On July 10, 2009 an unusual film biography of an unusual television and radio broadcasting pioneer will premiere at the Lincoln Plaza and Quad Cinemas in New York. The film is Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, and the filmmaker is Aviva Kempner, who had previously produced the commercially and critically acclaimed documentary The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg in 1998. The film will move to the Beekman Theater on July 17 and then go to theaters nationally.

Kempner’s new documentary biography, and a recent Syracuse University Press book, ‘Something on My Own’: Gertrude Berg and American Broadcasting, 1929-56, by Glenn D. Smith1, bring to life one of television’s formidable pioneers: Gertrude Berg. One of the tag line’s for the Kempner documentary is: “The most famous woman in America that you never heard of.” And, indeed, whereas most Americans know Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason, Burns and Allen and Milton Berle, few have heard of Gertrude Berg.

It turns out that Gertrude Berg was the founder of the family situation comedy on radio and television. She was Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz rolled into one, a business genius and negotiator as well as performer, writer, director and auteur of her own show — and this during an era when women in up-front power positions were rare. She was known as “Molly Goldberg” on her show The Goldbergs, which ran from 1929-49 on radio and from 1949-56 on television. Kempner’s film gives a fascinating multi-sided portrait of Gertrude Berg, the demons that drove her and the undeniable imagination and talent that made her such a prolific writer-producer and star of early television. Gertrude Berg had extraordinary powers of observation, love for her grandparents’ generation, and an innate drive to write and perform evident from her teenage years when she entertained the children of guests at her father’s Catskills hotel.

The Goldbergs was The Cosby Show of its time. Instead of an upper middle class African American family in the 1980s, tens of millions of listeners and viewers joined an iconic lower middle class Jewish family in the Bronx. At one point the radio show was simultaneously aired on all three networks, something that had never happened before, and by the end Gertrude Berg’s salary had increased to the then-phenomenal $7500 a week. She received royalties from a daily newspaper comic strip of The Goldbergs and at approximately $500,000 a year, was one of the best known and highest-paid women in America.

The fact that Gertrude Berg was an outspoken liberal and that the The Goldbergs gave a frank depiction of Jewish ethnicity at the height of the McCarthy period, when anti-communism and anti-semitism were rife and often interconnected2, also made the show stand out. Despite Jewish broadcasting executives’ anxiety about shows that were “too Jewish,” The Goldbergs created one place where Jewish audiences had a chance to see themselves.

Three generations of Jewish Americans were represented on the show. On one side of Molly Goldberg and her husband Jake was the first-generation “Uncle David,” with the characteristic shrug of the shoulders and Yiddish theater inflection that made him endearing. On the other side were the third-generation “kids” who were becoming fully American. But it was Molly Goldberg herself, placed squarely in the middle, still speaking the Yiddish-inflected language of the Bronx when she moved to the suburbs years later, who created the central vitality of the show as she opened it each week from her window in the Bronx.

Aviva Kempner’s film and Glenn D. Smith’s book are not solitary phenomena. They are part of a broader re-emergence of interest in ethnicity in popular culture and Jewish ethnicity in particular. This re-discovery of Yiddishkeit — the language, humor, and folk artistry that accompanied the Yiddish-speaking wave of immigration to the U.S. in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth century — has been represented by the rediscovery of traditional Jewish Klezmer music, in its many neo-Klezmer forms; by the Yiddish Radio Project broadcast on National Public Radio3; by the amazing new Yiddish Book Center in Northhampton, Massachusetts4; by a major exhibition, Entertaining America: Jews, Movies and Broadcasting, put on by the Jewish Museum of New York in 2003, and the Princeton University Press book that came out the year of the exhibit (J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler, eds, Entertaining America: Jews, Movies and Broadcasting, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.)); and by Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, which, as of December 2008, was in pre-production for a movie by the Coen Brothers.

Why did it take so long for recognition to come to a performer who had such an obviously long run and impact on the radio and television industry? How did Lucille Ball become such an icon of early television when, up to this point at least, most Americans have never heard of “Gertrude Berg”?

The answers are multiple – technical, economic, and cultural. Only relatively poor quality kinescopes were available for the classic episodes of The Goldbergs in the Bronx. Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball had high quality 16 mm masters for syndication and re-runs. I Love Lucy was identified with one network, CBS, throughout its run. It had the advantage of simple network brand identification and loyalty. Through the vagaries of its business history, The Goldbergs appeared on three separate networks (CBS, NBC, and Dumont). Then there was the crucial period during which Philip Loeb, “Jake Goldberg” on the show, was driven off the air because his name appeared on the Red Channels blacklist. Gertrude Berg’s spirited defense of her co-star was, in retrospect, heroic. But her liberal credentials and battle to keep Loeb on the air put her, by association, in the penumbra of the blacklist. It certainly made it both more difficult for her to keep the show on the air as long as she did, and it discouraged Berg and the show from being acknowledged in broadcasting history memorials afterwards.

It is also true that the late fifties and early sixties were a time when other ethnic shows (I Remember Mama, The Life of Riley) were losing favor in the new multi-sponsor corporate environment of network television. Finally, a show like I Love Lucy had the advantage of having instantly recognizable physical humor, pratfalls, and comedy that went straight for the laughs—belly laughs, rolling laughs. The comedy and humor in The Goldbergs and other “dramedies” of the time like I Remember Mama were of a gentler kind, folding into the human situations and characters portrayed. The show was not something that would stop a viewer flipping through the channels watching re-runs on TV Land with the immediate jolt of its images or humor. You would have to want to return to that earlier time and savor the intricacies and richness of the writing, plots, and ethical and moral dilemmas to truly enjoy a show like The Goldbergs.

Now, fifty years after the last episode of The Goldbergs, its time may have finally come. With only the suburban “Haverville” episodes of The Goldbergs commercially available up to now, in the next few years the UCLA Film and Television Archive is preparing commercial DVD distribution for the Bronx shows as well. Good television history and criticism are playing a role as well. Aviva Kempner’s documentary and Glenn D. Smith’s comprehensive history of Gertrude Berg finally do justice to a broadcasting pioneer who did as much or more than anyone else to shape the genre of a family, and a situation, on television.

Image Credits:
1. Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg!
2. On the set of The Goldbergs
3. Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union
4. Gertrude Berg as “Mrs. Goldberg”

Please feel free to comment.

1. Glenn D. Smith, Jr. ‘Something on My Own: Gertrude Berg and American Broadcasting, 1929-56,’ The Television Series, Robert J. Thompson, Series Editor, Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 207.
2. See Arthur Miller’s first novel, Focus, 1945, and Laura Z. Hobson’s Gentleman’s Agreement, 1947, brought to the screen that same year by Darryl Zanuck to win the Academy Award. Both are searing indictments of anti-semitism in late 40s and 50s America.
3. Produced by musician and historian Henry Sapoznik with MacArthur Fellow radio documentary producer David Isay, the 10-part Yiddish Radio Project series won a Peabody award in 2002 and continued on-line with a 26-week festival of Yiddish radio. See also:
4. Founded by MacArthur Fellow Aaron Lansky, the Center is supported by 30,000 members and bills itself as “the fastest growing Jewish cultural organization in the country”.

This disco-inspired parody of the Jordache jeans commercial was the seventh appearance of Gilda Radner as “Jewish American Princess” Rhonda Weiss. The 60-second commercial ends with the tag line: “You don’t have to be Jewish to wear Jewess Jeans,” and Gilda/Rhonda’s immediate on-camera reply: “But it wouldn’t hurt.”

The commercial aired at the end of what many consider Saturday Night Live’s greatest period: its first five years under executive producer Lorne Michaels from 1975-80. What Gilda Radner and the writers of Saturday Night Live had done was puncture one more longstanding taboo of network television.

But this taboo had been a particularly strong one. David Zurawik, along with Neil Gabler,2 Steven Carr,3 and other film and popular culture historians, have detailed the ways in which the Jewish “moguls,” whether they ran studios or were executives of television networks, were ever apprehensive about material they considered “too Jewish.” As Zurawik points out in The Jews of Prime Time,4 these television executives had motives that were deeply ambivalent and social-psychological at root. Their decisions had more to do with their own self-perceived fragile positions as assimilated American Jews than the economic arguments they marshaled against Jewish characters and themes on television.

The “too Jewish” taboo was still alive and well at the end of the 1980s. One notable example of how strong the network executives’ instincts were against programming that “outed” Jewish humor came with the initial pitch by Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David for Seinfeld at NBC. With only six million or so Jews in the total U.S. population, for a television executive like Brandon Tartikoff at NBC a show featuring a Jew “could never find a large enough audience to be commercially viable.”5 Though himself Jewish, Tartikoff was ready to nix Seinfeld before its first episode. It was saved only by the forceful intervention of another, non-Jewish television executive.

Noting Tartikoff’s reluctance to air the show at all, when Seinfeld and co-producer Larry David launched the show in 1989 they cautiously obfuscated specific Jewish identity on the show. The “cultural ambiguity” of the Jason Alexander/George Costanza character was a case in point. Costanza’s parents, played by Jerry Stiller and Estelle Harris, wanted more specific instruction on their ethnic origins. “When I first started on my first [episode of the series], I went over to Larry David,” said Harris. “I told him that it would help my motivation to know what the Costanzas are. ‘Are they Spanish? Are they Italian? Are they Jewish?’ And he said, ‘You don’t have to know.’ And that was the only answer I ever got, really.” Stiller’s response to the matter: “I think we’re a Jewish family in the Witness Protection Program under the name Costanza.”6 With some exceptions on Seinfeld (for example, the notorious shaky-handed “mohel” episode directed by Larry Charles),7 it was only after Larry David went to HBO for the first five years of Curb Your Enthusiasm 2000-2005 that Jewish identity and Jewish culture became specific (and regular) targets of his satire.

In the winter of 1980, therefore, Gilda Radner’s “Jewess Jeans” satire was raw and in-your-face. The “Jewess Jeans” commercial was not the first of Radner’s appearances on Saturday Night Live as the “Jewish American Princess” character Rhonda Weiss, it was her seventh. In all, Radner performed seventeen characters during those first five years on the show, including “bumbling Emily Litella, scatterbrained Roseanne Roseannadanna, and nerdy Lisa Loopner.”8 But it was as a Jewish woman performer relishing a Jewish American stereotype, enjoying it, and turning it on its face that Radner broke a new glass ceiling on this issue. Not until almost thirty years later would the word “Jewess” be reclaimed with a note of third-generation “Heeb movement” celebratory pride in on-line and print forums like the Jewish Women’s Archive’s blog “Jewesses with Attitude,” Rebecca Honig Friedman”s “Jewess,” and Ophira Edut’s “The Jewess is Loose!”9

Gilda Radner herself had always been comfortable with her Jewish identity. It was one of the first things her new husband Gene Wilder noticed about her when he met and eventually married her in the early 1980s.10 Born June 28, 1946, into the prosperous Detroit Jewish family of Herman and Henrietta (Dworkin) Radner and older brother Michael, Gilda Radner’s grandfather, George Ratkowsky, had emigrated from Lithuania to New York City, and later to Detroit, where he established a successful kosher meat business. Her father, despite only a fifth-grade education, made the family fortune from an Ontario brewery he purchased in the 1920s. “While not religiously observant in her adult life, Radner had a clearly Jewish upbringing. Her brother had a bar mitzvah, she attended Sunday and Hebrew school, and sat shiva for her father when he died.”11

Executive producer Lorne Michaels was also comfortable with the Jewish satire. Born Lorne Michael Lipowitz on November 17, 1944, he had been part of a Toronto Jewish community that was comfortable with its identity and roots. Saturday Night Live performers attended seders at Michaels’ home, and he encouraged writers like Al Franken, Rosie Schuster (Michaels’ wife until their divorce in 1980), Marilyn Miller, Allan Zweibel and others to write material that took on Jewish cultural topics directly.

The “Jewess Jeans” parody was by no means the first or the last of the Jewish parodies on the show. Three years previously the famous “Royal Deluxe II” car commercial aired. In it a Rabbi performs a death-defying circumcision in the back of a car, complete with potholes, sudden road signs, crazy zigs and zags to “challenge” his skill.12 Parodies to follow included: a dating video sketch starring former series regular Gary Kroeger as a perverted dentist named “Ira Needleman;” a faux home-shopping program featuring a cheesy, underhanded Israeli electronics salesman played by guest host Tom Hanks, who also hosted the “Jew, Not a Jew” quiz game (with strong echoes of the famous Lenny Bruce routine); the “Minkman brothers,” Al and Herb, a pair of unscrupulous merchandisers played by cast members Christopher Guest and Billy Crystal in 1984; recurring segments by Linda Richman as a “Coffee Talk” yenta; a skit combining guest host Jerry Seinfeld, a Passover seder, and an unbelievably boorish Jewish family;13 and the famous Al Franken/Jon Lovitz “The Night Hanukah Harry Saved Christmas” sketch.14

So what was the secret? What broke the ice? What enabled Saturday Night Live to take on and demolish a show business taboo that was so powerful it almost kept Seinfeld off the air? The answer: a Jewish star who was comfortable in her identity and had star power, an executive who also had some power, was also comfortable in his identity and enjoyed poking fun at it, and a show that made it’s name by taking on idols and taboos in show business – and smashing them.

Image Credits:

1. Gilda Radner on SNL
2. Larry David, the creator of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm
3. The Costanzas from Seinfeld

Please feel free to comment.

1. Saturday Night Live, Episode 5.11 (Program #97), February 16, 1980. The commercial appears on a number of sites on-line as a “classic” of early SNL, and also on the “Best of Gilda Rader” DVD.
2. Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, New York: Crown, 1988.
3. Steve Carr, Hollywood and Anti-Semitism: A Cultural History Up to World War II, London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
4. David Zurawik, The Jews of Prime Time, Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2003.
5. Zurawik, p. 202.
6. Zurawik, p. 206, and Bruce Fretts, “Oy George! The Elder Costanzas of ‘Seinfeld,’” Entertainment Weekly on-line edition, http://www.ew.com/ew/report, posted 5/13/94 – cited 12/29/06.
7. It should be pointed out, however, that the implicit Jewish comedy of Seinfeld and its success did give rise to a large number of shows with Jewish identity themes in the next decade. See Vincent Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the ‘Jewish’ Sit Com, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003.
8. Andrea Most, from Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, posted on-line on Jewish Women’s Archive Profile: Gilda Radner (1946-89), http://jwa.org/discover/infocus/comedy/radner.html – cited 3/9/09.
9. Daniel Krieger, “The Rise And Fall-And Rise-Of ‘Jewess’: Why Are Twenty-First-Century Women Reclaiming A Derogatory Term?,” posted 5.14.08 in History Media Books. http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=772&page=2 – cited 3-11-09.
10. Abigail Pogrebin, “Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish,” New York: Broadway Books, 2005, pps. 92, 97.
11. Andrea Most, from Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, http://jwa.org/discover/infocus/comedy/radner.html
12. The “Royal Deluxe II” commercial appeared Season 3 of Saturday Night Live, Episode 1, 9/24/77, http://snltranscripts.jt.org/77/77aroyaledeluxe.phtml – cited 3-12-09.
13. Most of these examples are taken from Jason Maoz, “NBC Peacock’s True Colors?,” posted 9:28 am, Dec 31, 1999, http://thejewishpress.blogspot.com/2008/07/golden-oldie-lorne-lipowitzs-jewish.html – cited 3-12-09.
14. ”The Night Hanukah Harry Saved Christmas,” written by Al Franken with Hanukah Harry played by Jon Lovitz, (# 275) Season 15, Episode 9 of Saturday Night Live, December 16, 1989, http://www.tv.com/saturday-night-live/show/365/episode_guide.html?season=15 – cited 3-15-09.

All serious thinking about art must begin from the recognition of two apparently contradictory facts: that an important work is always, in an irreducible sense, individual; and yet that there are authentic communities of works of art…It is to explore this essential relationship that I use the term “structure of feeling.”1

(Raymond Williams, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, 1969)

States like these and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger…and the price of indifference would be catastrophic.

(George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, January 29, 2002)

I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. To go into something you don’t understand you would have to be crazy, or ‘become part of it.’

(Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones, No Country for Old Men)

Click here to view the embedded video.

“The Evil Outside the Frame” (1:00), edited by Bernard Timberg and Michael Dixon.

During the Christmas holidays of 2007-08 I tried to catch up on a number of films I had read or heard about: No Country for Old Men, Into the Wild, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Michael Clayton, There Will Be Blood, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Charlie Wilson’s War, Atonement. Something struck me about these films, an undercurrent, a persistent dark theme they seemed to share. This theme lurked in words of their titles: “No Country… Devil… Dead… Wild… Blood… Assassination… War… Atonement.”

In each of these films protagonists would come into contact with forces of evil and struggle against them, but as often as not the evil was still out there at the end of the film. I was not seeing the traditional Hollywood endings that John Cawelti calls “moral fantasies” in which audiences leave the theater satisfied that the right conclusion had been reached.2

And then there was the fact that there were so many Westerns appearing this year—almost half of the films listed above were Westerns—with two of them, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, leading contenders for Academy Awards when the nominations came out in January 2008.3 Two months earlier The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to the re-birth of the Western, noting that the Western is often our modern American morality play.4

No Country for Old Men won Best Picture (Scott Rudin, Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, producers), Best Director (Joel and Ethan Coen), Best Adapted Screenplay (Joel and Ethan Coen), Best Supporting Actor (Javier Bardem), and was nominated in four other categories.

This film expressed in starkest terms the force and staying power of evil. Though all Westerns represent a form of entrenched dualism, the struggle between good and evil, how that struggle plays out changes over time. In the classic Western, the frontiersman mediates between the untamed forces of the wilderness, on the one hand, and the necessary and ultimately overpowering mandates for peace, justice and civilization on the other.5 This is how the West is won.

But at times, and in certain historical periods, the drama between good and evil is not so clear cut. In the “professional” plots of the Western of the 1970s, film historian Will Wright sees films like The Wild Bunch, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and The Professionals launching a new plot that focuses on teams of professional heroes and anti-heroes who populate the West.6 Wright’s book was completed before films like Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), which paved the way to the post-Western Westerns discussed in this piece. These were Viet Nam era films in which audiences were left to question how good was the good, how evil the evil, and the range of “grays” in between. Still, by the end of the film, some kind of order is re-established. These are, after all, “rites of order” as Thomas Schatz puts it, rites of contested space, and someone must remain in control of the space at the end.7 But now No Country for Old Men moves past the professional plot described by Wright. At the end of this film, as the lights come up and the audience files out, there is no ambiguity, no gray between black and white, no partial solutions. Evil rules. It has no contenders. It hovers, triumphant, over the last frame.

No Country for Old Men is a stark variant of the “evil is out there” theme, but other films reflect it as well. Into the Wild, for example, is a combination road picture, social critique, psychodrama and survival story. There is no single psychopathic killer to confront, as in No Country, but the protagonist is finally overcome by the implacable force of nature itself, the audience looking on in horror. Similarly, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead begins as a caper film but moves into a very different kind of dark space. The devil here is truly in the details. The temptation of going after easy money is quickly subsumed by the malignant force of destiny itself. Once again, as in No Country and Into the Wild, a deadly vortex of circumstances moves forward, and, once in motion no human will or act can stop it. The ending of this film too is devoid of redemption.

There Will Be Blood won Best Actor (Daniel Day-Lewis), Best Cinematography (Robert Elswit), and was nominated in six other categories.

We see it this year even in films that seem to fulfill the requirements of the uplifting “moral fantasies” of Hollywood. Somehow even these films leave an aftertaste, a question, something viewers must ponder or deal with when the lights come up. Charlie Wilson’s War, Atonement, and Michael Clayton all follow this pattern. They confront substantial evils in the course of their narratives, and seem to overcome them, but unstitched plot lines or penultimate codas disturb the equilibrium of their endings. In Charlie Wilson’s War the victory of the U.S. against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan is subverted by the final scenes in the film and our own awareness of history. Atonement, a romance and an upper-class melodrama set in World War II England, appears to celebrate a romantic passion that succeeds over all who would deny it. But the film’s harder message is that the lives of the principal characters have truly been destroyed—early on and before the romance has ever really had a chance to come to fruition. In fact, the evil that represents the pivot point in the plot has gone unpunished, has been normalized even, in the character of a war profiteer and his accomplice. In both Charlie Wilson’s War and Atonement, despite seemingly satisfying conclusions, the evil is still out there.

Michael Clayton won Best Supporting Actress (Tilda Swinton) and was nominated in six other categories.

What do all these “evil is out there” endings signify?

Taken together they represent what Raymond Fielding aptly terms “the structure of feeling” of an age.8 This structure of feeling arises from “social crises, technological developments, and new patterns of experience” that “lead to the establishment of new conventions” in drama or art, as alterations of accepted standards of aesthetic performance become inscribed in the film and literary “documents” of their time.9 During the era of cultural conflict, uncertainty and the Vietnam war, for example, Peter Biskind points out how many of the films of the late 1960s and 70s “dared to end unhappily”: Midnight Cowboy, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Easy Rider, Raging Bull, and The Shootist, to name a few.10

If we accept that the open ended or morally ambiguous conclusions of these films represent a “structure of feeling” in Williams’ sense of the term,11 and that the “evil out there” has a social as well as aesthetic foundation, I would suggest that we are now entering an era where our social experience of the Iraq war is reflected in our film experience in much the same way that it surfaced during the Viet Nam era.

Even as the battle against worldwide communism has waned, we live once again in an era when our President has taken action against what he calls the “axis of evil.” Soldiers and commentators once again invoke a “good guys”/“bad guys” formula. Despite the mid-term elections of fall 2006, where a clear majority voted for a Democratic Congress and an end to the war in Iraq, the war keeps moving forward. For myself and many others, it appears that no matter what–the elections, the popular vote, the mood of the country or the popular will–the Iraq war and occupation grind inexorably on. Though direct depictions of the war in Iraq have not done well at the box office, the structure of feeling embodied in the endings of these films does seem to represent our current social and political malaise.

Once again in the spring of 2008 we seem to be enmeshed in a time and a place where the evil is still out there with no easy or magical solution to it. Perhaps that is why Barack Obama’s call for change during the political season that parallels the Academy Awards is so galvanizing for so many. It is a vision of a way out of the dark mood of stalemate these films evoke.

Image Credits:
1. Daniel Day-Lewis
2. No Country for Old Men
3. There Will Be Blood
4. Michael Clayton

Please feel free to comment.

1. Raymond Williams, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, New York: Oxford University Press, 1969, pp. 16-17.
2. John Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery and Romance, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
3. Both of these films, leading contenders for Best Picture, were shot at the same time in the same place, Marfa, Texas, as the press noted. Scott Bowles, “Hollywood deep in the heart of Texas,” USA Today, February 18, 2008, pp. D 1-2.
4. “Hollywood Goes West” theme issue, The New York Times Magazine, November 11, 2007. See in particular A.O. Scott’s overview essay, “How the Western Was Won,” pp. 55-58.
5. See, for an extended historical discussion of this mediated dualism, Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860, Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1973.
6. Will Wright, Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.
7. Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking and the Hollywood System, New York: McGraw Hill, 1981.
8. Raymond Williams, Preface to Film, London: Film Drama Limited, 1954; Culture and Society 1780-1950, Harmondsworth, Penguin, (1961) 1988; Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, Harmondsworth: Penguin, (1968) 1973.
9. John Eldridge and Lizzie Eldridge, Raymond Williams: Making Connections, London: Routledge, 1994, p. 116.
10. Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, New York: Simon Schuster, 1999, p. 17.
11. It should be noted that a number of social critics have done extensive examinations of literature, film, and theater within the “structure of feeling” of their times. John Cawelti’s Adventure, Mystery, and Romance is one example (cited above). Other notable examples: Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler, Princeton University Press, 1966, and John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett’s The Myth of the American Superhero, Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002.

Video by Bernard Timberg, Erick Green, and Hsaio Chu / East Carolina University

Commentary Montage

The question of how central television has remained in an age of decentralizing media, including a proliferating and ever more expansive and visual Internet, occasioned some of the sharpest debates of the first Flow conference in Austin in the fall 2006. Our project explores, in words and images, not only the continuing power of television as a preeminent and central force in politics and entertainment today, but its central and axial role in “activating” all other forms of media. We employ a 9-minute video as well as print to explore this issue, using as a prime example of television’s continuing power Al Gore’s appearance at the 2007 Academy Awards. And we introduce the terms “launch text” and “rebound text” to this discussion.

We begin with the video.

Inside and outside academia combinations of image production and critique are increasingly plentiful. Well circulated examples include the video critiques of Sut Jhally (Dream Worlds 3, 2007) and Jean Kilbourne (Killing Us Softly 3, 2000) distributed by the Media Education Foundation of Northhampton, MA. Films that use video images to critique video images have been commercially distributed in such works as Atomic Café (1982) by Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty, and Pierce Rafferty, Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) by Michael Moore, and Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism (2004) by Robert Greenwald. But there are many others.

The works cited above, as diverse as they may be as forms of entertainment and analyses of media imagery, have one thing in common. They integrate the analysis and the objects and images analyzed. These films are not compilations, in copyright terms, that is, assemblies of chapters or pieces of a work, but commentary montages: works that cut up and recombine images to make a new point.1 The recombination of images “transforms” them from their original purpose as images of commercial culture and turns them into forms of critical discourse. This is a crucial distinction in law and in practice.2 See Bernard Timberg column: “A Fair Use Declaration of Rights” in Flow Vol 5, Special Issues, Flow Conference, November 17, 2006.

In addition to more widely known films that employ commentary montage, there are hundreds, even thousands of others. Some are produced by amateurs and sent into the blogosphere as emblems of individual creativity and critique. Others are produced by teachers and educators on the model of the work distributed by the Media Education Foundation.

Al Gore at the Academy Awards: A Commentary Montage as Work in Progress

The video in the link at the beginning of this column, “The Convergent Moment: Al Gore at the 2007 Academy Awards,” is a work in progress. If what we present here is viewed as a base line, we are still in the process of building the treble line and harmonics of the piece. The finished work will involve the voices of industry professionals and television scholars and critics—including, perhaps, some of the readers of Flow itself.

We chose the Al Gore text because of the unusual convergence it represents not simply of technology but of genres of information and entertainment, and of political and social marketing campaigns as well. Gore’s appearance provides us with an example of a landmark live television “launch” event. The platform for the launch was the Academy Awards themselves, a venerable 79-year old institution in television and a “media event” in Katz and Dayan’s terms.3 But this single launch text spins out a series of fascinating “rebound texts” in the 24-hour news/entertainment cycle to follow. These are the images we sample, reproduce, and juxtapose in our 9-minute video.

This particular launch text commanded an international audience of upwards to a billion viewers, which is an audience consideraly more extensive than the one that attends purely national U.S. media events such as the yearly Super Bowl or the national Presidential election every four years. Al Gore’s appearance at the Academy Awards of 2007 was certainly an entertainment event, but it also represented a significant political shift. The Academy’s celebration of Gore and “An Inconvenient Truth” precipitated a major change in national and international awareness of global warming. In the terms of the Birmingham movment in cultural studies, an”oppositional” position had moved through stages of “negotiation” and, after Gore’s appearance, now seemed “dominant.”4

The next day headlines appeared that Wall Street, which had remained decidedly quiet on this issue, was suddenly jumping on the “green” bandwagon of carbon emission control. New dollars and new industries, some of which had been germinating for some time, capitalized on the moment. The following week Al Gore appeared before Congress arguing for new policy initiatives before new Democratic majorities in both houses.5 But there was a kickback as well. Below are two cartoons arguing opposite points of view in the wake of Gore’s appearance, and a CNN poll that shows the diversity of reactions to Gore’s appearance. Gore’s appearance, and his triumph in “liberal” Hollywood, did not overcome the fact that the country was still divided into “red” and “blue” camps.

CNN.com Overall opinion poll on Al Gore after the Academy Awards (February 21-27, 2007)

Even the kickback to Gore’s appearance, reflected in the cartoons, the chart and video blogs, represented a triumph for the “green” movement. Every form of reaction placed global warming center stage. Never before in recent Academy history had a single cause–some ten minutes of free air time, counting Melissa Etheridge’s live rendition of the “Inconvenient Truth” theme song as the words of the song flashed overhead—received such prominence. It was a live Public Service Announcement of global proportions. If this time had been purchased commercially, at the going advertising rates for the broadcast, it would have cost $17.5 million—and not been half as effective. It was not a “product placement” but an “idea placement,” a fine example of how contemporary entertainment and politics work together.

In the video we set the stage with two minutes and fifty seconds of the Academy Awards launch text itself, including Al Gore’s by now famous “faux announcement for President,”6 The rest is taken from over 26 hours of programming distilled by a team of six student researchers.7

The commentary montage in the video link at the beginning of this piece gives a good indication of the variety of responses that occurred in “rebound texts” over the next twenty-four hours.8 Working chronologically forward, we included examples from 18 programs that ranged from hard news to daytime talk to late night comedy entertainment to video blog commentary that preceded and followed the Awards ceremony. We subsequently interviewed veteran television director Hal Gurnee for his reaction to the launch text/rebound text phenomenon, and as we continue to build our montage we hope to include the comments of a wide range of television scholars and industry professionals.

Our planned end products are a documentary with voiceover (a half hour in length) and a web site that will allow further explorations of the texts we use. The web site, as we conceive it, will be designed as an evolving text on the model of Wikipedia, with a web manager, centering on the topic of Al Gore and the politics of entertainment. It will include accounts of Gore’s acceptance of the Nobel Prize as an entertainment event, his appearance on “30 Rock,” and other intersections of politics and entertainment in Gore’s remarkable post-Vice Presidential career.

We hope readers of Flowtv.org will share their reflections with us on both the video and proposed commentary montage, and promise to give appropriate credit for comments or ideas we are able to use in either the documentary or web site. You can place your comments here or write video co-producers Timberg and Green at b_timberg@hotmail.com and greene@ecu.edu, or video editor Chu at rudychu@hotmail.com.

Please feel free to comment.

Image Credits:

1. Al Gore Silhouette

2. Gore Cartoon 1

3. Gore Cartoon 2

4. Opinion Poll on Al Gore’s Academy Award Appearance

1. The aesthetic and legal concepts that support a fair use ruling for all forms of commentary montage is theorized in greater detail in the 2006 Flow column and in the book, “New Forms of Media and the Challenge to Copyright Law” in Fair Use and Free Inquiry: Copyright Law and the New Media, John S. Lawrence and Bernard Timberg, editors, Norwood, Ablex Publishers (1989), 210-230. The author of the print portion of this column, Bernard Timberg, has both produced and written about commentary montage extensively. His video productions include: A Video History of TV Talk (20 min), 1998; The OJ Simpson Verdict as National Talk Event (22 min), 1995; Three Takes on Chernobyl, (10 min), 1987. Each of these video commentaries was accompanied by corollary print commentary in Television Talk: A History of the TV Talk Show, University of Texas Press (2002). His audio productions include: Watergate Tapes: The Sam J. Ervin Morality Hour, audio montages produced at KPFT-FM Pacifica in Houston, Texas, 1974; Property Is Theft, a 45-minute audio montage tribute to Pierre Joseph Proudhon on his 165th anniversary, produced at KPFA-Pacifica, Berkeley, California, 1973, and re-broadcast on Pacifica stations in Los Angeles, Houston, and New York, and The Jewish Bob Dylan, a 30-minute radio documentary feature on Robert Dylan Zimmerman’s Jewish roots and influences. (Digitized versions of this program have appeared in several web sources.) Timberg’s audio commentary montages were inspired by the multi-source mix work of Wes (Scoop) Nisker at KSAN-FM, San Francisco, in the late 1960s and early 70s.
2. “Transformative use” has become an important concept in current fair use legal theory and practice. See Judge Pierre Leval’s influential essay in The Harvard Law Review (1990) which first employed and defined the term.
3. Elihu Katz and Daniel Dayan, The Media Event: The Live Broadcasting of History, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992, reprint edition, 2006.
4. Stuart Hall, David Morley, et al.
5. The bandwagon effect continued. Seven months later Al Gore would win the Nobel Peace Prize, and, as one news reporter put it, a “Trifecta”: the popular vote in the 2000 elections, the Academy Awards, and at that point, in October, 2007, the Nobel Prize. Cartoonist Gary Trudeau joked sardonically in a Doonesbury cartoon that advisors to Gore were suggesting he go for a Heisman trophy as well.
6. It was fitting, and also an old speaker’s trick, for Gore’s to precede his “serous” speech with a joke. The narrative strategy of “An Inconvenient Truth” included the same gambit. But the play back and forth between comedy entertainment and seriousness was here further emphasized by the choice of comedian Jerry Seinfeld as presenter. He gave the award to Gore and the “Inconvenient Truth” producer team after his completing his own stand-up routine, a devastatingly funny critique on the perils of trying see a movie in a modern corporate megaplex.
7. That team included Ian Glancy, who did all the preliminary work on video blogs, Jeanne Stewart, Courtney Tysinger, Nadine Maeser, Bruce Midgette, and Kelly Neilson, five undergraduates and one graduate student in East Carolina University’s School of Communication, working under the able supervision of technical consultant Butch Saul.
8. Unlike the other forms of television we recorded in the immediate 24 hours after the broadcast, we allowed up to a week for the video blog commentary to be posted on YouTube.

“It was time to stir.
It was time for every man to stir.”
–Tom Paine, Common Sense, 1776

We reaffirm our rights to the fair use of moving images under Article 1: Section 8 of the Constitution, the Copyright Clause1, and under the Copyright Law of 1976 (Section 107).2

These rights refer to the fair use of all images, copyrighted, uncopyrighted, public domain or “orphaned.”

Though we speak as individuals, we urge our places of employment and professional associations to publish best practices statements that clarify and support these rights.3

We refer here specifically to the right to:

I. Play back or screen clips in a classroom or educational setting.

II. Play back or exchange clips in a distance education extension of a classroom setting.

III. Exchange clips with a colleague in a process of teaching, scholarship or research.

IV. Copy a moving image document to preserve it for future study.

V. Screen clips at scholarly conferences or presentations.

VI. Disseminate clips to publicize or inform the public about an exhibit in a museum or educational institution.

VII. Combine clips to disseminate or publish a commentary montage to make a thematic or critical point.

VIII. Disseminate clips to inform the public about the permanent or special holdings of a moving image collection, a specific part of the collection, or a theme from the collection presented as a commentary montage.

IX. Combine clips to share with others in personal or artistic experiments that have no ascertainable commercial purpose or value.

X. The foregoing in no way precludes an application of fair use under Section 107 of the 1976 Copyright law to areas not enumerated above.

These are basic fair use rights for scholars, teachers, researchers, writers, moving image artists, documentarians, and consumers of media images.

Analysis

The “Fair Use Declaration of Rights” proposes that teachers, media critics and moving image artists see fair use collectively and as concerned citizens–not simply as members of interest groups.

The “Fair Use Declaration of Rights” focuses on fair use as a political issue as well as a legal one.

The words of the Declaration echo those of the American Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights in quite conscious ways. They echo other declarations of collective identity and purpose as well.

Though best practices statements by individual professional associations are important for all of us who critique, parody and contextualize the media images that surfeit us, surround us, and bombard us daily, we also need to unite under a single banner.
Fair use is, put quite simply, the right of reply. That right applies as much to my next door neighbor as it does to the teachers, writers and media artists who confront, explain, organize, quote or teach from these images daily as part of their jobs.
What the Fair Use Declaration of Rights is intended to signal is a turn from the defensive stance so often adopted in response to law and lawyers on this issue, to a position of forthright, positive, and proactive assertion.

These are our rights from the very beginning. The lawyers work for us, not other way around. It's time to leave the bargaining table where so often compromise means, finally, giving ground, and take a forceful stand on this issue.

What we are saying when we subscribe to a “Fair Use Bill of Rights” is that fair use is a “right,” not a “defense.” As one prominent intellectual property attorney, who happens to work for a major research University recently put it: “fair use–use it or lose it.”

REFERENCES

The publications and statements listed below are by no means exhaustive. Rather, they represent a very selective list of some notable items in a growing literature on fair use that has been developing over the past forty years, and continues to grow.

Aoki, K., Boyle, J., & Jenkins, J. (2006). Bound by law? Tales from the public domain [Legal education comic book]. Durham, NC: Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain. http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/zoomcomic.html

Barlow, J.P. (2006, March/April). Is cyberspace still anti-sovereign? California Magazine 117:2. Also available: http://www.alumni.berkeley.edu/calmag/200603/barlow.asp

Center for Social Media/Washington College of Law Report (November 18, 2005). Documentary Filmmakers Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use. Statement endorsed by Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers, Independent Feature Project, International Documentary Association, National Alliance of Media Arts and Culture, Women in Film and Video. Washington, DC: American University School of Communication/Center for Social Media. Also available: http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/fairuse.htm

Downhill Battle web site (2006). Grey Tuesday: Free the grey album November 24, 2004. Retrieved July 27, 2006 from http://greytuesday.org

Kunzle, D (1989). In Fair use and free inquiry: Copyright law and the new media. Timberg, B., eds. 2nd ed. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishers (21-32).

Lange, D (2004). Proposal concerning compensation and rights to use copyrighted clips in documentary film. Presented at “Framed! How Law Constructs and Constrains Culture” conference sponsored by the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain and the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival at Duke Law School, April 2, 2004.

Lawrence, J.S. (1989). Copyright Law, Fair Use and the Academy. In Fair use and free inquiry: Copyright law and the new media. Timberg, B., eds. 2nd ed. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishers (3-19).

Lawrence, J.S. & Timberg, B.(1989). Conclusions: Scholars, Media and the Law in the 1990s. In Fair use and free inquiry: Copyright law and the new media. 2nd ed. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishers (364-372).

Leval, P.N. (1990). Toward a fair use standard, Harvard Law Review 103:1105.

Negativland. Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2 (1995). [with CD]. 1920 Monument Blvd, MF-1, Concord CA 94520, fax 510-420-0469: Seeland Publishers. Available also through: www.negativland.com.

Rosenfield, H. (1989). The American constitution, free inquiry and the law). In Fair Use and Free Inquiry: Copyright Law and the New Media 2nd ed. (281-304).

Timberg, B. (1989). New forms of media and the challenge to copyright law (1980). In Fair Use and Free Inquiry, 2nd ed. (210-230).

Timberg, B. (2006). A Fair Use Declaration of Rights. Carolina Communication Annual Sept 2006, Robert Westefelhaus, College of Charleston, ed. (12-16).

Timberg, S. (1980). “A modernized fair use code for visual, auditory, and audiovisual copyrights: Economic context, legal issues, and the Laocoon shortfall. In Fair Use and Free Inquiry, 1st ed. (305-336). Later version published in Northwestern University Law Review (1981) 75:101.

For the work of other leading legal theorists on this issue, see Lawrence Lessig, Peter Jaszi, Laura Gasaway, Pamela Samuelson, and Siva Vaidhyanathan. Teachers of law and legal theorists are speaking up. Where are the rest of us?

Image Credits:

Aoki, Jenkins, Boyle from the Center for the Study of the Public Domain. Also available here.

PDF document: Written by Bernard M. Timberg, designed by James Harman.

Please feel free to comment.

1. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution reads: “The Congress shall have Power…To promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their Respective Writings and Discoveries…” Cited in Harry Rosenfield, “The American Constitution, Free Inquiry and the Law,” John Shelton Lawrence and Bernard Timberg, Fair Use and Free Inquiry: Copyright Law and the New Media, 2nd ed., 1989, p. 289.
2. Section 107 of the Copyright Law of 1976 reads: “Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use. Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include – (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
3. An outstanding model for a fair use best practices statement that has been used by other professional associations was issued by the American University Washicngton College of Law and Center for Social Media in November 2005. It is entitled a “Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use, and was written in association with the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers, Independent Feature Project, International Documentary Association, National alliance for Media Arts and Culture, and Women in Film and Video, Washington, DC chapter. A complete version of the statement can be found here.