by Bill Bryson
If we fall for such commercial manipulation, we have no one to blame but ourselves. When Kentucky Fried Chicken introduced ‘Extra Crispy’ chicken to sell alongside its ‘Original’ chicken, and sold it at the same price, sales were disappointing. But when its advertising agency persuaded it to promote ‘Extra Crispy’ as a premium brand and to put the price up, sales soared. Much the same sort of verbal hypnosis was put to work for the benefit of the fur industry. Dyed muskrat makes a perfectly good fur, for those who enjoy cladding themselves in dead animals, but the name clearly lacks style. The solution was to change the name to ‘Hudson seal’. Never mind that the material contained not a strand of seal fur. It sounded good, and sales skyrocketed.
Truth has seldom been a particularly visible feature of American advertising. In the early 1970s, Chevrolet ran a series of ads for the Chevelle, boasting that the car had ‘109 advantages to keep it from becoming old before its time’. When looked into, it turned out that these 109 vaunted features included such items as rear-view mirrors, reversing lights, balanced wheels and many other such items that were considered pretty well basic to any car. Never mind; sales soared. At about the same time, Ford, not to be outdone, introduced a ‘limited edition’ Mercury Monarch at $250 below the normal list price. It achieved this by taking $250 worth of equipment off the standard Monarch.21
And has all this deviousness led to a tightening of the rules concerning what is allowable in advertising? Hardly. In 1986, as William Lutz relates in Doublespeak, the insurance company John Hancock launched an ad campaign in which ‘real people in real situations’ discussed their financial predicaments with remarkable candour. When a journalist asked to speak to these real people, a company spokesman conceded that they were actors and ‘in that sense they are not real people’.22 During the 1982 presidential election campaign, the Republican National Committee ran a television advertisement praising President Reagan for providing cost-of-living pay increases to federal workers ‘in spite of those sticks-in-the-mud who tried to keep him from doing what we elected him to do’. When it was pointed out that the increases had in fact been mandated by law since 1975 and that Reagan had in any case three times tried to block them, a Republican official responded: ‘Since when is a commercial supposed to be accurate?’23 Quite.
In linguistic terms, perhaps the most interesting challenge facing advertisers today is that of selling products in an increasingly multicultural society. Spanish is a particular problem, not just because it is spoken over such a widely scattered area but also because it is spoken in so many different forms. Brown sugar is azucar negra in New York, azucar prieta in Miami, azucar morena in much of Texas, and azucar pardo pretty much everywhere else24 – and that’s just one word. Much the same bewildering multiplicity applies to many others. In consequence, embarrassments are all but inevitable.
In mainstream Spanish bichos means insects, but in Puerto Rico it means testicles, so when a pesticide maker promised to bring death to the bichos Puerto Rican consumers were at least bemused, if not alarmed. Much the same happened when a maker of bread referred to its product as un bollo de pan and discovered that to Spanish-speaking Miamians of Cuban extraction that means a woman’s private parts. And when Perdue Chickens translated its slogan ‘It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken’ into Spanish, it came out as a slightly less macho: ‘It takes a sexually excited man to make a chick sensual.’25
Never mind. Sales soared.
15
The Movies
In 1877, in one of those instances of one thing leading to another, the railway tycoon Leland Stanford and a business crony were lounging with drinks on the veranda of Stanford’s California stud farm when the conversation turned to the question of whether a galloping horse ever has all four hoofs off the ground at once. Stanford was so sure that it did – or possibly didn’t; history is unclear on this point – that he laid his friend a bet of $25,000. The difficulty was that no matter how carefully you watch the legs of a galloping horse you cannot tell (particularly, we might suppose, when you have had a number of drinks on the veranda) whether the horse is at any point momentarily suspended in air. Determined to find an answer, Stanford called in his chief engineer, John D. Isaacs, who in turn summoned the services of the photographer Eadweard Muybridge.
Muybridge was a self-created exotic (his real name was the rather more plebeian Edward Muggeridge) and an accomplished landscape photographer, though in 1877 his fame rested chiefly on having managed to get himself acquitted of murdering his wife’s lover in one of the more sensational cases of the age. Isaacs and Muybridge deployed twenty-four cameras along a racetrack and with the aid of trip-wires executed a series of photographs of a horse galloping past. This had two effects. It proved beyond question that a galloping horse does get all four hoofs off the ground, and for quite a lot of the time, and it marked the beginning of motion picture photography.1
Motion pictures of a type had been around since the late eighteenth century. Usually they involved cut-out silhouettes, pictures painted on discs or cylinders or some other such simple device, which could be back-lit and spun to throw a moving image on to a wall or screen. Despite their primitiveness these early devices went by a variety of scientifically impressive names: the phenakistoscope, the animatoscope, the thaumatrope, the phantascope, the stroboscope. Inspired by their linguistic inventiveness, Muybridge constructed a projector of his own and called it a zoopraxiscope. Soon other similar devices were flooding the market: the mutascope, the kinematoscope, the kinematograph, the theatrograph.
All of these had certain deficiencies, primarily that they relied on stringing together sequences of still photographs, a process that required either a lot of cameras or careful orchestration of movements on the part of the subjects. What was really needed was moving film. Thomas Edison saw himself as the man to provide it – or at least as the man to provide the man to provide it. He gave the task to a young Scotsman in his employ named W. K. L. Dickson. Dickson (who would later go on to found Biograph, one of the first Hollywood studios) studied the competitors’ machines, considered the problem, and in short order devised an entire motion picture system, the first in the world (which perhaps makes him the true father of the movies). The camera was called a kinetograph, the projection device a kinetoscope, and the films thus made were kinetophones. (I mention them specifically because books of film history sometimes confuse them.) Nothing that Dickson came up with was particularly new. He essentially put together, albeit in an ingenious way, existing technologies.
Edison didn’t envision kinetophone viewing as a shared, public experience, but rather as a home entertainment system – and one whose primary purpose would be to provide an extra, incidental use for his recently invented phonograph. Some of the early motion pictures even had sound. (What slowed the progress of sound movies wasn’t the problem of synchronization but of amplification.) He suspected the whole thing would prove a passing fad, and had so little confidence in it that he decided against spending $150 on an international patent, to his huge eventual cost.2
The first public demonstration of Dickson’s new system was on 14 April 1894, on Broadway in New York. Despite an admission charge of twenty-five cents, people lined up around the block for the chance to take a look at this marvellous new peep-show.3 (The invention may have been new, but the word wasn’t; peep-show had first been used in 1861 in reference to kinematoscope viewers.) Projected through fifty-foot loops of film, each kinetophone show lasted no more than a minute and sometimes as little as sixteen seconds, with obvious consequent limitations on narrative possibilities. That the camera which recorded the moving images weighed 500 lb. and was the size of a modern refrigerator acted as a further deterrent to adventurous scenarios. As a result, the first kinetophone films consisted of simple amusements: quick vaudeville turns, pratfalls, dancing bears and – something of a surprise hit – a brief but lively feature called Fred Ott’s Sneeze (Fred Ott being an Edison employee), which has the distinction of bei
ng the first copyrighted motion picture.
The shortcoming of the kinetoscope was that it could be viewed by only one person at a time. Unwilling or unable to see its potential, Edison failed to exploit his head start and was soon left behind in the hunt for a projection system that would allow motion pictures to become a shared experience. Rival systems began to sprout up everywhere, particularly in Europe where there were no copyright problems thanks to Edison’s miserly failure to secure a patent. In one of the more intriguing developments, an inventor named Louis Aimé Augustin le Prince briefly excited Paris in 1890 by demonstrating a fully developed system in which moving film was projected on to a screen to the delight and astonishment of an invited audience. Shortly after this acclaimed performance, le Prince left his house on some errand and was never seen again. Another inventor in Paris, one Jean Leroy, thereupon demonstrated a rival system, again to great acclaim, and likewise mysteriously vanished.4
Not until 1895 did anyone else crack the problems of projecting film. Then in quick succession came three workable systems, all developed independently. One was the cinématographe, invented by the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière. From this evolved both the French and British words for the movies as well as such terms as cinematography, cinematographer and, much later, Cinerama. The word occasionally appeared in America in the early days, though usually spelled kinema. In Germany, meanwhile, the brothers Max and Emile Skladanowsky developed their Bioskop, anglicized in America to Bioscope. And in England Robert Paul invented the Theatrograph or Animatographe, which was as technically sophisticated as the other two, but failed to prosper and soon dropped from contention.
At last it dawned on Edison that there was money to be made in the film game. Unable to invent his own projection system, he did the next best thing. He bought one and claimed to have invented it. The system was in fact the invention of Thomas Armat. The only thing Edison invented was the name: Vitascope. Armat based his system on Edison’s kinetophone, but improved it substantially. One improvement was the addition of a small reel that gave the film another loop. Called the Latham loop after its American inventors, the brothers Otway and Greg Latham, it didn’t look much, but it transformed the history of the movies. Before the Latham loop, movies of more than a minute or so were impossible because the film would so often break. The Latham loop eased the tension on the film and in doing so made it possible to create films of more than a hundred feet. For the first time real movies, with plots, were possible.
The first public display of this new wonder was on 23 April 1896, as an added attraction between live shows at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall on Thirty-fourth Street and Broadway (a site now occupied by Macy’s).5 Not having enough films of his own to show, Edison illegally copied some of the Lumière brothers’ early works.6 Motion picture was coined in 1891, but wasn’t used much at first. The earliest movies were called life portrayals or mechanically reproduced theatre entertainment, though by the end of 1896 people were calling them moving pictures and by the early 1900s had shortened this almost everywhere to movies (though until as late as the 1920s people sometimes referred to them as movie plays). People who took the pictures were called camerists. Cameraman didn’t occur to anyone until 1905.
The first real movie – that is, one with a story-line – was The Great Train Robbery by Edwin S. Porter, who had begun in the Edison studios in Paterson, New Jersey, as a general handyman and camerist before rising to become head of production. Running eleven minutes and containing fourteen scenes, The Great Train Robbery was not only revolutionary in its sophisticated editing and pacing, but also in its content. It was both the first true movie and the first western – though that word wouldn’t become general until about 1928; before that they were cowboy movies or gun operas – and the first to explore the exciting possibilities of violent crime.7 It was a sensation. The excitement it generated and its sense of wondrous novelty are difficult to conceive now. When one of the characters fired a gun at the camera, many members of the audience gasped and recoiled. (This may not seem quite so ridiculous if you pause to consider your own response the first time you saw a 3-D movie.) A few even fainted. It became one of those things that simply everybody had to see.
Almost overnight movies went from being a craze to a compulsion. By 1905 people everywhere were flocking to store theatres (so called because they were usually set up in vacant stores) or nickelodeons, where viewers were treated to half an hour of escapism for a nickel. Nickelodeon had been used as a word for peep-show arcades since 1888, though the first purpose-built cinema, in Pittsburgh, styled itself not a nickelodeon, but a Nicolet. Within two weeks of the Nicolet’s opening, people were flocking to the theatre from eight in the morning until midnight to see Edwin S. Porter’s sensational Great Train Robbery, and the proprietors were clearing profits of $1,000 a week.
By 1906 there were a thousand nickelodeons all over America; by 1907 five thousand. Film was designed to run at a speed of sixteen frames per second, but nickelodeon operators quickly discovered that if they speeded things up a little they could get in more shows. For millions, attending the nickelodeon became a kind of addiction. By 1908 New York City’s movie theatres – the word had been coined the year before; in 1914 it would be joined by movie houses – were clocking up 200,000 admissions every day, including Sundays when they were required by law to be closed. Many non-movie-goers considered the phenomenon alarming if not distasteful. This was partly because of the mildly risqué nature of some of the shows – within two weeks of Edison launching the first kinetophone parlour in 1894 some enterprising opportunist was offering a peep-show called Doloria in the Passion Dance, which was not terribly titillating by modern standards but was certainly a step up on Fred Ott’s Sneeze – and partly because the movies attracted a disproportionate number of lower-class immigrants (for whom language problems often made other, more verbal forms of entertainment impractical), and anything that gave pleasure to lower-class immigrants was almost by definition suspect. But it was also because of something less specific – a vague sense that going to the pictures was somehow immoral and conducive to idleness – and authorities often had sudden, unprompted purges on the early movie houses, as in 1908 when New York Mayor George B. McLellan arbitrarily ordered shut all 550 of that city’s establishments for no real reason other than that he didn’t like them.8
The word movies even began to take on a slightly unsavoury tone. In 1912 a studio called Essanay invited fans to come up with a better name. The winning entry was photoplay. It never caught on as a word for the pictures, but it did become the name of a hugely successful magazine.9 (Hollywood’s curious disdain of the word movies is reflected in the decidedly inflated title of its most vaunted institution: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.)
As movies became increasingly sophisticated they developed an argot to describe the new production techniques – close-up (1913), to pan (1915), fade-in and fade-out (1918), dissolve (1920), trailers (early 1920s), and captions (1907), subtitles or titles (1913) for the frames of dialogue or explication that were inserted into the film at intervals to explain the action. Some were used so often that they passed into the language as stock phrases, notably ‘comes the dawn’ and ‘meanwhile back at the ranch’.10 Trailers were so called because in the early days they followed, or trailed, the main film. Many other movie words were taken from the stage. Slapstick was a vaudeville term. It described two sticks that were literally slapped together off-stage to accentuate an onstage pratfall (prat being an old slang term for the buttocks). Ham actor, first recorded in 1875, alludes to the practice of lesser performers having to use ham fat rather than cold cream to remove their make-up. Soon a second-rate actor was known as a hamfatter; by 1902 he was just a ham. Grips, the term for scenery shifters, was also originally a theatrical term. They were so called because they gripped the sets and props when they moved them.
By 1925 the movies had become not only America’s most popular form of entertainment, but its fifth
biggest industry, and people everywhere dreamed of making it big in Hollywood. How a dusty, misnamed southern California hamlet that never had much to do with the making of movies became indelibly fixed in the popular consciousness as the home of the entertainment industry is a story that takes a little telling.
Let’s start with the name. Hollywood never had any holly or even much wood to speak of. Originally called Cahuenga Valley, it was principally the site of a ranch owned by a Mr and Mrs Harvey Henderson Wilcox. The more romantic name came after Mrs Wilcox, on a trip back east, fell into a conversation with a stranger on a train and was so taken with the name of her new acquaintance’s summer home, Hollywood, that she decided to rename the ranch. That was in 1887, and in the general course of things that would very probably have been that. Hollywood would have been an anonymous piece of semi-arid real estate waiting to be swallowed up by Los Angeles.
But between 1908 and 1913 something else happened. Many small independent film companies began moving to southern California, among them the Selis Company, the Nestor Film Company, Biograph and Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios (from which of course would eventually come the Keystone Kops movies). Partly they were drawn by the weather, which would permit year-round filming without a lot of expensive lighting. (Early ‘studios’, if it’s not too much to call them that, were mostly in the open air, with even interior scenes shot on stages that had backdrops but no roofs.) More crucially, they were also trying to escape the threats, legal and physical, of the Motion Pictures Patents Company, a consortium of eight studios led (inevitably) by Thomas A. Edison. The MPPC had been trying for some years to gain monopoly control of the movie business and had developed increasingly aggressive tactics to encourage competitors to join the consortium and pay its hefty licensing fees. Its idea of exploratory negotiations was to send in a party of thugs with baseball bats. Hence the appeal of a locale two thousand miles away on another coast.
