Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (81 page)

Busiest McDonald’s in the world: Pushkin Square in Moscow.

A 2½-hour version was released theatrically in Japan.

• The Thorn Birds
(1983). Spanning 60 years, Richard Chamberlain played a priest torn between his vow of celibacy and his passionate love for a woman he raises from childhood.

• V
(1983). Alien spaceships loom over U.S. cities, planning to devour humanity in this sci-fi allegory of Nazism.

EPISODE FIVE: THE END IS NOT THE END

Two World War II miniseries adapted from Herman Wouk novels ended the heyday of the miniseries.
The Winds of War
was a 14-hour, $40 million project that took nearly a decade to film…and it only covered the first two years of World War II. It was a hit in the spring of 1983, so ABC approved a sequel.
War and Remembrance
(1988) was even bigger, costing a record $110 million, but its lackluster ratings told their own story: miniseries had become too expensive to produce; audiences were no longer captivated.

By the late 1980s, broadcast TV networks were fighting for audiences against hundreds of new cable channels as well as home video. Result: very few major minis were produced after the
War
years. CBS and NBC aired a few small, four-hour miniseries, but nothing approaching a
Roots
. ABC, however, wasn’t yet ready to let go of the high-profile mini. Filming budgets shrank considerably, but ABC continued to make miniseries thanks to a partnership with horror author Stephen King. He would be the creative force behind seven moderately successful ABC miniseries in the 1990s, including It,
The Tommyknockers
, and
The Stand
.

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.

*        *        *

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
.

T
HE 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.