March 19, 1953—With perennial emcee Bob Hope doing the honors from LA’s Pantages Theater and actor Fredric March making presentations from the NBC International Theatre in New York, the Academy Awards were televised for the first time, taking a giant bicoastal leap forward to the overproduced extravaganza we know today.
The six major awards—for acting, directing, and Best Picture (in this case, The Greatest Show on Earth, one of the all-time upset winners)—each went to a different film, the first time this ever occurred—and still one of only three instances this took place in Academy history.
For the first decade and a half of its existence, the Oscars were not the scripted, flack-friendly, unabashedly gaudy spectacles of our time. In 2008, when the ceremony almost came derailed because of union unrest, it should be remembered that the early history of the awards were dominated by the industry’s rocky relationship with the labor movement.
The Academy Awards started out in 1927 as a banquet thrown by the International Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (the “International” part was quickly dropped)—the brainchild of mogul Louis B. Mayer, who saw it as a potential company union at a time when the industry’s directors, actors and screenwriters remained outside the basic agreement with Hollywood’s employees. If you were a member of the academy, you voted for the awards as instructed by your bosses.
Resignations en masse by creative talent during the Depression dropped the Academy’s membership from 600 to 40 by the time Frank Capra was elected President of the Academy in 1935. The director of It’s a Wonderful Life—a film about a man whose life undergoes a dramatic turnaround and spiritual rebirth—engineered a similar miracle by saving the Oscars, including, over the next couple of years, luring creative talent back with a ceremony in which film pioneer D.W. Griffith received a lifetime achievement award, democratizing voting procedures to neutralize studio influence, and introducing new supporting acting awards.
After 1942, increased attendance, along with a war that made an industry party look out of place, resulted in a move to theaters. And even though the festivities were broadcast live on the radio, if you were an Oscar recipient you didn’t particularly care what you said or for how long (thus, Greer Garson’s rambling acceptance speech for Mrs. Miniver, which urban legend quickly exaggerated from five to 45 minutes—a claim that made the Irish actress’ face as red as her hair).
You could, in effect, let your hair down—as Bing Crosby did when, rushing to get to the show, he left his toupee behind—only to find himself up on the podium without it when he won for Going My Way.
The six major awards—for acting, directing, and Best Picture (in this case, The Greatest Show on Earth, one of the all-time upset winners)—each went to a different film, the first time this ever occurred—and still one of only three instances this took place in Academy history.
For the first decade and a half of its existence, the Oscars were not the scripted, flack-friendly, unabashedly gaudy spectacles of our time. In 2008, when the ceremony almost came derailed because of union unrest, it should be remembered that the early history of the awards were dominated by the industry’s rocky relationship with the labor movement.
The Academy Awards started out in 1927 as a banquet thrown by the International Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (the “International” part was quickly dropped)—the brainchild of mogul Louis B. Mayer, who saw it as a potential company union at a time when the industry’s directors, actors and screenwriters remained outside the basic agreement with Hollywood’s employees. If you were a member of the academy, you voted for the awards as instructed by your bosses.
Resignations en masse by creative talent during the Depression dropped the Academy’s membership from 600 to 40 by the time Frank Capra was elected President of the Academy in 1935. The director of It’s a Wonderful Life—a film about a man whose life undergoes a dramatic turnaround and spiritual rebirth—engineered a similar miracle by saving the Oscars, including, over the next couple of years, luring creative talent back with a ceremony in which film pioneer D.W. Griffith received a lifetime achievement award, democratizing voting procedures to neutralize studio influence, and introducing new supporting acting awards.
After 1942, increased attendance, along with a war that made an industry party look out of place, resulted in a move to theaters. And even though the festivities were broadcast live on the radio, if you were an Oscar recipient you didn’t particularly care what you said or for how long (thus, Greer Garson’s rambling acceptance speech for Mrs. Miniver, which urban legend quickly exaggerated from five to 45 minutes—a claim that made the Irish actress’ face as red as her hair).
You could, in effect, let your hair down—as Bing Crosby did when, rushing to get to the show, he left his toupee behind—only to find himself up on the podium without it when he won for Going My Way.
With TV claiming a larger share of viewers’ attention and dollars, Hollywood decided in 1953 to market in the new medium, with a black-and-white broadcast going out to all of the U.S. and Canada. The experiment worked, and then some, garnering the largest audience in commercial television history up to that time.
From that moment on, it was inevitable that the awards lengthened with all those long recipient walks to the stage, all that fussing over hideously inappropriate gowns, all those commercial breaks, and all those musical numbers (including a duet between Snow White and Rob Lowe that made the erstwhile Brat Packer more of an industry laughingstock than that little sex tape with two groupies he met at the 1988 Democratic Convention).
Guiding the show at this pivotal 1953 broadcast was a familiar, soothing presence—Bob Hope, then in the middle of his record 18 appearances as host, and himself an award recipient that night. (He was given an honorary statuette, providing him with more fodder for his running joke about never winning a competitive Oscar. That statuette is in the picture accompanying this post.)
It’s hard for anyone under 40—and virtually impossible for anyone under 30—to understand how ingrained Hope became in the fabric of American entertainment. It’s only a start to realize that this British immigrant established the template for the host as quipmeister that would later be used, to varying degrees of success, by Johnny Carson, Billy Crystal, Steve Martin, Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Rock, Ellen DeGeneres, and most infamously, David Letterman. (“Oprah, Uma…Uma, Oprah!”)
You might begin to grasp Hope’s importance a bit more when you trace his influence on the performing style of later stars—especially Woody Allen, whose early schtick as a would-be Romeo with a coward’s instincts owed much to popular Hope vehicles such as “The Road to…” series done with friend Crosby and The Paleface.
But most of all, consider this: in seven decades in show business, while others (like radio comedian par excellence Fred Allen) floundered as they adapted to new media, Hope thrived on each in turn—vaudeville, movies, radio, and TV. So much of that owed to a near-limitless stockpile of jokes.
How limitless, you ask? Well, get this—after writing his own material at the start of his career, Hope employed other writers to help with his topical monologues—more than 100 unseen scribes by the end of his life. He’d not only put them in teams and cobble together scripts from the best of their efforts, but then—and this is what it takes a librarian like myself to appreciate— categorize the jokes and scripts by subject matter and file it all in cabinets in a fire- and theft-proof, walk-in vault, in an office next to his residence in North Hollywood, California.
The Library of Congress’ collection of this “Joke File” – now digitized and scanned, as you might expect—runs to 85,000 pages. I repeat: 85,000 pages. Un-be-lievable.
For the broadcast that launched the Oscars on its way to the global phenomenon it is today, it was only appropriate that it would feature this colossal presence in American entertainment, this indefatigable performer before America’s armed forces, this unapologetic jester of the American Century.
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