What I watched: The only surviving episode of City at Night, a local newsmagazine that aired on KTLA. Keith Hetherington and Dorothy Gardiner were the hosts, with guests Irving Pichel, John Archer, Warner Anderson, Dick Wesson, Tom Powers, Robert A. Heinlein, and George Pal. The episode aired sometime (presumably at night) on Tuesday, October 11, 1949, and can be viewed on Internet Archive.
What happened: We begin with a shocking opening shot, as our cheery co-anchors Keith and Dorothy fly away from the Earth, with us seeing the planet shrinking in the distance. They end up in a rocket on the moon, and get off. They quickly find four people in spacesuits, who they seem to be very intimidated by. However, when the men take off their helmets they turn out to be friendly Hollywood actors Archer, Anderson, Wesson and Powers. (What a nice collection of manly Hollywood name!) Another nice man politely explains what a spacesuit is, and goes over all of the suits’ features.
Eventually we admit that the rocky surface is the set for an upcoming movie, Destination Moon. The man is director Irving Pichel, a man with a fairly droning voice. He describes his movie as “the first serious space picture that’s been made in the United States”, directly referencing George Melies’s 1902 “A Trip to the Moon”, as well as an earlier story by Cyrano de Bergerac. Producer George Pal comes on, and talks about his past in animation and puppetry.
The next guest is “Bob” Heinlein (!), author of the script and the original novel, who assures us that travelling to the moon is possible with current technology. Heinlein immediately starts throwing numbers out, and the hosts quickly shift focus to panning around the set. Heinlein continues to stress the realism of the picture, and gets a chance to show off one of his books. The hosts also talk to art department head Chesley Bonestel.
There are a lot of slow pans over the set, and Keith talks obliquely about the difficulties of moving the cameras and speakers around for every show. Dorothy notes that this is the first time television has ever shown a movie set (although movies had shown a TV set a decade ago.) More technical staff are interviewed, including a Technicolor consultant, who mentions that he hopes TV will be in colour by 1960, when the movie is set.
The director of photography talks about flying a military aircraft, chasing a black line through the desert, as part of the process, while two air force officers provide a model. They all goof around with a larger rocket model. Pichel promises that “nobody’s going to come to any great disaster” in the movie, which seems emblematic of 40s Hollywood.
Our two hosts and their slow-moving camera then go inside the spaceship. The ship, of course, has television cameras and screens inside it, so the astronauts can watch their own flight. There’s a lot of kayfabe, as they talk about which parts of the ship would be left on the moon. Keith and Dorothy conclude by shaking hands with everyone and telling the viewer to go see the picture once it comes out in 1950.
What I thought: City at Night was reportedly a newsmagazine program that visited a different part of Los Angeles each week. On a technical level, recording on-location is pretty remarkable for this age of television — the only other place I think we’ve seen it is some outdoor shots in Suspense. I have no idea if this was a typical episode or not, but based on Heatherington’s comments it probably wasn’t.
Whether typical or not, this episode functions as an Access Hollywood-type show, providing a glimpse behind the scenes of an upcoming movie with a lot of promotional fluff in between. As with entertainment shows to come, its approach is not just positive but almost wonderstruck. Still, such footage and access to movie staff was not as commonplace then as it is now, and I think a 40s audience would have been reasonably entertained (more than they would be by Rehearsal Time, anyway.)
It would be twelve years before Russia put a man in space, and twenty before America put one on the moon, but the glimpses we have of Destination Moon here shows how long the iconography of space travel had been incorporated into American culture. In this episode we have spacesuits that look reasonably like real suits would and a rocket that is curvier than the real deal but still follows the same general principles. In part this prescience is because of the legacy of pulp science fiction, especially hard, fact-based SF of the kind Destination Moon purports to be. But I think there was an additional pull. If America was now an empire, it needed new territory to conquer, and with none left on Earth, they gradually began looking to space as the next frontier. (The final frontier, if you will.)
One thing that I appreciated about City at Night is the way it stresses the collective nature of film production. The coverage of a contemporary Hollywood movie will discuss the actors, the director, and maybe a screenwriter or cinematographer if you’re lucky. This episode interviews all of the above as well as the producers, set designers, art department, and a few others. The studio system was towards the end of its peak, but you can still see its ethos in the way these professionals talk about their work — not unlike factory workers would discuss a car or a steel beam. A mid-century studio was like a movie factory, with everyone working their part on the assembly line. There were a lot of problems with this system, but the lack of auteurism is sort of refreshing.
The most notable crew member influenced is Robert A. Heinlein, here referred to as “Bob.” Heinlein was one of the pillars of the “golden age” of science fiction, and due to his very private nature made few television appearances. In 1949 Heinlein was still fairly early in his career, at the point where his work was most palatable to the mainstream and before he started writing books about libertarianism and incest and other goony things. But even here he appears uncomfortable and dry on screen. As far as I know none of Heinlein’s work has been adapted for television, but his influence can be seen in everything from Star Trek to Dr. Who, so it’s worth acknowledging him during his brief stopover in Hollywood.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the program is the way in which the hosts jokingly move between the reality of the movie business and the fictional world of the film. At one moment, Keith and Dorothy are talking to the producers about the process of creating the movie, and at the next they’re talking about the rocket as if it could actually take off into space. There’s even reference to the artificiality of television, as with the repeated shots of the City at Night cameraman riding a boom. Perhaps this is a casual acknowledgement of the truth of entertainment journalism: that really, it’s all fiction in the end.
Coming up next: The Lone Ranger stops by to deal with some rustlers.
The Eternal Couch Potato 