Major Bowes Amateur Magazine – March 1936

Post by Ross Melnick

American Idol is now in its fourteenth season on Fox; America’s Got Talent will start its tenth season next month on NBC; and The Voice has launched its eighth season of catapulting amateur talent on the same network. There is, it seems, still plenty of money in the “amateur hour” game. A large segment of the audience for these shows wasn’t born when Star Search (1983-1995) went off the air and their parents and grandparents have only a fading memory of the venerable Amateur Hour program on radio and television from 1934 to 1970. (Yes, thirty-six years.) But before American Idol and other contemporary amateur talent shows rose to prominence, and even before Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (1946-1958) and The Gong Show (1976-1980), the Amateur Hour was appointment radio listening as “Major” Edward Bowes and, later, Ted Mack paraded a gaggle of singers, impressionists, musicians, comedians, and other performers before a microphone and launched the careers of Frank Sinatra, Gladys Knight, and many others.

Major Bowes’ radio career, though, like his amateurs’ chance of winning, was partly luck.

Some history is in order. In 1908, Samuel ‘Roxy’ Rothafel, a 25-year-old former Marine and traveling salesman, took a position as a bartender in a rough and tumble saloon at the Freedman House in the small coal mining town of Forest City, Pennsylvania. While tending bar, he asked and received permission to turn the Freedman House’s large storage area into a back alley entertainment center. The Family Theatre opened on December 21, 1908 with roller-skating while vaudeville launched three days later on Christmas Eve. Film ultimately proved most popular and the Family Theatre became a highly successful nickelodeon in 1909. From there, Roxy converted the 3,000-seat Alhambra Theatre in Milwaukee into the nation’s largest movie house in 1911 and performed the same trick for the 1,700-seat Lyric in Minneapolis. His growing reputation encouraged the owners of the Regent Theatre in New York City to acquire his services in 1913 and, for the next five years, Roxy opened or managed every important movie house along New York’s Great White Way—the Strand, Knickerbocker, Rialto, and Rivoli theaters. By 1918, he had become the country’s most lauded motion picture exhibitor (and a documentary filmmaker).

The city’s largest movie house was not opened by Roxy, however, but by owner Messmore Kendall and Managing Director “Major” Edward Bowes. The 5,300-seat Capitol Theatre opened on October 24, 1919, and quickly struggled creatively and financially. Needing an infusion of capital, Samuel Goldwyn and other investors purchased a controlling interest and installed Roxy as Director of Presentations. (Bowes was given a raise but less responsibility.) Over the next two years, the Capitol became the country’s most celebrated movie house and a launching pad for German (Passion, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) and documentary (Nanook of the North) films.

In 1922, the Capitol also became a key site for radio broadcasting when AT&T approached Roxy about the possibility of transmitting the live performances from the Capitol Theatre over its new toll broadcasting station, WEAF. On November 19, 1922, the Capitol orchestra’s performance of Richard Strauss’s ‘Ein Heldenleben’ was sent out over the ether. Roxy introduced all of his musicians, dancers, singers, and other performers over the air and struck a chord with audiences with his informal style. The broadcast—radio’s pioneering variety show—became a fixture on WEAF known as “Roxy and His Gang.” Roxy’s folksy introduction, “Hello Everybody!,” and his warm signoff, “Good Night, Pleasant Dreams, and God Bless You,” were hallmarks. Roxy and His Gang toured the east coast over the next several years, building up his own brand name and that of the program. The Capitol Theatre subsequently became a tourist destination like Disneyland through ABC in the 1950s.

Roxy at the NBC Microphone

In July 1925, Roxy announced that he would be leaving the Capitol to open his eponymous Roxy Theatre that would be even larger (5,920 seats) and with new broadcasting studios outfitted for his Gang and organist Lew White. The Capitol Theatre broadcasts on Sunday nights did not end, however. Major Bowes, who took over management of the Capitol upon Roxy’s exit, launched his own “Capitol Theatre Family” program for WEAF, then the flagship station of the NBC Red network. It would be the start of two decades of Bowes broadcasting.

When the Roxy Theatre opened on March 11, 1927, Rothafel launched a new “Roxy and His Gang” weekly show on NBC Blue. NBC now had the two leading exhibitors in New York on Sunday and Monday nights. From 1927 to 1931, Roxy and Bowes kept up their weekly addresses to local and national audiences, becoming celebrities in their own right. Roxy’s weekly radio shows also continued after he took over the new Radio City Music Hall and the RKO Roxy Theatre projects in 1931. (They opened on December 27 and December 29, 1932, respectively.) Roxy was disillusioned with the micromanagement of both cinemas, however, and he abruptly quit both in January 1934. His departure from Radio City also meant the end of his time with NBC.

Bowes, by contrast, was still in a decade-long groove at the Capitol Theatre (and on its radio show) and headed Loew’s’ radio group and its flagship station WHN. On April 4, 1934, Bowes launched the Amateur Hour with Major Edward Bowes on WHN on Tuesday nights from 8:00 to 9:00pm. Launched during the Depression after sound, economics, and double features had decimated vaudeville, Bowes booked the best (free) talent he could find and let the audience decide the results based on their phone calls through AT&T. Votes were then tabulated during the show by six harried WHN operators and results were provided by the end of the program. Part of Bowes’ ingenuity was cultivating emotional back-stories for each contestant. During the Depression, a tear jerking narrative wasn’t hard to find and played beautifully every time.

Bowes’ amateur talent show was picked up by NBC in 1935, paired with a major sponsor, and renamed the Chase & Sanborn Amateurs with Major Bowes. Bowes also used the popularity of the broadcasts to create traveling troupes of Amateur Hour winners and filmed other performers for a series of short films released through RKO.

Roxy, meanwhile, returned to radio in September 1934 for CBS. The show and Roxy were tired, though, and the reviews and market share weren’t as expected. His radio contract ended in September 1935 and, for the first time in thirteen years, Roxy was off the air. He was set for a comeback at the old Roxy Theatre for Paramount and for a new radio show at NBC when he died in his sleep on January 13, 1936 at age 53.

Bowes, by contrast, was very much alive and then had the number one radio show in the country. Radio Guide estimated that the Amateur Hour, with its broadcasts, tours, licensed merchandise, and films, was generating almost two million dollars per year. Bowes moved to CBS in 1936 where he remained the highest paid and highest rated broadcaster through the end of the decade.

Wartime restrictions on telephone usage and a growing ennui with the format lessened the show’s impact during the 1940s and Bowes retired from radio in April 1945. His longtime assistant, Ted Mack, took over the microphone and also created a new television program in 1948 (radio broadcasts continued for several more years as well). The Original Amateur Hour debuted on the DuMont TV network and would appear variously on ABC, CBS, and NBC from 1948 until 1970 when it finally went off the air.

Roxy and Bowes

Today, Roxy and Bowes are largely forgotten but their impact on variety shows (Roxy) and amateur talent contest shows (Bowes) remains. Two questions still linger then: Would Bowes have ever appeared on radio if Roxy had not left the Capitol in 1925? Without Bowes, when would the amateur talent show have first reached radio listeners/television viewers?

For more information on Samuel ‘Roxy’ Rothafel, please see American Showman: Samuel ‘Roxy’ Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry (Columbia University Press, 2012). For more information on Major Bowes and the Amateur Hour, please see “Reality Radio: Remediating the Radio Contest Genre in Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour Films.” Film History 23:3 (Fall 2011): 331 – 347.

By the time Les Brown published his first Encyclopedia of Television in 1978, he was already worthy of an entry of his own.

Brown, who died Nov. 4 at the age of 84, was still an editor at Variety, the show business daily, when he published Televi$ion: The Business Behind the Box in 1971. Coverage of TV at that time was largely a matter of day-after reviews, programming announcements and celebrity puff pieces. Television was treated as something magical and mysterious, as if those “free” programs just appeared out of thin air like electronic manna.

Expanding on his nearly two decades covering radio and TV for the trade publication, Brown lifted the veil on network television, using a watershed year in the life of CBS’s programming division to illuminate the scheduling chess game and the astounding amounts of money involved.

“The business of television,” Brown wrote, “is to deliver audiences to advertisers.”

The observation may seem obvious today, but at the time the notion that programs weren’t television’s products but rather its lures, was a revelation to the millions watching the “big three” networks every day.

Along with Horace Newcomb’s 1974 TV: The Most Popular Art, which dared to take entertainment programming seriously, The Business Behind the Box became an inspiration and essential guide for a new generation of television critics and reporters that asked tougher questions about the medium’s impact and social responsibility.

Brown’s encyclopedias provided succinct, clear explanations of the networks’ histories, key players, technical terms and slang, and became a crucial reference for reporters covering the TV beat, for scholars and for any couch potato who was curious about how and why the television industry worked as it did.

Ron Simon, a curator at the Paley Center for Media in New York, called Brown a pioneering television scholar.

“The several editions of his Encyclopedia of Television were essential reading to understand the sweep of media history,” Simon said. “His Channels magazine charted the impact of the cable revolution, showing all the forces at work creating a new type of TV. Les Brown, as well as any media historian, documented all the forces at work that resulted in our TV programming: creative, business, and regulatory. He shared his wisdom at many conferences around the world, especially the Paley Center.”

In 1982, Brown launched the magazine Channels of Communication (later just Channels). Unlike TV Guide, which served mainly as a program guide, and Broadcasting, which was more concerned with hirings, firings and bottom lines, Channels took an analytical approach to broadcast television’s strategies, trends, profitability and ethics.

Brown served as a Peabody Awards board member from 1982 to 1988. Newcomb, whose board tenure overlapped Brown’s by a year, recalled that he “made everyone think twice — or more — about their judgments of the media, and Peabody was strengthened by his own strong arguments.”

Newcomb, who retired last summer as Peabody director, also called Brown “a giant among television commentators in the formative years of the medium.  He was a fierce critic in the best sense of the term, always concerned with what television meant for the society at large.”

In later years, Brown taught at Yale, Columbia and Fordham universities. But his lasting legacy is the approach to reporting and critiquing television that his books exemplified.

As Variety co-editor-in-chief Cynthia Littleton tweeted upon hearing of Brown’s passing, Televi$ion: The Business Behind the Box “remains required reading.”

1) The Supreme Court has been busy (and not just with DOMA). The High Court handed down multiple rulings with major impact for the entertainment industries. First, the Court extended the “first sale” doctrine to content purchased overseas but resold in the US, in a case brought by Supap Kirtsaeng, a Thai-born student sued for copyright infringement by Wiley & Sons when he resold textbooks purchased in Taiwan. The ruling has already spurred some in Congress to call for revisions to copyright law, with testimony from the U.S. Register of Copyrights calling for the “next great copyright act” involving clarifications and revisions to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act enacted 15 years ago.

2) While the industry may have lost that case, they did come out ahead in another, as the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Comcast in an antitrust suit filed by Philadelphia-area subscribers claiming they were being overcharged. This could extend beyond the realm of television/cable providers, as the ruling impacts the ways cases can be pursued by a class group.

3) As regular WAYM readers might recall, last week News Corp and Disney were both considering buying the other out for control of Hulu. Now, reports show both sides are considering selling to a third party. Potential buyers being tossed around are investment firm Guggenheim Partners, Yahoo, and Amazon, tough no official comments have been made. So at this point, anything (or nothing) could happen.

4) In other streaming news, HBO GO, the online streaming service from HBO that is currently only available to those with a cable subscription (with the extra HBO fee), may ‘go’ broader, with HBO CEO Richard Plepler mentioning interest in teaming up directly through broadband providers. This would make HBO the “first premium cable network to bypass cable” and go directly to its Internet-based audience. This could be a big step, and a tacit admission of new competition in the form streaming sites like Netflix and Amazon.

5) This past week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a report detailing the results of an “undercover shopper survey” on the enforcement of entertainment industry ratings. In an age where video games are often singled out for their impact on children, the FTC found the ESRB’s rating system and video game retailers the best, noting an 87% success rate of underage children being denied buying M-rated games. All areas found marked success, however, as box office, DVD sales, and CDs all showed improvement over the past years (See graph/report for more details).

6) The Game Developers Conference (GDC), the “world’s largest and longest-running professionals-only game industry event,” took place this past week, featuring booths, panels, and demos of the latest and greatest out of the video game industry. Although events like PAX and E3 draw larger audiences and media coverage, GDC has become another site for industry outsiders, like Disney and Warner Bros., to become more involved. Highlights include Activision’s uncanny valley-crossing graphics demo and independent game Journey taking home several awards including being the first independent to win Game of the Year.

7) Upfront season is really heating up, starting with News Corps cable network FX announcing the launch of a new sister channel, FXX (The extra X is for… I don’t know). FXX (launching in September) will specifically target a younger demographic, 18-34, and will be bolstered by moving current FX comedies It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and The League, as well as new comedy programming and reruns of popular shows like Sports Night and Arrested Development. Back on the FX front, network president John Landgraf also announced the acquisition of a 10-episode adaptation of the Coen Brothers’ Fargo, a bid they hope puts them in competition with more premiere cable fare like HBO and AMC.

8) More from the upfront front, Participant Media announced the creation of ‘pivot’ (stylized in lower-case), a new cable network formed from their purchase of the Documentary Channel. The new channel will mostly be filled with non-fiction programming aimed at Millenials, with shows from Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Meghan McCain already lined up. Participant Media is exploring options for offering the channel via broadband, trying to hook this young generation with both relevant technology and content.

9) A new report out this week from UCLA and the Writers Guild of America (WGA) revealed women and minorities are still underrepresented on television writing staffs as well as in producer roles. UCLA sociologist and the report’s author Darnell Hunt revealed that while some progress was made, it was at such a slow rate, the effects are marginal or nearly nonexistent.

10) Variety isn’t gone, but it won’t be the same. The 80-year-old Hollywood daily trade magazine published its last print edition on March 19. Variety will live on, both online in its revamped (paywall-free) website and in a new weekly magazine that debuted March 26.

And we return to The Silly Side, looking at the inherent weirdness that comes from entertainment industries:

• Montie, the cat understudy of the new Breakfast at Tiffany’s Broadway production, has been fired.
• Ashley Judd has officially announced (on Twitter) she will not be running for Senate. In related news, I, Andrew Zolides, will also not be running for Senate.
• In Jon Hamm’s penis news, Jon Hamm has spoken out (in a Rolling Stone interview) about the Internet’s obsession with his penis, calling out various blogs and tumblers devoted to… him. At any rate, Mad Men returns April 7.

1. The upside and downside of Twitter and celebrity: Conan O’Brien turned to Twitter to entertain us (thus becoming what he once mocked). He then used Twitter to turn one woman’s life upside down, and she charmed us all by channeling her sudden fame into good causes. But Twitter doesn’t always have such delightful results, as evidenced by the fact that Academy Awards ceremony co-producer Adam Shankman chose actors like Zac Efron and Miley Cyrus to present at the Oscars because Twitter followers told him to. Where’s Fail Whale when you need it?

2. The viral video of the fortnight was OK Go’s Rube Goldbergian “This Too Shall Pass.” It’s sponsored by State Farm, which dismays some (I assume Sarah Polley wouldn’t approve) who also point out that Honda and others did this first. Regardless, it looks cool, and Wired found out how they pulled it off. By the way, there was a previous video for “This Too Shall Pass” involving the Notre Dame marching band, but you likely missed it due to ridiculous embedding restrictions. There’s a very important lesson in there, internet. In fact, OK Go has since left its record label EMI over the issue. Viral video runners-up: SNL presidents, Avatar/Pocahontas mashup, Mean Disney Girls, the Russian singer, Battlestar Galactica–Sabotage video.

3. Jesse Thomas composed a fascinating “State of the Internet” video, featuring such facts as that 247 billion emails are sent each day, but 81% of them are spam. And Zaheer Ahmed Khan has a fun list of Internet firsts, like the first item sold on eBay: broken laser pointer, purchased by a collector (?) for $14.83. Who could have predicted then what sites Twitter, Facebook, Linked In would be worth now? Speaking of internet firsts and future loads of money, Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson has the contentious story of the founding of Facebook.

4. Scholar Thomas Doherty says film criticism is dead, and (not dead) film critic Richard Schickel seems inclined to agree, having said during a recent panel discussion, “I don’t know honestly the function of reviewing anything.” Chuck Tryon disagrees with Doherty, as does Jim Emerson, and Keith Uhlich pulls no punches in depicting what he thinks of Schickel. Meanwhile, (not dead) film critic Armond White once allegedly kinda sorta said he wished filmmaker Noah Baumbach was never born, but I’m not sure whether the resulting kerfuffle qualifies as film criticism dead or film criticism alive.

5. Doherty can amend his article with the news that Variety has kicked to the curb its last remaining salaried (but not dead) film critic, Todd McCarthy, as well as its last theater critic. Former Variety columnist Anne Thompson says the trade has cut its lifeblood, (not dead) film critic Roger Ebert gives the move an impassioned thumbs down, (not dead) film critic David Edelstein remembers the way Variety used to be, and McCarthy himself offers some thoughts. Best headline, from the LA Times: Variety Lays an Egg. Variety also has a lawsuit to deal with in regard to a negative film review. Variety’s defense? Film criticism is dead.

6. Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek detailed the decline of Miramax, and in its wake, Levi Shapiro points to The Messenger as a new example for indie cinema to follow, while Paramount is trying a new approach with producing “micro-budget” films. With the studio infrastructure for indie cinema broken down otherwise, film festivals might be ever more important in taking up the slack, if they can do it right and especially properly utilize both online distribution and marketing. In that regard, Lion’s Gate is trying to take advantage of social media marketing for its April release of Kick Ass, and Break.com is succeeding with its online distribution of low-budget videos, though their indie fare is decidedly lowbrow, rather Hurt Locker territory.

7. Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panah (The Mirror, The Circle, Offside) was arrested in a government crackdown on dissidents. Countryman and international art cinema icon Abbas Kiarostami has decried this development, the LA (Not Dead) Film Critics Association has expressed its dismay, and you can too via an online petition. For more on the broader context, The Believer Magazine has a revealing report on filmgoing and filmmaking in Iran.

8. Speaking of The Hurt Locker, hooray for Kathryn Bigelow’s Best Director Oscar, which New York Times (not dead) film critic Manohla Dargis was thrilled about. However, Rachel Abramowitz offers the cold slap of reality in her LA Times piece about the ongoing challenges for women in Hollywood. The other woman everyone fell for at the Oscars was Gabourey Sidibe, and Feminista Files blogger Erika Kennedy detailed the insulting backstory of her Oscar dress saga and defended Sidibe as a role model. Howard Stern should give that a read.

9.  In DVD news, an Indiana prosecutor wants only G movies in Redbox kiosks, Blockbuster is going back to imposing late fees, and the MPAA had small win in their big fight against DVD copying software, but this chart of DVD sales struggles will make them unhappy. Disney has  shortened the Alice in Wonderland DVD release window, but speculation that Hurt Locker’s post-Best Picture difficulties with booking theaters are due to the film being out on DVD might give other studios pause (literally!).

10. My favorite News for TV Majors story links: There Will Be Retrans, CNN Fears Facebook, Flushing Measurements, TiVo News, Indecency Backlog, Cable Channel Fees, Exec Interviews, Viacom & Hulu Break Up, Old Spice Ad, and NCIS Fandom.