Television and Other Circuses
HOWE, QUINCY
WRITERS and WRITING Television and Other Circuses The Public Arts. By Gilbert Seldes. Simon & Schuster. 303 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by Quincy Howe ABC news commentator; author, "A World History...
...This is not because newspaper, magazine or book publishers possess greater wisdom, virtue or intelligence than radio or television executives...
...what chiefly distinguishes one network or station from another is the use to which it puts the talents at its disposal...
...It applies to relationships between sponsor and network, between Government and industry, between sustaining and commercial programs, between public service and entertainment...
...Seldes accepts the present American system of radio and television broadcasting, partly because it seems to have developed naturally from our culture, partly because no alternative--including pay-television--seems to offer greater promise...
...In his last book, The Great Audience, he criticized the motion pieture, radio and television industries for not addressing themselves to the separate sectors of the mass audience...
...They ought to have bad consciences, and now they seem prepared to make amends for past sins...
...it uses a portion of the public domain...
...Not that Mr...
...He also points out that the great stars of television and radio--Jimmy Durante, Jack Benny and Fred Allen--owe less to what they learned from television and radio than television and radio owe to them...
...For instance, no newspaper, no magazine, no book-publishing house could achieve any esthetic, public or financial purpose if it squandered, miscast and insulted its talent as the controllers of the radio and television industries have squandered, miscast and insulted theirs...
...Radio and television present so many new problems that no experience gained in other fields has much validity...
...But those who want those questions defined and discussed will find that Mr...
...But he views with more satisfaction than alarm the fears of pay-television and of Government supervision that currently afflict most leaders in the radio-television industry...
...our private enterprise system pays all its bills and decides what the public does and does not get...
...He might have laid greater stress on what radio still can do in these fields...
...Seldes's new book...
...At the turn of the century, mass production "began to take over all the arts, to produce them for everyone--big business and the democratic ideal appeared in a perfect fusion...
...More than thirty years ago, in The Seven Lively Arts, Gilbert Seldes analyzed and summarized the kind of popular entertainment that has now developed into what he calls the public arts...
...And because he brings to that field one of the finest critical talents of his generation, he illuminates whatever he touches...
...De Forest's photoelectric cell completed it...
...Of the public arts, he now writes that "they are offered to the public as a whole, not to any segment of it...
...This is especially true of those arts and professions that require some degree of collaboration and teamwork...
...Because Gilbert Seldes has spent the best years of his life working as a movie, drama and music critic, as a television executive and producer, and as a radio performer, he writes with unique professional competence in his chosen field...
...author, "A World History of Our Own Times' Free entertainment now flows unceasingly into almost every American home, affecting the lives of those who are not exposed to it as well as the lives of those who are...
...Seldes, "express the soul of a people (the eternal), the folk arts reflect the earthly experience over the centuries (the past...
...Then comes a more discerning discussion of the wide-screen sound film, in color...
...Murrow broadcasts...
...He admires the courage and integrity of Edward R. Murrow more than he admires the courage or integrity of the network for which Mr...
...Just as The Seven Lively Arts dealt at length with the great entertainers, composers and directors of the 1920s, so The Public Arts deals at perhaps excessive length with the personalities and celebrities who dominate television...
...But the positive choices he has made in certain directions have compelled him to make negative choices in others...
...Edison's phonograph record and motion picture film started the process...
...Seldes can say is that it always knew how to live within its limitations...
...And the public arts have so engrossed him that he has perhaps lost sight of one principle that the older arts and professions have learned to observe and respect over the generations, and even the centuries...
...Seldes holds Milton Berle or Jackie Gleason in high esteem...
...True, the author begins with a nostalgic tribute to the silent, black-and-white movies...
...The public arts popularize the classic arts...
...they tend to outstrip or displace all the other arts...
...The popular arts express the present moment, the instant mood...
...Those who want answers to the more than $64,000 questions that plague the practitioners of our public arts will not find them in Mr...
...It operates under public law...
...These limitations, however, made it forever impossible for radio to become an art form with the possibilities of the movies and television...
...What chiefly distinguishes Murrow from other newsmen is his enormous natural talent for both radio and television...
...By and large, Mr...
...Seldes expresses the hope that the movies will again become what they once were, "the great lovely art of our time," and he recalls, approvingly, the judgment of H. G. Wells in 1935: "I think the cinema is the very greatest art, with the possibilities of becoming the greatest art form that ever existed...
...it has become a prime means of communication...
...Seldes points out that television and radio have always regarded news and ideas as distinct from entertainment...
...the function remains the same) plays an essential role...
...It is that in most of the arts--fine or folk, popular or public--the impresario, director, editor (the title varies...
...Seldes is their man...
...What are the public arts...
...The fine arts," according to Mr...
...And this applies not only to the problem of how to use talent...
...they are, to an extent, habit-forming, and their effect is contagious...
...Most of these observations apply primarily to television, with which The Public Arts is primarily concerned...
...Of radio, the best that Mr...
...Seldes once called the lively arts, what others call the mass media, and what he now calls the public arts...
...The field that he has chosen is so vast, it has gone through so many changes, that no one--least of all so knowledgeable and honest a critic at himself can offer many final judgments...
...The popular arts acquired new characteristics, becoming what Mr...
...But courage and integrity are not the only virtues that have put Ed Murrow in a class by himself, nor has the lack of those virtues severely handicapped any network or station in radio or television...
Vol. 39 • July 1956 • No. 28
