“TV – THAT’S WHERE MOVIES GO WHEN THEY DIE:” Rewatching the First Televised Oscars.
One decision the AMPAS board of 1953 did not have to anguish over was the selection of the host: the availability of stand-up comedian and radio and film superstar Bob Hope made life easy. The most versatile, reliable, and motor-mouthed MC of the mid-twentieth century, especially when his writers were waiting in the wings, Hope had first hosted the ceremonies in 1940 when Gone With the Wind took home eight Oscars (“What a wonderful thing — this benefit for David Selznick!”) and he would perform the duty 13 times in all, up until 1978.
The minute Hope walks to the podium he owns the room. His cascade of non-stop punchlines taps two main veins: side-eyed swipes at television (“Jack Warner still refers to TV as that furniture that stares back”) and the long-running gag about his unrequited Oscar-love. (“I like to be here just in case. You can never tell — one year there might be one left over.”) For viewers under a certain age, Hope’s topical humor may require a footnote. “Don’t glare at me, you melted-down Stevenson button!” he snaps at the shelf of Oscars stage left. When actor Ray Milland walks off stage, he muses, “I wonder if he ever redeemed his typewriter.” An evergreen joke that cuts both ways gets the biggest laugh of the night: “TV — that’s where movies go when they die.”
In the 1998 A&E documentary version of Neal Gabler’s excellent 1989 book, An Empire of their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, the narrator (actor R.H. Thomson) notes that after being unable to break the monopoly that east coast-based Thomas Edison had on moviemaking at the start of the 20th century, the largely Jewish immigrants who created what we now call Hollywood went west, both for the excellent weather that allowed them to film outdoors throughout most of the year, and for the freedom to build, as Gabler dubbed it in his title, “An Empire of their Own,” far from Edison’s (often anti-Semitic) control. Eventually, with 75 percent of the public going to the movies at least once a week between the wars:
Actors became the gods and goddesses of the new American religion. And where there are new gods, there must be new idols. So the studio heads began a movie guild with the lofty title of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It was [MGM’s Louis B.] Mayer’s brilliant idea [in 1929] to create the Oscars, where the movie moguls could honor themselves by giving each other awards. In this way, they went from being a group of immigrant Jews, to award-winning American producers.
Not to mention, as one biographer quoted Mayer, “I found that the best way to handle [filmmakers] was to hang medals all over them. […] If I got them cups and awards they’d kill themselves to produce what I wanted. That’s why the Academy Award was created.”