On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television AN EVENING OF PERFECT TV BY REUVEN FRANK MENCKEN HAS been dead since 1956, Gogol since 1852, Swift since 1745, so there was no one around to properly portray what happened on...
...Simpson story and still wear white at their weddings...
...We used to have to wait for the opera...
...By the accepted precept that what happens in California will soon happen to the rest of us, News From Above is surely coming to us all...
...The sun had set by then...
...His calls were rebroadcast and relished over four commercial networks and CNN and all the TV stations in the United States...
...Peter Jennings admitted he knew no more than his viewers, without saying he had to talk anyway...
...Moving...
...It was some kind of miracle...
...And threatening...
...For two hours, 95 million Americans ignored the sixth game of the professional basketball finals in the East and the sunset in the West to stare at the tube as a white Ford Bronco drove sedately along one strand and then another of L.A.'s web of freeways—from Orange County, home of Disneyland and the New Right, to a posh part of town known as Brentwood...
...Instead, ABC's coverage won, and NBC reaped only the anger of the hundreds who called to protest interrupting their game...
...Southern Californians by the dozens, then hundreds, drove alongside the upscale panel truck carrying Simpson shouting "Go...
...They knew only that he was 10 hours late for a court appearance to answer charges that he had brutally stabbed to death his former wife and her male friend...
...Bosnia is real...
...After it came the battle of the networks' new stars, Simpson's attorneys and the prosecutors, who raised such a cloud of dust that a judge yanked the indictment process from a grand jury and turned it over to a preliminary hearing in open court...
...There was much babble about celebrity status, evoked by how lightly Simpson got off when he was found guilty of beating his wife: He spent no time in jail and failed, with impunity, to do the community service the judge had ordered...
...Thus began the orgy of coverage of O.J...
...Movies like Grand Canyon and Boyz N the Hood have taught us about LAPD helicopters, but not until that Friday did the country, especially the backward East, learn about local TV helicopters...
...Richard M. Nixon's funeral got less coverage...
...Simpson, is enshrined in professional football's Hall of Fame...
...But if this was ever true, we learned that Friday evening that live television is no longer reality...
...Simpson's driver was seen coming out of the Bronco, talking to police, going back to the Bronco...
...It seemed fitting...
...Broadcasters fear silence...
...Suddenly this is the hot topic for publications and programs seeking to exploit the O.J...
...Trees and a fence partially obscured the car from the helicopters and their cameras...
...Everything became television, so nothing was real...
...the plunge of the dollar is real...
...Simpson has been bound over to stand trial for murder, after a week-long preliminary hearing that pushed the soap operas off the networks as they jostled to keep their addicted audiences away from CNN, there is danger that the memory of that amazing Friday evening may be fading...
...The pattern was set by Friday, June 17...
...Marking Simpson's celebrityhood, Barbara Walters, with her own program kept in the can, contributed inanities, even speculating that he might be jailed next to the Menendez brothers...
...ABC canceled 20/20 because this was better than anything it had scheduled...
...As A che la morte parodies the world's eternal theme And pulses with the sunset-glow...
...as they had when he ran for the touchdowns...
...At NBC, harried executives switched between Tom Brokaw describing the helicopter shots of the stately car chase and the basketball playoff—also live, and therefore unsalvageable for some future time...
...I do know it is what befell at sunset on Friday, June 17...
...and 10 p.m...
...It was television...
...Four years ago, a court branded him a wife-beater, but few watching the shiny white roof of the Ford Bronco knew that yet...
...Four years later, the National Organization for Women is petitioning for removal of that judge...
...Not as it was happening...
...After more than an hour, it pulled up at the door of Simpson's considerable house in Brentwood...
...A television movie...
...On CBS Dan Rather and Connie Chung were also heard along with the usual experts?prosecutors and defense attorneys, psychologists and psychiatrists, professors and practitioners, Simpson's friends and former coaches...
...Central Time...
...Cerebral commentators have been pronouncing about reality...
...The passenger in the Ford Bronco, O.J...
...The media's answer to charges of excess has been the usual bath of mewling, guilt-ridden self-examination, admitting sin, promising penance but pleading absence of malice...
...All programming stopped as anchor persons described a vehicle on a highway a continent's width away...
...The TV talk was of what might be happening, but no one knew...
...That evening the United States parodied itself...
...The driver, Simpson's friend and ex-teammate Al Cowlings, was reported to be telling police on his own cellular phone that O.J...
...Now that O.J...
...Nor is the story itself new: the hero accused of slaying his former wife and the man he found her with...
...Some stood on overpasses, waving handmade signs of affection and encouragement...
...was holding a gun to his head—to his own head, it developed...
...On a freeway...
...But not instantaneously...
...tribal massacres are real...
...Whatever comes in the weeks, months, even years ahead, in the courts, media or history books, June 17 was an evening of astonishing national nakedness, an evening of perfect television...
...Behind the Bronco—an expensive "cross-country" vehicle of the type now de rigueur for the better-off, hipper over-'30s crowd of pre-21 st-century America—were nine police cars that never fell back and never moved closer...
...Local commentators and reporters from the Los Angeles stations actually supplying the live pictures were at times heard with their own vapid conjectures, but at least they knew the geography...
...And serious journalism is doing its own hours of community service by discovering wife-beating, a social problem it has long ignored...
...Immediacy is not reality...
...A dozen ungainly helicopters flew above, seven from Los Angeles' seven fiercely competitive commercial VHF television stations, five from the Los Angeles Police Department...
...History's richest, most powerful nation was mesmerized by the roof of a small white truck, we were told, because it was real...
...And detailed...
...They were bought to spot traffic jams but soon became handmaidens of "live action" news, empowering Southern Californians to look from above at humanity's trials and traumas, much as a Higher Authority itself must view Mankind...
...These are real...
...Simpson in a Ford Bronco was not real...
...Not very fast...
...Verdi, Verdi, when you wrote II Trovatore did you dream Of the City when the sun sinks low...
...Immediacy destroys reality...
...The only picture shown, though, was the shiny roof of the expensive white Bronco...
...Hostility between her and Jennings was palpable...
...While viewers saw only the roof of a white vehicle on a highway, what they heard was the cacophony of network television not letting a story tell itself...
...They stayed up the whole two hours, with the seven news hounds vying to position their TV cameras for pictures, but there was no collision...
...With a mixture of tabloid grisliness and tedious legal arcana that somehow suited the momentary national need, the preliminary hearing captured day-time audiences rarely seen since man walked on the moon...
...Unedited, perhaps, and with the last act to come, but a made-for-TV movie nonetheless...
...the people flocking to his support, then wavering, until at the end he must face his ordeal alone...
...NBC had counted on basketball to be the night's ratings winner...
...since 1975 he had loped through airports in car rental commercials...
...Juice...
...Every newsroom in Los Angeles has one...
...the trade gap is real...
...it is television...
...Will there be a health bill, a welfare bill, a crime bill...
...Of seven choppers making live TV, none got Simpson's picture as he left the car to surrender to the waiting police...
...In history, in fiction, in drama, in a dozen languages, it is an oft-told tale...
...And boring...
...he has been a comedy cop in silly movies...
...Patrons in the fancier local restaurants watched portable TV sets as they nibbled fashionable foods, too absorbed even to answer the cellular telephones beeping in their pockets and handbags...
...local news hours...
...Live television is reality, goes the mantra...
...they call it "dead air...
...Those lines, by a lesser English poet named Alfred Noyes, were written at the other end of the century...
...Many pulled up on the grass meridians and set out deck chairs in clusters, as though waiting for the marathon to pass...
...at first this was not clear—and not to crowd him...
...Not only did the seven stations have helicopters up, but each broadcast to the nation: Those owned by ABC, CBS,NBC, and Fox fed to their networks...
...On Television AN EVENING OF PERFECT TV BY REUVEN FRANK MENCKEN HAS been dead since 1956, Gogol since 1852, Swift since 1745, so there was no one around to properly portray what happened on Friday, June 17, when it was already dark in the East while in Los Angeles a brick-red sun, looking like a cheap postcard, was setting over the Pacific...
...10 years earlier he carried the Olympic torch on its final leg to its place atop the Los Angeles games...
...CNN used the pictures from two of the independents, and all three independents supplied non-network stations across the country, especially for their 10 and 11 p.m...
...and he was a sportscaster...
...Simpson and the murders...
...I don't know when it happened...
Vol. 77 • July 1994 • No. 7
