In 1930, the “lowest-priced high quality” version of the name brand RCA Radiola would set you back $112.50, serious money (roughly $2,000 in today’s dollars), but for $5 down you could walk away with it. In 1929, what everyone was talking about was The Amos ‘n’ Andy Show, on the air weeknights at 7 p.m., the first appointment software in broadcasting history and the best reason to purchase the requisite hardware. Radio, however, soon reached the tipping point for what media scholars call penetration - the mysterious moment when a mass communications technology truly enters the bloodstream of a culture. Depending on your druthers, the arrival can be measured in hard statistics or cultural conversation. 19, 1928) suggested that singing and speaking onscreen would easily outperform a noisy box with no pictures. 6, 1927) and especially The Singing Fool (Sept. Sam Warner, the most tech-wise and farsighted of the four Warner brothers, understood that the movies would need to incorporate sound rather than ignore it. The blockbuster success of The Jazz Singer (Oct. Nonetheless, Hollywood heard the rumblings on the horizon. “Human beings insist upon gathering together, going places where they will meet other human beings and where they may join in a common entertainment objective.” The need for community would never be satisfied by cocooning at home. “The public cannot be kept privately at home by the radio or by anything else,” asserted Exhibitors Herald, telling readers what they wanted to hear. As early as 1924, they sought reassurance that the living room rival was no imminent threat. Radio had formally arrived on the American scene in 1920, with broadcasts of the election victory of Warren Harding. Though still very much a luxury item for most of the jazz age, the mushrooming presence of the new-fangled furniture caused immediate concern among exhibitors. The macroeconomic catastrophe inflicted the most crippling blow, but an entertainment medium that required no paid admission provided an alternative readily at hand. 20th Century Fox Film Corp./Courtesy Everett Collection The marquee at the Rivoli theater in Times Square, New York City, 1933. The Great Depression, lamented an exhibitor, had left most theaters in the United States “places where tickets were mostly kept not sold.” That made it “the worst year financially in the history of pictures,” but only until 1932, which then took the title for “the industry’s sickest year.” 1933? All that could be seen was a box office landscape of “Stygian blackness.” The decline was precipitous, steady and seemingly irreversible. When the crash hit, it was left cold-cocked by what industry veterans called “its first real churning in the economic maelstrom.”įrom a jazz age high of more than 100 million loyal moviegoers a week in a population of roughly 120 million, Variety estimated in 1931 that average theater attendance had plunged to 65 million by 1931, a drop of 40 percent. Since the days of the nickelodeon, the motion picture industry had considered itself immune from the normal cycles of boom and bust. (“The Great Depression ruled our home,” a fellow baby boomer once remarked to me.)įor Hollywood, the swiftness of the descent into hard times proved especially wrenching. Twenty-five percent unemployment, no safety net, widespread hunger and hopelessness - a soul-crushing trauma that scarred the psyche of the greatest generation more than World War II. Of course, the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression was the main cause of the rush to the exists, a prolonged convalescence for which not even FDR could fast-track a vaccine. Revisiting a Hollywood Crew's Archival Effort to Use Film to Convict Nazis at Nurembergīy way of perspective and maybe solace, it is worth remembering that the present emergency is not the first time that exhibitors have been beset by a sickening plague and a hot new media rival. In the nadir of the Great Depression, a flatlined economy and the siren call of radio had audiences deserting theaters in droves. It was the movie house version of a bank run, only the customers were running away from the venues.
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