Listen to me on TV CONFIDENTIAL:
As always, the further we go back in Hollywood history, the more that fact and legend become intertwined. It's hard to say where the truth really lies.
March 19, 1953
First
Academy Awards program on network TV (NBC).
The first network broadcast of the Academy Awards takes place on this
day in 1953. Some 174 stations across the country carried the awards. Gary
Cooper won Best Actor for his performance in High Noon, and Shirley
Booth won Best Actress for her role in Come Back, Little Sheba. The
Greatest Show on Earth won Best Picture. for the first time, audiences are
able to sit in their living rooms and watch as the movie world’s most
prestigious honors, the Academy Awards, are given out at the RKO Pantages
Theatre in Hollywood, California.
Organized in May 1927, the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences was envisioned as a non-profit organization dedicated to the
advancement of the film industry. The first Academy Awards were handed out in
May 1929, in a ceremony and banquet held in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood
Roosevelt Hotel. The level of suspense was nonexistent, however, as the winners
had already been announced several months earlier. For the next 10 years, the
Academy gave the names of the winners to the newspapers for publication at 11
p.m. on the night of the awards ceremony; this changed after one paper broke
the tacit agreement and published the results in the evening edition, available
before the ceremony began. A sealed envelope system began the next year, and
endures to this day, making Oscar night Hollywood’s most anticipated event of
the year.
Public interest in the Oscars was high from the
beginning, and from the second year on the ceremony was covered in a live radio
broadcast. The year 1953 marked the first time that the Academy Awards were
broadcast on the fledgling medium of television. The National Broadcasting
Company (NBC) TV network carried the 25th annual awards ceremony live from
Hollywood’s RKO Pantages Theatre. Bob Hope was the master of ceremonies, while
Fredric March, a two-time Academy Award winner for Best Actor (for 1932’s Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and 1946’s The Best Years of Our Lives), presented the
awards. The statuette for Best Picture went to Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest
Show on Earth, while John Ford won Best Director for The Quiet Man. Winners in
the top two acting categories were Gary Cooper (High Noon) and Shirley Booth
(Come Back, Little Sheba).
Hope, a star of stage and screen who tirelessly
performed in United Service Organization (USO) shows for American troops during
World War II, would become a mainstay of the new TV medium. He was also the
most venerated Academy Awards host, playing MC no fewer than 18 times between
1939 and 1977. NBC broadcast the Oscars until 1961, when the American
Broadcasting Company (ABC) took over for the next decade, including the first
awards broadcast in color in 1966. Although NBC briefly regained the show in
the early 1970s, ABC came out on top again in 1976 and has broadcast every
Academy Awards show since. The network is under contract to continue showing
the Oscars until 2014.
Ratings for the Academy Awards have been notoriously
uneven, with larger audiences tending to tune in when box-office hits are
nominated for high-profile awards such as Best Picture. When Titanic won big in
1998, for example, the Oscar telecast drew 55 million viewers; the triumph of
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in 2004 drew 44 million. The 80th
Academy Awards ceremony, held in February 2008, drew the lowest ratings since
1953, with a total of about 32 million viewers--just 18.7 percent of America’s
homes--tuned in to the telecast. Analysts blamed the relative obscurity of the
Best Picture nominees--the winner, No Country For Old Men, made a relatively
puny $64 million at the box office--and the lingering effects of a Hollywood
writers’ strike for the poor viewer turnout.
March
19, 1983
Diff'rent
Strokes - The Reporter (Season 5: Episode 22).
Determined
to prove he didn't fabricate a story about drug abuse in his grade school just
to win a journalism contest, Arnold takes his article to the New York City
newspaper sponsoring the competition, and when they
run his story on the front page, Arnold receives some unexpected more support
from First Lady Nancy Reagan.
March
20, 1928
Fred
McFeely Rogers is born.
Mr. Rogers was most famous for
creating and hosting Mister Rogers' Neighborhood
(1968–2001), which featured his gentle, soft-spoken personality and directness
to his audiences. Initially educated to be a minister, Rogers was displeased
with the way television addressed children and made an effort to change this
when he began to write for and perform on local Pittsburgh-area
shows dedicated to youth. WQED developed his own show in 1968 and it was
distributed nationwide by Eastern Educational Television Network.
Over the course of three decades on television, Fred Rogers became an indelible
American icon of children's entertainment and education, as well as a symbol of
compassion, patience, and morality. He was also known for his advocacy of
various public causes.
His testimony before a lower court in favor of fair use recording of television shows to play at another time (now known as time shifting) was cited in a U.S. Supreme Court decision on the Betamax case, and he gave now-famous testimony to a U.S. Senate committee, advocating government funding for children's television.
His testimony before a lower court in favor of fair use recording of television shows to play at another time (now known as time shifting) was cited in a U.S. Supreme Court decision on the Betamax case, and he gave now-famous testimony to a U.S. Senate committee, advocating government funding for children's television.
Rogers received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, some
forty honorary degrees, and a Peabody
Award. He was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame, was recognized by
two Congressional resolutions, and was ranked No. 35 among TV Guide's Fifty
Greatest TV Stars of All Time. Several buildings and artworks in Pennsylvania
are dedicated to his memory, and the Smithsonian Institution displays one of his
trademark sweaters as a "Treasure of American History".
Rogers was born in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, 40 miles southeast
of Pittsburgh,
to James and Nancy Rogers; he had one sister, Elaine. Early in life he spent
much of his free time with his maternal grandfather, Fred McFeely, who had an
interest in music. He would often sing along as his mother would play the piano
and he himself began playing at five.
March 21, 1983Hello & Goodbye: The Last episode of Little House on the Prairie - YouTube
The show was one of television's 25 most highly rated shows for seven of its nine seasons. When series star and executive producer Michael Landon decided to leave the show in 1982, the show's title changed to Little House: A New Beginning and focused on character Laura Ingalls Wilder (Melissa Gilbert) and her family. The show lasted only one more season. Three made-for-television movie sequels followed: Little House: Look Back to Yesterday (1983), Little House: Bless All the Dear Children (1983), and Little House: The Last Farewell (1984).
To
quote the Bicentennial Minute, "And that's the way it was".
quote the Bicentennial Minute, "And that's the way it was".
Stay Tuned
Tony Figueroa
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