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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.
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Following on EJHill’s comment, it is hard to imagine a time when “live” was a major selling point, a cardinal virtue. Part of the reason is the introduction of video tape in 1956, which recorded so well that it was indistinguishable from live TV. It took some of the specialness out of it along with much of the risk.
Although there were four TV networks in the early Fifties, Du Mont and ABC were small operations compared to the dominant big two, NBC and CBS. If you were on one of those two, you had a chance of one-time only audiences of 30 million people for live drama like “Marty” and “The Miracle Worker”.
Not entirely, though? Housewives had it on at home throughout the day. I remember my mom kept the radio on, listening to chat and swap meets and Paul Harvey. It didn’t fix you in place like TV.
The fate of old downtown LA theaters is just criminal. I think the Tower is an Apple Store, and the Los Angeles and the Million Dollar are event centers. Old downtown was coming back before the pandemic, but even so, the occupants of the rehabbed buildings are more likely to Netflix than wander a few blocks to the Orpheum or the El Rey. I wonder how much of that has to do with the nature of movies today, the change in the experience. Instead of settling for newsreel-cartoon-short feature – programmer – main feature, people skip and dip between this channel and that, this device and that, pausing, half-watching, scrolling while the movie plays. The whole idea of sitting in a chair for the long parade of entertainment doesn’t fit the jerky, twitchy modern character.
And the movies are different, too.
I wonder if the appointment nature affects that, with specific showtimes rather than popping in whenever and watching the cycle. More limiting, perhaps?
It’s interesting that the Sorry, Wrong Number performances weren’t touted as being “live.” That was assumed to be the default, unless they told you that the show was coming to you “transcribed.” Suspense, the show that aired Wrong Number, would eventually go canned, but by that time no one cared.
It’s a great show – Orson Welles deemed it the finest radio play ever written – and it gave ol’ Endora a special place in radio, playing manic, unsympathetic biddies whose perils were pushed into place by Louise Fletcher, the writer. (Or Ray Bradbury, who wrote a Suspense script that featured Moorhead.) It’s amazing how tight the performances were, and how flub-free. Sorry just runs on rails
It’s definitely a different mindset. When my parents were young, they “went to the movies”; pretty much whatever was playing at the Bijou or the Keith’s. Like an evening at home watching TV, it was expected to last a couple of hours.
But by the time I was a teenager, that had been replaced with “going to a movie”. A specific film at a set showtime. This wasn’t just art films, but increasingly all films. Few of us going to Star Wars in 1977 just walked into the theater at random in the middle of the movie. Once, everyone understood the expression, “this is where we came in”. Now that happens less and less. Theaters don’t usually grind from feature to feature without a break anymore; for decades, they’ve wanted a substantial amount of time to sell concessions. That gap between shows makes it even less desirable to arrive in the middle of a film.
As a kid, I had the radio on. New formats like NBC’s Monitor made it a steady weekend companion. The buzzword of that radio era seems to be “companionate”. Although there were Old Time Radio nostalgia broadcasts (for example, on Jersey City’s WJZ) only a couple of years after OTR left the evening airwaves (other than Johnny Dollar), it was understood that radio had just gone through dramatic change, that it wasn’t the national force it had been a decade earlier.
You’re right about the new residents of downtown being more likely to live like nearly everyone else in their social cohort and economic class and bypass the renovated classic theaters in favor of staying in.
The on-demand entertainment of the day. Dance hall, restaurant, movies; everything was available when you were ready, just like now.
The theater television idea was also based on the idea that if the public was unable to directly see or hear the high-bandwidth signal being sent to the theaters, then their programs would not be subject to FCC broadcast rules. This was mostly true. The FCC passes no moral judgment on microwave links, for example. The liberties to be taken would probably have been very modest, more along the lines of a Johnny Carson monolog, not the Folies Bergere. Think of SNL, but twenty years earlier.
“I want to wake up in the city that never sleeps …”
Not just downtown. Let’s say you’re a night shift worker restless at two in the morning. Ain’t no where to go. All the fast food joints are closed, the bars will be on last call when you get there, and even WalMart is on shortened hours since the pandemic taught them they could get away with it. Your best bet is to go to the one 24 hour grocery store in town and see if there’s any late night shopping to do.
Pre-television, the lights never came on in the theater until the end of the day. Just as they had done in vaudeville the audience came in whenever they wanted. Young men and women, armed with flashlights, served as ushers – getting you to your seats without trying to disturb the already seated patrons.
In vaudeville, they used to employ really, really bad acts to put at the end of the bill to encourage audiences to leave. One of the legends were “Fink’s Mules.” Nothing can clear a theater like braying, kicking, pooping mules.
As a projectionist, I often worked the “grind houses” that never turned the lights on or closed the curtain between shows. Marki Bey in Sugar Hill on a bill with Scream, Blackula, Scream, along with coming attractions and usually a sponsored short: Prove It, about the Chrysler Proving Grounds, or Wings Over the Atlantic, from Lufthansa. But this was unusual by the Seventies.
More often, in a regular theater, the film would end and we’d slap in the 8 track of Neil Diamond for intermission music. It cleared the theater as efficiently as Fink’s Mules.
If I had a curtain, I made a point of timing its opening with the fade in of the film. This was called “Deluxe-ing the house”.
But the most classy, sophisticated New York theaters were bare minimalist design-ery places with no curtain, just a flat white wall.
There’s a theater in the neighborhood, the Aero, that got its name because Donald Douglas paid to have it built during WWII to provide round-the-clock showtimes for aircraft workers on overnight shifts. Bars had signs in their windows: “Open 6 am”.
You could start playing Nickelback.
I have two words for you: Yoko Ono.
I can provide anecdotal evidence of bars hanging on after WWII. My father moonlighted as a bar accordionist at a local bar in Northeast Philly from 1947 through maybe 1958 or so. I didn’t get a chance to ask him, but since my father is from Jersey and my mother from North Philly, I believe that might be one possible place where they met. My dad went through periods of otherwise being unemployed by suitcase factories, but passed a civil service exam and landed a steady job as a postal clerk around the time I was born. He continued to also play music on the weekends until years after I had graduated from college.
My father glowingly described the atmosphere at the bar in Philly, making it seem like a pretty happy place to be. He knew all the customers and their favorite tunes, and just to make the point, would switch to that person’s song when he noticed them coming through the front door, no matter what else he was playing. My dad had a phenominal memory for tunes.
I wonder if that’s where they met. And if so, I wonder what tune he played when she walked in the door. I guess we’ll never know. At least they both heard him playing it at the time.
With music, that’s the main thing.
OTOH, I have a 58″ TV in the basement, and a bathroom nearby to deal with all the used beer. I also have a pause button to achieve said potty break . . .