Radio

EARLY EXPERIMENTATION

In the days before regulatory and network standardization, when the main business of radio was inviting various representatives of entertainment businesses on the air to publicize themselves, it seemed natural that Hollywood, with its immense reservoirs of talent under contract, should join in to publicize that other "national" medium, the cinema. One of the earliest cases of filmradio cooperation took place not in Hollywood but on the stage of the Capitol Theater in New York City, part of the Loew's/MGM chain. In 1923 theater manager Samuel L. Rothafel entered into an agreement with the American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (AT&T) to broadcast his prefilm stage show over the new station WEAF. The results were so positive that it quickly became a regular feature, called Roxy and His Gang , one of the earliest hits of radio broadcasting. Soon other movie theaters jumped on the bandwagon.

Many big-city theaters featured elaborate stage shows and enormous theater organs, whose musical accompaniments animated their film showings. Concerts by theater organists were broadcast over WMAC, WGN, and KWY in Chicago and in many other cities starting in 1925. In 1925 Harry Warner of Warner Bros. put forth a prediction and a challenge:

I am in favor of the motion picture industry, after the wave-length situation has been adjusted (as it will be)—building and maintaining its own broadcasting stations in New York and Los Angeles, and possibly in the Middle West. Through these sources … programs could be devised to be broadcast before and after show hours, tending to create interest in all meritorious pictures being released or playing at that time. Nights could be assigned to various companies, calling attention to their releases and advising where they were playing in that particular locality. Artists could talk into the microphone and reach directly millions of people who have seen them on the screen but never came in contact with them personally or heard their voices. Such programs would serve to whet the appetites of the radio audience and make it want to see the persons they have heard and the pictures they are appearing in.
( Motion Picture World , 11 April 1925)

Warner followed up on this vision by opening up station KFWB in Los Angeles that same year, and a second one, WBPI, in New York City in 1926. In the summer of 1926, Sam Warner took a portable transmitter on a cross-country tour, broadcasting from theaters showing Warner Bros. films.

By 1927 the major studios could see the sound era rapidly approaching. Earlier, they had jointly agreed to a "stand still" position, in order to see whether the RCA or the AT&T sound system would predominate. Either way, Hollywood studios would in effect find themselves in technical thrall to the interests behind NBC, at this point (with CBS still struggling to get organized) the only broadcasting network with national reach. RCA was NBC's parent company; AT&T had an exclusive arrangement with NBC for the provision of landlines, the backbone of network broadcasting. Simultaneously, regulators in Washington were working on passage of the Radio Act of 1927, which promised a reorganization of the radio spectrum with an express mandate to bring the "chaos" of radio under control. Studios increased the pace of radio experimentation, attempting to get a foot-hold in the promising new business before restrictions might potentially be imposed, either by Washington or by contractual limitations from sound-on-film technology providers.

In May 1927 Paramount announced plans to form the Keystone Network, in partnership with the Postal Telegraph Company, one of AT&T's only competitors, "for dramatizing and advertising first-run motion pictures." As a backup plan, Paramount head Adolph Zukor also approached the interests behind the proposed NBC competitor, United Independent Broadcasters (later to become CBS) to suggest a partnership that he proposed might be renamed the Paramount Broadcasting System. In September MGM announced an ambitious project with the Loew's theater chain: a planned network based on movie materials and promotion that would link over sixty stations in more than forty cities. In December, to give audiences a taste of things to come, MGM experimented with the world's first "telemovie": a dramatic, blow-by-blow account of Love (1927), MGM's adaptation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina starring Greta Garbo and John Gilbert, delivered on-air by WPAP's announcer Ted Husing (usually known for his sports coverage) as it unreeled before his eyes in the Embassy Theater in New York. Despite much excitement in the industry, neither the Keystone Chain, the Paramount Broadcasting System, nor the Loew's/MGM network reached fruition. A combination of regulatory discouragement, exhibitor opposition, and competition from other sources diverted studios' radio ideas in other directions.

Upon the expiration of the "stand still" agreement in 1928, film studios jointly decided to go with AT&T subsidiary Western Electric's sound technology. Left out in the cold, RCA in 1929 formed its own studio, RKO Pictures, and ushered in the era of film-radio cooperation in earnest as RKO and NBC learned to share talent and properties, such as the RKO Theater of the Air . Faced with this unsettling prospect, in the summer of 1929, just months before the stock market crash, Paramount again approached CBS. A stock transfer was hammered out, by the terms of which Paramount received a 49 percent interest in CBS while CBS received a certain number of Paramount shares. In three years Paramount would have the option of either buying the rest of CBS or simply regaining its own stock by turning back CBS's. By 1932, however, the country was in the depths of the Depression, and while radio's fortunes continued upward, the film industry was in steep decline. Rather than further consolidate their mutual interests, Paramount withdrew its merger offer, and the brief alliance was over. RCA divested itself of most of its interest in RKO in the late 1930s under similar pressures. Studios would not attempt to enter networking again until the television era.