"*Whew,* it's you! We thought it was Mom catching us watching The Late Show on a school night!"
(Ruth Roman, Farley Granger, and Pat Hitchcock in Strangers on a Train)
Remember the days before DVRs, DVDs, Blu-Ray discs, and Video on Demand back when Blockbuster Video still ruled the earth and you had to consult your good old-fashioned bound paper TV Guide to see what was on the tube? Cast your mind back to a time when The Late Late Show meant movies, not Craig Ferguson interviewing celebrities (no offense, Craig, if you’re reading this). You discovered that one of your favorite movies, which you hadn’t seen in years, happened to be airing on a weekday—maybe even a school night, if you were a kid—at 3 a.m., and the only way you could see it would be to actually stay up late and watch it, unless you were one of the then-few people on your block to own one of those early VCRs with those clunky cassettes. Sure, you’d be dragging your ass all the next day, but as a die-hard movie buff, you knew it was worth it, especially when the film in question wasn’t available on any form of home video. I was mulling this over recently as I was popping through my TiVo menus to make sure I didn’t miss any classic films, TV series, or talk show appearances of my favorite actors—a concept which, during my late-night-movie-watching peak (junior high/middle school through college), would have seemed like something out of one of Jules Verne’s fantastic yet prescient tales.
Growing up in the
When I was about 12, I got both my own bedroom and my own TV therein—just in time for me to go gaga over the classic films of The Marx Brothers, Alfred Hitchcock, Humphrey Bogart, and the wonderfully wicked world of film noir. Oh joy of joys! I didn’t have to fight to stay awake into the wee hours, either. Now that I didn’t have to worry about waking Cara, all I had to do was set my alarm clock for the movie’s starting time. I never slept through the alarm, but there were a few nights when I’d sleepily turn off the alarm, stop to rest my eyes before getting out of bed to turn on the TV (we didn’t have remotes), and of course, the next time I opened my eyes, Mom would be knocking on my bedroom door telling me to get dressed for school. How mortifying!
Usually, though, I’d bound out of bed with the late-night alarm, tune my TV’s volume so it was just loud enough to be heard inside my room but nowhere else (all the bedrooms were upstairs), and enjoy! Since I was the youngest, most “goody-two-shoes” member of my family, watching all these films alone in the middle of the night added an extra little outlaw thrill to my movie-watching experience, especially for mystery/suspense films like the classic 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon and my instant fave, Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (SoaT), which I watched with my older brother, feeling quite grown-up. It was the first Hitchcock film I’d ever seen, one of the Saturday night wee-hours films shown on our local CBS affiliate. SoaT was also the film that introduced me to Patricia Hitchcock and Robert Walker, both of whom deserved Oscar nominations, in my opinion. I was surprised to find the role of the psychotic Bruno Antony was a change-of-pace role for clean-cut, baby-faced
That marathon late-night advertising could be murder! Even the worst insomniacs would be hard-pressed to keep from nodding off during the duller Mom-and-Pop business commercials, or those WPIX editorials; it was only in later years that I learned to appreciate the phlegmatic, avucular Richard N. Hughes and his catchphrase, “What’s your opinion? We’d like to know.” Sure, the station cranked up the volume on the commercials, but the initial shock just pumped enough adrenaline through me to blast me out of bed and twist the volume control so as not to wake my unsuspecting family. The commercial for Dario Argento’s 1977 horror classic Suspiria was the exception. It showed the back of a woman’s head as she brushed her hair while a creepy female voiceover chanted an ominous variation on “Roses are red, violets are blue....” The woman turned around, revealing a grotesque skeleton face. The voiceover screeched, and so did I! Hell of an image when you’re watching the 1937 Marx Brothers comedy A Day at the Races, like I was!
The stations usually made up for their late-movie shows’ dull and plentiful commercials with memorable openings. WhatNew York City
The stations usually made up for their late-movie shows’ dull and plentiful commercials with memorable openings. What
Sometimes if my mom had trouble sleeping during the wee hours, she’d catch me in thrall to my late-night movie habit despite my best efforts to conceal it. Even if Mom didn’t hear a sound, she still saw the soft telltale light of the TV peeping under my door. Naturally, she’d come in, startling me almost as much as that damn Suspiria TV spot. She’d grill me in her nice but firm way about why I was up at this hour when I had school the next day. Mom rarely yelled (but when she did, you shaped up but quick! J) ; mostly she’d look sad and give me a well-meant guilt trip about how I’d be so tired tomorrow and not be able to concentrate in school, and college tuition doesn’t grow on trees.... Now that I’m a mom myself, I understand where she was coming from. At the time, however, I just nodded, apologized, and went to bed. Mom retired for the night feeling like a good mom (which she was, bless her), while I climbed back into bed secretly annoyed because I’d been made, and I’d missed twenty or more minutes of the film during Mom’s lecture. That was my problem as a kid: I was much too well-behaved! J
I don’t think I’ve watched a late show on TV since my college days. As a working wife and mom, I don’t have as much free time for watching movies in the middle of the night—but my husband Vinnie and I have a TiVo in our bedroom with tons of time-shifted entertainment, and we own plenty of DVDs—including Help!, A Hard Day’s Night, and Strangers on a Train, complete with cool extras. So you see, the more things change, the more they remain the same; only the technology and packaging changes.
Got any late-night movie stories to share? Let us know!
Please welcome our newest "...Easily Distracted" Followers: Andrew Duvall, a.k.a. 1001MovieMan, and Emm, a.k.a. AudreyObsession (the Audrey in question being Hepburn -- Emm, you have excellent taste!). Thanks for joining our cinematic sewing circle! :-)
ReplyDeleteI believe I was fourteen when my parents got me a 15" B&W TV (second-hand, natch') for my bedroom. Before that I was only allowed to set up with them in the livingroom and only until 11:30pm or so on a Friday or Saturday night. As you can imagine, there wasn't much horror film watching.
ReplyDeleteOnce I got my own set, all bets were off. Saturday night was CHILLER theatre (with the six-fingered hand rising from the swamp), where I was introduced to lots of amazing horror/suspense films. One of the other local stations generally ran gangster/crime films on Friday night, and i loved them almost as much.
Why, thank you, Dorian! (You don't mind if I call you Dorian right off, do you?)
ReplyDeleteIn my early days of old movie lovin' I frequently would watch 3-5 films in a weekend, with a few vintage TV shows thrown in for good measure. The movie binge normally began around 7 o'clock and didn't let up until 3:00 or sometimes even 4:00 the next morning. Now, at 17, I feel much older and wiser. I'm rarely up past 1:00. ;D
I really do enjoy reading your blog...it's so much more sane than my own! I'm not much of a writer, and it definitely shows.
Thanks for sharing your escapades as a wee-hours furtive film film fanatic, Steve! You know, when I began looking for links to CHILLER THEATER and other movie show openers, commercials, and movie trailers to use in this blog post, I was pleased to see that they were all easy to find on YouTube! The Internet can be a boon to pop culture knowledge! :-) Good luck with your move, Steve, and feel free to drop by here again soon!
ReplyDeleteEmm, you're most welcome, and yes, please feel free to call me Dorian. Heck, many people go really wild and call me Dori! :-) Sounds like your movie-watching habits are a lot like mine; further proof you're a young lady of superb taste and breeding! Thanks for your nice words about "Tales of the Easily Distracted." I'm glad you're enjoying it, and if you like, I'd be happy to include a link to your blog on my site so others can enjoy your wit and wisdom. Judging from your "Audrey Obsession" handle, would I be correct in assuming that Audrey Hepburn is mentioned regularly on your blog site? :-)
ReplyDeleteOur own Michael Wolff, witty author, raconteur, and walking encyclopedia of vintage TV knowledge, had this to say:
ReplyDeleteOh my goodness, Dorian!
Such memories . . . such memories. And you're truly dating yourself well beyond your rosy-cheeked years if you're effortlessly dredging up details of those glorious days (or, perhaps more correctly, those glorious nights) before the current age of Cable Television came along and homogenized everything, and true creativity and vision danced away with the stars.
From the onset it must be understood that I grew up in Austin, Texas. Being the capitol city of a great state, the burghers who ran the place naturally tried to make certain that the Local Media was as squeaky clean and presentable as possible. Back then, of course, a good deal of late night broadcasting was turned over to old motion pictures and so, faced with such a circumstance, the local media was behooved to run only the most vanilla of films. Gosharootie . . . none of this highly suspect film noir or foreign cinema or anything of that nature. Oh, Heaven Forbid! Break out the sequined Westerns, Bowery Boys comedies and PTA-approved depictions of Life In America.
(Given this background, my undying affection for June Allyson must be viewed with considerably more understanding.)
The closest the young Michael Wolff would ever come to seeing anything the least bit horrific would be whenever the local stations (of which there were two, plus the PBS outlet, which was then known as NET in those days) would run a film listed as "melodrama". Remember when "melodrama" was a legitimate genre description? Back then such an appellation might indicate a film like The Strange Case Of Dr. Rx, The Return Of Dr. X or, if I was very, very, very lucky, a rogue showing of The Curse Of The Cat People or The Maze.
The situation enjoyed something of a quantum skew in the late-60s. That's when my parents picked up what was then a rudimentary sort of cable television package. Technically what it meant was that we were now able to watch the programming coming out of San Antonio.
Realistically it meant the opening of a whole new world for me. The Captain Gus Show, with the old Fleischer Studio Popeye cartoons, as well as episodes of Space Ghost! Episodes of Supercar, the old British Invisible Man series . . .
. . . and Project Terror!
But wait, friends, there's more to Michael Wolff's marvelous post! Read on:
ReplyDeleteOh Yes, Dorian! Every Friday night at 10:30 would find me dutifully in place before the portable RCA black-and-white tube, anxiously waiting for the horrific mixture of jet aircraft, grinding motorcycle and electronic warbling . . . accompanied by shifting oscilloscope patterns on the screen, and Joe Alston's voice-over: "Project . . . TERROR! Where the Scientific, and the Terrifying, Emerge!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIapC7SZbLs
That's where I got my chops (along with certain others, such as future film director Robert Rodriguez). All the classic Universal horror films! The treats from the Hammer studio, as well as the finest in kaiju from Toho! All of this interspersed with whatever had been cheerfully stuffed into the package and sent to the KENS-TV. I mean, back in those days, the concept of Programming was as totally alien as anything which was depicted in the films. One week I'd be watching Forbidden Planet, or The Time Machine, and then the next week I'd get Samson And The Vampire Women, Giant Of Metropolis or Robot Monster.
To the people at KENS it was all one quality. And, back then, it made some sort of absolute twisted sense. It was almost Zen. A unique form of poetry. Of course The Slime People was just as good as When Worlds Collide. You just had to develop a cosmic sort of perspective.
(A lesson which, alas, I've never quite been able to impart upon my offspring.)
And there were the genuine scares. Films such as The Black Scorpion, Curse Of The Demon, Not Of This Earth and Cult Of The Cobra, which used to upset my mother no end because, according to her, they upset me. Now I have no proof that I actually had screaming nightmares because of these films . . . but she claimed that I did and, in her court of law, that was enough! Any hope of weaning me off of Project Terror, though, was a harder job than separating a crackhead from his pusher. Especially more so when UHF arrived in full force in Austin, and channel 24 began running Shock Theatre and Aftershock on Saturday nights.
Oh bliss!
(Of course the fact that, as I grew older, I learned to face my fears . . . with the possible exception of Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch . . . might've also been a contributing factor to my Mom eventually throwing in the towel.)
(And then there was the time I like to call The Night Someone Was Asleep At The Switch! Or: how else to explain a showing of Godard's Alphaville on Aftershock? Granted, the film was an edited version. But I was scratching my head over it for weeks afterwards.)
Unfortunately, though, such days have faded into the past. Late-night television programming has since fallen into the hands of celebrity whores. The salad days of independent television stations and UHF are a dim memory, as is the concept of motion pictures being a major part of network broadcasting (remember when films such as Cleopatra, or Bridge Over The River Kwai, were Big Events stretched out over two evenings?). The concept of Modern Cable Television as a blessed realm of innovation has been exposed as thin fiction, and even those cable networks supposedly devoted to movies seem more interested in expanding the careers of talentless magazine cover floss than in plumbing the depths of creative weirdness.
Dorian, trust an old man's word on this. We were much better off when no one was at the wheel.
But wait, Michael has more to say:
ReplyDeleteOh Yes, Dorian! Every Friday night at 10:30 would find me dutifully in place before the portable RCA black-and-white tube, anxiously waiting for the horrific mixture of jet aircraft, grinding motorcycle and electronic warbling . . . accompanied by shifting oscilloscope patterns on the screen, and Joe Alston's voice-over: "Project . . . TERROR! Where the Scientific, and the Terrifying, Emerge!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIapC7SZbLs
That's where I got my chops (along with certain others, such as future film director Robert Rodriguez). All the classic Universal horror films! The treats from the Hammer studio, as well as the finest in kaiju from Toho! All of this interspersed with whatever had been cheerfully stuffed into the package and sent to the KENS-TV. I mean, back in those days, the concept of Programming was as totally alien as anything which was depicted in the films. One week I'd be watching Forbidden Planet, or The Time Machine, and then the next week I'd get Samson And The Vampire Women, Giant Of Metropolis or Robot Monster.
To the people at KENS it was all one quality. And, back then, it made some sort of absolute twisted sense. It was almost Zen. A unique form of poetry. Of course The Slime People was just as good as When Worlds Collide. You just had to develop a cosmic sort of perspective.
(A lesson which, alas, I've never quite been able to impart upon my offspring.)
And there were the genuine scares. Films such as The Black Scorpion, Curse Of The Demon, Not Of This Earth and Cult Of The Cobra, which used to upset my mother no end because, according to her, they upset me. Now I have no proof that I actually had screaming nightmares because of these films . . . but she claimed that I did and, in her court of law, that was enough! Any hope of weaning me off of Project Terror, though, was a harder job than separating a crackhead from his pusher. Especially more so when UHF arrived in full force in Austin, and channel 24 began running Shock Theatre and Aftershock on Saturday nights.
Oh bliss!
(Of course the fact that, as I grew older, I learned to face my fears . . . with the possible exception of Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch . . . might've also been a contributing factor to my Mom eventually throwing in the towel.)
(And then there was the time I like to call The Night Someone Was Asleep At The Switch! Or: how else to explain a showing of Godard's Alphaville on Aftershock? Granted, the film was an edited version. But I was scratching my head over it for weeks afterwards.)
Unfortunately, though, such days have faded into the past. Late-night television programming has since fallen into the hands of celebrity whores. The salad days of independent television stations and UHF are a dim memory, as is the concept of motion pictures being a major part of network broadcasting (remember when films such as Cleopatra, or Bridge Over The River Kwai, were Big Events stretched out over two evenings?). The concept of Modern Cable Television as a blessed realm of innovation has been exposed as thin fiction, and even those cable networks supposedly devoted to movies seem more interested in expanding the careers of talentless magazine cover floss than in plumbing the depths of creative weirdness.
Dorian, trust an old man's word on this. We were much better off when no one was at the wheel.