Inside Prime Time
Tuchman, Gaye
marriage faced difficulties internal and external, but their love was never in doubt. Mother encouraged her daughter's interest in writing fiction, while father urged her also to find a way...
...This obliged (or enabled) her to travel all over her state, helping to clean up after a tornado, or set up a county fair...
...These stories are deceptively simple...
...Sometimes I wish that sociologist Gitlin were more sociologically systematic but he clearly had no intention of writing for that narrower audience...
...We are a people," she writes...
...Most important, they seek to mold what Gitlin aptly terms "recombinants" -- recombinations of elements from several proven successes brewed together with a pinch of hope...
...The rediscovery of black writers, as well as the proliferation of women writers, works to the advantage of all of us...
...Eudora Welty was educated before"writing" became a college subject...
...Her gift allows her both to explain the chore of writing and capture the magic of fiction simultaneously: "In here, in the confines of my fiction, we are all still alive...
...Mother's clan,, the Andrews, live on a mountain top, where water comes from a well hundreds of feet deep, and the only access to the outer world used to be by boat or raft down a fiver often in winter iced over...
...One of the odder tales,"A Father's Pleasures," revolves around Rudolf Geber, a world-renowned concert pianist who rewards his son with the ultimate prize, the father's own wife...
...The brotherhood of Moslem men -- all colors -- may exist there, but part of the glue that holds it together is the thorough suppression of women...
...Gaye Tuchman E VERY now and again, a disgruntled Hollywood writer or producer, whose slightly unorthodox idea for a series has been "ruined" by the networks, bares his soul and tells all: TV chases after money...
...Supposedly, people with talent are serving their apprenticeship so they can move on to the big screen...
...And so, Inside Prime Time contains a third theme...
...Thus, although his own discussions of plots and characters are frequently shrewd and insightful, I get queasy about his interpretations of others' interpretations of interpretations of a show...
...Part HI, Finding a Voice, carries the author through college, and work during the Depression for the WPA...
...I wish Gitlin had used it to notice analogies between TV-work and other work...
...o . A n n Mort i l l , UNDERSTAND that each woman is i capable of truly bringing another into the world," writes Alice Walker in her,new collection of essays, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens...
...It is good enough for its purposes...
...Making pictures of people in all sorts of situations: I learned that every feeling waits upon its gesture...
...To flesh his portrait, Gitlin traces the rise, transmogrifications, and fall of some promising programs, paying special attention to the refreshingly honest and short-lived American Dream...
...Ultimately, capitalism does not explain all...
...I wantedto marry, to travel, to be a writer," says one character...
...The industry-coined initials stand for "tits and asses," programs such as Three's Company or the nowdefunct Charlie's Angels which were afflicted by the jigglies...
...But Gitlin is writing about culture, not work...
...Part H, Learning to See, is mainly family history, as it appears to a little girl visiting distant grandparents and later to the grown woman who puts it together...
...I have always trusted this voice...
...Another story tells o f a successful novelist who has taken refuge in a mountain community and is benignly accepting of his typist's habit of wearing women's clothes when I~e types I June 1984:345...
...To obey that rule, people in the industry reproduce the formula of a genre until that genre is played out...
...In "The CNil Rights Movement: What Good Was It...
...In Mr...
...Todd Gitlin interviewed roughly two hundred men and (a few) women who, with others, write, produce, direct, and manage network television, including its systematically associated production companies...
...That observation makes sense...
...It isn't my mother's voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own...
...Even as Gitlin carefully details some men's passionate feelings about ideas they want to express but cannot get by the networks, he doesn't think to ask how these women feel when they attend meetings where the old boys discuss "T & A" shows...
...One article is especially timely in these days of tension between blacks and Jews...
...There are talented guys and bad guys...
...Inside Prime Time is superb cultural criticism: a Commonweal: 344 radical expressing dismay at a nonpoliticized America and an audience which doesn't have politics in its soul...
...As I read and reread Inside Prime Time, I increasingly felt that Gitlin, a published poet, mistakenly believes that art, "real art," can emerge only from the unitary vision of a man who cares...
...Reasonably, Gitlin suggests that "the deal is the art form...
...Inside Prime Time presents the richest information ever collected on the inner workings of America's chief culture industry...
...I wonder how he can announce that a show failed "because," when he has been emphasizing how no one can either predict or even postdict success or failure...
...But among the normal childhood events described in Part I -- learning to read, school, Sunday School, the arrival of two brothers -- one factor seems the most important to her, and perhaps the most indicative of her future calling...
...Interwoven with this critical, literary, and often wittily written condemnation of kitsch is another more sophisticated analysis...
...Bedford and the Muses, Gaff Godwin offers us five stories which are fictionalized accounts of a writer's experiences...
...These were thingg a story writer needed to know...
...They "create" spinoffs...
...Again Gitlin provides an extended example by focusing upon a show (Bitter Harvest, a "Movie of the Week" starring Ron Howard) whose radical potential was dissipated by everyone's implicit understanding of how TV gets done...
...Unable to explain why Johnny can't read, teachers point to the thoroughness of their lesson plan...
...The television industry is an old boys' network of fellas out to earn the big buck by manufacturing kitsch...
...9 . . My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too . . . When I write, and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make my changes...
...Whether the story is about a woman, man, young, or old writer, the author's voice is intelligent aa~Ujoyable...
...Safety first is the network rule...
...As sociologist Everett C. Hughes explained years ago, when people can't control the outcome of their work, they emphasize what they can control to show how hard they're trying...
...All seem to be filtered through the eyes of that disgruntled writer or producer...
...misconstrue the "mood of the country" as more reactionary than it has actually been...
...I write "man" consciously...
...In our society, capital is rewarded when it is risked...
...and identify social problems with the little guy or gal overcoming death, disease, or disaster...
...In the lingo Giflin occasionally adopts, they want to "give good meeting" in the innumerable conferences and conversations in which the creative folk and managers cooperate and spar...
...Good literature is both sexless and colorless...
...Beyond the people and the stories is the focusing excitement, the framing function, of travel itself...
...Everyone seems to be on the make or protecting the position they have already made...
...so they construct intricate life histories...
...There is an underlying perversity, in several of them almost a petrified quality...
...The trips were wholes in themselves_9 They were stories_9 Not only in form, but in their taking ondirection, movement, development, change...
...Mother encouraged her daughter's interest in writing fiction, while father urged her also to find a way to make a living_9 The Massey Lectures appear here as the three sections of the book: Listening, Learning to See, Finding a Voice...
...tellers around her...
...The second part of the book is devoted to essays dealing with the civil rights movement...
...An ad agency referred to CBS's series Falcon Crest as 'a taste of The GoodEarth and a dash of Dallas in the middle of a California vineyard...
...Dealing with Hollywood's "word" about shows, Gitlin writes as though the ,facts speak for themselves, even though his earlier The Whole World Is Watching, on the effects of news coverage on Students for a Democratic Society, clearly acknowledges how the facts never stand on their own...
...What Gitlin did do, he did very well...
...Once I was twenty-one and terrified I woOkl not get the most out of life...
...An editor at Ms...
...A people do not throw their geniuses away...
...It is, of course, an artful book -- written with love and Craft, and with one art, the fiction writer's, at itsheart...
...accede to conservativism, including the MoralMajority...
...It isn't steady...
...Ever since I was read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear...
...All seem intent on getting along and selling their ideas...
...She gives us the materials to decide for ourselves why, from the many cared-for children of her time, her milieu, only one of them grew up to be Eudora Welty...
...Making & marketing culture INSIDE PRINE TINE Todd GitUn Pantheon, $|6.95, 360 pp...
...Though roughly chronological in order, as chapters they overlap, because, as the author both points out and demonstrates, neither sequence nor memory is a fixed thing...
...Walker takes on the women's movement with the same verve she uses on the black revolutionaries who condemn her mainstream civil rights work while "consuming quantities of wine and cheese at our house...
...Some are bitter, some resigned, some cautious, some just out for a buck...
...Gitlin condemns the "attitudes" rampantdn the industry...
...Nobody but me," that bitter expatriate invariably complains, "cares about quality...
...Nil...
...Towns had edges, stopped where the country began...
...Gitlin's treatment of the industry's interpretation of programs is less satisfying than his other discussions...
...They use those shows to sell the largest possible audience to the advertisers who finance America's dominant and probably most profitable medium...
...and I had to be prepared to recognize this moment when I saw it...
...Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had...
...Although Gitlin interviewed at least one woman who is a self-described member of the boys' network (and whose lover identifies her as a feminist), he seems oblivious to her analogues in other industries and singularly uncurious about these women...
...Sometimes I wish he had drawn the obvious analogies to other industries and spoken about risk-taking in the automobile industry or how Harvard M.B.A.'s are said to search for personal success and profit before success for their corporation...
...In this book, Walker goes on an expedition, in search of the missing voices of women and black writers...
...For Gitlin, TV just won't do...
...But what is refreshing about this essay is Walker's statement decrying the treatment of blacks in Arab countries, since it has recently become acceptable for radical blacks to embrace not only Palestinian rights, but the Arab governments and the PLO: As for those who think the Arab world promises freedom, the briefest study of its routine traditional treatment of blacks (slavery) and women (purdah) will provide relief from all illusion...
...She does not theorize -- as in her stories, she presents...
...Travel might have perils such as a flat tire needing to be vulcanized, but also such rewards as ferries towed across a river by hand, where the deck was awash and bared feet could be cooled...
...Events in Jackson included Thurston the magician, one-night stands by Galli-Curci and Paderewski, and the silent films we revive today...
...say, put to play "one on one" against a ratings hit or shuffled into a different time-slot each week...
...This is a volume which should be read over and over again for sustenance...
...Unable tO predict a show' s ratings, people in the TV industry "give good meeting...
...Frequently using the words of those interviewed, Gitlin skillfully describes how in this capitalist business, all activity is geared toward minimizing the risk...
...That one's about the politics of hermeneutics or how, when managers seek to explain why one program succeeded and another failed, they discredit liberalism, not to speak of radicalism...
...If Malcolm X had been a black woman his last message to thewodd would have been entirely different...
...Black Power critics, she defends her own involvement in Martin Luther King's struggle...
...She learned from listening, to that inner Voice, and to the story...
...The whole book is engaging...
...She learned, she says, from her own mistakes...
...Childhood's learning is made up of moments...
...It's a pulse...
...PITCH DARK Rengta Adler Knopf, $12.95, 145 pp...
...Walker castigates the toleration of anti-Semitism in the black community, but also describes the black sense of identity with the underdog, explaining the current growth of solidarity with the Palestinians...
...BEDFORD AND THE NUSES Gall Godwin V|kin~ $14.95, 229 pp...
...Like that expatriate, though, Gitlin sees this emphasis on meetings as somehow inappropriate to art, or in his phrase "even entertainment...
...She took her camera along_9 Photography, like fiction, demands composition, form, and timing -- to capture the instant...
...a response to Letty Cottin Pogrebin's article on anti-Semitism in the women's movement...
...magazine, Walker challenges the white, middle-class nature of much of the women's movement, though she criticizes as a member of the clan...
...In answer to America by dissecting and condemning the consciousness industry that contributes so significantly to the state of that soul...
...And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children, and, if necessary, bone by bone...
...As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me...
...In it, Gitlin details how the drive for corporate profit in today's culture industries militates against the production and acceptance, let alone celebration, of good shows...
...By this means, breaking the ice, Eudora's mother Chessie had carried her dying father to a hospital in Baltimore, and brought his coffin home again...
...When a program escapes "the industrialization of mannerism" identified as TV's dominant style, it may be undercut through scheduling...
...This collection, however, is especially instructive for writers and for women writers in particular -- if only because Walker's prose makes one feel less isolated in a wodd which is not very accepting of writers...
...hoping they have identified the key elements in the success of a program, they try to shape a clone...
...For too long, we have collectively ignored the voices of our past and our present...
...We take our Muses where we find them," writes Godwin...
...Father's family, farmers, seems to live less dramatically, but for a child there are wonders on a farm too, a springhouse, a great barn, and again, affection...
...Some of us are still young, plotting our favorite versions of the love, accomplishment, beauty, elegance, and wealth we hope to win for ourselves...
...Walker explains the territory she charted previously in her novel, Meridian...
...Most network television is simply bad -- inert, derivative, cardboard -- because no one with clout cares enough to make it otherwise...
...Psychiatrists can't prove they have helped their patients...
...The search for recombinants so affects the industry that its men and women think in terms of what something's like, not what it is...
...The first story is about a young American writer living her "formative years'" in England, in a rooming house run by American expatriates...
...Less interesting is her writing on Cuba, where she falls into commonplace revolutionary rhetoric, with her insistence that the Cuban revolution will triumphantly bring freedom and dignity to that country's citizens...
...a radical discussing what he doesn't like in A prose , o f her own IN lURCH OF ORB NOTHERS' GARDENS WOMANIST PROSE Alice Walker Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $14.95, 397 pp...
...It is the record of a person, a family, a town, and an era...
...Muriel Cantor reported a similar phenomenon in her 1971 The Hollywood TV Producer, although she emphasized how a concern for perfecting cinematic skills leads some men to tolerate network interference rather than to seek professional autonomy elsewhere, as others 1 June 1984:343 do...
Vol. 111 • June 1984 • No. 11
