How Hollywood Fell Apart in the 1950s
In 1962, perceptive readers of variety may have noticed a peculiar advertisement appearing in the classifides. It was an older woman seeking a job. Not so unusual, but she boasts an impressive credential. 30 years experience as an actress in motion pictures. The woman in question was Betty Davis.
Yes, one of the greatest stars of the 1930s. Once a shining starlet, now reduced to passive aggressively posting in variety. She was looking for film work really to avoid being forced to do what many film actresses were seeing as the ultimate indignity being on television. In the same year, 1962, Lucille Ball bought out her husband’s shares of Desiloo Studios, making her the first woman to own a major television studio.
She had become a magnate while many of old Hollywood stars were fading. You may think of the 1950s as the golden age of Hollywood. Sometimes we just blend it all in under the old Hollywood umbrella. But the 1950s was really the swan songong of an industry trying oh so hard to hold it together. In today’s episode, we’re diving deep into how television nearly bankrupted the movies and how Hollywood fought back, or at least tried.
I’m Swafford and this is another vintage deep dive. This video is sponsored by you. No ad here for VPNs or weird mobile games. I can only ask that if you don’t want the algorithm to banish these lovely film and fashion history documentaries into the ether that you subscribe and consider supporting me on Patreon or becoming a channel member.
Thank you to everyone you see here for making this possible. Now, let’s sink our teeth into this story. Now, you would think that the Great Depression would have been a crisis time for Hollywood, and this would make some sense. One out of every four Americans faced unemployment. The roaring 20s had roared right out like a Model T Ford running out of gas on an old style gravel highway.
How would Americans find the dough to see the shows? It just really doesn’t make sense. And you’d be forgiven for thinking that Hollywood must have been an absolute crisis just like everyone else in America. But you would also be dead wrong. You see, you forgot one thing. Hollywood doesn’t give a flying whatever about your reality.
Somehow the 1930s were actually some of the best times in the entire industry. With sound films going from gratuitous to ubiquitous between 1927 and 1931, suddenly the movies were more immersive than ever before. While Americans pockets were sore, nobody could think of a better use of a spare quarter than to mosey down to a cozy palace of luxury, sometimes even an airconditioned one, and live vicariously through the escapist narratives on the screen.
And the velvet cushion seat promised to melt the mundane and align you with the sublime. Directors like Busby Berkeley created lavish musical splashes, surreal dreamlike numbers which innovated with new camera techniques to create visual splendor never before seen on the screen. Films like The Gold Diggers of 1933, even while disparaging, gave women fantasies of upward mobility at a time 13 years after the vote when it seemed feminism was receding back.
The loose morals of the 1920s were partially blamed for the economic hardships at present, as if by some divine punishment. But Hollywood didn’t care. one after the other, turning out 500 fantasies a year. And the people were placid participants. It was a medicine for the weary world. Now, I’m going to introduce the popcorn bucket.
And I’m going to add in one popped corn for every 1 million Americans with their ass in a movie theater seat per week, per year on average. I’m going off of this graph and I’m multiplying each percentage by the US population. So in 1930 this was around 80 million an early peak.
Attendance fell just a little during the depths of the depression. So a few of these will go away but the industry bounced back. Meanwhile in 1933 a young actress was just arriving in Hollywood. Her name was Lucille Ball. She had just come from New York modeling coats and silken evening gowns for an upscale department store while assuming the name Diane Belmont.
She had posed for Joan Crawford and other stars at the turn of the 30s. But now she had caught her own lucky break. After a painting done of her while she was modeling was used for an advertisement for Chesterfield cigarettes, she was scouted to be a chorus girl at RKO. She came off of the train with a movie contract in hand and a dream in her heart.
Hollywood in 1933 was a busy, bustling place full of men about town and producers chasing wouldbe starlets. I was one of the lucky few to arrive in Moland with a contract. In those days, that was a blessed way to begin. There was a big hoopla when we arrived at the Pasadena station with a crush of photographers, press agents, and studio people.
I was wearing a black silk dress with a demure white collar. I just sat back in my cushion limousine seat and drank it all in. The olive and the lemon and orange trees, the strange and exotic flowers, the chorus of birds, and over everything, the cleanest, purest air. Nobody thought of smog in those days like TV. It didn’t exist.
World War II did not shake the cinema industry either. Cinema news reels were the only place you could see footage of the war. The cinema gave people escapism and it also gave them stories they could latch on to and even propaganda. 1946, just after the war, was the biggest year of attendance ever.
80 million weekly, the industry celebrated this huge harrah, thinking it could never end. But this scenith was soon to crumble. And already by 1946, the cracks were beginning to show. Old Hollywood, even while thriving, was in a way built on a house of cards. Exploitation of their stars, their crews, a complete and total monopoly on theaters.
Yes, movie studios used to own all of their own theaters. This was called vertical integration, and it was a powerful economic tool. Studios could block book and blind sell. Block booking was the practice of making your theaters buy multiple films at once. You can’t buy Gold Diggers of 1933 without also buying Picture Snatcher, for instance.
What a racket. Well, just after the very peak of attendance, the House of Cards began to fold. In 1946, after a longunning strike by actors and motion picture crews, studios were forced to raise all of their payments by 25%. So, even before things got bad, studios began to contract. that things were about to really take a turn for the worse.
Anti- trust. Don’t let any large corporation hear you utter this word. Studios had been duking it out with the United States government and the courts for a while. Actually, the extent of the antitrust investigations themselves were extensive. They had tried to put some rules on Paramount in 1943, but Paramount was like, “We don’t give AF.
This is a money printer. Try harder to stop us.” So then the government turned back around and told Paramount, “Okay, we’re tired of your Get rid of your theaters or you’re all going to jail. Federal prison studios were forced to divest their theater chains and vertical integration went a bust.” But hey, movie attendance was still up, right? Right.
Meanwhile, if we check back in with Lucy, or actually I should call her Lucille at this point. Ironically, during her time trying to make it as a Hollywood actress, she hated the name Lucy, feeling that it was unrefined. My idols were Carol Lombard and Katherine Heburn. I could visualize Lucille on theater mares, but not Lucy.
Little did she know, well, eye ahead in her future. She appeared in film after film as a contract player, worked to the bone. The days and roles flew by so quickly she seldom knew which picture she was even appearing in just to show up at this studio at this time. even when sick and smile and dance.
Ginger Rogers mother, Ila Rogers, actually took Lucy in and advocated for her, preventing her contract termination a few times, even when she threw coffee at Katherine Heburn’s makeup artist. And she also advocated for her to get speaking roles. In 1935’s Top Hat, she felt she was having an important break as she had a bit part at a florist shop.
She had a hard time with it. Leila Rogers talked Mark Sandrich into giving me a few lines and top hat. It was my first real speaking part, and during the filming, I was so nervous and unstrung that I couldn’t get the words out. My scene took place in a flor shop where I was supposed to make some biting remarks to some man about Fred sending flowers to Ginger. I stumbled and blew my lines.
She didn’t feel like a star. She felt like a prop. In all these pictures, I was just part of the scenery, strolling past the camera in chiffon and feathers. Friends kept telling me, “You should be in comedy. We often worked past midnight. I did whatever was asked of me.” Despite these grueling hours, she pressed on, making just enough to rent a small house and put her family up in it.
Until an RKO producer asked her to marry out of the blue, she turned him down and suddenly her movie career went from nent to non-existent. She was forced to appear again and again in second rate B pictures Pictures. Basically, she was tracked. You know, you know, she had to wait until her contract was up and when it was, she signed with MGM.
Then she went out on her own. She attained some film success in the late 1940s. This year, 1946, was the movie’s peak year when some 90 million people went to the movies every week. It was also the year that five of my movies were playing on Broadway at the same time. But she still had a bone to pick with RKO, a whole new level of success in her future.
By 1948, attendance had fallen to roughly 70 million. We’ll have to take just a little bit of popcorn out of this bucket. With attendance slipping, Warner Brothers was feeling the squeeze. Jack Warner began finding ways to let go of his most expensive stars. Errol Flynn cut. Barbara Stanwick cut. Even Betty Davis, who was earning a staggering $328,000 salary, was set free in 1949.
She made herself difficult to work with on the film Beyond the Forest. What a dump. And told Jack she’d finished the film with no more objections if he ended her contract as soon as it was done. And he did. About her last day at Warner Brothers, Betty Davis had this to say. There was no celebration.
Henry Blankie and a cutter who had cut all my films and I sat on a bench on the back lot. We sat there all night remembering and talking saw the dawn come up. I don’t think Warner was in any mood to say goodbye. The last work I did on the lot was to double line. This is the last line I spoke for Warner Brothers. I can’t stand it here anymore.
The engineer and all of us roared. It was the truth. What a And the worst slump had yet to befall Hulkwood. This little box right here was not good news. The television was invented in the late 1920s in a mechanical format, but it was ridiculous. 30 lines of resolution, a spinning frisbee mechanism.
I mean, it was a farce and a novelty, and the makeup was questionable. Go check out my previous deep dive if you want the rundown on that ridiculous makeup style and why it was the way it was in the first place. Green lipstick, clown contouring, and all. But television continued to develop in the background. Cathode ray displays were refined during World War II for war equipment, and improvements in the technology allowed for consumer television prices to drop to somewhat reasonable levels, with a television costing $200 in 1950 compared
with $500 in 1935. Americans suddenly went booby for the tuby. Ownership exploded. While radio had been the mainstay of the living room before, now it was the television and the new medium lent itself to new formats. Entertainment of a lower budget or a lower brow arguably exploded. Sitcoms, game shows, soap operas, anything your little heart could possibly dream or desire.
But the FCC, the same people who regulated radio, were regulating what was on the airwaves. So TV shows were clean. This is partially where we get the idea of a squeaky clean 1950s America because so much entertainment was being produced for FCC standards where married couples had two twin beds and there seemed to be some obvious disadvantages to TV, right? There’s none of the inherent glamour of the movie theater. None of the spectacle.
The quality of content was definitely different. And early television, I mean, it was trit a lot of the time. No offense to anyone who enjoys that trite. I mean, the quality did greatly improve over time, but compared to a 40ft silver screen, it pald. But once you paid your $200, television was free.
And if you’re one of those neurotically financial people, I understand every episode you watched made your television technically cheaper per use. You could watch television for hours while doing whatever else at home you pleased. And the only annoyance were the stupid, probably sexist ads that you would have to watch uh in between your entertainment.
This is how free entertainment works. If you don’t pay to watch, someone else is going to be paying for your eyes. But that ad money was good. TV studios were popping up everywhere. New concepts, new products to advertise, plastics, the consumer revolution. It was a boom time. Even the babies were booming.
You know who wasn’t though? Hollywood. Yeah. Attendance just kept cratering desperately. Their whole business model was falling flat on its face. They used to split their efforts between A pictures like starstudded spectacle films and B pictures aka you know B movies. You like jazz? Not that one.
B movies were cheaper to produce and were frequently double build with the more attractive A pictures as a way to double the money as were short films, cartoons, and news reels. But here is what changed. People in the 50s didn’t really care to get out to see a bee flick or the news or cartoons in a cinema anymore. All of that was on television.
If people wanted to see a worse version of a movie, they’d go watch Search for Tomorrow or something. Television was also cool. A new novelty is important. Hollywood by this time was an old beast, a Goliath, a one-trick pony. So Hollywood ended up down on its luck. Production fell. While in the flirty30s, Hollywood had cranked out 500 films a year, by 1954, only 232 were made.
Meanwhile, it’s 1951 and Lucille Ball is about to get the break that will change her life forever. CBS has given her and her husband Desi Arnos the green light for a TV show that stars them together as a domestic couple. At first, she has her doubts because it’s TV and TV is sacrilege in Hollywood. She was fully aware of the risk of this move.
At that time, television was regarded as the enemy of Hollywood. So terrified was Hollywood of this medium, movie people were afraid to even make guest appearances. If I undertook a weekly television show and it flopped, I might never work in movies again. It was a tremendous gamble. It had to be an all or nothing commitment.
Luckily for Lucy, it paid off. I Love Lucy became the biggest television show in the country. By the time the 20th episode aired, Lucy found herself recognized everywhere she went, even outside of Hollywood. When she returned to her hometown, they hosted a parade for her. It was madness. The I Love Lucy brand was on oodles of merchandising.
They received thousands of fan letters every week. And when Lucy found herself pregnant with her second child, they decided that instead of canceling the show, they would just have Lucy’s character give birth at the same time she did. This episode, Lucy goes to the hospital, aired on January 19th, 1953, and boasted 44 million live viewers, 70% of all American households at the time.
American was absolutely television mad, but cinemas couldn’t say the same. Many were shuttering their doors. Cinema attendance by 1954 had fallen to just 24 million a week. Nearly half of the viewers of just that single episode of I Love Lucy and a complete slashing from 1946’s peak of 80 million. Things were dire, but Lucy had still yet to get her best revenge.
And as television continued to erode movie profits, Jack Warner began to get irrationally, or perhaps rationally angry at the stupid thing. When he came home and found his wife watching TV, he saw it as an insult to his craft, his business, his very being. “Turn off that box,” he would shout at her. “You can’t see anything on that little screen.
” Earlier on, it was easy to pretend that it didn’t exist. Jack would allow no television sets at the studio. Although millions of Americans now watch television, no living room and a Warner Brothers movie had one. Television was never mentioned in dialogue. When Sammy Feain and Paul Francis Webster were writing songs for a Warner Brothers film, they thought they had a bright idea with I’m in love with the girl on channel 9.
When they played it for Mel Shaveston, he predicted Jack Warner will never approve it. He was right. The first stage of grief is denial. The second one is anger. And for Jack, this was beyond personal. This was war. The panic had fully and completely taken hold. But Hollywood was not about to go down without a fight. And in typical Hollywood fashion, it would be spectacular and sparkly.
Now, the first course of action in an attempt to recapture Hollywood’s glory days was just to attempt to recreate their glory days. In 1930, they could choreograph the most lavish spectacle in the hemisphere, guaranteeing they’d print money, put girls in glitter gowns, a loose plot, and a grand star-studded cast, and guaranteeing attendance of 80 million a week.
So, Hollywood frenzied itself, burned money, began investing in their own lavish spectacles, reviving the glory days of Busby Berkeley, and now in Technicolor. The share of films in black and white dropped from 88% in 1948 to 42% in 1954 as color was something that television just couldn’t do. Beyond just this differentiating factor, it was now possible to shoot Technicolor in a normal film camera using an Eastman color negative, which could then be printed with Technicolor’s secret sauce inition die transfer process, creating all those glorious
colors without all the harsh conditions that Technicolor required in the 1930s. I’m planning a whole video on Technicolor. This is not that video, but yes, in the 50s, color became the default. Singing in the rain was always one of my favorite films. I think I first saw it when I was 9 years old. And I think seeing now, understanding all of the context, it makes it spectacular yet poignant.
Here is a love letter from Hollywood to itself, recalling their own glory days. When sound was the heroic disruptor from within, when possibilities seemed endless, and when integration was as vertical as that profit trajectory. 1927 just before the big attendance peak and here it is lovingly recrafted in technicolor. I think the smash big budget musical of the 1950s is one of the reasons people think of the 1950s as the peak of old Hollywood and popular culture when really it was the war cry of an industry that wished not to be forgotten and thus
was recasting their glory days of the 1930s recontextualized in color. It’s profound. That’s not all they did though. Films had been produced with few exceptions in a ratio roughly equaling 4×3 since the beginning. This box was it, which is also why ceilings tended to seem unrealistically high in those 1930s art deco sets.
Matte painting was just easier in black and white, and you’d rather just extend the walls up than show the ugly top of the sound stage. So, hence this feeling of scale and height that was very common. 4×3 is great for faces and people interacting, but not the best for scenery. Television was also 4×3, and Hollywood was feeling encroached upon.
It’s like when a little sibling tries to dress like an older sibling, so then they stop dressing like that. Fox was on the prowl for new technology that would make the big screen even bigger. Widescreen had been done a few times for epics, like 1927’s Napoleon, which was triple wide because they just shot three parallel tracks of 35mm film and also projected them together. Incredible.
But the big innovation would be Cinemascope. Cinemascope. The Cinemascope technology was developed in 1927 by Orri Shatan and went mostly unused until Fox bought it up. Cinemascope worked using anamorphic lenses which squished a longer image onto regular film which could then be stretched back out to produce a widescreen aspect ratio of 2.66 to1.
This cinemascope ratio was designed to feel more sweeping and more epic than television could ever do. Fox could also make some good money charging Jack Warner $25,000 to use the technology. And Jack, still at war with television, was happy to cough up the dough to stick it to him.
How to marry a millionaire, put Marilyn Monroe on full display alongside Lauren Beall and Betty Greybel in full technicolor with lavish sets on full wide display. Composing for the cinemascope ratio is completely different. You have perfect flexibility and showing scenery, and that empty space on the left and right you’ll end up with in most other shots is definitely artsy.
But try to get too close to someone’s face and you’ll see where its weaknesses lie. Studios were so enthusiastic for the new widescreen technology that they would even take old films and just cut everyone’s heads and feet off to make them widescreen. The fact that this created a subpar viewing experience mostly ended the practice, but it was worth a shot.
How to marry a Millionaire really echoed similar themes as Gold Diggers of 1933. In fact, the Gold Diggers theme was so profitable back in the old days, they even made seven films between 1923 and 1938, including a mostly lost 1929 technicolor talkie that I am obsessed with. Thank you old films and stuff for discovering more of this film than probably any other one person.
If any of you have access to a stack of old films, please go check for this film. Please and thanks. This is my agenda. But yeah, Hollywood was reviving old themes and old IP left and right. And Hollywood films were getting more provocative, too. You’ll notice starlets of the 50s showing a little more skin more often than the stars of the 30s.
Hollywood was trying to keep with the times and keep people in the seats, but it still wasn’t working. Hollywood even had a brief craze for 3D as part of their early ’50s effort to bolster audience novelty, which seems cool until you realize 3D had been figured out in the 1920s and fundamentally isn’t that hard. Put two cameras next to each other like your eyes.
Put color filters on the two films. Put color filters on your eyes when you watch it back. That’s very much not really rocket science and it’s very much not really a boon for storytelling. every 3D trope you can imagine. Flying at you, people punching you, pointing at you. It was all there in this experimental film.
It was really good at making people motion sick, though. Really good. So, Hollywood was trying everything to save the cinema and failing. By 1955, attendance had continued its death spiral down to just 25 million a week. By this point, Hollywood was coming to grips with reality. If you can’t beat them, you ought to join them.
Yeah, these executives were suddenly starting to change their tune. In 1952, Columbia Pictures created their Screen Gems division, which produced commercial content for television. In 1956, Hollywood burst the damn wide open and made more than 2500 films made before 1948, suddenly available for TV. Even Jack Warner, who at one point had declared absolute war on television, began to warm up.
After failed attempt after failed attempt to revitalize the very medium of film and advising from all sides, telling him he should give up the war and get into television, he finally struck a deal with ABC. They’d do a 1-hour weekly show, Warner Brothers Presents, each episode containing a 10-minute promo for their movies, and they’d be paid $75,000 per hourong special, plus half that for each rerun.
Finally, Jack was getting cut in on that TV cash. Between 4 and $5 million a year, in fact, enough to offset their losses that they were making on their feature films by this time. But to the end, Jack Warner still hated TV and the failing it represented from their golden age when they were thriving in the 30s.
It was around this time actually that lots of TV print copies were made of older films which to this day are some of the only surviving copies of said films like on with the show a 1929 film that was shot in technicolor originally but now survives only in fragments and a full black and white television print.
So it was good for conservation not that studios were big on that more in a future video. Okay. So the studios were able to secure some revenue and help patch up their sinking ships. By now it’s 1957. Hollywood is practically in shambles. But Lucille Ball is still on top of the world, and she and Desi received the call that was surely symbolic of their victory.
RKO was selling off their old motion picture company assets. The very soundstages where Lucy had once practiced dance routines with Ginger Rogers mother and been directed by Busby Berkeley were now just business commodities. But they were hers now. All of those years she’d showed up to set for a 16-hour day with a fever and cough, taking enough cough syrup to sleep all day in a set airplane wing, all the bee movies she’d been forced to make after turning down the RKO producers marriage proposal and avoiding taking the easy way out at
every turn. She reclaimed them. She owned every single soundstage because of the television show that she started with her husband, which ironically was something that the movie studios never wanted to let her do. She bought all of their properties for them for over $6 million and integrated them into Desilu Productions.
Their business continued to expand. More space meant more shows. Lucy began mentoring youths in the same theater where Leila Rogers had once mentored her and by embracing the new medium of television. She had won. There’s no sweet poetic victory like buying your old boss’s whole lot put together. But the rest of Hollywood wasn’t so lucky.
By 1960, weekly attendance had fallen under 20 million. What could studios even do now? So, it’s funny, which is funny. The movies from 1929 to 1934 actually had a reputation for being indecent, crude, immoral affairs. We retcon old movies to be an over wholesome, sanitized schllock. But really, this conception came about in 1934 from the haze code.
This told you what could and couldn’t be in movies and completely rearied queer representation and made lots of movies kind of boring. But Hollywood in the late 1950s started loosening up a little bit. Some Like It Hot was a 1959 film starring Marilyn Monroe set in 1929. Again, Hollywood recalling its own glory days. But the wild thing about the film is it involves the two male leads going undercover in drag for the vast majority of the film.
It could almost be said that the runchy nature of the film and the manner in which it plays with gender and sexuality so as to subvert the wideeyed cookie cutter boy meets girl narrative of the Hayes days was an ode to the precode itself. With the film setting in 1929 and the fact that it was based on a 1930s French film both suggesting this conclusion.
While it was an independent production by United Artists, its runaway success and six Oscar nominations set Hollywood on a new path. It was 1963’s Cleopatra, however, that really sealed the fate of the old Hollywood order. disastrously over wrought and overbudget. A dramaf fueled production, a historical epic that recalled better days of Hollywood.
It was the biggest grossing film of 1963 and still lost money. It technically didn’t even break even until 1966 when Fox sold the rights to ABC for airing on television. Fitting, isn’t it? So, in the 1960s, Hollywood could get as wild as they wanted. Teen beach flicks, British invasion, and youthquake mods. The walls were wide open.
Two films from 1967, I think, encapsulate this chain. Valley of the Dolls was based on a 1966 novel by Jacqueline Suzanne. It was a melodrama, pulp fiction for women. It was about fame and men and addiction, and critics hated it, but it was a gigantic commercial success. The film adaptation was a melodrama. It was about fame and men and addiction and critics hated it and it 10xed its budget.
Numbers don’t lie. The Graduate also came out in 1967 and its earnest explorations of sexuality and young adulthood also broke the haze code mold while absolutely printing money and becoming known as one of the best films of all time. While TV was still FCC regulated, film could now explore more mature subject matter.
Foreign imports boomed. A whole new generation of filmmakers with no loyalty and no context for the way things had once been in 1935 could now make whatever they wanted. And it was beautiful. And attendance had actually stabilized. Sometime around 1965, weekly theater attendance had rounded down to about 20 million Americans.
And it stayed about level at 10% of the population from then on, growing slightly as population did. There was never any hope that Hollywood would become the giant it once was again. And so it was the 1970s were an absolute slump in film making. I mean they were good films but mid-budget films dominated as they were the highest profit margin until Star Wars reinvented the blockbuster in 1977.
While it didn’t meaningfully return weekly attendance to pre-colapse levels, it made Hollywood at least relevant again. And so on it went, Hollywood and television becoming inextricably linked and interdependent. I believe that this quote from the 1975 book Light and Shadow sums it up pretty well.
A huge thanks to this book for being a great resource for this video. The relationship between television and motion pictures ultimately moved from competition to cooperation. Television did not kill motion pictures anymore than it killed radio. What it did was displace a key function of both mediums. The loss of a prime time evening entertainment function for radio forced it to adjust to a different formula which it did remarkably well.
Motion pictures however did not adjust as quickly or efficiently. The industry was slow to react primarily because it had become too big, unwieldy and inflexible. And when television replaced the major forms of the be film, the short, the news reel and cartoon, the industry found it had little alternative but to just cut back.
Radio expanded with FM and the youth music market. Motion pictures had no comparable market. Television became the be movie, the national habit, mass- prodduced, spit it out once a week medium. The 60s would see the relationship between television and motion pictures grow even closer until the word symbolizing the relationship was merger rather than simply cooperation.
In fact, as we shall see, the motion picture industry has survived only to the extent that it has been able to accommodate and serve television. Of course, Hollywood would face several more curve balls over the decades. the rise of home media, digital piracy, the streaming wars, but none would quite shake their very foundation to topple their empire like TV did in the 1950s.
In fact, in the streaming age, the formats have come to converge even further as a whole series of featurelength episodes can comprise a show as the format restrictions that force 22-minute episodes to be able to fit in 8 minutes of soap ads have fallen away. So, really, who won? I think we did. We got all the choice we could ever ask for and years and years worth of highquality entertainment in as many formats as we can imagine, even vertical movies. Watch out, Hollywood.
Here comes Tik Tockywood, and that’s not going to be pretty. If you find yourself interested in the history of television and film, and you also like cute, classy things to decorate your home, consider these posters that I hand painted myself. Now, this one’s upside down. Oh my god. Now, the ortho chromatic poster shows the strange makeup actors had to wear in the 1920s on film.
And the beard system poster shows the strange makeup that television presenters had to wear in the 1930s on television. It’s a great gift for your friend or for yourself who loves art deco, classy design, and pieces of humanmade creativity that match your aesthetic sense and start conversations with your guests. If you had dinner with this video, please tell me what you ate in the comments.
I recently watched this video by Design Theory and had a bowl of taco pasta. It was delicious. If you want to support these deep dives, consider becoming a member of the Purple Check Club as a YouTube member for members onlyly content, extra research, and early access, while the inner circle on Patreon gets this plus some other stuff at the same rate.
Every new member, every poster purchase helps to support me in my dream of turning this into a full-time thing one day. I would love to get to a place where I can post more of these. They are my favorite thing to make and it’s your support that makes it possible. I have been Swaffford and I will see you on the flip side. Bye-bye.
I didn’t know we were going to Old Muggywood. Knock off our removal in old Hollywood.
