by Lisa Napoli
The arrival of the talkies in the late twenties intensified America’s love affair with the cinema. Movietone’s newsreels evolved, too. Now, a booming narrator’s voice accompanied the fifteen-minute presentation of film clips gathered from points around the globe, a powerful voice of God updating entertainment-seekers on the week’s current events.
As Americans settled into a postwar boom—babies, suburbs, houses, commutes—television, consumed from their plush living rooms, commandeered their leisure time. Library use plummeted, the take at jukeboxes fell, and theaters, suffering from plunging attendance, began to close at an alarming rate. Who needed to go to the movies when the entire family—plus envious neighbors who’d not yet purchased their own sets—could be entertained at home with the likes of I Love Lucy, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, The Honeymooners, and Lassie for free? The networks continued to expand their broadcast hours, offering a wider array of programs, from kids’ fare, game shows, Westerns, variety programs, and soap operas. Though newscasts were but a tiny piece of nightly network programming, just fifteen minutes in length each night, 90 percent of the nation consumed their dinners while watching the headlines.
Grasping at staying relevant, Movietone partnered with the wire service United Press. In addition to supplying newsreels to theaters, the service offered news footage to the television networks as well as to local stations. Few could afford the manpower and film equipment necessary to maintain their own crews. A subscription to United Press–Movietone News allowed them to embellish their rudimentary newscasts—typically comprised of a man behind a desk, reading wire copy to the camera, occasionally punctuating a headline by holding up a photograph from the wire service.
When Reese stepped onto the blisteringly hot movie-soundstage-turned-news-factory at the corner of Tenth Avenue and Fifty-Fourth Street for his first day as a copyboy, he found himself instantly captivated by the sizzling electricity of the newsroom. The frenetic motion matched the speed at which he spoke—the words tumbling out so quickly it was as if he was inhaling the thoughts that followed.
Movietone’s cameramen shot on the fly out in the field, true craftsmen racking deftly through their lenses in an age before built-in zoom, recording images on hundred-foot reels of film that yielded a minute and ten seconds of footage. “Can carriers” spirited the exposed film to a processing lab a few blocks away, which in turn handed the footage to wizened editors, who screened and spliced the images into news clips. Grizzled veterans groused about the newfangled but cheaper and easier-to-process sixteen-millimeter film—spaghetti, they called it—quickly replacing the sturdier old standard, thirty-five millimeter. And they’d complain about stringers who didn’t precisely choose their shots by editing “in-camera” as they filmed. Inefficiency meant more footage to process and wade through, which in turn slowed down the works. Reese absorbed it all.
After pictures came the words to vivify them. The best writers, he observed, crafted the stories on a dime, with ease, carpenters of language: “Two and a half words a second, making sure to identify each face, each action, as it pops on the screen.” If you couldn’t write—if you couldn’t write fast—you couldn’t survive.
In watching stories take shape on this assembly line of production, piece by piece, Reese experienced the eye-opening notion that the news, every step of the way, was formed by humans—from the choice of stories to cover, to the choice of pictures and words that conveyed them.
The otherwise menial task of mimeographing scripts provided the young copyboy with a crash course in the bigger picture. He studied the pages curiously, carefully, as he cataloged the day’s material for the company archives. On index cards, he’d meticulously type out the specific shots used in each one, cribbing the unique language of film he’d gleaned, like “close-up” or “medium shot.”
Another of his daily duties involved monitoring the nightly network newscasts and keeping a handwritten log of each story. He’d not watched much television before, mostly the fights on a Friday night over at a neighbor’s house in Newark. Now that it was Reese’s job to hawk it closely, he observed and absorbed the pace and flow that made for a compelling program. Breaking news to start, softer news and features at the end. The utter homogeneity of the three shows surprised Reese. Not only was what they reported on virtually the same, but the men who delivered the newscasts all resembled one another in tone and demeanor. They spoke as if theirs was the voice of God. Their staffs, he learned, had all attended the best East Coast schools and eagerly mimicked the front pages of the New York Times and Washington Post with their story selections.
“They were all first-rate,” he observed, “but they saw things through the same set of eyes. It was as if you were running the same raw materials through the same strainer and expecting different results. No matter how many times you ran it through, the product was always pretty much the same.” A man delivering a scripted report, the occasional filmed piece from a reporter in the field.
Underscoring the sameness, the networks all aired their newscasts at the exact same time, with the end result for the viewer being, he observed: “You will watch the news when we tell you to watch the news, or you will not watch news at all.”
Continuing the dominance they’d created in radio, the three networks formed a mighty TV troika. And they all managed to get stories on the air faster than Movietone could rush them out the door. A carrier pigeon would have been more efficient than their system, which relied on motorcycle couriers who whisked the little green boxes of film, scripts carefully tucked inside, out to the airport. By the time the footage arrived at stations the next day—or later—the news was as stale as day-old bread. Even newspapers, reliant on the printing press and delivery trucks, published more timely information in the multiple editions they updated throughout each day.
Reese was shocked to learn the networks collectively possessed an advantage his employer did not. Their secret? Each paid $25 million annually to the phone company for the use of its speedy information superhighway, zigzagging their programs and footage over a complex matrix comprised of thousands of miles of high-speed copper coaxial lines and two-hundred-foot-tall microwave towers strategically placed around the nation. The system wasn’t explicitly unavailable to others, but the high cost of using it made it prohibitive to all but the mighty three. Even still, there were limits. Remote and mountainous swaths of the nation were still unreachable, and, most limiting of all, there was no way to transmit a TV signal across the ocean.
Reese began to see that a news organization didn’t rise to the top because it had the best stories. The key to success was size and how much you had to pay to transmit your stories. Competing with the triopoly of ABC, CBS, and NBC seemed an impossible task, an unattainable dream—never mind the ability to beat them.
After just a month in the hallowed, bustling halls of the news factory, Reese knew for certain he’d discovered his life’s passion. He couldn’t imagine leaving this mighty ringside seat to history in which he’d inadvertently found himself. When an Italian ship, the SS Andrea Doria, capsized en route to New York City from Nantucket, the young newsman watched as film crews pressed into action, rushing to the West Side docks in search of reaction. Here was the access he’d longed for to a world far beyond his block in Newark. When the fall semester arrived, his bosses allowed him to juggle his work schedule around his studies. While earning master’s and law degrees, he rose up the ranks in the newsroom. On the assignment desk, he grew skilled at negotiating with stringers. The higher-ups admired his thrifty nature. The flush networks could afford to spend money in pursuit of a story, even waste it, but his second-string employer required and exalted in parsimony.
Out in the field, he had no compunction about muscling his way to the front of the press pack to land comment from newsmakers of the day. Big Mo, the fearless gambler from Newark, face-to-face with one of the world’s biggest movie stars, Marilyn Monroe, whispering a reply to his query about how she was feeling after being r
eleased from the hospital. Big Mo, scuffling with a rival crew that obstructed his cameraman’s shot as he interviewed the American Nazi Party’s George Lincoln Rockwell. Big Mo, with his toothy grin and mile-a-minute speech, roaming the halls of the 1960 political conventions. The bar exam? Why bother? He was a journalist—a broadcast journalist.
Time and again, though, his triumphs were tempered by technological hindrances. When an air force bomber accidentally dropped an unassembled A-bomb on Mars Bluff, South Carolina, Reese scrambled to find a local cameraman. The footage he commissioned didn’t arrive in New York until the next day, delaying its arrival to subscribers until the day after that. By then, the story was too old. It never aired.
The unstoppable rise of television ultimately rendered newsreels as obsolete as the horse and buggy. Slowly and steadily, as they vanished, so did United Press–Movietone News.
And yet, television needed that filmed news footage more than ever. Reese and some of his colleagues found themselves scooped up by a reincarnation of the wire service’s television arm, UPI Newsfilm. But with no newscast of its own and a delivery system as slow as a tortoise, it was, out of the gate, an also-ran. With annoyance, Reese began to see why the mighty networks could boast that “news was what they said it was.” If they didn’t cover a story, it didn’t make it into the public eye.
When would fresh viewpoints and other voices be heard? Reese wondered. When would the delivery speed of news accelerate? When would the umbilical cord to the phone company’s superhighway get cut? He held on to his quixotic hope that one day, stories might flow at the speed of light—with no jag or delay or reliance on rich corporations. Long before modern connectors like airplanes and telephones had been created, William Shakespeare’s character Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream had expressed his desire to lasso a “girdle ’round the earth,” to cinch the enormous planet tight in order to traverse it in just forty minutes.
What if not a person but the news could travel the earth in an instant?
* * *
Great minds had been working on collapsing space and time for as long as people had communicated. From the tom-tom drum and smoke signal to the carrier pigeon and the Pony Express; from speeding trains to the telephone. As each domino of discovery fell, the girdle ’round the earth cinched a bit tighter—ratcheting up the desire for greater speed and connection.
The first time a message had been transmitted over transatlantic telegraph lines, in 1858, it was cause for celebration that merited a parade and a hundred-gun salute. The eighteen hours it took to deliver the hundred-word message seemed like lightning compared to the ten days it typically took a steamer ship to squire a letter across the ocean.
While the ability to beam moving images into the nation’s living rooms had seemed a miraculous step forward, as ubiquitous as television had become by the early 1960s, it was still an imperfect technology. If you lived in an area where trees and mountains obstructed the clear lines of sight, you might not be able to tune in at all. And that was assuming you lived near enough to a city that could support a television station with enough ads to keep it afloat, much less two or three.
In 1945, the futurist Arthur C. Clarke imagined a fantastical solution, “a true broadcast service, giving constant field strength at all times over the whole globe.” Instead of beaming phone calls and television programs over AT&T’s terrestrial superhighway, why not shoot the signal up into the heavens? A constellation of orbiting rockets, deployed 22,300 miles over the equator, rotating at the same speed as the earth, could receive the data and then shower it back down to an interconnected planet.
If only such a system had existed for the historic June 2, 1953, coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Even once the shy young Elizabeth buckled to public demand and agreed to allow television to document her installation, it was only a fantasy, utterly inconceivable, that the ceremony might be seen around the world as it happened.
To maintain decorum in the hallowed halls of Westminster Abbey, only British Broadcasting Corporation cameras would be allowed. Copies of the three-hour ceremony would be provided to international broadcasters by the BBC. Vexing technological hurdles remained. Duplicating film required darkened labs, chemicals, and time. Transmitting the three-hour ceremony across the pond using existing cables under the sea was impossible. A CBS executive calculated it would take ninety-nine years and seven months. American network executives and engineers schemed elaborate work-arounds to ensure their viewers could see Queen Elizabeth wearing her crown as soon as possible after it was placed on her head. This included renting airport hangers in England where they would record the historic broadcast right off the television with their own cameras (a process known as “kinescoping”), then spiriting away that film onto a waiting chartered jet—one of only a handful of planes then capable of making the transatlantic journey—that had been retrofit with a processing lab and edit bay; arriving in Boston, which put them on American soil an hour earlier than if they’d gone directly to headquarters in New York; then feeding out film from Logan Airport over the speedy phone company system.1 While Elizabeth was rousing from her first official night of queenly slumber, an American television audience finally got to see the pomp and ceremony.
A more efficient system was in the works.
Four hundred scientists had been toiling away on an invention that would ultimately enact Clarke’s dream and link the corners of the world in real time, instantly. Years and $50 million in the making, the very first active communications satellite was a wonder called Telstar, and by 1962, it was ready for a dazzling debut. At 170 pounds, a tad under three feet in diameter, and framed in magnesium, the sparkling curiosity was covered with 3,600 sapphire-encrusted solar cells mounted in platinum and filled at the core with ten thousand electronic components. It hardly looked as if it possessed the power to connect the globe.
On a clear day in June, a square white air-conditioned truck pulled out of a nondescript warehouse in Whippany, New Jersey, with this odd-looking masterpiece in tow. As it embarked on the thousand-mile journey to Cape Canaveral, Florida, final preparations were under way there for its ascent. After a battery of tweaks and tests, the engineers strapped the precious cargo onto the back of a Thor-Delta rocket and, at 3:35 a.m. on July 9, blasted it into space.
From its orbit in the heavens, the miraculous Telstar could, just as Arthur C. Clarke had imagined, receive phone calls and television pictures beamed up from Earth, then shower these data bits back down to receiving stations where they’d be relayed instantaneously—far faster, more widely, and at a fraction of the cost of the flawed information superhighway on the ground.
As Telstar orbited the earth at eighteen thousand miles an hour, a team of broadcasters from the three rival American networks worked together in unprecedented fashion with their counterparts in Europe on a grand show to illustrate the power of a satellite to revolutionize communications.
From the dimly lit Studio 4J at the RCA Building in midtown Manhattan, an anxious production team oversaw the American side of the extravaganza. A startling split screen of images welcomed viewers: simultaneous live transmissions of French masterpieces separated by an ocean. On the left, Alexandre-Gustave’s majestic Eiffel Tower in Paris, on the right, Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty, standing watch in New York Harbor. BBC broadcaster Richard Dimbleby shouted an enthusiastic hello to the hundred million viewers across the United States, crying, “Go, America, go!”
And go America did. The voice of the man installed just months earlier as anchor of the CBS nightly news became the first televised American voice to be heard in real time across the ocean in sixteen nations.
“Good evening, Europe,” Walter Cronkite intoned in his trademark warm timbre. This simple juxtaposition of two relatively static live shots awed even the most wizened of the broadcast team. In his voice viewers could hear the utter sense of “primal wonder and amazement” he felt as technology allowed them to collapse time and space.
“This is the N
orth American continent live via Telstar, July 23, 1962, three p.m. Eastern Daylight Time in the east, the New York skyline on the Atlantic Ocean,” he declared, as live pictures punctuated his words. “On the west, three thousand miles away, San Francisco, twelve noon at the Golden Gate Bridge. Between these two oceans, 180 million Americans have begun another week.”
There was nothing remarkable about the average week in America except that humans across these great United States and on another continent could see these images live, in real time.
Thus began a glorious skip-hop of a travelogue across the continent, a wild, expansive tour from sea to shining sea that most Americans had not taken and likely never would, made possible in a matter of minutes thanks to a series of well-positioned cameras and the magical communications power of a multimillion-dollar girdle. The armchair traveler was guided from Niagara Falls down to the southern border at El Paso, Texas, so close to Mexico one could sneak a peek across, back up north to the bustle of the World’s Fair in Seattle, and over again to a serene meditation room at United Nations headquarters in New York. A team of translators converted Cronkite’s words into a dozen languages, but it was the live pictures that were indisputably the star of this show.
From the control room, director Sid Smith called his crew to punch up the image of a live baseball game at Wrigley Field in Chicago, where the Philadelphia Phillies were playing the Cubs—another milestone, as this now counted as the first international transmission of a sporting event. The game’s announcer rallied the fans assembled in the stadium to, “Give all the baseball fans in Europe a big hello from Chicago. We know this doesn’t make sense to people in Europe. Our colleagues are going crazy trying to say ‘runs,’ ‘hits,’ and ‘errors’ in Swedish and Italian.”
