Made In America (50 page)

Huge amounts of effort and emotion go into deciding the order of billing for movie stars – whether the name goes above the title, whether it is larger than the title and by what percentage and so on. When Paul Newman and Steve McQueen starred in
The Towering Inferno,
the problem of which of these superstars was to enjoy top billing led to protracted negotiations between agents and producers. Eventually it was decided that Newman’s name would take the left-hand, pole position, but would be positioned fractionally lower than McQueen’s, a practice that has been followed and elaborated on to the point of tedium in movie posters and advertising materials ever since. In 1956, Otto Preminger appalled the Hollywood community by announcing
The Man With the Golden Arm
as ‘A Film by Otto Preminger’. No one had ever displayed such audacity before, and few have failed to engage in it since. Occasionally a director is so miffed with the handling of a film in post-production that he demands to have his name removed. The Directors Guild hit on the convention of crediting such disowned movies to the fabled and wholly fictional Allen Smithee, who is thus responsible for such classics as
Ghost Fever, Student Bodies, Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home, City in Fear,
a Whitney Huston video and some two dozen other efforts.
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The ultimate in screen credits, though, was almost certainly the 1929 production of
The Taming of the Shrew,
starring Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, which contained the memorable line: ‘By William Shakespeare, with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor.’
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Possibly the most choleric credit line appeared on the 1974 movie
The Taking of Pelham 123,
which concerned the hijacking of a New York subway train and finished with the closing line: ‘Made
without any help whatsoever from the New York Transport Authority.’

No discussion of the lexicon of Hollywood would be complete without at least a passing mention of the Oscars and how these golden statuettes got their name. Few terms in any creative field have engendered more varied explanations of an etymology. The most plausible story perhaps is that the figure was named by Margaret Herrick, a librarian at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who said upon seeing the prototype, ‘Oh, that reminds me of my Uncle Oscar’ (whose surname, for the record, was Pierce).
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But it must be said there are many other similar versions to choose from. What is certain is that the figure of a naked man with a long sword standing on a film can originated as a doodle by Cedric Gibbons, the MGM art director, and that the first one was awarded in 1929.

In 1949, after nearly half a century of continuous, seemingly unstoppable success, Hollywood’s executives got a shock when movie attendances slumped from 90 million to just 70 million in a single year. Matters would grow increasingly more fearful for them as the 1950s unfolded and Americans abandoned the movie theatres for the glowing comforts of their own televisions. In desperation the studios tried to make the most of whatever advantages they could muster. One was colour. Colour movies had been possible since as far back as 1917, when a Dr Herbert Kalmus invented a process he called
Technicolor.
The first Technicolor movie was
Toll of the Sea,
made by MGM in 1922. But the process was expensive and therefore little used. In 1947, only about a tenth of movies were in colour. By 1954 well over half were. Hollywood studios also responded by forbidding their stars to appear on the new medium, and by denying television networks access to their library of films, until it gradually dawned on them that old movies generated money when shown on television and didn’t when locked in vaults.

But what was needed was some new technique, some blockbuster development, that television couldn’t compete with. In September 1952 the world – or at least an audience at New York’s Broadway Theatre – was introduced to a startling new process called
Cinerama.
Employing a curved screen, stereophonic sound and three projectors, it provided watchers with the dizzying sensation of being on a Coney Island roller-coaster or whizzing perilously through the Grand Canyon. People loved it. But Cinerama had certain intractable shortcomings, notably distractingly wobbly lines where the three projected images joined, and an absence of theatres in which to show it. It cost $75,000 to convert a theatre to Cinerama, more than most could afford. There was also the problem that the process didn’t lend itself to narrative performances and the few Cinerama movies that were made, such as
This Is Cinerama, Cinerama Holiday,
and
Cinerama South Seas Adventure,
consisted mainly of a succession of thrills. In 1962, as a kind of last gasp effort to save the process (theatre owners who had invested heavily in the massive screens and projector systems naturally wanted to put them to use) two narrative films were made,
How the West Was Won
and
The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm,
but the problem of having to swivel your head to follow a conversation between characters separated by sixty feet of screen was one that audiences failed to warm to.

In the same year that Cinerama was born, the world was also given 3-D movies. The first was a film called
Bwana Devil,
apparently one of the worst movies ever made. The process involved slightly overlapping images which melded into a three-dimensional whole once the viewer donned special Polaroid glasses. Originally called
Natural Vision,
it enjoyed a huge if short-lived vogue – sixty-nine Natural Vision movies were made in 1953 alone – and people flocked in their millions to features like
The Creature from the Black Lagoon
and
The Charge at Feather River
for the dubious thrill of
having barge poles thrust at them and, in one particularly memorable scene, having a character appear to spit in their faces. So promising did the process seem at first that many quite respectable films, notably Hitchcock’s
Dial M for Murder,
were filmed in 3-D, though the fad was so short-lived that most, including
Dial M,
were released in the normal flat form.

Before long it was all but impossible to go to a movie that didn’t involve some impressive-sounding new technical process. One after another came
Vistarama, Superscope, Naturama,
even
AromaRama
and
Smell-O-Vision,
in which, as you might surmise, the theatre was pumped full of appropriate odours at regular intervals. The problem was that the odours tended to linger and mingle in a perplexing manner, and the members of the audience situated nearest the smell dispensers weren’t particularly gratified to find themselves periodically refreshed with a moist outpouring of assorted scents.

A year after Cinerama made its debut, Twentieth Century-Fox came up with a slightly more sophisticated, and certainly less gimmicky, process called
CinemaScope,
which required just a single camera with a special anamorphic lens. The first CinemaScope picture was
The Robe.
CinemaScope screens were roughly double the width of a normal movie screen and were slightly curved to give some illusion of depth.
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By 1955, just two years after its introduction, more than 20,000 cinemas throughout the world had installed the CinemaScope system.
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Hollywood would live to fight another day.

Hoplock’s amazing catch in the 1946 World Series

The abiding impression of life in Puritan New England is that it wasn’t a great deal of fun. ‘Sad-visaged people moving always with sober decorum through a dull routine of work unrelieved by play’ is the traditional view expressed by the historian John Allen Krout in 1929.
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In fact, it wasn’t quite like that. Though they could scarcely be described as libertines, the Puritans were not averse to pleasure. They smoked and drank, and enjoyed games and contests as much as anybody, particularly those involving physical challenges like foot-races and wrestling, or that honed necessary skills like archery. Increase Mather called recreation ‘a great duty’, and at Harvard College the students were not merely permitted but actively encouraged to take part in ‘lawful’ games.
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And lawful is the operative word. What the Puritans didn’t like were activities deemed to be an encouragement to idleness or ungodliness – and of these, it must be said, they found many. Among the amusements they forbade at one time or another were quoits, ninepins, bowls, stool-ball and even shuffle-board. Games involving dice and cards were entirely out of the question. Plays, entertainments, ‘dancing and frisking’ and ‘other crafty science’ were equally abhorrent to them. Maypoles were cut down and even Christmas was abjured. Smoking was acceptable only within certain well-prescribed bounds. Connecticut had a statute forbidding inhabitants from taking ‘tobacco publiquely in
the street, nor shall any take yt in the fyelds or woods’.
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On Sundays, no recreation of any sort was permitted. Even going for a stroll was forbidden. Indeed, sitting quietly could land you in trouble. One hapless couple found themselves hauled before magistrates for no graver offence than being found ‘sitting together on the Lord’s Day, under an apple tree’.
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Oddly, none of this was inherent in Calvinist doctrine. Calvin himself was known to enjoy a lively game of bowls on a Sunday afternoon. Nothing in their pre-American experience had suggested that the Pilgrims would institute such an aggressive crackdown on fun.

To understand why this happened in New England, it is necessary to re-examine two commonly held conceptions about the Puritans. The first is the belief that they had come to America to establish freedom of religion. In truth, freedom of worship was the last thing they wanted. Having suffered years of persecution on their native soil, they desired nothing from America so much as the opportunity to establish an equally intolerant system of their own. The second misconception is the belief that the colonization of New England was primarily pious in its impulse. In fact, throughout the early period Puritans were decidedly – indeed, uncomfortably – in the minority. The great bulk of early pilgrims were attracted to America not by religious zeal but by the hope of a better life. Between 1630 and 1640, of the 16,000 immigrants to Massachusetts, only one in four was a Puritan.
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Even on the
Mayflower,
the Saints had been outnumbered 61 to 41 by Strangers. Both of these considerations worked powerfully on the Puritan psyche. From the outset they became jealously possessive of their moral authority in the New World, and in consequence showed a decidedly neurotic preoccupation with activities that might be construed as a challenge to their pre-eminence.

But beyond this there was a practical side to their detestation of idleness. Building a community in a wilderness
was a terribly earnest undertaking, and one that did not admit of much leisure. Yet many of the non-Puritan settlers showed a vexing inclination to down tools and engage in play on any convenient pretext. Thus, when on Christmas Day, 1621 (almost precisely a year after their landing), Governor William Bradford found a group of impious Strangers ‘in the streete at play, openly; some pitching the barr and some at stoole-ball’, and huffily took their implements from them, he was offended not merely by their celebration of a holiday not recognized by his sect, but at the wanton and dangerous frittering away of time and energy that might have been directed to securing their survival.

Such concerns were far from unique to New England. In Virginia, too, outsiders were often appalled at how little the inhabitants attended to their well-being and security. Thomas Dale, arriving with supplies in 1611, found the residents on the brink of extinction but playing at bowls. Soon after, the Virginia Assembly enacted restrictive laws very similar to those of New England, making it illegal to gamble, to be found incapacitated by drink, to fail to observe the Sabbath, even to dress ‘in excess’. None of this was motivated by a desire to help them tread the narrow path to heaven, but rather by the need to bring order and discipline to a vulnerable community.

When a celebration was deemed in order, the Puritans were delighted to let their hair down. The first Thanksgiving feast went on for three full days and involved, in addition to copious eating and drinking, such diversions as stoneball, a game similar to croquet, and competitions of running, jumping, arm-wrestling, shooting and throwing.

No one knows quite when this first Thanksgiving took place, other than that it was sometime between the beginning of October and the first week of November 1621. Nor was it regarded as the start of an annual tradition. No Thanksgiving appears to have been held the following year, and the
Plymouth colony would not begin regular celebrations until almost the end of the century. For the rest of New England, Thanksgiving didn’t become an annual tradition until about the 1780s. For the nation as a whole, Thanksgiving wasn’t a fixed holiday until President Lincoln so decreed it in 1863. The date he chose was 6 August. The following year it was moved, arbitrarily, to the last Thursday in November, where it has remained ever since, apart from a brief period during the Depression years when it was brought forward seven days to give stores an extra week of potential Christmas shopping.
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