Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Television Curfew
Open up the entertainment section of any big city American newspaper of the Thirties and Forties and you’ll be amazed by how much live entertainment there was, from singers in small cafés, to jazz bands, to live theater. In my own city, Los Angeles, we had ad listings for nightlife all over town. During World War II, industry went to triple shifts. Ports and rail transportation hubs were mobbed 24/7 with servicemen. When the war ended, new workers continued to flood America’s cities. Since before the days of the Romans, city downtowns have found ways to profit from a restless, timeless human desire for nightlife and entertainment.
Timeless, that is, until it faded. Within a half-dozen years after VJ Day, US downtowns lost much of their nighttime magnetism. Bars held on, but many theaters and restaurants closed, club musicians hit the unemployment lines, and even burlesque houses were shuttered. Now that’s a serious cultural change. Back then, business owners and the newly unemployed had a terse, three-word nickname for the sudden phenomenon: “The television curfew.” When people stopped going out at night, downtowns largely died in darkness. We’ve lived on into a time when downtown’s daytime is dying as well. Then as now, it was due to tens of millions of people making the unexpected discovery of being able to stay home and experience life through an electronic screen.
Television was possessive; once a family bought a TV, it quickly took precedence over radio listening and moviegoing. Both of those media had to adapt. By the mid-Fifties, radio became something you listened to in the car, and movies began to focus on the things you couldn’t show on TV.
The reason that “the television curfew” took restaurants, clubs, and live entertainment by surprise is they hadn’t suffered much of a “radio curfew” when it made its big arrival a quarter century earlier. Some claim that it finished off dying vaudeville, though that’s also attributable to the nearly simultaneous debut of talking pictures. If anything, radio may have benefited nightlife; it got people in the habit of staying up later, for one thing, and live music from heavily promoted local clubs and hotels was a staple of early radio.
One reason that bar business held steady was obvious: bars were the first places most early viewers were introduced to TV. For the postwar years, programming reflected that male viewership with boxing, wrestling, baseball, and news, sponsored by makers of beer, razor blades, tires, gasoline, and hair tonic. Laundromats, another postwar development, tripled their nighttime business when they put in TV sets. Signs read, “Watch Berle While Your Clothes Whirl.”
One enthusiasm for the future was still unresolved in the early Fifties: lavish, live television events in movie theaters. This ambitious plan, backed by Paramount and 20th Century Fox, went well beyond what theater TV would come to be used for: boxing matches and rare special events. With broadcast TV still only a small, black and white screen, the idea of entertainment spectaculars delivered live and direct via full color, theatrical TV was regarded as a promising new hybrid art form that could enrich Hollywood and revitalize America’s downtowns.
It could have changed American popular history if it had. Yet, in one of those intriguing what-ifs, it never really got off the ground. The FCC balked at allocating the wide bandwidths needed to connect the theaters. Announced for 197 theaters, less than a hundred were equipped with first-generation video projectors. Other than a handful of specialty situations, the idea quietly faded away.
By the Seventies, there was widespread interest in bringing high-spending nightlife back to downtown areas. Once again, as in 1933’s 42nd Street, downtown was where “the underworld can meet the elite.” Gentrification took hold. Old buildings were restored. Abandoned plots of land got turned into “vest pocket” parks. Mostly it worked, if we define “worked” as “Did it generate more new economic activity than it cost?” rather than “Was it realistic to claim it would restore downtown life to what it had been decades ago?” As more city halls around the country became run by Giuliani-type mayors, a big drop in street crime brought in more business and foot traffic, leading to less street crime. This virtuous circle, the seemingly miraculous rebirth of cities, went on for decades…until it didn’t.
“Broadway Treasures” is a good-hearted 2019 documentary about a successful effort to restore a group of forgotten grand theaters in downtown Los Angeles, directed by earnest novice filmmaker Haeyong Moon and made by volunteers over a nearly decade-long production period. Despite the seemingly happy outcome, there’s a realistic sense of disappointment. The old theaters are saved, but scattered across downtown’s immense size, they haven’t ignited any critical mass of night life, crowds, or development. Used for special events and a handful of limited engagements, they’re dignified islands of architectural nobility in an otherwise tired concrete landscape of daytime-only businesses and low-end retail. No chic cafes have sprung up, not yet.
Today, there is a revival of the idea of keeping movie theaters viable by presenting large-screen live events you can’t see at home. There’s no need to install a video projector, because today “film” projectors are digital. In essence, it’s already a jazzed-up video projector. Fiber internet provides bandwidth beyond the dreams of the theaters that got turned down by the FCC when they applied for frequencies in the early Fifties.
Seventy years ago, cities experienced the lingering near-death of nightlife. In our own time, lockdowns emptied downtowns night and day. No downtown mobs of young office workers hitting the sidewalk each weeknight means few customers for comedy clubs or impress-your-date restaurants. After the pandemic era shock of the arrival of mass Zooming, our era’s daytime version of the Television Curfew, workforces will be nudged back to the office, but real estate markets are already pricing in the unsentimental certainty that downtown office towers aren’t going to be as needed.
In 1983, I was on local TV as one of the managers of Filmex, the Los Angeles film festival. The interviewer asked if I was worried that, with all the new video cassettes and cable channels, movie theaters would eventually go away. I got beaucoup credit among my raggedy cohort by grinning confidently and proclaiming, “Every home has a kitchen, but people still like to go to restaurants.”
That statement, I have to say in my own defense, held up for a long time. But forty years later, now that every home may have a 72-inch 4K screen, a credit card, and a DoorDash account…well, things change.
Published in General
If only someone were working on a Best of 2023 collection…
This would be a candidate, and I am quite sure that it would win a spot when the year was over.
= = = = = = = =
Note: I’d do it myself if society still had advanced software technology, which for reasons I don’t fully understand, we don’t.
– – – – – – – –
Mrs Tex and I were discussing the John Wick series and how when the fourth installment comes out we will pay to watch it on the big TV at home rather than trek to the theater. Microwave popcorn and all the rest room pauses we want.
Excellent point. This is an amazingly low bar. It justifies almost everything from public art to convention centers and pro sports stadiums, “fields of schemes.” This is the economic equivalent of using a “can he fog a mirror” test for a commercial pilot’s license. The starting point for the calculation is the cost of the investment, then add the “multiplier effect” of new economic activity, even if it’s just the additional spending by the construction crew on household goods and services, and you’re there. Add to that the widespread belief that any and all activity at the new venue represents spending that would not have happened otherwise, and the bar is set so low that any centenarian can clear it with his walker in tow.
Wrangler,
I’m willing to stipulate to the implicit assumptions in that, in the interest of not hijacking this thread with a lesson on economics.
There was a lot of live entertainment in the smaller cities of the US in the 30s and 40s as well. In Texas that would have been places like Galveston, Palestine, Marshall, Austin, Abilene, Odessa, and Waco. (Well, maybe not Waco. The Baptist influence was pretty strong.) There are analogues in other states, but Texas is what J know. Live was how entertainment was done back then. (Especially we throw in the picture show as “live.”)
The Marx Brothers formed the routine that made them famous at a performance in Marshall. They changed what they were doing on the fly when their live performance was bombing.
Fascinating, Gary! I had no idea how all these events and locations influenced each other. Thanks!
I don’t mind sports bars with lots of screens. But when I go to a nice restaurant for a pleasant dinner and conversion, the last thing I want to see in CNN covering war atrocities in some corner of the globe (this actually happened one time when I took my children to a pizza restaurant, of all places) . . .
War atrocities are one thing, but some of them even show sports on every wall.
I subscribe to NBC’s Peacock streaming service. For $4.99 a month I can choose to watch any English Premier League soccer match that isn’t televised by the NBC network over the air broadcast. As someone who follows Arsenal, I have the ability to watch all their league matches.
Apple + has made a big shift in their Major League Soccer streaming service. You can watch any match you choose and there are no blackouts. ESPN + and the earlier MLS streaming services had blackouts.
When it comes to movies there are some that should be watched in a theater. Top Gun Maverick was a must see in a theater.
I like the big screen for viewing a visual spectacle, but I hate, HATE having some troglodyte propping his feet on the back of my seat.
Plus one can curl up on the couch in comfy pajamas wrapped in a nice quilt with a cat purring on one’s lap and a fire crackling in the fireplace and nice adult beverages of one’s choice.
Even the best movie theatres cannot compete against that.
Agreed. A multiplier effect exists, but it’s far weaker than most spending advocates claim. New York’s Broadway has shamelessly overplayed this card for decades, claiming that live theater–which does bring a fair amount of money into the Manhattan economy–is a mighty engine of prosperity that, paradoxically, must be more heavily subsidized. .
Many thanks, Susan! Glad to have you here!
Fascinating. I’ve been wondering about this for decades. It is so bizarre to go into a city after, say, six or seven o’clock at night–early for night owl me–and see almost everything shuttered. We went into Boston one Friday night, and by eight o’clock almost every business on Newbury Street was closed. We were really surprised. And my daughter lived in Manhattan for three years recently, and she said Manhattan was pretty much closed up too after six.
The television curfew exists everywhere, I think. I took my kids to Chatham, Massachusetts, for a Christmas fun outing while they were here for the holidays. Chatham has long been considered the Christmas Capital on Cape Cod. We got there just after dark, at about six in the evening on a Friday night. Every business was closed up. We couldn’t believe our eyes. This was a prime holiday-moneymaking time slot. And it was very early, still cocktail hour really.
$4.99 a month is much cheaper than flying to England every week-end. :)
There have really been several inflection points in the “TV vs. real life” sweepstakes. As stated in the OP, television’s first appearance was mesmerizing. Even a test pattern could compete with radio. For decades, small theaters barely held on, until in the 70s some became porno houses, or specialists in Blaxploitation movies. This is when multiplexes began to proliferate, and those new theaters had to compete with cable and videotape rentals, a new stage in the game. “New TV” hurt broadcasting revenues, but didn’t dent theaters very much.
But then, after 2000, big flatscreens and video-on-demand were a game-changer, and streaming turbocharged the process. More “grown up” programming has also erased some of the distinction between theatrical and home entertainment.
I lived there for three years starting in spring of 2000 and it was nothing like that. Gary mentioned Broadway above; that had fairly high foot traffic all night long. The bars didn’t close until four, and even then it was still easy to get a cab pretty much all over town. My first night there, I was in a hotel on Broadway, and my first meal was a deli sandwich at midnight. Dropped a couple of bucks in the pot for a guy playing Beethoven’s 9th on a pair of steel drums. He was amazing and it was after midnight.
This was right at the end of the Guiliani era, and all of Manhattan was so safe it was like a giant amusement park. Not much TV curfew. I think your daughter got Covid curfew.
Another great walk through entertainment history! Thank you, Gary.
Theatrical exhibition is hanging on, but the pandemic has killed the small, adult-focused film market. Those films aren’t being made because their audience hasn’t returned to the theaters. It’s all blockbuster action films.
My daughter was living near the United Nations building. Throughout the pandemic, her zip code had the lowest positive-test rate for covid. :) You’re right. Broadway is already back to being open almost all night, as it always was.
My dad lived on Riverside Drive for a few years. I love New York. :) It’s a dazzling city! We went to Zabars and the Monks’ Inn where I learned about beef fondu. Saint Pat’s. Sardis. :) :) My dad always said, “New York, New York. The city so nice they named it twice.” :) :)
My empty street experience was the day after 9/11. I had to walk from Chambers St. to Penn Station (about fifty blocks). I went a couple of blocks in to avoid crowds on West St, and didn’t see a soul for over thirty blocks. It was like the Will Smith movie I Am Legend.
Yep, you didn’t have to go to Chicago or Boston to see live shows; even Leadville, Colorado had an opera house. Texas has always been lively.
L.A. had a third of today’s population; by any measure it wasn’t nearly as affluent back then, and more of those Angelenos had to get up with the sun and be at work early. Yet the bars, night clubs and restaurants were packed anyway.
There is also a multiplier effect to subtract, showing the effect of the reduced private-sector spending.
Lots and lots and lots of small adult-focuses films are being produced. They simply don’t have the same marketing budgets as blockbusters. Twas ever thus.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_films_of_2022
There was a later, forgotten attempt to make some of the video-for-theaters idea work with existing business arrangements. Electronovision was a process of making theatrical films with high definition video equipment and then transferring the finished videotape to regular 35mm film so any theater could show it. In 1964, the first Electronovision release was Richard Burton playing Hamlet. The production company played up the “Live!” aspect, as in “This is a once-in-a-lifetime event–never to be repeated–don’t miss it!” They even pledged to destroy the film prints after this one week screening.
(They reneged, claiming that they would donate the copies to college drama departments.)
The Congress Hotel, the Edgewater Hotel, Aragon Ballroom, the Blue Note Jazz Club … and that’s just Chicago.
I admit I am perhaps overstating it. But they are certainly getting less box office.
My brother runs a small production company and he no longer produces features. He has moved to documentaries. That is my evidence.
I am willing to stipulate to that, and to the implicit assumption that people suddenly spending more money somehow suddenly produces more economic value in final consumption goods available for sale.
I concede to the second thing because it would take me more than one Comment (I’d be hijacking this great thread) to present my understanding of all these things:
Of course, I’m not claiming that it was all due to TV. there are other reasons why downtowns started hollowing out. Historians are quick to blame cars. True, the Fifties saw the debut of superhighways, and a V-8 horsepower race that made farther commutes possible.
And speaking of race… mainline sociologists would likely place racial inequality at the center of their own theory of why inner cities entered a downward spiral: crime due to abandonment, further abandonment due to crime.
Oh, it was definitely the killer. The prints were all over the knife.
Vaudeville performers could keep an act for years – same songs, same dances, same jokes – and thrive. People wanted to come back and experience something several times over. And they did that at the movies, too. But radio? You weren’t going to survive for two weeks with the same routine, let alone 26 weeks. It was ravenous. But it paid so much better. The stars of vaudeville would rather stay home and hire writers by the bushel than spend 50 weeks a year living in cheap hotel rooms and doing two-a-days in the backwaters.
That’s not to say radio audiences didn’t enjoy a good encore. They did. Agnes Moorhead performed Sorry, Wrong Number at least five times – but always live. It’s almost impossible to envision a world where audiences rejected “canned” programming but both NBC and CBS waged massive PR campaigns to promote the idea that live was better. Of course their idea was to hobble the syndication business and the unions were more than happy to go along with it.