Despite THE movie exhibitor of the thirties who once pleaded, “Don’t send me any more pictures that start where a guy is writing with a feather, ” American history has always been one of the themes of American movies. There are so many good plots and great characters in our past that one can easily conceive of an entertaining, if preposterous, history of the United States made up of clips from several hundred films: from Drums Along the Mohawk to Suiter’s Gold to Gone With the Wind; from Sergeant York to Little Caesar to The Grapes of Wrath to Pride of the Marines to All the President’s Men.
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January 2011
MOST OF THE world must know by now that Epcot is a place built in north-central Florida by the followers of Walt Disney to explain how science and technology fit into the human scheme of things. When the editors of AMERICAN HERITAGE invited me to take a look at it, I gratefully accepted for several reasons.
For one thing, as an American historian I have from time to time written pieces on the same subject matter with results that had begun to seem not only dully reiterative but increasingly problematical to me. I could use a new look.
THE IDEA OF HOLLYWOOD as a boomtown would not have surprised those who lived there as this century began, for they worked hard toward that very ideal. But they would have been astounded and dismayed had they foreseen the kind of boomtown it was destined to become.
JACK WARNER RAN HIS organization the same way Al Capone ran his: ruthlessly. The problem was that, unlike Capone, he couldn’t simply wipe out the competition. In 1930 Jack and his two older brothers, Sam and Harry, owned one-quarter of all the movie houses in the United States, plus the Warner Brothers studio and fifty-one subsidiary companies. But their theaters were now frighteningly empty. Millions were out of work, and the novelty of talking pictures, which had started with Warner’s Vitaphone process, had lost its drawing power. Warner’s profits came crashing down along with the stock market—$14 million in 1929, $7 million in 1930, and losses of $8 million anticipated for 1931.
Jack could not be consoled by the knowledge that other Hollywood studios were in trouble too. MGM was the exception, but MGM’s movies had opulent sets, high-key lighting, lush scores, large casts. The Warner assembly line was not equipped to turn out that sort of luxury product. Something else was called for, something fast—and cheap.
“COME ON OUT, DAD. SWANIE.” These homely words unlocked the gates of paradise, opened the road to fortune and easy living. They were from my West Coast agent, H. N. Swanson, and climaxed the telegram announcing the sale of my story Low Pressure to the 20th Century-Fox Film studio and giving the terms. It was a nice deal—a tidy sum for the story and a six-week writing contract, all traveling expenses paid, first class of course—the 20th Century Limited to Chicago, the Santa Fe Chief to L. A. The year was 1940; the trip started with the red carpet laid down at Grand Central for 20th Century travelers. It put one in the right mood for Hollywood.
Christmas hasn’t been all that merry on the screen in the past couple of decades. Santa was as likely as not to be Gene Hackman in costume to make a drug bust in The French Connection; the holiday itself became a horror in films like Black Christmas and Silent Night, Bloody Night; and there was even an extraterrestrial turkey called Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. So every holiday season, television late shows and repertory movie houses have to reach far back to find films suitable to the season. Of course there are the many versions of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, with Alastair Sim’s winning out by a wide margin. And there is the inevitable Miracle on 34th Street, in which Edmund Gwenn convinces Natalie Wood, a skeptical child, that there is a Santa.
The murder of John F. Kennedy twenty years ago last month occasioned an overwhelming sense of grief that may be without parallel in our history. When the news first was announced, people wept openly in the streets, and during the painful weekend that followed, as the mesmerizing images of the youthful President and his family were flashed again and again on the television screens, the feeling of deprivation deepened. A San Francisco columnist reported: “It is less than 72 hours since the shots rang out in Dallas, yet it seems a lifetime—a lifetime of weeping skies, wet eyes and streets. … Over the endless weekend, San Francisco looked like a city that was only slowly emerging from a terrible bombardment. Downtown, on what would normally have been a bustling Saturday, the people walked slowly, as in shock, their faces pale and drawn, their mood as somber as the dark clothes they wore under the gray skies.”
On December 3 Oberlin College (then known as the Oberlin Collegiate Institute) opened its doors to twenty-nine men and nineteen women, the first coeducational college in the world. Oberlin was also the first college to admit students regardless of race: it is estimated that, at the turn of the century, one-third of all black college graduates in the United States had been educated at Oberlin.
In Sydney, Australia, on December 26, Jack Johnson defeated the Canadian Tommy Burns for the heavyweight championship of the world before twenty-five thousand spectators. Burns had long avoided the fight, claiming as he did so that Johnson was “yellow” and had no chance. The thirty thousand dollars paid to Burns was the biggest purse in boxing history to that date; Johnson got five thousand dollars.
Johnson trained in Australia and puzzled sports fans by his methods. He did a great deal of road work and bag punching but little actual boxing. He also, to the wonder of all, outraced a kangaroo, caught and subdued a greased razorback pig, and ran a jack-rabbit, considered the last word in animal speed, to death. (The kangaroo had also died of exhaustion.) In spite of these triumphs over the animal kingdom, Burns was the favorite of the bettors.