  VOICES
OF THE CENTURY:
America Goes Hollywood
In show business and the arts, the 20th century was our long moment in
the sun. Listen now as the stars, artists and those who knew them tell the stories of life
behind the scenes. Lights down, curtain up.
Back in the 1890s Thomas Edison predicted that the phonograph he’d
invented and the moving pictures he was tinkering with would combine to provide high-class
home entertainment for the wealthy. Can’t you just see it? There they’d be in the
parlor, listening to “Don Giovanni” or something, the synchronized images flickering
away, while outside poor immigrants clustered around the organ-grinder on the corner. Just
goes to show you how wrong a visionary can be. Those immigrants, mostly Eastern
European Jews, would soon invent the movies as we know them, and any average Joe with the
price of a ticket could go into a theater and enter a realm of wonder and imagination –
or at least of pratfalls and fisticuffs. And thanks to that phonograph, the
music of America’s poor blacks and backcountry whites would soon set the whole nation
dancing. This was the beginning of America’s cultural revolution, and the world has
never been the same.
In the past hundred years Americans invented jazz and rock and roll,
abstract expressionism and the skyscraper; we’ve seen the Golden Age of Hollywood and
the rise, for better or worse, of television and the cult of celebrity. In Louis
Armstrong’s sky-splitting trumpet, in Audrey Hepburn’s wry bemusement at
her own radiance, in Fred Astaire’s wonderment at his good luck in
inhabiting the human body, you could feel the joy of liberation. In Hank Williams’s
lonesome caterwaul, in the grisly novels of Stephen King, in Charlie Parker’s saxophone
leaping and wriggling at the edge of hysteria, you could feel the dread – and find
refuge from it. These distinctively American productions blew a hole in the wall between
elite and popular culture the size of a drive-in movie screen. They excited and inspired
the rest of the world – and ended up covering the planet in cultural kudzu: in
the remotest Himalayan village, someone’s wearing a T shirt with the face of Sylvester
Stallone.
 Early in the
century American artists and entertainers were overshadowed by the European masters of
high modernism. Picasso fragmented and rearranged the images of representational painting
into strange and powerful visions. In Ulysses, Joyce magnified a single ordinary
day into an epic of the thinking mind, and transformed language itself from a mere
signifier of information to the novel’s truest subject. Stravinsky and Schoenberg freed
music from the constraints of tonality and invented rigorous formal constraints of their
own choosing. Yet Americans – particularly African-Americans – were inventing their
own hybrid forms of vernacular music: blues, jazz and eventually rock and roll,
which has come to be the lingua franca of the world’s youth. Those
European modernists recognized America as a locus of energy and innovation; they drew
heavily on American popular arts, from jazz to vaudeville to comic strips. “When
American technology popularized entirely new media – the motion picture, television and
the computer – the rest of the world couldn’t refuse.
Technology didn’t just “influence” the arts; increasingly it made
the arts imaginable and possible. Movies obviously needed such elaborate mechanical
gimmicks as the camera and projector, and mass-production techniques for reproducing
and distributing film so paying customers all over the world could make the expense
worthwhile. But even the phonograph, a far simpler piece of technology, changed the way
musicians thought of their calling. By 1900 Enrico Caruso’s live operatic and
concert appearances had made him the great singer of his era; he simply began recording
songs and arias in response to demand. But in 1954, when Elvis Presley began his career,
he’d seldom if ever performed in public: his aspiration was specifically to make a
record. His rockabilly sound was the serendipitous result of fooling around
in the studio with two musicians he’d just met; when the resulting recording was played
on the radio, this ad-hoc band had to hustle to get together enough songs
for a plausible stage show. For Elvis, recording technology, pressing plants, distribution
networks and mass-media publicity weren’t peripheral to his art: they were integral to,
implicit in, what he did.
The century’s new media – sound recording, motion pictures, radio,
television, computers – took some getting used to. Radio was not vaudeville without
visuals; movies were not plays staged in front of a camera; television was neither radio
nor movie. Initially these media seemed to be neutral containers for the same old content:
like photographs, they captured, preserved and transmitted what was out there in the
world. But they could also create things that never were. The very earliest moviemakers
speeded up, slowed down and reversed projected film to amuse the patrons of nickel
theaters. In making “The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots” (1895) at Edison’s New
Jersey studio, cameraman Alfred Clark stopped the film so the actor (not actress) playing
Mary could hop away from the chopping block and be replaced by a dummy, which was beheaded
in what looked to viewers like real time. Special effects (from crude rear-projected
“process shots” to digitized dinosaurs), animated films, seamlessly spliced
or overdubbed recordings, radio broadcasts incorporating live and prerecorded
material, electronic music, multimedia computer works: these aren’t preserved images of
anything that actually existed but pure artifacts of technology.
Yet if technology was esthetically liberating, its costs kept the
small fry out. It routinely takes tens of thousands of dollars to make a
state-of-the-art CD and millions to make a movie. The recent proliferation of
affordable, powerful computers and the growth of the Internet might democratize the
high-tech arts. But by the end of the century corporate entertainment conglomerates had
largely buried a lively and kaleidoscopic popular culture under a stultifying,
monolithic mass culture: heavily marketed, deliberately disposable and instantly
replaceable movies, music, books, television shows and celebrity entertainers.
Recording, publishing and motion-picture companies, of course, were
always about making money. The early Hollywood producer Carl Laemmie once recalled the
moment of revelation that led him to give up his career as a couturier. “I dropped into
one of those hole-in-the-wall five-cent motion-picture theaters,” he told an
interviewer. “The pictures made me laugh... I liked them, and so did everybody else...
‘Funny pictures are the thing,’ I said to myself. ‘Charge people and make them
laugh’.” That simple quid pro quo evolved into a system of publicity
schemes (from cute items in gossip columns to brokered cover deals with major magazines),
product tie-ins (from a doll to the licensed merchandise that accompanies every
animated Disney film) and synergistic sweetheart deals with advertisers and manufacturers.
The current Austin Powers movie plugs Heineken, AOL, Volkswagen and Chili’s baby
back ribs, while its star, Mike Myers, appears in airline ads and on a limited-edition
Visa card. Such revenue-generating entertainment product now dominates the world’s
culture. Outside of India and China, Hollywood movies account for more than three fourths
of the global market. What’s the non-English-language share of the U.S. box office? Less
than 1 percent. It’s not hard to see why: American movies and pop music sell glitz
and glamour to a world that’s heartbreakingly short on both. The Depression-era
syndrome of housewives in an old gingham watching Fred and Ginger gliding around
some art deco penthouse has gone global.
By the end of the century, the corporate entertainment industry was
beating the bushes for fresh, preferably “edgy,” new talents – rappers,
independent filmmakers, actors, novelists – making them into instant celebrities, then
scouting around for their replacements. True, from Valentino and Nazimova in the ’20s to
Prince and Madonna in the ’80s, American culture has been awash in one-name
wonders, and periodically lit up by brilliant flameouts: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Janis
Joplin. What’s different today is the magnitude of celebrity inflation – “stars”
must now be “superstars” – and the speed of turnover. Yesterday’s fresh young
thing is tomorrow’s tabloid gargoyle: the process took Elizabeth Taylor 30 or 40
years; her friend Michael Jackson has done it in a decade. The emerging talents of the
late 1990s are rich in promise: Beck, Jim Carrey, Savion Glover, Lauryn Hill, David Foster
Wallace. And even if nobody will have heard of any of them 100 years from today, it’s
still been a hell of a show. This has been the century of Irving Berlin and Charlie
Chaplin, Duke Ellington and Ernest Hemingway, George Gershwin and Greta Garbo, Frank
Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Tennessee Williams, Bob Dylan and Steven
Spielberg. If there’s a century that can top that, we’d like to live there. And maybe
we will. Here’s hoping. But we’ll spend a lot of time looking back.
GLOSSARY:
visionary провидец, пророк
pratfall театр. жаргон падение на зад (клоуна
и т. п.)
fisticuffs мн. кулачная драка
trumpet муз. труба
wry иронический, насмешливый
Fred Astaire американский танцор, особенно
прославившийся участием в музыкальных комедиях
kudzu быстро растущий вьюн
vernacular зд. простонародный
lingua franca язык, используемый людьми из
разных стран (часто в области коммерции)
gimmick разг. хитроумный механизм, ловкое
приспособление; “штучка”
calling призвание; профессия; занятие; ремесло
rockabilly в ритме рока
serendipitous книжн. связанный со счастливым
случаем
ad hoc лат. на данный случай
process hooting кино, комбинированная
киносъёмка
seamlessly без шва, из одного куска
overdub спец. накладывать одну
(магнитофонную) запись на другую
artefact (любой) продукт, сделанный человеком;
(любой) предмет, отличающийся от природного
объекта
small fry пренебр. мелкая сошка, мелкота
state-of-the-art книжн. достигнутый, реальный,
внедрённый (в противоп. планируемому,
экспериментальному)
proliferation распространение
stultifying отупляющий
disposable одноразового использования
quid pro quo лат. компенсация
tie-in принудительный ассортимент
plug рекламировать (в нерекламных передачах
радио и телевидения)
glitz and glamour разг. шикарное и
привлекательное (зрелище)
gingham платье из бумажной или льняной материи
(обыкн. полосатой или клетчатой)
beat the bushes (for) амер. искать (обычно в
отдалённых районах)
edgy раздражённый; нетерпеливый; вызывающий
awash заваленный (чём-л.)
flameout вспышка
gargoyle горгулья (рыльце водосточной трубы в
виде фантастической фигуры в готической
архитектуре)
|