The Mamoulioan Factor
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television THE MAMOULIAN FACTOR By Reuven Frank When radio was still young, it depended a lot on live broadcasts of string quartets or visiting speakers done from hotel dining rooms. Home...
...David Bloom reported that White House aides were telling Congressional leaders the President would address the nation, but were warning he might change his mind...
...CNN had not had so many viewers since the jury acquitted O.J...
...Eastern time...
...The second show was in the street outside the courthouse, where perhaps 60 television correspondents, almost a dozen of them from foreign countries, reported live to their viewers about what was going on inside...
...REFLECTiNG the addition of more production-minded executives to its top echelons, CNN tried to add pace to the languid proceedings by inserting a digital clock in an upper corner of its picture to record the "elapsed time" of Clinton's testimony...
...C-SPAN,the cable industry's admirable cooperative service that carries Congressional debates and rounds out its schedule with unedited broadcasts of a wide range of events, successfully filled the void of that significant afternoon by employing one of its customary practices: It moved its television cameras into a series of radio studios around the country where talk shows were being hosted...
...From one minute before one in the afternoon to 25 minutes after six, with time out for breaks, it never deviated to the right or left, never zoomed in a little closer or back a little farther...
...In short, they earned a living...
...Dick Morris, Clinton's chief tactician until he was caught in flagrante by a supermarket tabloid, is now a paid consultant for Fox, which had him offer a few thoughts, among them a gratuitous smear of Senator Orrin Hatch...
...who usually finds Clinton in the wrong...
...No better informed were the various visiting experts, brought in from time to time to tease out the endless hours of what was becoming a tiresome attempt to underline the importance of the occasion without having anything to say about it...
...But things seemed to quiet down when Mamoulian spoke about pictures as symbols...
...So they speculated...
...One could leam how America felt...
...Once television's glory was said to be its unique ability to bring great events— wars, space voyages, instances of national grief—to people in their homes...
...He was sitting in the same room he had testified in that afternoon, and was shown in a shot that was presumably like the one the grand jurors saw, although it had a little movement...
...None worked harder than those toiling for the three all-news cable networks...
...That is still possible, but the icon for television transmitting reality has become reporters standing outside a building expatiating on what is happening inside...
...There was little point in staying up...
...they extrapolated from documents already published and leaks already dribbled...
...they validated each others' preconceptions...
...An announcement of the devaluation of the ruble scrolled along the bottom of the screen, as did a bulletin of a raid on Hezbollah camps in Lebanon by Israeli jets...
...Even over the air the good burghers' listlessness was made palpable by the rattling of plates and silverware...
...Since they had no way of knowing how often or for how long he was taking breaks—and these turned out to be quite long and often—the clock was wrong...
...Sometimes someone would hold a press briefing that was carried on all three of the channels...
...Eventually the President's lawyer emerged to say that the testimony was over, that it had gone well, and that the President would tell the American people about it himself at 10 p.m...
...But the latest in fiber optics plus the most complex encryption technology ensured that the picture was seen and the words were heard nowhere except in that courtroom...
...and the one with the curly black hair from George Washington University (or was it Georgetown...
...There were, finally, journalists, predominantly from the print medium, whose product takes hours and even days to reach its audience and is sometimes actually edited along the way...
...A digital clock does not tick off a minute dramatically, so it merely contributed to the dreariness...
...While prosecutors asked questions offcamera and he answered, 19 grand jurors sitting in a courtroom just a few blocks away watched...
...One such Mamoulianesque moment occurred during the day-long television coverage of President Clinton's August 17 grand jury testimony...
...Simpson...
...MSNBC shortly got on the same track and found its own talk show host right there in Washington—Oliver North...
...Afterward the cable networks, and most broadcast ones, went on into the night speculating about the testimony...
...Home from high school one day, I listened to Rouben Mamoulian addressing a local businessman's club...
...Elsewhere on television news occasionally intervened...
...Radio being radio and talk shows being talk shows, the absence of both visual images and facts was made up for by the intensity of feeling...
...There were pollsters, who recited numbers, and analysts—including, naturally, those lawyers and Presidential historians, who explained what the numbers meant...
...A shaky, smeary picture, because with cameras barred from the White House, it had to be shot from far away...
...In each, the host and his sidekick and his microphone and his audio control panel could be seen...
...Around 3 p.m...
...MSNBC had itself a scoop...
...Congress was not in session...
...Worse, it displayed only hours and minutes, without seconds, the way they do for football, or hundredths of a second as for track events...
...All those who called in to comment could be heard, as could what the host said to his sidekick during commercials...
...More frequently, an expert would appear on the three seriatim saying practically the same thing each time...
...They would confront each other for the first time in a Clash of Titans, a Final Conflict, fought head-to-head, to the death...
...The first, we were informed, involved a single-camera medium closeup shot of the President...
...It helped pass the time...
...they solicited each others' opinions...
...Fox News also won its biggest audience ever...
...There were the history professors, invariably identified as "presidential historians," from all the academies within taxicab distance of downtown Washington...
...With 30 minutes to go before the scheduled start of testimony, they showed the wrought iron gates of the White House opening to allow in two automobiles, a steel-gray one followed by a tomato-red one...
...Now they were about to come face-to-face—the round-visaged one smiling and shrugging into his jacket as he entered the building, the unseen one getting set inside...
...But soon we were back to people like David Gergen and Elizabeth Drew...
...By itself, Starr's arrival was only a picture of men getting out of cars...
...Starr was in shirtsleeves, as he had been every morning for seven months in front of his suburban home, taking out the garbage or fetching the paper from the lawn, and saying some empty but pleasant words to the waiting cameras that would inevitably be used over and over all day...
...Those with any actual knowledge of the President's testimony were so committed to secrecy, the law was so emphatic about the sanctity of grand jury information, the fiber optics and encryption provided by the Pentagon and the CIA were so impenetrable, that nothing would leak until morning...
...So much of what we see, he told his listeners, depends on what is already in our heads...
...From them debouched Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr, his assistant prosecutors, their assistants, and their assistants' file-bearers...
...they traded barbs and jibes with anchors comfortably seated in air-conditioned studios...
...An estimated 68 million Americans watched, more than saw Neil Armstrong walk on the moon or Diana's funeral...
...Yet when all is said and done, it was a TV show—or, more correctly, two simultaneous TV shows, capped by a third...
...It was exotic to hear one of Hollywood's better-known directors, in his Russian-accented English, telling a weekly Rotary or Kiwanis lunch in Toronto how to watch movies...
...The cars stopped before the canopy leading to the Executive mansion's diplomatic entrance...
...CNN announced that Larry King Live would be a two-hour special that night...
...MSNBC approached a million homes for the first time...
...They seem not to have made themselves available...
...We react differently to the closeup of a doorknob turning depending on whether we're expecting Bela Lugosi or Harpo Marx...
...As television, it was a success...
...Interrupting Larry King's expanded two-hour show, the President spoke to the American people for four minutes...
...One network used the top of the Washington Monument as a perch...
...As the afternoon dragged to a close, the only television image with even the implication of drama was still of men getting out of cars...
...It seemed a horde...
...If nothing else, this is a logical monstrosity...
...Interestingly, there were very few politicians...
...Of course, they could not possibly know...
...The talking heads wondered, too, whether Clinton would speak to the American people after his testimony...
...it got a big rating...
...who usually supports Clinton...
...It happened at 12:30 p.m., a half hour after the three allnews cable networks, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, began nonstop live coverage from the scene...
...All eight doors seemed to open at the same time...
...Illustrating Mamoulian's point, any drama was derived from what those watching knew: They were witnessing the climax of almost 30 weeks of heroic strife between two powerful antagonists...
...Despite the oceans of ink and hours of blather that have been devoted to the implications of the President's grand jury appearance for both public policy and private morality, there has been little written about it as television...
...This was the third program...
...One had been pursuing and the other had been fleeing...
...The prosecutor and his men then emerged from the diplomatic entrance, got back into the steel-gray and tomatored cars, and drove off...
...There were the law professors, especially the one with the red spade beard from Georgetown University (or was it George Washington...
...A good deal of the talk was about President Clinton testifying from the White House Map Room, where Franklin D. Roosevelt used to follow the course of World War II, and which has been left pretty much as it was the day he left for his last trip to Warm Springs, Georgia...
Vol. 81 • September 1998 • No. 10
