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- History of Broadcasting: Radio as Popular Culture, 1926-1940
- Radio Goes Hollywood
- radio needed talent to put on the air
- Hollywood became major center or production by 1936
- abandoning former radio production hubs in New York and Chicago
- AT&T lowered charges for land lines to the west coast
- NBC and CBS built production studios in Los Angeles
- synergy between movies and radio
- Vaudeville Post-Mortem
- silent movies siphoned vaudeville audience
- talkies raided the performers
- radio cannibalized vaudeville audience and performers
- vaudevillians moves to radio
- Burns and Allen
- Jack Benny
- Al Jolson
- Edgar Bergen
- Eddie Cantor
- comedy variety programs based on vaudeville entertainment
- Great Depression
- stock market and credit bubble throughout the 1920s
- started in 1929
- marked by the stock market crash on October 29
- bank failures
- 25% unemployment
- radio provided distraction for millions
- Amos and Andy, A Law Book to Help Amos, July 3, 1929
- minstrel tradition
- WGN Chicago
- voiced by Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll
- Franklin Roosevelt, First Fireside Chat: Bank Holiday, March 12, 1933
- 30 speeches between 1933 and 1944
- Emergency Banking Act
- calm panic
- didactically explain the mechanics of banking and government action
- suppress fear
- Clara Lu n Em, Men are the Weaker Sex, January 6, 1936
- first network daytime soap opera
- started at WGN Chicago, June 1930
- Northwestern University students
- Louise Starkey, Isobel Carothers, and Helen King
- Jack Benny, Money Ain’t Everything, December 6, 1936
- variety comedy program
- roots in vaudeville
- initially sponsored by Canada Dry on NBC Blue
- switched to CBS and Jell-O sponsorship
- reputation for being a penny pincher
- Mercury Radio Theater, War of the Worlds, October 30, 1938
- Orson Welles radio theater group
- “Mercury Radio of the Air"
- adapted HG Wells’s War of the World to modern times
- took the form of a radio concert interrupted by news bulletins of alien invasion
- Father Coughlin, Jews Support Communism, December 11, 1938
- radio evangelist
- fervent populist
- bought time on local radio stations to form ad-hoc national network
- anti-Semitic
- Lux Radio Theater, It Happened One Night, March 20, 1939
- adaptation of famous motion pictures
- hosted by Cecil B. de Mille
- many of the programs featured original motion picture actors
- Information Please, Carl Van Doren and Gloria Stewart, Jan 2, 1940
- quiz program
- featured a panel of experts
- challenged by radio audience to stump the experts
- this episode features
- actress Gloria Stewart
- writer and critic Carl Van Doren, uncle to Charles Van Doren—a central figure in the TV Quiz Show Scandals of the 1950s.
This outline is based on material from Michele Hilmes, Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States. 4th ed. Boston: Cengage, 2014.