Dream Factories and Radio Pictures (26 page)
Read Dream Factories and Radio Pictures Online
Authors: Howard Waldrop
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Essays & Correspondence, #Essays, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Anthologies, #short stories, #Anthologies & Short Stories, #TV; Movie; Video Game Adaptations
●
PART TWO
●
Radio Pictures
W
HAT THE MOVIES DID,
around the corner, for a quarter, television came to your house and, in any room you wanted—living room, kitchen, bedroom—did for free.
All the science fiction stories of the ’20s and ’30s dealt with television (a word coined by Hugo Gernsback) as this great medium that would bring high-tone radio programming—opera, great plays and novels, educational shows—into your home,
with pictures
.
You would be enlightened, ennobled: you could see great actors and actresses, the world’s greatest plays; far-off places, scientists, philosophers, all at the touch of a button and the click of a dial.
They envisioned enlightenment streaming from the great broadcasting centers and (even before Arthur C. Clarke thought of geosynchronous communications satellites) events broadcast simultaneously around the world. You could go anywhere, see anything, never leave home. The wonders of the world would come to you.
So how did we get
Mr. Ed
, a horse, selling you oats?
My Mother the Car
?
The Love Boat
?
American Gladiators
?
Johnnie LaRue’s Jumping for Dollars
? Who was responsible? How had the dream gone so bad in so few years?
Along with all that great stuff it was capable of (and there has been
plenty
) it has probably served up more steaming heaps of
caca
than have been shoveled in the history of the planet, even more than the movies could ever dream
Where had those dreams of the uplifters gone?
What follows are attempts at a stammering explanation in this hydrogenous age, as Dylan Thomas used to say before he croaked at age thirty-nine . . .
* * *
As soon as there was photography, there was an attempt to make the picture
move
. Motion pictures were
one
answer—all the experiments of Muybridge, Friese-Greene, the Lumières, Edison, the invention of the Maltese Cross and the loop, to cause the camera (and the projector, which at one time were
the same machine
) to pause at the precise point to add to the persistence of vision at 1/24th of a second.
Parallel to this, and once photoactive chemicals were found, others tried to find a way to instill motion some other way. They
knew
it involved holding an image a fraction of a second, then the next image, and so on. They knew it probably involved electricity. Their experiments are almost as old as photography. (Go find and read R.A. Lafferty’s brilliant take on this in “Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies,” which originally appeared in the late Terry Carr’s
Universe 8
.) They tried them
all
: selenium, all the other -iums which take a charge, become luminescent, and can be made to hold an image.
Making it move was another matter. Anything which electrically disrupted the image also obliterated it. Hence the slow development of all kinds of systems, electrical and electronic, mechanical, or a combination of the two, some of which are described in the following three forays.
A few months after I’d meticulously researched, from hundreds of places, the backgrounds for the first two of these stories—
voilà!
There are big-ass books and
two
television series that put it all together, in one place, at one time; easy pickin’s. My method was more fun and wasted lots more time, and I got most of it right.
So, as I said, here’s to all the old SF writers who envisioned the uplift of the (human) race through broadcasting, who wanted a future where great culture was yours at the flick of a switch. And to all the mad Russians in their mothers’ basements (Zwyorkin) and Idaho ploughboys seeing in the contours of a field the way to make an image appear on a phosphor-dot screen (Philo T. Farnsworth) and Scots who got
so close
, and had the thing that could have worked, a good mechanical TV, up and broadcasting, only to take one look at the all-electric orthicon tube, and see the jig was up; he saw the Future, and he wasn’t in it (John Logie Baird).
And dozens of others, whose lives were heartbreak and who died unknown somewhere, the places where people laugh when the children say, “My father invented television.” For the bitterly ironic thing is, they’re telling the truth.
Introduction: Hoover’s Men
T
HE HISTORY OF BROADCASTING
is one of accidents.
The reason stations started was the dream—music, opera, plays, funny people telling jokes
in your house
. Stations broadcast: People bought radios. But people quit buying radios for a while because there was nothing to listen to twelve hours of the day. More radio stations were built that broadcast longer hours. People bought more sets. So many stations went on the air they interfered with each other. Radio sales went down again. The Commerce Department set up what later became the FCC and assigned frequencies, and thoughtfully divided up all the airwaves between Canada and the U.S., leaving Mexico out of the picture, which is what led in the 1950s to the million-watt blue-lightning-bolt-emitting Mexican-border radio stations like XERF, sending out signals you could pick up from Newfoundland to McMurdo Sound—won’t let us have
any
airwaves, señor? We’ll use them
all
. Networks were set up by the radio manufacturers to sell more radios.
Then somebody asked if he could advertise his egg farm on WHYY in Philly. He paid something like ten dollars for an hour’s worth of time over the next month. The guy was out of eggs in two days. . . .
Gee whiz! When they realized people would pay money to sell people stuff on your radio station, or network, the whole thing changed. Before, it had been about culture, entertainment, and selling radio sets. After, it was about the same thing it is now: dollars. The programming was there to get the audience to get the advertiser to pay dollars to sell their stuff to that audience . . .
Meanwhile, there were the Russians in the basements, and the ploughboys, and mad Scots, and people with a little brains at the stations and networks, who were working on Radio with Pictures, and
just could not see
that the same damned thing that had happened to radio was going to repeat itself with Tele-Vision. . . .
* * *
I wrote this for one of Ellen Datlow’s what I call six-authors-for-a-buck things. Once every year or so at
Omni
—when it was a magazine—she’d ask six or seven writers for very short stories on common themes, and they’d all be printed in a single issue of the magazine. This went on for years—my year was 1988. Ellen said the theme was Urban Fantasy. Urban Fantasy? That means it takes place
in a city
, and it
didn’t happen
! Okay! Other writers my year: Daniel Pinkwater, Joyce Carol Oates, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Barry Malzberg, and K. W. Jeter. Pretty damn hot-shit company to keep.
And, as I said, after I’d killed myself in the research, here come PBS and the networks doing all my work for me, after the fact, making me sort of the John Logie Baird of the history-of-early-broadcasting SF story, of which I consider myself the exemplar. . . .
Hoover’s Men
O
N MARCH 30, 1929, THREE WEEKS AFTER
Al Smith’s Presidential inauguration, four gunmetal-gray Fords were parked on a New Jersey road. On the
tonneau
top of each was a large silver loop antenna.
There were fifteen men in all—some inside the cars in their shirtsleeves, earphones on their heads, the others sitting on the running boards or standing in stylish poses. All those outside wore dark blue or gray suits, hats, and dark ties with small checks on them. Each had a bulge under one of his armpits.
It was dusk. On the horizon, two giant aerials stood two hundred feet high, with a long wire connecting them. They were in silhouette and here and there they blotted out one of the early stars. Back to the east lay the airglow of Greater Manhattan.
Men in the cars switched on their worklights. Outside the first car Carmody uncrossed his arms, opened his pocket watch, noted the time on his clipboard. “Six fifty-two. Start your logs,” he said. Word passed down the line.
He reached in through the window, picked up the extra set of headphones next to Dalmas and listened in:
“This is station MAPA coming to you from Greater New Jersey with fifty thousand mighty watts of power. Now, to continue with The Darkies’ Hour for all our listeners over in Harlem, is Oran ‘Hot Lips’ Page with his rendition of ‘Blooey!’ featuring Floyd ‘Horsecollar’ Williams on the alto saxophone. . . .”
“Jesus,” said Dalmas, looking at his dials. “The station’s all over the band, blocking out everything from 750 to 1245. Nothin’ else is getting through nowhere this side of Virginia!”
Carmody made a note on his clipboard pages.
* * *
“The engineer—that’s Ma—said sorry we were off the air this afternoon for a few minutes but we blew out one of our heptodes, and you know how danged particular they can be. She says we’ll get the kinks out of our new transmitter real soon.
“Don’t forget—at 7:05 tonight, Madame Sosostris will be in to give the horoscopes and read the cards for all you listeners who’ve written her, enclosing your twenty-five-cents handling fee, in the past week. . . .”
* * *
“Start the wire recorders,” said Carmody.
* * *
“Remember to turn off your radio sets for five minutes just before 7:00
P.M.
That’s four minutes from now. First, we’re going up to what, Ma?—two hundred and ninety thousand watts—in our continuin’ effort to contact the planet Mars, then we’ll be down to about three quarters of a watt with our antenna as a receiver in our brand-new effort to make friends with the souls of the departed.
“Here, to end our Negro music broadcast for this evening are Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong and Dwight ‘Ike’ Eisenhower with their instrumental ‘Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?’ Hang on, this one will really heat up your ballast tubes. . . .”
Some of the sweetest horn and clarinet music Dalmas had ever heard came out of the earphones. He swayed in time to the music. Carmody looked at him. “Geez. You don’t have to enjoy this stuff so much. We have a job to do.” He checked his pocket watch again.
He turned to Mallory. “I want precise readings on everything. I want recordings from all four machines. Mr. Hoover doesn’t want a judge throwing anything out on a technicality like with the KXR2Y thing. Understood?”
“Yeah, boss,” said Mallory from the third car.
“Let’s go, then,” said Carmody.
* * *
Just then the sky lit up blue and green in a crackling halo that flickered back and forth between the aerials on the horizon.
“Yikes!” yelled Dalmas, throwing the earphones off. The sound coming out of them could be heard fifty feet away.
“
EARTH CALLING MARS! EARTH CALLING MARS
!
THIS IS STATION MAPA
,
MA AND PA
,
CALLING MARS
.
HOWDY TO ALL OUR MARTIAN LISTENERS
.
COME SEE US
!
“
EARTH CALLING MARS
. . .”
* * *
They burst through the locked station door. Small reception room, desk piled high with torn envelopes and stacks of quarters, a glass wall for viewing into the studio, locked power room to one side. A clock on the wall that said 7:07. There was a small speaker box and intercom on the viewer window.
An old woman was sitting at a table at a big star-webbed carbon mike with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders and a crystal ball in front of her. An old man stood nearby holding a sheaf of papers in his hand.
“ . . . and a listener writes ‘Dear Madame Sosostris—’ ”
Carmody went to the intercom and pushed down the button. He held up his badge. “United States Government, Federal Radio Agency, Radio Police!” he said.
They both looked up.
“Cheese it, Pa! The Feds!” said the woman, throwing off her shawl. She ran to the racks of glowing and humming pentodes on the far wall, throwing her arms wide as if to hide them from sight.
“Go arrest some bootleggers, G-Man!” yelled Pa.
“Not my jurisdiction. And Prohibition ends May 1st. You’d know that if you were fulfilling your responsibilities to keep the public informed . . .” said Carmody.
“See, ladies and gentlemen in radioland,” yelled Pa into the microphone, “this is what happens to private enterprise in a totalitarian state! The airwaves belong to
anybody
! My great uncle invented radio—he did!—Marconi stole it from him in a swindle. Government interference! Orville Wright doesn’t have a pilot’s license! He invented flying. My family invented radio . . .”
“ . . . you are further charged with violation of nineteen sections of the Radio Act of 1929,” said Carmody, continuing to read from the warrant. “First charge, operating an unlicensed station broadcasting on the AM band, a public resource. Second, interfering with the broadcast of licensed operations—”
“See, Mr. and Mrs. Radio Listener, what putting one man in charge of broadcasting does! Ma! Crank it up all the way!” Ma twisted some knobs. The sky outside the radio station turned blue and green again. Carmody’s hair stood up, pushing his hat off his head. His arms tingled.
“SOS!” yelled Pa. “SOS! Help! Help! This is station MAPA. Get your guns! Meet us at the station! Show these Fascists we won’t put up with—”
“We’ll add sending a false distress call over the airwaves, incitement to riot, and breach of the peace,” said Carmody, penciling on his notes, “having astrologers, clairvoyants, and mediums in contravention of the Radio Act of 1929 . . .”
The first of the axes went through the studio door.
“ . . . use of the airwaves for a lottery.” Carmody looked up. “Give yourselves up,” he said. He watched while Ma and Pa ran around inside the control room, piling the meager furniture against the battered door. “Very well. Resisting arrest by duly authorized Federal agents. Unlawful variation in broadcast power—”
“Squeak! Squeak! Help!” said Pa. Dalmas had bludgeoned his way into the shrieking power room and threw all the breaker switches. Ma and Pa turned into frantic blurs as all the needles dropped to zero. The sky outside went New Jersey dark and Carmody’s hair lay back down.
“Good,” he said, still reading into the intercom. “Advertising prohibited articles and products over the public airwaves. Broadcast of obscene and suggestive material. Use of . . .”
The door gave up.
“Book ’em, Dalmas,” he said.
* * *
“Two minutes, Mr. Hoover,” said the floor manager. He waved his arms. In a soundproof room an engineer put his foot on a generator motor and yanked on the starter cord. Then he adjusted some knobs and gave an okay signal with a circled thumb and finger.
Hoover sat down at the bank of microphones. A four-by-eight-foot panel of photosensitive cells lowered into place in front of him. In a cutout portion in its center was a disk punched with holes. As the panel came down the disk began to spin faster and faster. The studio lights came up to blinding intensity. Hoover blinked, shielded his eyes.
Carmody and Mallory stood in the control room behind the engineers, the director, and the station manager. Before them on the bank of knobs and lights was a two-by-three-inch flickering screen filled with lines in which Mallory could barely make out Mr. Hoover. Carmody and the other chiefs had turned in their reports to Hoover an hour before.
“I never thought he’d take this job,” said an engineer.
“Aw, Hoover’s a public servant,” said the director.
The
STAND BY
sign went off. Hoover arranged his papers.
ON THE AIR
blazed in big red letters over the control booth. The announcer at his mikes at the side table said:
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. This is Station WRNY and it’s 11:00
P.M.
in New York City. Tonight, live via coast-to-coast hookup on all radio networks, the Canadian Broadcasting System, and through the television facilities of WIXA2 New York and W2JA4 Washington, D.C., we present a broadcast from the head of the new Federal Radio Agency concerning the future of the airwaves. Ladies and gentlemen of the United States and Canada, Mr. Hoover.”
The graying, curly-haired gentleman looked into the whirling Nipkow disk with the new Sanabria interlaced pattern and pushed one of the microphones a little further from him.
“I come to you tonight as the new head of the Federal Radio Agency. After the recent elections, in which I lost the Presidency to Mr. Alfred Smith, I assumed that after eight years as your Secretary of Commerce under the last two administrations I would be asked to leave government service.
“Imagine my delight and surprise when Mr. Smith asked me to stay on, but in the new position of head of the Federal Radio Agency. If I may quote the President: ‘Who knows more about
raddio
than you, Herbert? It’s all in a
turrible
mess and I’d like you to straighten it out, once and for all.’
“Well, tonight, I’m taking your President’s words to heart. As chief enforcement officer under the new and valuable Radio Act of 1929, I’m announcing the following:
“Today my agents closed down fourteen radio stations. Nine were violating the total letter of the law; five were, after repeated warnings, still violating its spirit. Tomorrow, six more will be closed down. This will end the most flagrant of our current airwave problems.
“As to the future,” Hoover pushed back a white wisp of hair that had fallen over his forehead, “tomorrow I will begin meetings with representatives of the Republic of Mexico and see what can be done about establishing frequencies for their use. They were summarily ignored when Canada and the United States divided the airwaves in 1924.”
The station manager leaned forward intently.
“If this means another division and realignment of the frequencies of existing stations, so be it,” said Hoover.
The station manager slapped his hand to his forehead and shook it from side to side.
“Furthermore,” said Hoover, “under powers given to me, I am ready to issue commercial radiovision/radio movie/television licenses to any applicant who will conform to the seventy-line thirty-frame format for monochrome . . .”
“He’s gone
meshuggah!
” said the engineer. “
Nobody
uses that format!”
“Quiet,” said Carmody. “Mr. Hoover’s talking.”
“ . . . or the one-forty-line, sixty-frame format for color transmission and reception, with the visual portion on the shortwave and the audio portion on the newly opened frequency-modulated bandwidths.”
“Aaiiii!!” yelled the station manager, running out of the booth toward the desk phone in the next office.
“He’s
crazy!
Everybody’s got a different system!” said the director.
“No doubt Mr. Hoover’s in for some heat,” said Mallory.
“To those who say radio-television is too primitive and experimental to allow regular commercial broadcasting, I say,
you’re
the ones holding up progress. The time for review is
after
new and better methods are developed, not before. This or that rival concern have been for years trying to persuade the government to adopt
their
particular formats and methods.”
He looked into the whirling lights, put down his papers. “I will say to the people of those concerns: Here is your format, like it or lump it.”
Then he smiled. “For a wholesome and progressive future in America, dedicated to better broadcasting for the public good, this is the head of your nation’s Federal Radio Agency, Herbert Hoover, saying goodnight. Good Night.”
The
STAND BY
sign came back on. The blinding lights went down and the disk slowed and stopped; then the whole assembly was pulled back into the ceiling.
In the outer office the station manager was crying.
* * *
Mr. Hoover was still shaking hands when Carmody and Mallory left.
Early tomorrow they had to take off for upstate New York. There was a radio station there with an experimental-only license that was doing regular commercial broadcasts. It would be a quiet shut-down, not at all like this evening’s.
As they walked to the radio car, two cabs and a limo swerved up to the curbing, missing them and each other by inches. Doors swung open. Sarnoff jumped out of the NBC Studebaker limo. He was in evening clothes. The head of CBS was white as a sheet as he piled out of the cab throwing money behind him. One of the vice-presidents of the Mutual System got to the door before they did. There was almost a fistfight.
There was a sound in the air like that of a small fan on a nice spring day. Overhead the airship
Ticonderoga
was getting a late start on its three-day journey to Los Angeles.
Mallory pulled away from the curb heading back to the hotel where Dalmas and the other agents were already asleep. He reached forward to the dashboard, twisted a knob. A glowing yellow light came on.
“Geez, I’m beat,” said Carmody. “See if you can’t get something decent on the thing, okay?”
* * *
Nine years later, after his second heart attack and retirement, Carmody was in his apartment. He was watching his favorite program,
The Clark Gable-Carole Lombard Show
on his new Philco console color television set with the big nine-by-twelve-inch screen.