Crown Publishers, 1988). The salesman quote is in Thomas Schatz, Hollywood: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 2004), 81. The Canadian actress Mary Pickford was known as “America’s Sweetheart.” She wrote an autobiography, Sunshine and Shadow (New York: Doubleday, 1955).
4. “The pride and business sense of such men urged them to find means of repressing Zukor before he could acquire dictatorial power.” Richard D. MacCann, The First Tycoons (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1987), 162. See also Benjamin B. Hampton, A History of the Movies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), 176.
5. The portrait of William W. Hodkinson comes from his personal papers, held by the UCLA research library, which include his own journal, letters, transcripts of interviews, and unpublished essays. Also helpful is Bernard F. Dick, Engulfed: The Death of Paramount Pictures and the Birth of Corporate Hollywood (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001).
6. “Behind-the-scenes Intrigue at Paramount: Testimony of Al Lichtman,” New York Telegraph, April 25, 1923.
7. This description of Paramount under Hodkinson can be found in Balio, United Artists, 9.
8. As quoted in Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947), 93.
9. The auteur filmmaking model is contrasted with the central producer model, as described in Joseph Lampel, “The Genius Behind the System: The Emergence of the Central Producer System in the Hollywood Motion Picture Industry,” in Joseph Lampel, Jamal Shamsie, and Theresa K. Lant, eds., The Business of Culture: Strategic Perspectives on Entertainment and Media (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006), 41–56.
10. Jacobs, Rise of the American Film, 287.
11. One of Zukor’s agents was Benjamin Hampton, who later wrote about this time period. This account is based mostly on Hodkinson’s journal and letters, Bernard F. Dick’s Engulfed, and Benjamin Hampton, A History of the Movies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932).
12. From a transcript of a 1966 interview with Hodkinson, in his papers.
13. Hampton, History of the Movies, 154–61.
14. Dick, Engulfed, 11.
15. Hampton, History of the Movies, 153–54. This quote is from Cecil B. DeMille’s autobiography. Cecil B. DeMille and Donald Hayne, The Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1959), 152.
16. This number comes from Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Picture Feature, 1915–1928 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 73.
17.
Jacobs, Rise of the American Film, 166. Details of the agreements with Chaplin and Pickford come from Kozarski, An Evening’s Entertainment, 74–77.
18. Hampton, History of the Movies, 196.
19. To read more about Zukor’s bold stock offering, see Tino Balio, The American Film Industry, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 121. Hampton, History of the Movies, 255.
20. Olson’s main work on group and organizational behavior is in Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).
21. Hampton, History of the Movies, 253.
22. Ibid., 255. See also Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment, 75.
23. Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment, 75.
24. On Ford’s economics, see Bernard Doray, From Taylorism to Fordism: A Rational Madness (London: Free Association Books, 1988).
25. Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment, 75.
26. Hampton, History of the Movies, 267.
27. As quoted in Clyde L. King, Frank A. Tichenor, and Gordon S. Watkins, The Motion Picture in Its Economic and Social Aspects (Trenton, FL: Ayer Publishing, 1970), 133.
28. Federal Trade Commission v. Famous Players–Lasky Corporation et al., Complaint No. 835, in The Annual Report of the Federal Trade Commission: For the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1922 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1922).
29. Ibid., 131. See In the Matter of Famous Players–Lasky Corporation et al., 11 FTC 187 (1927).
30. The Frankenstein quote is from an unpublished 1935 essay found in Hodkinson’s papers entitled “After Block Booking—What?” The early use of block booking is described in Balio, American Film Industry, 117–18.
31. P. S. Harrison, “Give the Movie Exhibitor a Chance!” in Waller, ed., Moviegoing in America, 211–13.
32. Ibid., 212.
33. The two U.S. Supreme Court cases are U.S. v. Paramount Pictures, 334 U.S. 131 (1948), and U.S. v. Loew’s, 371 U.S. 38 (1962). These decisions are discussed in Balio, American Film Industry, 560–61.
34. U.S. v. Paramount Pictures, 157.
35. George J. Stigler, “United States v. Loew’s, Inc.: A Note on Block-Booking,” Supreme Court Review (1963), 152–57.
36. This example is drawn from ibid., 152–53.
37. This idea was developed in Benjamin Klein and Roy Kenney, “The Economics of Block Booking,” Journal of Law and Economics 26 (1983): 497–540.
38. U.S. v. Loew’s, 49.
39. Pauline Kael, “Why Are Movies So Bad? or, The Numbers,” New Yorker, June 23, 1980, 82–93.
40. Balaban himself wrote a history of the early Chicago movie palaces: David Balaban, The Chicago Movie Palaces of Balaban and Katz (Chicago: Arcadia Publishing, 2006) 103–6. Other sources on this period of film history are Lee Grieveson and Peter Kramer, The Silent Cinema Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), 273; Douglas Gomery, The Coming of Sound: A History (New York: Routledge, 2005), 11; and Balio, American Film Industry, 223.
41. 2.5 million was the number claimed; see Douglas Gomery, “Fashioning an Exhibition Empire, Promotion, Publicity, and the Rise of Publix Theatres,” in Gregory Albert Waller, ed., Moviegoing in America: A Sourcebook in the History of Film Exhibition (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002). The sale to Warner Bros. is described in Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, Classical Hollywood Cinema, 399.
42. This account of the film industry lobbying the FTC and the appointment of Myers comes from Louis Pizzitola, Hearst over Hollywood: Power, Passion, and Propaganda in the Movies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 248.
43. To read about the success of the Warner brothers and their studio in the words of their descendants, see Cass W. Sperling, Cork Millner, and Jack Warner, Jr., Hollywood Be Thy Name: The Warner Brothers Story, 2nd ed. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 84. For Tally’s fate, see “Thomas L. Tally, Film Pioneer, Dies.” New York Times, November 25, 1945, Obituaries. See also DeMille and Hayne, Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille, 152. “That character” is from Hodkinson’s papers.
PART II: BENEATH THE ALL-SEEING EYE
1. These “sustaining” programs and this interesting period in network history, particularly relating to NBC, can be read in Michele Hilmes and Michael Lowell Henry, NBC: America’s Network (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 17.
2. This observation would prove prescient as American communications culture would continue to be dominated by mass production for decades. The original may be read in Lawrence P. Lessing, Man of High Fidelity: Edwin Howard Armstrong, a Biography (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1956), 19–20.
CHAPTER 7: THE FOREIGN ATTACHMENT
1. Leo Beranek supplied a copy of Hush-A-Phone’s letterhead. The product was the subject of an article in Popular Mechanics, February 1941, 230.
2. Much of the Hush-A-Phone story is based on interviews with Leo Beranek and on his autobiography, Riding the Waves: A Life in Sound, Science, and Industry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 91. The hearing and appeal may be found respectively at “In the Matter of Hush-A-Phone Corp. et al., Decision,” 20 FCC 391 (1955), and Hush-A-Phone v. U.S., 238 F.2d 266 (D.C. Cir. 1956).
3. The early voice mail machine is described in Mark Clark, “Suppressing Innovation: Bell Laboratories and Magnetic Recording,” Technology and Culture vol. 34, no. 3 (1993): 516, 529.
4. Compare Richard Posner, “The Social Costs of Monopoly and Regulation,” Journal of Political Economy, vol. 83, no. 4 (1975).
5. As Clark writes, “the suppression was so effective that historians who have relied on the published record have rendered a highly incomplete picture of Bell Laboratories’ activities.” Clark, “Suppressing Innovation,” 517, 536.
6. Ibid., 534.
7. The descriptions of the Hush-A-Phone hearing with the FCC, and all direct quotes from the hearing, are from Telecommunication Reports, January 30, 1950. Additional material comes from Beranek, Riding the Waves, 91–92, and from an interview with Beranek.
8. Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 171. “If you want a Jew to do something,” wrote Black, paraphrasing Breen, “you don’t ask him politely—you just tell him.”
9. This AT&T quality control argument is drawn from the initial 1950 hearing with the FCC, reported in “In the Matter of Hush-A-Phone Corp. et al., Decision,” 20 FCC 415 (1955).
10. Nelson and Winter’s absorbing “evolutionary” theory—the book’s jacket flap calls it “the most sustained and serious attack on mainstream, neoclassical economics in more than forty years”—may be read in full in Richard R. Nelson and Sidney G. Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1985).
11. Fred W. Henck and Bernard Strassburg, A Slippery Slope: The Long Road to the Breakup of AT&T (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 38.
12. “In the Matter of Hush-A-Phone Corp. et al., Decision,” 20 FCC 419.
13. Hush-A-Phone, 238 F.2d 269.
14. Ibid.
CHAPTER 8: THE LEGION OF DECENCY
1. Daniel A. Lord, “George Bernard Shaw,” Catholic World April–September 1916, 36–37; for a (rather dry) account of his life, see Daniel A. Lord, Played by Ear: The Autobiography of Daniel A. Lord, S.J. (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1956).
2. Time magazine, September 13, 1926.
3. On Breen, see Thomas Patrick Doherty, Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 21. Excerpts from Breen’s letters concerning his views are in Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 70. This quote comes from a letter Breen wrote to Reverend Wilfrid Parsons. For more on Breen and Jews, see Doherty, 199–225.
4. Doherty, Hollywood’s Censor, 198.
5. Mark LaSalle, “Pre-Code Hollywood,” Green Cine, www.greencin
e.com/static/primers/precode.jsp.
6. Frank Walsh, Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 76.
7. For the entire pledge, and more on the Church’s efforts to control the content of films, see Thomas Patrick Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930–1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 321.
8. Doherty, Hollywood’s Censor, 203.
9. For a discussion of the federal government’s near-intervention into film censorship, as well as a discussion of the study done on the effects of film on children, see Doherty, Hollywood’s Censor, 59.
10. Leonard L. Jeff and Jerold L. Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 54–55.
11. Ibid., 38.
12. Doherty, Hollywood’s Censor, 352.
13. Mark LaSalle, “Pre-Code Hollywood,” Green Cine, www.greencine.com/static/primers/precode.jsp.
14. Holmes never actually used the phrase, but it derives from his dissenting opinion in Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919).
15. Quoted in Doherty, Hollywood’s Censor, 7, 75.
16. Ibid., 79.
17. Mark LaSalle, “Pre-Code Hollywood,” Green Cine, www.greencine.com/static/primers/precode.jsp.
CHAPTER 9: FM RADIO
1. Engineer Edwin Armstrong, the man behind the research and development of FM radio at Columbia University, was a fascinating, and ultimately tragic, character. As we will see in this chapter, Armstrong spent a great deal of time and money in the latter portion of his life defending FM radio against the FCC and the major broadcasting networks, particularly David Sarnoff’s RCA. One excellent biography of Armstrong that is referenced and utilized throughout this chapter is Lawrence P. Lessing, Man of High Fidelity: Edwin Howard Armstrong, a Biography (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1956). Another interesting source, covering more than Armstrong is Tom Lewis, Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio (New York: HarperCollins, 1991). Columbia University’s Electrical Engineering Department is another useful source: see Yannis Tsividis, “Edwin Armstrong: Pioneer of the Airwaves,” Columbia University, www.ee.columbia.edu/,isc-pages/armstrong_main.html?mode=interactive (accessed February 2010).