Radio

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Radio

EARLY EXPERIMENTATION
RADIO GOES HOLLYWOOD
CROSSOVER CAREERS
AFTER TV
FURTHER READING

Hollywood's involvement with radio predates the movies' ability to talk. From the earliest years of broadcasting, farsighted film producers and studio heads saw in radio a promotional medium made to order for enhancing the popular reach and appeal of their valuable entertainment empires. As sound film debuted and brought members of the "radio trust"—RCA and AT&T—into closer connection with film operations, several major studios made countermoves into the business of network radio. Though largely excluded from network ownership, the studios formed an alliance with the advertising agencies, which by the mid-1930s were producing the bulk of commercial programs on the air. "Prestige" radio production had moved to Hollywood by the late 1930s, and the lively process of mutual influence and exchange enriched both industries, setting the stage for Hollywood's increasing domination of television beginning in the late 1950s. Yet even as television took over the entertainment genres and cultural functions that had been created by network radio, the film industry, by expanding into other areas of media production and distribution, remained a player in the radio business. In the twenty-first century, all five major over-the-air television networks (NBC/Universal, CBS/Viacom/Paramount, ABC/Disney, Fox, and CW [formerly WB and UPN] as well as the majority of cable channels either bear a studio's name or are part of a filmmedia conglomerate. Producers, writers, directors, stars, and properties flow seamlessly from one medium to the other. This process began in radio.

EARLY EXPERIMENTATION

In the days before regulatory and network standardization, when the main business of radio was inviting various representatives of entertainment businesses on the air to publicize themselves, it seemed natural that Hollywood, with its immense reservoirs of talent under contract, should join in to publicize that other "national" medium, the cinema. One of the earliest cases of filmradio cooperation took place not in Hollywood but on the stage of the Capitol Theater in New York City, part of the Loew's/MGM chain. In 1923 theater manager Samuel L. Rothafel entered into an agreement with the American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (AT&T) to broadcast his prefilm stage show over the new station WEAF. The results were so positive that it quickly became a regular feature, called Roxy and His Gang, one of the earliest hits of radio broadcasting. Soon other movie theaters jumped on the bandwagon.

Many big-city theaters featured elaborate stage shows and enormous theater organs, whose musical accompaniments animated their film showings. Concerts by theater organists were broadcast over WMAC, WGN, and KWY in Chicago and in many other cities starting in 1925. In 1925 Harry Warner of Warner Bros. put forth a prediction and a challenge:

I am in favor of the motion picture industry, after the wave-length situation has been adjusted (as it will be)—building and maintaining its own broadcasting stations in New York and Los Angeles, and possibly in the Middle West. Through these sources … programs could be devised to be broadcast before and after show hours, tending to create interest in all meritorious pictures being released or playing at that time. Nights could be assigned to various companies, calling attention to their releases and advising where they were playing in that particular locality. Artists could talk into the microphone and reach directly millions of people who have seen them on the screen but never came in contact with them personally or heard their voices. Such programs would serve to whet the appetites of the radio audience and make it want to see the persons they have heard and the pictures they are appearing in.
(Motion Picture World, 11 April 1925)

Warner followed up on this vision by opening up station KFWB in Los Angeles that same year, and a second one, WBPI, in New York City in 1926. In the summer of 1926, Sam Warner took a portable transmitter on a cross-country tour, broadcasting from theaters showing Warner Bros. films.

By 1927 the major studios could see the sound era rapidly approaching. Earlier, they had jointly agreed to a "stand still" position, in order to see whether the RCA or the AT&T sound system would predominate. Either way, Hollywood studios would in effect find themselves in technical thrall to the interests behind NBC, at this point (with CBS still struggling to get organized) the only broadcasting network with national reach. RCA was NBC's parent company; AT&T had an exclusive arrangement with NBC for the provision of landlines, the backbone of network broadcasting. Simultaneously, regulators in Washington were working on passage of the Radio Act of 1927, which promised a reorganization of the radio spectrum with an express mandate to bring the "chaos" of radio under control. Studios increased the pace of radio experimentation, attempting to get a foot-hold in the promising new business before restrictions might potentially be imposed, either by Washington or by contractual limitations from sound-on-film technology providers.

In May 1927 Paramount announced plans to form the Keystone Network, in partnership with the Postal Telegraph Company, one of AT&T's only competitors, "for dramatizing and advertising first-run motion pictures." As a backup plan, Paramount head Adolph Zukor also approached the interests behind the proposed NBC competitor, United Independent Broadcasters (later to become CBS) to suggest a partnership that he proposed might be renamed the Paramount Broadcasting System. In September MGM announced an ambitious project with the Loew's theater chain: a planned network based on movie materials and promotion that would link over sixty stations in more than forty cities. In December, to give audiences a taste of things to come, MGM experimented with the world's first "telemovie": a dramatic, blow-by-blow account of Love (1927), MGM's adaptation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina starring Greta Garbo and John Gilbert, delivered on-air by WPAP's announcer Ted Husing (usually known for his sports coverage) as it unreeled before his eyes in the Embassy Theater in New York. Despite much excitement in the industry, neither the Keystone Chain, the Paramount Broadcasting System, nor the Loew's/MGM network reached fruition. A combination of regulatory discouragement, exhibitor opposition, and competition from other sources diverted studios' radio ideas in other directions.

Upon the expiration of the "stand still" agreement in 1928, film studios jointly decided to go with AT&T subsidiary Western Electric's sound technology. Left out in the cold, RCA in 1929 formed its own studio, RKO Pictures, and ushered in the era of film-radio cooperation in earnest as RKO and NBC learned to share talent and properties, such as the RKO Theater of the Air. Faced with this unsettling prospect, in the summer of 1929, just months before the stock market crash, Paramount again approached CBS. A stock transfer was hammered out, by the terms of which Paramount received a 49 percent interest in CBS while CBS received a certain number of Paramount shares. In three years Paramount would have the option of either buying the rest of CBS or simply regaining its own stock by turning back CBS's. By 1932, however, the country was in the depths of the Depression, and while radio's fortunes continued upward, the film industry was in steep decline. Rather than further consolidate their mutual interests, Paramount withdrew its merger offer, and the brief alliance was over. RCA divested itself of most of its interest in RKO in the late 1930s under similar pressures. Studios would not attempt to enter networking again until the television era.

RADIO GOES HOLLYWOOD

As the Depression continued, film industry profits suffered as theaters went out of business and box-office receipts slowed to a trickle. Radio, however, continued to thrive. As advertising agencies began to take the broadcast medium seriously as an outlet for their customers' campaigns, a new and influential partnership was about to emerge. Dissatisfied with CBS and NBC's staid approach to programming, several aggressive advertising firms turned their attention to Hollywood's untapped potential for radio-based product promotion. One of the biggest players in this Hollywood-agency alliance was the J. Walter Thompson Company (JWT), whose plan for radio advertising envisioned big-budget, starstudded productions sponsored by JWT clients over the major radio networks. By the mid-1930s JWT was producing at least five shows out of each year's top ten, most of them featuring Hollywood talent, such as The Chase and Sanborn Hour (with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy), Rudy Vallee's Fleischmann Yeast Hour, andLux Radio Theatre. Other major agencies included Young and Rubicam, Blackett-Sample-Hummert, and Dancer Fitzgerald. When in 1936 AT&T, as a result of an investigation by the FCC, reduced its land line rates to the West Coast, a "rush to Hollywood" resulted, and most major agencies along with the two national networks opened up studios in Los Angeles. Radio had gone Hollywood.

This productive and profitable association would have great impact on both the radio and film industries. A variety of radio programs developed that centered on movie industry stars, properties, and Hollywood celebrities. The most prestigious was the movie adaptation format pioneered by JWT's Lux Radio Theatre. Hosted by celebrity director Cecil B. DeMille (1881–1959), Lux presented hour-long radio adaptations of recent Hollywood film releases, introduced and narrated by DeMille and featuring well-known film stars. Others in this format, often referred to at the time as "prestige drama," included The Screen Guild Theater, Hollywood Premiere, Academy Award Theater, Dreft Star Playhouse, Hollywood Startime, and the Screen Directors' Playhouse. A popular feature of these programs was the intimate, casual interviews with famous stars; DeMille, for instance, would chat at the end of each show with that night's leading actors, often casually working in a mention of the sponsor's product. Here audiences could enjoy a new, more intimate relationship with stars and celebrities that had formerly been available only in the pages of fan magazines. Chatting about their upcoming pictures, a recent performance experience, or even domestic details and romantic tidbits, allowed the celebrity to step off the screen and into the familiar space of the living room.

The second major venue for Hollywood stars and film promotion was radio's leading genre, the big-name variety show. Fleischmann Yeast Hour, The Jack Benny Program, The Fred Allen Show, and many others featured regular guest appearances from Hollywood's A-list stars, often promoting their latest pictures or acting out skits related to film properties. Supporting roles were often filled by B-list actors and actresses, some of whom went on to considerable broadcast fame. Many stars eventually began hosting such programs themselves, especially in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Adolph Menjou and John Barrymore served as hosts for The Texaco Star Theater; Al Jolson appeared on radio almost exclusively after 1935; William Powell and Herbert Marshall hosted Hollywood Hotel at various times.

Some directors got into the act as well. Orson Welles's dramatic radio debut in 1938 on The Mercury Theatre on the Air, most notably his 30 October broadcast of War of the Worlds, helped secure his contract with RKO to produce, among other films, Citizen Kane (1941). Welles would frequently return to radio, as a variety show guest, guest host, and producer of lesserknown programs. Many accounts of the Mercury Theatre on the Air years agree that, once the first couple of broadcasts were past, the group Welles had gathered around him—notably John Houseman and Howard Koch—actually did most of the dramatic selection and adaptation work; nevertheless Welles's inimitable sense of drama and timing as well as his penchant for reflexive and confrontational material permeated the productions. And Welles would bring a heightened awareness of the potential of sound as an expressive medium with him to Citizen Kane and much of his other film work. Alfred Hitchcock, too, established a reputation on American radio, as well as film, before becoming a television personality.

CROSSOVER CAREERS

Many Hollywood stars extended their careers on radio, some of them also moving into television in its early years. Groucho Marx made frequent appearances not only on comedy-variety programs but on the rising genre of humorous quiz shows. In 1947 he became the host of ABC radio's popular You Bet Your Life, which made the transition to television in 1950 and ran until 1957. Ed Wynn started out in film, moved to radio and television, then played comic parts in a series of films in the 1950s and 1960s. Robert Young became established as a reliable second leading man in the 1930s and 1940s, then debuted the long-running Father Knows Best franchise on radio, before moving to television. Especially for Hollywood's extensive B-list starts, radio in the late 1940s became a springboard both to television fame and, less frequently, back toward greater eminence in the film business.

It was a set of Hollywood's secondary ladies who made the deepest mark on one of broadcasting's most enduring genres, the situation comedy, first on radio, then on television. Such B-list performers and comediennes as Lucille Ball, Dinah Shore, Joan Davis, Eve Arden, Hattie McDaniel, and Ann Sothern began by building up reputations as frequent radio guest stars in the 1930s and early 1940s. When World War II removed many male comedians from the air, as well as increasing the prominence and importance of the female audience at home, the film industry supplied key talent to move into prime time. Out of this conjunction the sitcom was born, taking comedy in a new direction—away from the stand-up, gag-based variety format and toward a new genre based on recurring characters in humorous situations, emphasizing domestic settings.

Joan Davis was the first to step into the leading-lady spotlight, as she moved from a supporting cast position on The Rudy Vallee Show in 1941 to primary status when Vallee left the program to go into the military in 1943. Renamed The Sealtest Village Store, it featured Davis as a frustrated, man-chasing spinster; she would go on to take the headline role in The Joan Davis Show on CBS in 1945, and from there to television in the sitcom I Married Joan (NBC, 1952–1955). Lucille Ball, the best-known of radio's film comediennes, moved, like Davis, from an RKO contract to star in My Favorite Husband (CBS, 1948–1951), though her fame came with the debut of I Love Lucy in 1950 on CBS-TV. Ann Sothern took her fame as the star of MGM's Maisie films to radio in a situation comedy of the same name in 1949; she went on to star in television sitcoms for the next twelve years. Eve Arden, who starred in a long line of B-movies from the 1920s through the 1940s, including a series of Republic Studios features based on the Lucky Strike Your Hit Parade radio series, debuted as Our Miss Brooks on CBS in 1948. Hattie McDaniel, the first African American actress to win an Emmy, for her role in Gone with the Wind (1939), made her radio headliner debut in the long-running Beulah in 1947. These pioneering woman-centered situation comedies used the star power of their Hollywood-based leading ladies to draw ever larger audiences to this new form, and to take them from radio to television in the early 1950s.

Other properties moved from film to radio, many of them adaptations from fiction or comics. Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man first mutated into a series of films starring William Powell and Myrna Loy beginning in 1937; it became a radio program in 1941 and later shifted to television. Series like The Lone Ranger and The Green Hornet prospered in film, radio, and television formats. The film industry also came to increasingly rely on the star-producing capabilities of radio, with radio personalities starring in many popular Hollywood films. One of the first of these crossovers was Check and Double Check for RKO (1930), starring Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll as the characters they played in the Amos 'n' Andy show on radio. Movies like The Big Broadcast of 1936—and 1937 and 1938—were produced specifically to consolidate radio stars' popularity with the film-viewing public, and to cement the Hollywood-radio relationship. Other stars who had first made it big on radio found significant new success in films, like the "Road" pictures starring Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Dorothy Lamour (Road to Zanzibar [1941], Road to Morocco [1942], Road to Rio [1947], et al.). Rudy Vallee, Eddie Cantor, and Jack Benny all met with box-office success in films that often highlighted their roles as radio stars and featured the exciting world of radio behind the scenes. This tradition continued, as Howard Stern's 1997 movie about his radio career, Private Parts, attests. Other memorable films about radio and its role in American life include The Hucksters (1947), an indictment of advertising-dominated radio and its effects on American postwar society; George Lucas's classic American Graffiti (1973), with its memorable top-40 soundtrack and a cameo by the legendary DJ Wolfman Jack; and Woody Allen's Radio Days (1987), a highly nostalgic look at life before television.

AFTER TV

Although the nature of radio changed dramatically once TV came onto the scene, some studios did maintain a persistent presence in radio ownership and production. Warner Bros., Paramount, RKO, and MGM all owned radio stations, and also got in on television station ownership early. MGM went into syndicated radio program production and distribution in the late 1940s, with such programs as The MGM Theater of the Air and Maisie. Just as film companies diversified into television, they also began to acquire interests in the music industry, the new backbone of radio. For example, the Disney Corporation holds extensive interests in music recording, and through its merger with ABC in 1995 came to own radio stations that reach 24 percent of US households. Twentieth Century Fox was purchased by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in the 1980s and is now linked with satellite music channels worldwide. News Corp. also owns the Australian Mushroom and Festival record labels. And in this age of synergy, the tie between movies and music has become tighter than ever before, with movie soundtracks used to promote artists and recordings, and soundtrack releases often achieving billions in sales.

In the era of new media, where the lines between film, radio, television, music, recordings, and the Internet seem to be growing blurrier every day, the integrated entertainment corporations formerly designated by the term "Hollywood" have fingers in nearly every form of media that reaches into the home—or anywhere the viewer might be. Now Internet radio technology gives companies the ability to go online with their own "radio" services. DisneyRadio.com already provides a schedule of music and features from its films and artists, oriented toward children. Television shows on studio-owned networks promote recordings distributed by the company's record arm, which become hits on pop radio. Recording stars launch film careers; film and television stars, like Janeane Garofalo and Al Franken, start radio careers. Although in the United States the days of radio drama and comedy faded long ago, transferring their stars and audiences to television, the film industry continues to play a vital behind-the-scenes role linking radio to a host of other media. Without Hollywood, American radio could never have risen to the heights of creativity and popularity it achieved in its heyday. Without radio, Hollywood as we know it today would be missing some of its brightest lights and most memorable ingredients. The twenty-first century's digital media promise to bring these two media venues into an ever closer relationship.

SEE ALSO Sound;Technology;Television