TV and Me: The PBS Oasis

 Television and I grew up together.  This is our story.  Latest in a series.

During the 1970s and especially the 80s and beyond, the vast wasteland of television increased in vastness and waste.  Jerry Springer springs to mind, along with Dynasty and Dallas, Inside Edition, shopping channels, Faux News, and various other forms of supermarket tabloid trash TV, paving the way for our current trash Internet anarchy.

 Television’s potential was being obliterated even from memory, but these dumbed-down shows with their psychotic grins exploiting violent versions of lowest denominator banality weren’t the whole story in those decades. There was, as principal example, PBS: the Public Broadcasting Service, officially founded in 1969.  Fighting off fierce political attack for much of the past 40 years or more, and not immune to the dumbing down and chicanery infecting television in general, nevertheless PBS remained a beacon of possibility.  For me as a viewer it was often an oasis in the Great Wasteland that provided me with the rescue of inspiring and expanding programs.

 As described in the previous post in this series, some of the shows that rescued me originated in other countries (principally the UK and Canada), and were presented to me via PBS stations.  Now this series on TV and me concludes with tributes to some deeply influential programs that PBS created or had a hand in creating.

Fred Rogers with Josie Carey WQED Pittsburgh early 1950s

 More generally, PBS was a persistent highlight of television.  The Pittsburgh public television station I first watched, WQED, was one of the first educational channels (eventually organized into NET or National Educational Television, one PBS precursor) and it was the very first to be community-sponsored in the country (which I guess meant corporations based in Pittsburgh as well as local viewers contributions.)  I was nearly 8 years old when it went on the air.  

Though our signal reception was iffy for the first years and most of the programming consisted of classes, I remember Josie Carey and her The Children’s Hour at 5 pm, just before Howdy Doody on WDTV.  Josie and Miss Francis on Ding Dong School were among my earliest teachers. (Not including Crusader Rabbit and Tom Terrific cartoons which I glimpsed mornings just before going to school.)  Backstage at Josie Carey’s show was puppeteer and organ accompanist Fred Rogers.  Her set would be modified for his show in the 1960s, and many of the same characters would appear.

 By the early 1970s, PBS news coverage would become trenchant and important.  PBS doggedly covered the various Watergate hearings, anchored by Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer, with analysis by Elizabeth Drew and the very young Cokie Roberts.  The daily MacNeil/Lehrer Report was essential.

 But I was mostly in awe of a number of their themed documentary series. I didn’t have regular access to television when the Kenneth Clark Civilization series ran in 1969, so my first experience with this form was  The Ascent of Man, which was first shown in the US in early 1975, before I left Greensburg for Washington.  These two series apparently were designed as counterparts: Clark examined the evolution of art, and Jacob Bronowski in Ascent followed the evolution of science, though each went beyond these borders.  Both were produced by the BBC and Time-Life, under the tutelage of David Attenborough.  This was the first of several series like it that I avidly absorbed.

 Bronowski’ 13 episode series set the template for these programs: they were personal views (which was Bronowski’s subtitle) and they depicted scenes around the world as illustrations and enactments.  Each host (or in British TV parlance, presenter) was also the chief author.  Their prejudices as well as insights were inevitably part of their narratives. Some viewers now would flag race and gender (and species) biases, and some of what was said on all these programs has since been superseded by later science and discovery.  But to me at the time, these programs were astonishing in their comprehensiveness.  In areas I knew anything about, they went far beyond textbook summations and embedded information in contexts, then linked both in narrative if not causal relation.  At times watching these I could almost literally feel my brain neurons firing—I was galvanized (which literally means to be stimulated by electric current.)  

 Bronowski’s subject was no less than the human story, with subsets such as one of his scholarly fields, the history and nature of science as an heroic human activity.  The moment that remains in memory is at the end of the 11^th episode, in which this otherwise genial, brilliant but conventional older man in a suit and tie is at the edge of a pond at Auschwitz, where ashes of crematorium victims—millions of mostly Jews-- were summarily deposited. 

 He points out that it is not science that turns people into numbers: the Nazis did it here.  “It was done by arrogance.  It was done by dogma.  It was done by ignorance.  When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no tests in reality, this is how they behave.”

 Then he suddenly steps into the pond, with water up to his ankles.  After noting that many members of his family died here, he continues: “We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power.  We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act.” And as he speaks his final sentence, he digs out a handful of mud and holds it up to the camera: “We have to touch people.”

 There are times when everything just stops, and the first time I saw this moment was one of those times.  It was so powerful that in my memory of it, he flings the mud at the camera (this scene is on YouTube, so I’ve seen this memory was erroneous.)  His words should echo in these times as well.

In 1979 another British series made it to PBS: Connections, created and hosted by James Burke (in his various leisure suits), explored interconnected events and technological innovations that led to major changes in societies. As host, Burke was as unconventional as his history, speaking plainly and with humor, without the scholarly gravitas of Clark and Bronowski, or any other documentary host to that point. 

 This series (and its followup, The Day the Universe Changed in 1986) asserted historical causalities that went beyond the generalizations and simplicities of the explanations we learned in school.  Crucial battles may not have been won just because of a brilliant leader, but because of a technological advantage, like the stirrup. Such was Burke’s influence that this kind of thinking has since become much more frequent.

 Burke made several more programs on the Connections theme but I believe their most important culmination came in perhaps his least known, three-part series, After the Warming in 1990.  In the guise of a citizen of the year 2050, Burke looks back at global efforts to address the climate crisis, and the changes resulting in the society of that time.  This early acceptance of the threats posed by global warming is still fascinating, especially in how it does--and mostly does not--match up with efforts so far.   Within this framework, Burke examines the determining role of climate and its changes in history and ordinary life, much as his Connections series did.  Lack of this perspective—of how important climate really is—remains a crucial and perhaps fatal ignorance.  This is essential information for our world, but unfortunately few people have ever seen these programs (though they are available free on YouTube.)   They are particularly interesting in light of what has and hasn’t happened since they were made.     

 The apex of this era came in 1980 with Cosmos.  In 1973 or so, I was managing editor of the arts at the Boston Phoenix, and interested in expanding our second section cover beyond the usual arts stories.  Celia Gilbert, our poetry editor, told me about a scientist friend of her scientist husband who was frustrated because the non-academic pieces he wrote weren’t getting published, and she asked if I would look at one of his manuscripts for the Phoenix.  I said I sure would.  But it never came. I therefore lost the chance to discover Carl Sagan.

 Carl Sagan’s first experience in the combination of science and show biz was at the age of four, when he was taken to the famous 1939 New York Worlds Fair, the World of Tomorrow.  As a scientist he believed in communicating to a general public the nuts and bolts of current science as well as the wonder scientific exploration engendered. 

 His early efforts culminated in the PBS series Cosmos, which he presented and co-authored with his wife Ann Druyan and Steven Soter.  This 13 part series was produced and directed by Adrian Malone (among others), who had produced The Ascent of Man, and again its subtitle was “A Personal Voyage.” Sagan used the irresistible vehicle of the ultimate starship to explore the cosmos, and human history in relationship to it.  It was the most popular of these programs, and one of the most watched PBS programs of all time.

 I remember it most for the vast timeline surrounding the present, not only of the universe but of humanity,  and its persistent, passionate emphasis on the fragility of human life and knowledge, eventually centered on the threat of nuclear self-destruction. In common with all these series, there was a lot of human history as context (the segment about the burning of the library at Alexandria was particularly potent.)  Again, it was enlarging: mind and soul-expanding.

 Probably just before Cosmos first aired, Jonathan Miller’s British-made series on medicine, The Body in Question, made it to America.  I may have seen some episodes then but remember it also from seeing at least some of it in later years.  Miller was always a stimulating and entertaining voice, and this series reflects his often contrarian view of events and their meaning.  I especially remember the program on the medical fad in France for “mesmerism” or hypnotism, one of many chapters in medical history the medical establishment would like to forgot.

 I did see every eye-opening episode of The Shock of the New, an 8-part series on the history of modern art by art critic Robert Hughes, seen in the US in 1981.  Hughes came from Australia, and at this time was based in New York as art critic for Time Magazine. He was not conventionally photogenic, yet his sun-lined face with its perpetual scowl demanded attention.  With his preposterous 70s hair humidified into strange shapes, and his eyes continuously moving across the camera from right to left and back again like a searchlight, he spoke plainly and yet eloquently.  His judgments were constant and definite.  He spoke from locations (beginning with the base of the Eiffel Tower), and the art of showing painting on TV had advanced so it was an experience in itself.  I learned a lot, including from his presentation on modern architecture, which proved immediately useful to me as I worked on my shopping mall book. 

 Probably the least remembered of these 1980 series was playwright Ronald Harwood’s history of western theatre called All The World’s A Stage. Its 13 episodes aired in the UK in 1984 and in the US probably a year later.  It, too, was a personal view, and was shot on appropriate locations. But its singular contribution was not only to tell what productions looked like in various times and places, but to show them—and not just in photos and diagrams, but with real sets and real actor speaking the words as they had more or less been spoken, sometimes presenting an entire scene or part of a scene.  Though I had a theatre history course in college, this series (which I taped) proved invaluable, especially when I began to write regularly about theatrical productions.  This series deserves more respect and renown than it apparently received. 

 By the mid-1980s, public television budgets had been reduced, due in large part to politically motivated cuts in funding by the federal government and some state governments, and the pinch was felt in productions. Something similar also happened in Thatcher’s UK. So the era of these ambitious multi-episode programs was largely over.

 While PBS still produced quality programs, they seldom were of this particular type: the elaborated vision of a single author.  These were television’s version of another vanished form: the long story presented by the New Yorker in full, in one issue or more often in several parts, written by John Hershey (Hiroshima) and Rachel Carson (Silent Spring), Frances Fitzgerald (Fire in The Lake) and Jonathan Schell (The Fate of the Earth), John McPhee and Janet Malcolm.  

I can remember one more such series just as the form was disappearing, eventually to be replaced by (for example) the Ken Burns histories.  It was called Millennium: Tribal Wisdom in the Modern World, funded largely by the natural cosmetics company The Body Shop, which gets lavish mention in the series, and once again produced by Adrian Malone.  

This series arrived in the US at the perfect moment: when Native American writers and activists were transforming the 500^th anniversary of Columbus into a classroom on Native history and the especially relevant traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples in a time of ecological crisis.

 It was created and narrated by David-Marbury-Lewis, an anthropologist who’d lived much of his life among Indigenous peoples in remote places. He also founded the organization Cultural Survival, which still exists. Ranging across Africa, Asia, Australia, South and North America, this series centered on vignettes of actual people in the present, which were created after producers took “care to ask them for the stories and incidents that they think are significant, and to elicit their commentaries on them.” 

 The vignettes tend to dramatize common human experiences but within contexts very different from the overdeveloped world. The themes of connectedness and ecological responsibility as crucial to physical and cultural survival have only become more critical since this series aired, and seemingly was forgotten. They are likely to become even more essential as the climate crisis begins to dominate.

 All of the aforementioned series seen on PBS also produced books based on them, and I got many of them.  Generally they expanded on ideas and information presented on TV, and became lasting references. I’ve read and consulted them many times over the years, so the influence of these programs on my life and my work have been considerable.   

Alastair Cooke, the long-time host of Masterpiece

Along the way I appreciated many of the ongoing PBS umbrella series.  Several brought over plays from the UK (playwright Tom Stoppard used to joke that these plays appeared there on such television programs as Play of the Month, but when they came to America they were Masterpiece Theatre and Great Performances.) There were American productions as well, providing me with most of the professional theatrical experiences I had, with much better than my usual rush seats in New York.  Great Performances was also one of the umbrella shows for dance and music of various kinds. 

These were also venues for dramatizations of classic (and not so classic) literature over several episodes, with the capability of more generously treating the characters, subplots and subtleties of a classic novel (a Dickens, an Austen) than a two hour movie would. The big hit in that era was the original Upstairs Downstairs.

  One of the first instances of this that I recall was the miniseries version of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.  This portrait of a woeful working class young man with aspirations to education and higher things who was diverted and ultimately destroyed by a tragic marriage, scared me to death in my early 20s. 

 Other PBS umbrella programs presented various biographies, histories, exposes, political analyses. PBS excelled in biography (often done by independent filmmakers) and explanatory journalism.  Their nature documentaries mostly suffered from the drawbacks of the genre: emphasis on conflict, action, pretty pictures, superficial narrative.  I learned less from these than other types of programs, though there were exceptions.

 Their explanatory programs on science could be breathtaking. In perhaps the early 80s or even the late 70s I vividly recall seeing a program (perhaps a Nova or a stand-alone) that went back and forth between new scientific discoveries in physics of the very large (black holes, etc.) and the very small (quarks, etc.)  The program described relativity and quantum physics, the four fundamental forces (gravity, the electromagnetic force and the strong force and the weak force within the atom) and the struggle to find the “grand unified theory” of how they all interrelate. 

 The climax of the program was the revelation of the one scientist who might yet put it all together. He was Stephen Hawking, then unknown to the general public (years before his bestselling book), or at least to me.  Most of what this program covered was new to me, and as I struggled to keep it all straight and deal with my increasing wonder, I was confronted with my first glimpse of a man twisted by disease (ALS) who might hold the answer.  This was before Hawking got his voice synthesizer, so I heard only the strange sounds he could make, comprehensible (the program said) only to a few.  It was an amazing moment.

 This program was a vivid introduction that allowed me to read further and more widely in related areas with some confidence, which eventually led to reviewing some new books covering some of these subjects for the general reader.  

These were just some of the ways that PBS was a meaningful part of my life.  This relationship continued beyond the 1980s and 90s, into the new century.  In my next post I isolate on one figure whose PBS shows were especially important to me over those decades: Bill Moyers.  This TV and Me series concludes next time. 

TV and Me: A Secret History of Cable TV

 Television and I grew up together.  This is our story.  Latest in a series.

In 1973 or so I went back from Cambridge to Greensburg to visit my parents and family.  My old bedroom had been converted to a den a few years before, and the huge console television set there was now on its last legs, with an uncertain purchase on color (the picture tended to be dark pink and white.)  But there was new element to it: it was hooked up to something called cable.

 Cable was so new there that there wasn’t much on—it kept repeating the same movie, Stormy Weather with Lena Horne, Bill Robinson, Cab Calloway and an all Black cast, including the fabulous dance team of the Nicholas Brothers. Evidently the cable was being tested with this apparently out-of-copyright film.  Lucky for me--I must have seen parts of it at least six times.

Cable came with a lot of publicity about its potential, but for Greensburg, cable had one major appeal: reception.  Television had always been prey to the vagaries of rooftop antennas and rabbit ears wrapped in tinfoil on top of the set, and their interactions with weather, geography, electrical disturbances and interference.  Some distant stations drifted in and out, but for us even the Pittsburgh stations weren’t entirely reliable, especially the educational (or now public) TV station WQED on channel 13.

 But the perils of broadcasting over the air disappeared when the signal reached the TV set directly through wires and cables.  A few additional stations were more of a bonus at that point.

 Later in the 70s, there were more channels on cable, though few of them were actually new.  For the major beneficiary of this technology turned out to be the small UHF stations.  The VHF (Very High Frequency)  signals were stronger.  They occupied the first 13 channel positions, though two adjacent channels were often considered too close to allow stations to broadcast successfully on both.  The rest of the channels (14 to 83) were for UHF (Ultra High Frequency) stations—that signal was innately weaker, so these stations had problems transmitting across the topography of hills and valleys, especially in a place like Pittsburgh that had plenty of both.   Nationally UHF stations struggled to survive.

 But then came cable, which presented the UHF stations with a level playing field—their signal was just as strong as the bigger VHF stations when it went directly through the cable. The UHF stations could now be seen—but could their programs compete?  They didn’t have much money for production, nor were many network affiliates.  What they had however was syndication. 

Usually a station could make money on a syndicated network series if it had at least five years of episodes.  But there was a show just coming onto the syndication market that had only three years of shows before being cancelled by NBC in 1969.  Some UHF channels took a chance on it, perhaps noticing that since 1972 enthusiastic crowds had been showing up for conventions honoring it, even when it was no longer on the air. 

That show of course was Star Trek.  By programming it every day (opposite the six p.m. news was a favorite time) syndication gave viewers an opportunity to immerse in the particular Star Trek universe, and see its characters every day, like friends or family.  It became an immense hit and a national phenomenon, often playing on multiple channels in the bigger cities (including some VHS channels), and definitely competing for audience share.  By 1976, Star Trek was being seen in 148 television markets in the U.S., and on 54 stations in other countries.

 Star Trek became a joyful sensation and an immediate part of the culture.  In 1975 I was the arts section editor of an alternative weekly newspaper in Washington, D.C. (and later its editor.)  The staff was mostly young and the office could get chaotic.  I was somehow seen as a voice of reason, and a calm presence—so my office nickname became Spock.  Once when two staff members were arguing heatedly in the center of the room I walked up behind them, applied the Vulcan neck pinch, and they both immediately fell to the ground.  That was the Star Trek effect in the 1970s.

 More than a half century after it first aired, Star Trek has several live action and animated TV series on the Paramount streaming network, several decades after three live action series ran for seven years and another for four years on cable TV in the 80s and 90s. The original Star Trek cast made six feature films beginning in 1979, and other casts have so far made seven more.  Star Trek had the intrinsic qualities that has supported its popularity and longevity, but this ongoing empire really began because of the technical coincidence that the original series went into syndication at pretty much the precise moment that UHF stations got onto cable TV systems. 

Cable’s potential was vast, partly because transmissions through the cable system weren’t restricted to the limited number of channels that could come over the air, using the available frequencies.  Cable could deliver an almost unlimited number of channels, eventually with an additional device that also freed you from being tethered to your set if you wanted to switch: it was called the remote. 

 But even if your main reason for hooking up to cable was to improve your reception, the primary change cable brought about was this: you had to pay to watch television.  Not just to buy the TV set, which until then was all you ever had to pay for to watch TV. (Well, the antenna cost a few bucks.)  But to get the programs, including everything you used to get free, you now had to pay a fee, every month, to the company that hooked you up. And it’s been like that ever since.

 It’s probably long been forgotten that, in addition to the promise of better reception for on-air stations, the argument used to lure users was that cable would provide lots of new channels unique to cable—and since you were paying a monthly free, the programs on those stations would be without commercials.  Advertising was only necessary to pay for programs when they were free.

 Commercials!  This far into this series on early television and this singular phenomenon of the TV commercial is only now appearing.  Yet the commercials are what television viewers are likely to recall (whether they want to or not), even more than the programs. 

 For me, growing up with television meant watching on Howdy Doody the simple drawings of Happy Tooth being threatened by Mr. Tooth Decay, before the application of Colgate Dental Crème (It cleans your breath—what a toothpaste—while it cleans your teeth!) or hearing the Halo jingle (Halo, everybody, halo! Halo is the shampoo that glorifies your hair) sung in its entirety by Frank Sinatra on the Jimmy Durante Show.

 My contemporaries may not recall Playhouse 90 but start the jingle You’ll wonder where the yellow went, and they’ll finish it: when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent.  Even Winky Dink or Soupy Sales may have faded from memory before the quartet in the bathtub singing Ajax, the foaming cleanser (baba baba ba ba bom) floats the dirt right down the drain!  Or Speedy Alka-Seltzer crooning Plop plop fizz fizz oh what a relief it is!

 The repetition of commercial phrases burns into the brain (You never outgrow your need for milk, Only you can prevent forest fires, that’s a speesy spicy meatball, where’s the beef?)  We saw live pitches by the stars of the show (Commander Corey of the Space Patrol leaving the Terra V in jeopardy to join Cadet Happy in extolling the merits of Nestles Crunch or cocoa) evolve into shorter special effects fantasies, and then even shorter ones.  There might a cascade of four, five or six frenetic, intense, boldly absurd and insistent messages in a row.  

 So by the 70s there were so many commercials bunched together in the breaks that it was more than possible to lose the thread of the show—or to lose interest in it.  From their 1950s beginnings, when they either presented serious arguments for why this product is better, or appealing little fantasies like Speedy Alka-Seltzer. But all too soon they became boldly false hyperactive scenarios championing the trivial--they set the template of disingenuous television lying that's been followed ever since, by infomercials, certain cable news channels and certain politicians.

The experience of being subjected to commercials became more than distraction—this loud, relentless grinning assault was demoralizing.  (Although there were—and are—aficionados who care more about commercials than what they sponsor.  Witness the immense attention to the TV ads on the Super Bowl, often eclipsing the ink on the game itself.)

Sure enough, once viewers were hooked, commercials began to creep onto cable shows, as indeed they began to appear on public broadcasting.  The template for what happened later on the Internet (with YouTube, for example) and streaming was set: create a market, establish market share with ad-free programs or sites, and quickly buy up the competition. Then when alternatives have faded and the customers are hooked into the habit, start up the ad machines. 

 Another promise of cable was that it could—no, that it would—bring very different kinds of programs into the American home.  There were so many potential cable channels that they didn’t all have to be used for common denominator programs—they could bring true variety and specialized programs that didn’t require a mass audience.  There could be a channel for classical music, and for plays, and for more in-depth documentaries and discussions of public issues than the networks could find time to broadcast.  There could be a channel for every sport, channels for hobbies and games—a chess channel!  A knitting  channel!

 Each new communications medium arrived with the same promise of bringing culture, information and education to the public. That included television itself, and to some extent, the networks tried. NBC had its own orchestra (though a holdover from radio days), and there was more opera, classical music and dance on early TV than there was by the 1970s, especially outside PBS.  Even in the 60s and 70s, talk shows routinely had prominent writers and a few artists and scientists as guests. 

 In the beginning, cable seemed like it might even succeed where network TV had failed.  One of the first production companies for cable, an outfit called Home Box Office, showed at least its New York audience a series of complex lectures on a Jungian approach to myth by Joseph Campbell. Needless to say, HBO moved on from there. (A decade later Bill Moyers would provide better context and production values to his PBS version of The Powers of Myth with Joseph Campbell.)  

 Cable saw innovations that changed culture, such as Ted Turner’s news channels and MTV. But instead of expanding choice to include arts and intelligence, these subjects were blithely labeled as elitist, and television expanded on its previous path.  

An early national cable channel called itself Arts and Entertainment, and for awhile the arts actually were represented.  When A&E faltered, a new channel called Bravo! took up the slack to focus on performances.  The Discovery channel was to focus on science, the History Channel on history, the American Movie Channel showed old movies, and so on.

 By now they have all largely succumbed to the same lowest common denominator competition as the broadcast networks, especially the latest form of crass "reality"shows.  A&E and Bravo became mere corporate names without identity, Discovery began to specialize in sharks and the pseudo-science equivalents of conspiracy theories, and the History Channel became better known as the Hitler Channel.  Eventually most became either amorphous holdings of larger conglomerates, or the sponsoring conglomerate itself.

 Some specialized channels and programs did result, especially in areas of sports and recreation.  The great dream of competitive skydiving and skateboarding on TV was realized.  But even this was mostly more of the same.  Thus the Bruce Springsteen song: 57 Channels (and Nothin’ On.)  (He has since increased the number of channels in performance.) 

Yet another potential of cable hyped at the beginning was the possibility of two-way communication on television through the cable.  In the late 70s, the corporate entity then known as Warner Communications wired the city of Columbus, Ohio with a two-way system they called Qube.   I researched and wrote an article about this experiment, which involved spending a week or so in Columbus observing the system and how it was used.  I also reviewed another two-way system and delved into the history and politics of cable up to that point.

 The Columbus experiment centered on the Qube console, precursor to the remote, though more the size of a Star Trek tricorder.  Its buttons were color-coded: blue for regular broadcast television channels, red for premium channels (concerts, movies and the world’s first but not last 24 hour channel of softcore porn),  and green for so-called Community programming, all produced by Warner just for this experiment.  But the innovative attractions were the five buttons on the far right: the response buttons, used for the green channels.

 When a response is requested by somebody on the screen for a yes/no question or something more like multiple choice, with the magic words “Touch now!”  the viewer makes a selection and within six seconds that response is received, then tabulated with others and the results instantly appeared. 

 The questions could be from town planners asking if there is enough small-unit housing (Strongly agree/ Agree/ Neutral/ Disagree/Strongly disagree) or a publishing survey asking which face you’d like to see on the cover of Us Magazine, with five choices.

 But mostly they were the kind of questions I witnessed during the afternoon teen show, in which five female high school students at a local swimming pool peeled back a bit of their swimsuits, and the host asked viewers at home to vote on who had the best tan line.  As well as what kind of bathing suit female viewers wore (the result: one piece 54%, two piece 46%.)  I also watched the Columbus equivalent of the Gong Show, with viewers at home anonymously—and liberally-- wielding the gong.

 And a talk show with an insurance agent as guest, who viewers could contact through their Qube box.  But unlike guests on normal TV talk shows who were paid a fee or appeared for free, it turned out that unbeknownst to viewers the insurance man was paying to be on the show.  He was his own secret commercial. This stealth precursor to the “infomercial” turned out to be a routine Qube practice. When I mentioned the paying “guest” to a viewing couple they weren’t really surprised.  A lot of products were being named. When I questioned Qube officials about this subterfuge, they were puzzled that anybody might object, but suggested corporate might reconsider the practice.

 Qube did construct an Electronic Town Meeting for one municipality in the Columbus area, but it was more sterile gloss than substance, heavily controlled by the regular evening talk show duo, whose questions to viewers normally were on the level of naming the studio cat.

 Meanwhile, another experiment was ongoing in Reading and Berks County, Pennsylvania in a different kind of participatory television, organized by the Alternative Media Center at New York University. It started by linking senior centers and grew to encompass the entire system.  Programs were generated by the users themselves.  I read the NYU report and spoke with Eileen Connell, who worked with participants, training them on how to use the equipment and listening to what they wanted the system to do, which determined how the system was designed.

  It was a long and apparently fascinating process, and eventually yielded surprising results. For example, a  participant in one program mentioned labor troubles in Reading fifty years before, and it struck a chord—seemingly for the first time, many people shared their recollections, and teachers and younger people got in touch, because this was local history that had never been written down.  Contrast this with Qube’s attempt at a pre-fab nostalgia program about Columbus, which became one of its first programs to be cancelled. 

The Qube system demanded what has come to be regarded as professional television, and though it decried the mediocrity of broadcast TV, it replicated it. The Reading system set out to prove that effective use of television—and specifically interactive TV--didn’t have to be all that professional.

 I watched a tape of one such program, a community meeting from Reading: there was sweat, fits of temper, tears, boring monologues, fierce debates, ambushes of humor, and large dollops of something rare on polished TV: sincerity.  The program wasn’t about a process—it was the process.   

 “It’s a very down-home system,” Connell told me. “It’s not snappy but it’s remarkably effective.  It had an extraordinary effect on how people saw themselves.”  The Reading system did silly entertainment programs and programs with a very local character (“Tell It To Eben and Herb”) but their interactive programs were serious, yet no more technically sophisticated than someone asking a question on a split screen with someone answering it: “The noun and the verb of the system,” Connell called it. 

 That was the key, and the major problem with the Qube response system and all subsequent iterations everywhere: “People in the Qube system can answer what’s asked of them, but they aren’t in control of the questions,” Eileen Connell observed. “It’s even more important who asks the questions than who answers.”

  When I visited Qube in Columbus, the executives there expressed the desire for “a bigger universe,” a bigger city or cities in which to demonstrate Qube’s capabilities.  One such city about to make a decision on a cable system was Pittsburgh, and Warner wanted it. 

But Pittsburgh had a number of suitors, and there was a process. This is another feature of cable that has slipped into history: local control.  From the beginning, each municipality had to decide on one cable company to provide service.  There couldn’t be competing cable providers in the same area, the argument went, because having more than one was technically difficult, expensive and confusing, as supposedly discovered in the days of competing telephone systems, each with its own wires. 

 In the early days of cable, I learned in my research, the awarding of cable contracts was sometimes, perhaps often, accomplished by the tried and true system of bribery and graft.  There were so-called “whiskey franchises,” in which officials got a case of Canadian Club in exchange for the sole right to wire their municipality.  Others were reputedly more expensive—like a cool million.  Some local officials went to jail for graft, others learned to have themselves hired as “consultants” for hefty fees.  

 Local professional reporters told me that as far as they could determine, the Pittsburgh process was clean. Pittsburgh had a cable ordinance and a committee to evaluate suitors.  I spoke to the chair of that committee who was suspicious of Qube, its expense and its insistence on control.  “But this is Pittsburgh—our neighborhoods, our hills, our winters,” he said. “We know our city better than any company does.  I think we know what we need.”

 A sticking point was the public access channels.  Cable systems were required to have them, since they were considered “common carriers” under the law, owned by everyone. (That same NYU Alternative Media Center was largely behind the adoption of this practice.)  But Qube didn’t want to cede control of any of its channels.

That negotiation went on past the time I finished my story and I’m not sure how it turned out. But in a way it didn't matter--soon the Supreme Court decided that cable systems weren’t common carriers after all--they were corporate persons who could do what they liked.  Congress hurriedly passed a new telecommunications law which said that municipalities “may” require public access channels, with public control of them.  

 In the years since, increasingly large cable companies have managed to convince some municipalities that pubic access isn’t necessary.  Where they exist, these channels aren’t often lively or creative, and certainly not interactive.  They cablecast city council meetings and other official events open to the public, which public officials tend to like, partly for the same reason that the only truly public television nationally are C-Span channels that mostly give air time to Senators and Representatives: politicians love to be on TV. 

 While there used to be debates in some municipalities before franchises were awarded and even when they were up for renewal in 10 or 12 years (when companies can be held accountable for not living up to their promises), I haven’t noticed any public discussion of renewal requirements for years.   Renewals seem depressingly automatic. 

Though Warner succeeded in wiring larger cities with the Qube promise in subsequent years—including Pittsburgh—Qube itself never quite caught on.  There were privacy concerns (people were quaintly resistant to their two-way responses being stored in the Qubemasters’ computer) and continuing high costs.  Its system of two-way television faded away.

 Meanwhile, the Alternative Media Center’s Reading experiment yielded what is now called Berks Community Television, thriving in the 21^st century.

  Aspects of Qube did influence cable television. It refined how pay-per-view might work, and it developed programs—especially the shows for children-- that later cable channels adapted. It also presaged commerce-driven shopping channels and program-length commercials styled as talk shows.  But in several ways it was more of a dress rehearsal for the Internet. 

For example, shopping from home.  A few years after my visit to Columbus I was in Las Vegas covering an International Council of Shopping Centers convention, where I attended a session on electronic shopping.  Qube was mentioned but the presentation focused on an experimental system in France that used a device hooked up to the telephone system.

 These retailers knew that electronic shopping was coming, they just didn’t know when or how.  A few years later there were home computers, and over the next decade or so the question was answered.  By showing how home shopping might work, Qube was a kind of proof of concept for Internet commerce.

 The public access interactive part of the Reading experiment didn’t influence subsequent cable television much, but it did produce one dry run for Internet systems like Zoom. That Berks experiment modeled the possibility of local, small scale, face-to-face participation, if not participatory democracy, which may have mitigated the vicious incivility that became the norm in anonymous and faceless Facebook and other online venues. 

 In any case, cable television’s potential to be much more than centralized, corporate television has largely failed.  Its fading legacy in this regard seems bequeathed to the corporate giants battling for streaming market share. The small screen (which is not so small anymore) is one big Marvel movie.    

By the 1980s, cable assumed the shape it maintained for decades. The local cable system—more and more part of a conglomerate—offered packages of local broadcast channels (UHF and VHF) and a few from afar, the growing number of cable channels, and the premium channels like HBO that ran recent movies and the occasional big name pop concert.  There might be a public access channel, often with little programming on it.  There were a few cable news channels—mostly just CNN Headline News at first (Lynn Russell was mesmerizing) and a couple of channels that told you what was on the other channels.

   The premium channels became known for softcore porn and for surprising Hollywood by making some of its theatrical rejects into hits. I discovered a few myself (for example, the lovely Jane Seymour/ Christopher Reeve Somewhere In Time, and the paradigm of this category, Eddie and the Cruisers), and was glad for the opportunity.  However, my most enduring cable memory of this early period is falling asleep one night to a movie I’d turned on halfway through, until I was awakened by a familiar voice: it was an old friend and actor from college, Ric Newman. By the time the voice registered, he was gone from the screen.  I had to stay awake for the credits to make sure I hadn’t been hallucinating. (I hadn’t.)  

 I had cable when I moved to Pittsburgh, and it enabled me to watch Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls games on a Chicago channel.  I watched C-Span, especially the heroic Brian Lamb and Book TV.  I think it was a public access channel that showed a lengthy and enlightening discussion on adult children of alcoholics by a couple of those adult children.   I didn’t have premium channels but didn’t miss them. 

 In our corner of California, corporate cable became more and more expensive and oppressive, and like many others, I cut the cable.  So I didn’t see the run of “viral” HBO series around 2007, though I wasn’t really interested.  I saw a few episodes of AMC’s Mad Men, and that was enough—I could see it was going to be an endless soap opera.  I even passed on The Sopranos—it seemed an extension of The Godfather, and by then I was angrily tired of seeing Italians portrayed only as Mafia gangsters.  Mostly what I missed were new Doctor Who episodes, by then on BBC America.

  Eventually the cable company got its vengeance, as Internet providers folded or were bought up, and there were only two left: our old friends The Phone Company ( AT&T) and The Cable Company (itself bought up and its name changed twice.) 

 Then once the cable company—eventually called Suddenlink for awhile, now Optimum—dominated Internet market share as well as the waning cable monopoly, it boosted prices into the stratosphere, and its customer service is nonexistent.  No one can get them on the phone (not that this is too unusual in dealing with today’s corporate barons.) It deals with customers with sarcastic arrogance.

  For most viewers, cable is the source for streaming, which at the moment is undergoing a shakeout that has the potential of reducing its offerings dramatically.  Monopoly cable could well be the future. 

 Despite all this, television in the 70s and beyond helped me through some dubious times, which is the subject of the next and last episodes. 

TV and Me: Home Movies

 Television and I grew up together.  This is our story.  Latest in a series.

In the early to mid 1970s I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at first freelance writing, then as the book review editor and finally managing editor of the arts section (half the weekly paper) for the Boston Phoenix, before I returned to freelancing, this time for national magazines.  For much of that time I was writing about new books, new records and concerts, new movies, new plays and only occasionally about television. (Although Mort Sahl read aloud from my piece on the Dick Cavett show, on the Dick Cavett show.)  So I wasn’t watching much.

 Most of my TV viewing in those years was late at night on a black and white set with a broken channel changer, and apart from news, PBS and Cavett I mainly watched movies.  There was a long tradition of movies on television, especially in the late hours.

 Movies were the easiest programs for television to broadcast when it began, but Hollywood resisted feeding this threatening upstart.  Movies appeared anyway in the early 1950s, mostly made in the 30s from hand-to-mouth studios like Republic and Monogram, plus British imports.  By 1955 or so, the major studios—now getting into television production themselves—released movies made as late as 1948.  Eventually there might be only a few years between theatrical release and a TV spot.

 As mentioned earlier in this series, movie cartoons, comedy shorts (included silent ones), faded western movies and serials like Flash Gordon were staples of Saturday morning TV for kids even in the early 50s. But in some ways, movies weren’t ideal. TV screens were small, picture resolution wasn’t good and reception was often iffy—this is one reason that most early TV shows were brightly lit and shot in medium and close-up.

 These viewing problems also prompted the TV editors of movies to discard darker scenes and wide shots first, as they looked for footage to snip and replace with commercials. But they weren’t consistent—I recall the Saturday morning boredom of trying to watch galloping cowboys chasing each other in the dark.  Murky viewing wasn’t caused only by television deficiencies—scratchy prints, inept editing and poor projection weren’t uncommon.

 Things had improved somewhat by the mid to late 1950s, when more than a thousand movies were available to appear at all times of the day and night, mostly presented by local stations but also from networks. One survey suggested that in 1955 alone, a quarter of television programming was comprised of old movies.

Carole Lombard in "To Be or Not To Be" (1942)
released to TV in 1955

 So I saw many old movies for the first time on television, including many I’ve never seen in any other way.  That I saw any movies at all before the age of 7 or so is due entirely to television. I couldn’t necessarily follow a complicated plot or dialogue at an early age, but I generally found something to like.

 Until I was 10 or so, I only saw a few movies on the big screen: Disney films at the theatre near my grandparents in Youngwood, and my father took me to see a few at the Manos or the Strand in Greensburg (I recall a Martin and Lewis comedy, and Killers From Space), before my classmates and I were bussed to Pittsburgh to see the latest Biblical epic (The Ten Commandments, etc.) at the big Cinerama theatre.  Eventually I walked every week with neighbor friends to Saturday matinees at the Manos, a faded movie palace just on the near side of Main Street in Greensburg.

 But thanks to television I could see dozens of old movies from the time I was 4, as long as they were broadcast before my bedtime. When they were made didn’t enter into my consciousness—for a kid, everything is either now, soon or in the indiscriminate past—but once again, I had an accidental, sideways education in movie history at an early age, partly because of the studio ban on newer films.

 The movies shown on television included major features with star actors, but most of them—especially at first—were serials (or compilations of serial episodes) and what were known as B movies.

 To tempt people back to theatres as the Depression seemed to ease in 1934, some exhibitors began showing two movies for the price of one.  In late 1935 the two largest theatre chains announced this would be the policy in all their venues across America.  The double feature was born, a movie institution that lasted for more than 30 years.  At first, however, the bonus movie was slightly different: almost always shorter, and shot on a smaller budget with lesser stars (some on the way up, and some on the way out.)  To contrast them with the big budget, big-star “A” films, they were known in the industry as “B” movies, to be shown before the main feature. 

"Bulldog Drummond's Bride" 1939

The B movies were among the first to populate television.  They were cheaper to acquire, and being shorter, they accommodated commercials more easily. Most were genre films—westerns (predominantly) and crime stories, plus war movies, romantic comedies, melodramas and musicals.  The often-strange Bulldog Drummond crime series was an early entry, and the Charlie Chan series. Perhaps even the Torchy Blaine movies (a 1930s woman reporter who became the prototype for Lois Lane.)  On a somewhat higher level, the Sherlock Holmes series with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce made its first appearances in 1954.  I remember seeing Rathbone as my first Holmes. 

 Drummond and other B movies had noticeably quick rhythms, and that must have appealed to me.  (As Superman in the series, George Reeves made the quick movements of serial and B movie heroes, though in those films they were probably augmented by speeding up the camera to enhance the effect—and shorten the movie’s length.)  I adopted quick movement in my play after TV, and I loved running.  There was lots of running in B movies.

 At Dumont, the network that at first scheduled the most movies, both B movies and a few A features were often grouped by genres under banners like Frontier Theatre (westerns) and Adventure Theatre (Tarzan, etc.)  Since the only Pittsburgh station in the early 1950s was Dumont’s cash cow, I could see a lot of these movies. While my attention to the westerns wavered, the Tarzan movies, with action in the relatively contained jungle, were fascinating. There seemed to be a lot of World War II movies on TV, though Hollywood was still making them for theatres in the 50s, along with Korean war films, which we sometimes saw at Saturday matinees later in my childhood. 

 I’m naming some movies and actors I recall for two reasons: they comprise part of my cultural life history, and they became part of the cultural literacy of my generation-- in both cases mostly because of television.

  I saw some film stars of the 1940s on television programs, and perhaps recognized others (like James Cagney, Peter Lorre, Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson) from their cartoon parodies or variety show impressionists before I saw their movies. But eventually I would see many of those movies on television, if nowhere else.  I probably caught glimpses of their gangster films as a child. 

There are others however I knew directly from their movies, like Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant (at least one of the films they did together, Bringing Up Baby, was televised in the mid-50s, and I seem to recall seeing Cary Grant in Arsenic and Old Lace.)

 I knew Jimmy Stewart from Harvey and It’s A Wonderful Life, which television made into a Christmas movie.  I knew Spencer Tracy, perhaps from one of his films with Hepburn but more likely from his role as Father Flanagan in Boys Town, a portrayal extolled by the Sisters at school.  And I certainly got an indelible impression of Henry Fonda when I saw The Grapes of Wrath on TV, an unforgettable movie.

Glenn Miller (top left), sax/vocals Tex Beneke
(bottom right) with singer Marion Hutton and
the Modernaires

  I recognized Fred Astaire, so I must have caught a dance or two from the Astaire and Rogers RKO films or his other musicals that were broadcast.  I was likely to have watched parts of the movies featuring Glenn Miller (Orchestra Wives or Sun Valley Serenade) if I happened on one, since I knew my mother had a particular fondness for Glenn Miller’s music, which I knew from records.  I’d seen Shirley Temple movies at an early age, but as with all these films, my attention was inconsistent, especially when I couldn’t follow the story.  By third and fourth grade my attention span improved, along with the ability to follow a more talky plot.

 Among the many movies I likely saw on TV, there were classic films of American and English directors I wouldn’t recognize the names of until later.  Until I left for college, this was virtually the only way I could see them. 

"Mrs Miniver"

I saw my first Hitchcock films on TV.  An early entry to TV was the 1940 Hollywood production of Foreign Correspondent. I seem to recall one of his early British films, The Lady Vanishes, as well as other British films of the 30s and World War II era. I saw British actors in American films or coproductions--I distinctly recall seeing Mrs. Miniver on TV, starring Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon (who I recognized in Forbidden Planet on the silver screen.)  Perhaps I even saw Greer Garson play Elizabeth Bennet against Lawrence Olivier’s Darcy in the 1940 production of Pride and Prejudice. 

 I certainly saw Oliver on TV in Wuthering Heights and Hitchcock’s Rebecca, probably in high school.  And though it wasn’t until college, I saw Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and other 50s and 60s British films for the first time on television, when I knew to look for them. 

Sims in "A Christmas Carol"

At Christmastime as a child I remember seeing the Alistair Sims version of A Christmas Carol.  I remember my excitement at seeing an old Laurel and Hardy holiday movie in which human sized wooden soldiers come to life (Babes in Toyland, 1934.)

 
Apart from the genre groupings, the more important pictures (or at least the A features) with the biggest stars were seen on prime time or weekend afternoons under marquees like The Million Dollar Movie. I also recall the Sunday afternoon movie on KDKA, introduced by legendary Pittsburgh Post-Gazette movie and entertainment columnist, Harold V. Cohen, who also provided background during commercial breaks.  (Later that function fell to probably Pittsburgh’s most famous radio voice of that era, Rege Cordic.) I don’t recall the movies or what Mr. Cohen said, but I did get the idea that movies could be taken seriously, and that real people made them. 

 So it’s entirely possible that I saw a Charlie Chaplin feature there (Cohen was a Chaplin buff), or even Orson Welles films like The Magnificent Ambersons.  (However, it was at the Orson Welles theatre that I saw Citizen Kane, and remember that as the first time.  Or the first several times.) 

So there were plenty for me to see, though the bulk of movies were shown late at night.  For years, they were just about the only programming past the eleven p.m. news.  They often went by the title—or were referred to colloquially as—the Late Show.  And then the Late Late Show.  At one point back in the Dumont days our Pittsburgh station showed movies all night on Swing Shift Theatre.

 In 1963 the third Pittsburgh station (Channel 11, NBC) premiered the local Chiller Theatre with “Chilly Billy” Cardille (the prototype for SCTV’s parody Monster Chiller Horror Theatre by Joe Flaherty, a Pittsburgh native), but shows featuring horror movies had been around for awhile by then. Though I first saw the Frankenstein and Dracula movies on TV, I wasn’t as fascinated with horror movies as many of my schoolmates (they were especially fashionable in 1957-58, or my sixth grade.)

 

But I loved science fiction.  Since I’ve now seen most of the 1950s s/f classics on the big screen, I’m not entirely sure which ones I first saw on television, or at a Saturday matinee, or at the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge (I wrote about their first sci-fi festivals in the Boston Phoenix under the title “It Came From the Orson Welles.” My friends at the Welles turned the phrase into a t-shirt. This became an annual festival that outlived the Welles itself.)

 I’m guessing The Day The Earth Stood Still is one I did see on TV first.  But I’m sure about several classics made in the UK, especially since I’ve seen them only on small screens: The Day The Earth Caught Fire and Five Million Years to Earth remain two of the best of that era. 

 I also saw the original King Kong and Mighty Joe Young first on TV, enough times to notice, when I saw King Kong on the silver screen, that the first part of it (the preparation for the journey) was routinely cut on TV to fit the time slot and make room for more commercials.

 I saw Olivier’s Richard III on TV, but when I saw it again at a screening at the Westmoreland County Museum of Art, I was dazzled by the prologue that I didn’t remember. Possibly it, too, was cut, so on TV the movie began with Olivier’s “Now is the winter of our discontent…” speech. 

 Such cutting was a major flaw.  Apart from commercials disturbing the mood and narrative drive, missing or truncated scenes hurt the film and at times rendered it incomprehensible.  Seeing these old films whole could be a revelation.   

By the early 1960s, Hollywood studios loosened up on showing their 1950s movies, and their big hits from previous years. By this time some movies were being broadcast in color. The first showings of The Wizard of Oz (beginning in 1956) were big deals. However, most people still had black and white sets so the switch from sepia to Technicolor within that film didn’t have quite the same impact until most homes got color sets beginning in the mid 1960s.

 The networks responded to this new availability of more recent movies—especially color films-- with prime time movie slots: NBC had Saturday Night at the Movies, then adding the Monday Night Movie in 1963. By 1966 there was the ABC Wednesday Night Movie and the CBS Friday Night Movie, and so on.

 Movies became so popular that networks began to make their own, the so-called “made for television” movies, which constituted a genre of their own. With some conspicuous exceptions (like The Day After), I don’t count many of them as movies.  In any case, real movies and TV movies became a major part of prime time into the 70s and 80s. 

 I do have a few indelible memories of movies I first saw on TV at some point: The 1956 Edmund O’Brien version of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four which I saw in high school; the Ernest Borgnine movie version of Marty, which was one of those primetime network movies.  I recall that we happened to be at my grandmother’s when I saw it. 

Others include Go, Man, Go, the Harlem Globetrotters movie with a very young Sidney Poitier, and Poitier again with Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward and Diahann Carroll (as well as Louis Armstrong) in Paris Blues, directed by Martin Ritt.  Newman and Poitier played expatriate jazz musicians.  When the Newman and Woodward characters wanted to return to the states, the Poitier character didn’t: he felt free of American racism in Paris.  An eye-opener.

 I was probably in high school when I saw the 1959 Gregory Peck film about F. Scott Fitzgerald, Beloved Infidel, and in college when I was taken with the 1962 Jason Robards film of Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night.  I recall being especially moved by seeing the 1959 film about the aftermath of a nuclear war, On the Beach on television, though it’s possible I saw it first at a theatre. It also starred Gregory Peck, with Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire.

 I saw both the Glenn Miller Story (Jimmy Stewart, 1954) and the Benny Goodman Story (Steve Allen, 1956) on TV in the 60s, and later taped them from TV to see several times since.  Among the many other biographical films I saw on TV, the most powerful was probably The Life of Emile Zola (1937) starring Paul Muni, with its revelatory scenes exposing prejudice in the Dreyfus affair.

 By the 1970s I was in fact interested in old movies, learning about directors and cinematographers and so on. So at the Orson Welles and other repertory theatres in Cambridge I saw again (and this time, whole) movies I’d dimly encountered on TV. I also had learned enough about film history to know which movies I wanted to see when they appeared in the TV listings.

 So while I might watch whatever was on the late show after an exhausting day and evening at the Phoenix and some work-related outing afterwards, I also scheduled viewings of particular movies I hadn’t yet seen.  Watching movies on TV could be frustrating, broken up by blocks of commercials and often cut down to make time for even more ads. But you could also watch them from bed.

 Once when I was back freelancing, I decided to see how many movies I could watch in one day.  At that time, the Orson Welles Cinema had three screens, and on Saturdays they had a special film or two in the morning, then their regular rotation the rest of the day (usually a double feature per screen), and at least one midnight movie. For various reasons I could see movies for free there at the time, and so I spent one Saturday seeing eight films (though I might have snuck out to see one at another of the three other theatres within walking distance.)  After the midnight shows I went home and watched two more movies on television for a total of ten.  After which I was sick in bed for at least a week. 

There is nothing like seeing a great movie on the big screen of a movie theatre, and I’m grateful I had the opportunity to see many that way, either first run or later. In Cambridge especially, I had the additional experience of seeing directors and actors in person, along with their movies.  In Boston I saw an advance screening of what is now regarded as a masterpiece, A Woman Under the Influence, featuring an intense and heartrending performance by Gena Rowlands, and when the lights came up, there was Gena Rowlands standing in front of the screen, together with the director (and her husband) John Cassavettes. It was an amazing, almost ecstatic moment: the fulfillment of two fantasies--seeing someone step down from the screen into real life, and (a bit more prosaically) being able to talk to someone you've been watching immediately after the film is over (and I did get a chance, with a few others, to chat with them afterwards, in addition to asking questions in the public Q & A, with Gena Rowlands turning that full wattage sympathetic gaze directly on me.) 

 But seeing movies at home is also part of my history, and the small screen brought them to me early and often.  Though seeing films in the cinema is the ideal (I think of "Sullivan's Travels" in this regard),video also has its advantages, principally an intimacy with the screen and its images. Seeing these movies in childhood to adolescence, even if I didn’t follow the plot or notice the nuances, added a depth of feeling and experience when I saw them as an adult.

"The Grapes of Wrath" 1940

 It may be tempting to assume that in the first quarter of the 21^st century, the variety and availability of movies is so much greater, what with streaming to a home theatre or a computer screen or a phone, in addition to the residual technologies of cable, satellite and DVD/Blu-ray, with ever increasing resolution and augmented sound.  But I’m not so sure.

  There was a kind of sweet spot in the 1980s, with several premium cable channels showing year-old releases, while channels like Turner Classic Movies and American Movie Channel showed a catalog of old movies, as well as Bravo for a few foreign films.  Meanwhile abundant video stores provided individual choice (and catalogs of foreign language films.) One could buy movies on cassettes or tape them off the TV, and play a particular movie whenever you wanted.  All of this while repertory theatres showing classic foreign and American films still existed in cities and college towns. Those films form the basic cultural and visual vocabulary of movies. 

"Sullivan's Travels" 1941

But now those rep theatres like the Orson Welles are largely gone, as are the video stores.  Those are really big losses, in terms of the movie experience but also curation and availability.

 Meanwhile AMC and Bravo show fewer movies in favor of phony reality shows, and there are fewer choices on the fewer old generalized premium channels. Streaming is a hot mess, as the new and old titans duke it out, and whether you can see a certain movie depends on which services you’re paying for, and whether they are showing that movie that month. 

It's Alive! "Frankenstein" 1931

Even then you may wind up paying an additional fee to see a particular movie, and not just brand new ones.  And that’s if you can find it. It seems to be much harder to see classic films and foreign films just about anywhere than at any time since the 60s. 

 There are a few streaming services currently which show medium-old movies (roughly from the 60s onward) without an additional cover charge, but with commercials.  But how free is it, if you must pay a hefty monthly fee to get Internet streaming, then pay out for Amazon Fire or some such device? In addition to your viewing and listening hardware.  But back when there were four to eight channels on a television set, there were movies galore. And they were all free.