Radio City: Cinema’s Sister
Sales of receiver sets rapidly increased over the next few years, and the radio stations learned how to sell advertising to support their operations. This step was crucial and not obvious at the time. The medium seemed profoundly unsuited to the capitalist marketplace at first, because it seemingly gave its product away for free, broadcasting into the “æther.” Requiring owners of receivers to pay an annual tax or license fee was one solution (still used in Great Britain for television), but it was a socialist one. The alternative was to leave the receivers to their own devices, so to speak, and concentrate the profit-loss calculation at the studio level. Advertisers, if they believed that enough ears would be exposed, would pay the broadcasters to transmit sales pitches, and rely on attractive entertainment to draw listeners. The periodic interruption of programming, with those familiar seven words, “and now for a word from our sponsors” was the “price” the listener had to pay after investing in the new household appliance.[1]
The radio medium could accomplish a range of functions that set it off fundamentally from its two contemporary rivals--newspapers and movies--but it was deeply interwoven with both of these media. Radio extended the news and sports reporting function of the dailies. For both, it allowed the listener a “live” experience of events. Live and sensational coverage of a murder trial in 1925 attracted thousands of listeners to KNX, who experienced also the reflexive drama of the reporter being thrown out of the courtroom numerous times. The following year it secretly circumvented KFI’s “exclusive” live coverage of the Rose Bowl football game by rigging a telephone “feed.” Live sports broadcasting accomplished a giant feat beyond the reach of the inherently historical media of newspapers and movies. Radio in effect compressed both time and space. The metropolis’s five major Englishlanguage newspapers still fought furiously to “scoop” their rivals by getting their stories first to the morning or afternoon newsstands.[2] Radio stations had no such constraint. Everything reported in the papers had already happened. The simultaneous auditory experience of events, performances, and political communication at great distances vastly expanded the size of the “audience” or the “crowd.” And when a medium successfully creates a huge audience, the leading producers of entertainment invariably take notice.
The Hollywood studios quickly grasped the significance of the radio medium as a complement for their primary product. By the early 1930s, the studios released their immensely valuable talent to perform on radio. Here, the process continued the merger of vaudeville variety acts into the mass media. Movies had drawn all of their talent from the vaudeville stage and now radio revived the variety format and raised it to a new scale. Just as the movie theatre shared its proscenium arch with the vaudeville stage, radio became an ethereal “stage.” “Radio versions of movies performed by glamorous stars, original dramas, variety shows, comedy series, and documentaries all reached burgeoning audiences.”[3] Motion picture technique and talent raised production values just as the profitable radio industry increased the power and quality of its electromagnetic signal. For several years from about 1923 through 1930 silent movies and pictureless radio neatly complemented one another. When the sound technology of movies finally matured and ended the silent era, the symbiosis continued.
The origins of RKO Radio Pictures, with its trademark image of a radio antenna tower mounted atop the spinning Earth, broadcasting the letters “RKO,” illustrates the important ways that radio and motion pictures intertwined. This Hollywood studio, while far smaller than M-GM, Warner Brothers, and Paramount, still played an immeasurable role in American popular culture, producing the Fred AstairGinger Rogers dance musicals, King Kong (1933); and Orson Welles’ tragi-parody of William Randolph Hearst, Citizen Kane (1941). The careers of Katherine Hepburn, George Cukor, and David O. Selznick were all launched at RKO.
Leaving his children Joseph Jr., John, Rosemary, Kathleen, Eunice, Patricia Robert, Jean, and Edward in their modest Brookline home with mother Rose, Boston politician and entrepreneur Joseph P. Kennedy, took his real estate money and moved into the Hollywood business in 1926 by purchasing the Film Booking Office of America (FBO). Although entirely forgotten today, FBO was at that time an important producer and distributor of “action, melodramatic, and Western features, many starring Yakima Canutt and Strongheart the Dog.” Kennedy moved in with the actress Gloria Swanson while in Hollywood, but Swanson was no mere mistress. Like many other women in the industry who had suddenly gathered money and power from the star system, she moved to establish independent control, forming her own production company. Kennedy backed her with his own capital to produce the ill-fated Queen Kelly (unfinished, 1928), directed by the megalomanical Eric von Stroheim. Appropriately enough, Queen Kelly is a story of adultery. Seduced by the playboy Prince Wolfram (Walter Byron) on his last night before marrying the domineering Queen Regina V of Kronberg (Seena Owen), convent novice Kitty Kelly (Swanson) is left alone when the Queen throws her adulterous fiancée in prison. Kelly sails to Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa, to visit her dying aunt, who runs a brothel there. When the aunt dies, Kitty Kelly gets to be queen at last, the new madame. Von Stroheim’s chronic megalomaniacal extravagance once again led to his downfall, however. Swanson fired him halfway thorough the film and it was only partially salvaged for partial release.
By 1928, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) had developed a leading sound system (RCA Photophone) for the movies, and its president, David Sarnoff (1891-1971) joined forces with Joe Kennedy to create a showcase for this technology. The first sound movies required theatres to be retrofitted with amplifiers, wiring, and speakers, so Sarnoff and Kennedy teamed up with the KeithAlbee-Orpheum vaudeville theatre circuit to provide the wired venues for the new sound movies. The result was the 23 October 1928 formation of the hybrid Radio-Keith-Orphem (RKO), whose first film was Syncopation (1929), starring Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians. [4] RKO took over the Robertson-Cole studios at Gower Street Melrose Avenue, 13.5 acres of land that would later become part of Paramount Studios. In this space, on which the Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa had starred in some of his most successful films, David O. Selznick became production chief in 1931, producing such box-office hits as What Price Hollywood? (1932); Bill of Divorcement (1932); and King Kong (1933).[5]
By the early 1930s radio was dominated nationally by the three New York-based networks: the Radio Corporation of America (RCA); Columbia Broadcasting Corporation (CBS); and the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), and the network that would soon be called the American Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). With such a formidable concentration of talent and production capacity, Los Angeles became the second capital of radio in the United States. In 1937, CBS built a cutting-edge broadcasting studio on Sunset Blvd, and NBC met the challenge by building its Radio City studios.
[1] Herbert Hoover, “Who Will Pay for Radio?” ***
[2] As of 1930 the six leading English language dailies, with founding dates, were: Los Angeles Evening Express (1871); Los Angeles Daily Herald (1873); Los Angeles Times (1891); Los Angeles Record (1895); Los Angeles Examiner (1903); Los Angeles Daily News (1923). Pitt and Pitt (200): 357-8.
[3] Pitt and Pitt (2000): 415.
[4] Slide (1986): 289.
[5] Slide (1986): 290-1
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