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Three Sisters of Mass Media: Cinema, Radio, Television, 1920s-1950s

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Radio broadcasting quite simply restructured the spatial, social, and cultural relations of the metropolis, the nation, and the world, all within an astonishingly short period of time, between 1923 and 1938.  Audio recording, and transmission was the sightless sister of cinema who regained her vision in junction with the talkies, 1928-31.  Radio, and television in the late 1940s had a very close and vexed relationship with the movie industry, each reproducing the other's material, re-marketing it, or competing directly.  The three together ultimately gained oligopoly over the U.S., and sometimes the global, public sphere.  All three were dramatically restructured and transformed by the rise of Cable and the Internet from the late 1970s through the end of the century.
 
No equipment for mass broadcasting existed in 1921; neither transmitters in the hands of producers nor receivers in the homes of consumers. The technology was available, but no organizations with capital had committed their resources to build the powerful equipment necessary to transmit the same program to many thousands of people simultaneously. Obviously, the public needed access to affordable receiver sets at the same time, so a chicken-and-egg problem slowed the foundation of the industry. The logjam was broken by the organizations already in charge of mass communications: newspapers and the motion picture studios. Newspapers suddenly realized that radio could be used to promote newspaper sales and extend the genre/format of their communication agenda. Harry Chandler and the Los Angeles Times founded KHJ in 1922, which remains the oldest continuously-operating radio station in Los Angeles (began operation on 13 April 1922). It began as a CBS affiliate, but CBS jumped to the much more powerful 100-watt KNX as its West Coast affiliate, and KHJ joined the Mutual Broadcasting network, the fourth network after the big three of CBS, NBC, and ABC. 

On 16 April 1922, three days after KHJ began broadcasting, an auto dealer fired-up the the 100-watt KFI to promote auto sales, and by 2015, as talk-radio consumed by the gigantic,auto-entrapped freeway commuter population, it became the most-listened-to station in the United States (with approximately 1.5 million listeners). 

While these other stations have done better the palm should really go the outfit who broke the logjam, the newspaper, the Evening Express and the station KNX.  When the Los Angeles Evening Express gave away 1,000 free crystal receiver sets and built the broadcasting equipment for KNX, the chicken-and-egg problem was solved and radio towers soon became prominent on the Downtown Los Angeles skyline.  KNX then is now the oldest continuously broadcasting radio station in Southern California.

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 English­-language 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 picture-less 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-G­-M, Warner Brothers, and Paramount, still played an immeasurable role in American popular culture, producing the Fred Astair-­Ginger Rogers dance musicals, King Kong (1933); and Orson Welles’ acclaimed 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 theaters to be retrofitted with amplifiers, wiring, and speakers, so Sarnoff and Kennedy teamed up with the Keith­-Albee-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]
 
Television, New York and Los Angeles
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), plus the network that would soon be called the American Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).  With oligarchic dominance of North American radio networks, these three would,  eventually became also the three oligarchic television networks by the 1950s.
 
Radio entertainment and the producers of radio shows grew up logically around and New York City's huge talent pool of Tin Pan Alley songwriters, Broadway, and Vaudeville performers.  The LA-based motion picture industry, by the 1920s, however, had a near-monopoly on the skills needed for cinematography, lighting, casting, production of picture-shows.  Television, then, could not fully operate in New York City.   TV, distributed by Manhattan-based networks wired like railroads across the United States, depended on the Los Angeles-based motion picture industry for most of its production.
 
With such a formidable concentration of talent and production capacity, Los Angeles became the second capital of radio and television 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.  In 1952 CBS hired Pereira and Luckman to design its massive, International-style CBS Television City in the Fairfax district, at 7800 Beverly Boulevard.

The co-dependency of New York City and Los Angeles in Televisual America is epitomized by the all-time most popular and profitable television show of the 1950s, I Love Lucy (1951-57 and 1958-1960).  Lucille Ball was always Hollywood-based, from her earliest roles in RKO films of the 1930s.  She performed numerous radio shows, and performed with and fell in love with the Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz in 1940.  Ball, having reached her limit as a leading comedienne, made a jump to Television, developing a show based on her real-life marriage with Arnaz.

Because of their celebrity, Desi and Lucy's guests were all the stars in Hollywood--the reality here is the colony of stars. Frawley and Vance were not married, so fiction and real are blended.  Lucy and Desi/Ricky proceed to deliver their first real child in the second season, making their baby son, Desi Arnaz, Jr./"Little Ricky", the first cyber-child, born on and for TV.  The episode of Lucy giving birth drew more viewers than President Eisenhower's 1953 State of the Union Address, by Nielson ratings. Surely that was a turning point in the American public sphere.  I Love Lucy, arguably the foundational television situation comedy that made the medium profitable, is also the first instance of reality TV.  It followed two married couples: Ricky (Arne) and Lucy (Ball), and their landlords and best friends, Fred (William Frawley) and Ethel (Vivian Vance).  

While set in New York City, I Love Lucy was always shot and produced in Los Angeles.  From the show's inception in 1951 until 1957, Desilu Productions produced the show in various studios, until RKO properties came up for sale.  Then, in a fitting act of recycling, Desi and Lucy's production company bought RKO's Gower Street facilities (adjacent to Paramount lot), and Culver City properties, renaming them Desilu Studios.  On those sound stages Desilu produced a remarkable string of TV hits, including but not limited to: My Three Sons (ABC; 1960-1965/CBS; 1965-1972); The Dick Van Dyke Show (CBS; 1961-1966); The Lucy Show (CBS; 1962-1968); You Don't Say! (NBC; 1963-1969); My Favorite Martian (CBS; 1963-1965); Gomer Pyle, USMC (CBS; 1964-1969); Hogan's Heroes (CBS; 1965-1971); Star Trek (NBC; 1966-1969); That Girl (ABC; 1966-1971); Mission: Impossible (CBS; 1966-1973); Mannix (CBS; 1967-1975); The Mothers-in-Law (NBC; 1967-1969).  In 1967, Desilu sold its studios to the conglomerate Gulf+Western, which had acquired Paramount, but these spaces remained major sites of television production in the second decade of the 21st century. 

 
[See Bloodbath Essay to continue the story from the 1960s.]
 
END NOTES

[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

This page has paths:

  1. Manufacturing Mass Culture, 1895-1950s Phil Ethington
  2. White Shadows: Mass Media / Empire, 1920s-1950s Phil Ethington
  3. White Shadows: The Erotics, Race, and Power of Global Hollywood Phil Ethington
  4. Narrative Essays Phil Ethington

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