How has the Evolution of the Silver Screen affected the theater and movie going experience in the...

[LizzieMaine]

"The New Odor." That made me laugh out loud when I was eight years old, and it still makes me laugh out loud today.

 

[LizzieMaine]

There are curious and interesting trivialities from the past that relate to race in connection with entertainment. One was from the radio show "Fibber McGee and Molly." In some episodes they had a maid, whose name I think was Beulah. She spoke with a typically stereotyped African-American voice and usually had comical lines. The reality was, the character was placed by a white man. The show was performed before a live audience and it was very startling for the audience to see who Beulah was being played by.

That was Marlin Hurt, who had been doing variations of that voice on the air for years before he joined "Fibber" in 1944. He had been a member of a singing trio in Chicago, and would interpolate comedy voices into the songs -- with this weird falsetto female voice being his most popular. In addition to the Beulah character he did the same voice with a Jewish dialect as a character called "Gypsy Rose Levy."

He was a well-known figure to radio listeners at the time, but the live audience seldom knew what he looked like -- so that was hammed up during the performances, with Hurt standing with his back to the audience until his cue came. He'd whirl around and bellow "SOMEBODY BAWL FO' BEULAH?" and never fail to bring down the house.

Hurt got his own show in 1945 where he played Beulah, her boyfriend Bill, and her employer, "Marlin Hurt." The idea that one guy was doing all the voices was the basic gimmick of the show, and when Hurt died of a sudden heart attack not long into its run, the sponsors tried to keep the gimmick going by hiring another white man -- a female impersonator named Bob Corley -- to play Beulah. But it didn't work, and the series flopped until they dropped the gimmick, and went out and got Oscar-winning African-American actress Hattie McDaniel to play the part.

There were very mixed feelings about live audiences in radio. Some performers, most notably Eddie Cantor and Ed Wynn, couldn't work on the air without them, because they used the audience reaction to time their gags. Others, like Fred Allen and Correll and Gosden, strongly disliked them, and only used them because their sponsors insisted on it -- Allen called them "a bunch of yucks who have nothing better to do than sit and gape at a group of people in business suits standing at a microphone." Listeners at home often disliked studio audiences as well, especially when the performers played to them instead of to the microphone, but the sponsors felt the audience reaction made the programs sound livelier, so they stayed.

 

[MikeKardec]

The whole race thing in America is very complicated. It is equally complicated in Latin America and different in every way and also different in every country. And it keeps changing everywhere.

I spent some time in the West Indies in the 1980s. Most particularly in Barbados, in my memory, everyone would be described/identified by the color of their skin and or their racial mixture using a complex assortment of terms that even in the relaxed nature of the times made my hair stand on end ... but it was just the way their culture had for identifying people, discussing their differences, knowing who they were talking about. After awhile I realized that I was the one who was uptight about it or uncomfortable with it. I still couldn't use those terms in conversation. however. I felt like the vocabulary came from Louisiana in the 1830s but it was only the white guy from the US who was uncomfortable.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, in the pearling ports of northern Australia, there was a strict hierarchy that seemed to be based on race with the British, Dutch and a few Americans on top. Then there were the Japanese, honored with second position because of their strict discipline and their stoic acceptance of the dangers of pearl diving along with their understanding of its science and technology. Further down were Chinese, Indians, Ambonese, Filipinos and at the bottom (depressing as it is) Aborigines. When I first started reading about this racial cast system I accepted it as being as ugly and simple as it seems to be. Then I ran into a fascinating discussion of some of the odder details. The most telling was that after the Spanish American War, Filipinos took a jump in status overnight. They had become "Americans." With little fanfare several Broome area Filipinos eventually married Irish women, again accepted by a society we would normally see as reprehensibly racist, but it was considered okay because both man and woman were Catholic.

These days we make everything about race but it seems in some instances it was a more complicated, though probably no more moral, reality than that. Human society is odd, and hard to predict from a distance ... there's no getting around it.

 

[MikeKardec]

One of the best things about being a child in the '50s as I was, was that there wasn't much made-for-kids programming so local tv stations ran old movies and cartoons. The studios wouldn't release anything post-1949 to television, so we saw all the movies our parents had watched, but we saw them out of order and we saw them over and over again. Cagney and Bogart and Bette Davis were as immediate to us as they had been 10-20 years earlier.

That was still true for me in the 1960s and '70s. I'm pretty sure one of the things that got me interested in film, other than growing up in Hollywood, was watching all those horribly chopped up yet still great old movies on the local stations. Even as a kid I'd much rather watch Bogart or Alan Ladd and Bill Bendix than The Six Million Dollar Man, I knew that stuff was junk before I was four feet tall.

On the subject of radio shows, I can only imagine what they were like, being recorded. Comedy works best before a live audience and in those performances, it was just the actors essentially just standing in front of the mike and reading their lines. There would be a sound effects man and usually a band, too. Today, that would seem like a very odd thing but there are still live radio shows like that, usually rather more sophisticated, but I wonder what the Prairie Home Companion looks like in person, especially Guy Noir.

There are some nice descriptions of very advanced Era radio production in John Dunning's, Two O'clock Eastern Wartime ... they are a bit cutting edge when compared to everyday productions, however. A fantasy of 1940s radio production. I did about 60 radio style dramas, some more radio style than others, between 1986 and 2015. The bulk of them were done with the cast speaking into multiple mics into one track and the SFX man doing his work live onto the other. There was editing but it was quite minimal.

That was fun for awhile but we eventually got better results with more sophisticated techniques. Several of our later productions were easily as complex and in depth as post production on a motion picture, those are my favorites because the result of your artistry is the highest even though it often takes great artists to execute the old system to an adequate standard.

Here are some videos of us at work on the last show -- http://www.thediamondofjeruaudio.com/VideoFiles/index.html

I wish I could find some earlier pictures but the have been lost over the years and we were never smart about documenting our work in the beginning.

There's also a bunch of photos that function almost as a "how to" tutorial if you have the patience to sit through all of them -- http://www.thediamondofjeruaudio.com/gallery/index.html#SU001-IMG_0021.JPG

Truly, it's the most fun I have had at work in my whole life but it is NOT a way to make money! You just have to love the doing of it.

 

[BlueTrain]

Sometimes I think entertainers, directors and producers do things just to be doing something different or novel, even if it isn't always their own idea. And, sometimes a director will do something incredibly difficult or time-consuming because he just has to do something a certain way. I suppose we're all like that, doing something just for the sake of being able to say we did it.

There was a man who produced commercials in the 1950s and someone suggested he make a full-length movie, so he did. The result was "Giant from the Unknown," filmed in Fawnskin, CA, and other locations around Big Bear Lake. There were some interesting trivialities about the movie, including Bob Steele as part of the cast. He had made lots of cowboys movies in the 30s and 40s. This movie was made in 1958. Supposedly the director said it was the most fun he had ever had. He went on to produce another five or six low-budget films. Like some others in the motion picture business, he had been in a motion picture unit in the army in WWII. I actually made a point of visiting one of the filming locations when we were in California a few years ago and it was very satisfying to stand in the same place a certain scene was filmed.

Alfred Hitchcock made a film, "Rope," in which there were exceptionally long shots, averaging ten minutes each. Typically a camera shot is measured in seconds. The production was in some ways rather like a stage production.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The big difference between radio in the Era and modern audio drama is that the latter is a boutique item, and the former was a ground-out, mass-produced product. There was neither the time, nor the money, for elaborate production technique, and much of it was extremely simple, especially by modern standards.

The average radio drama in the Era was performed with one or two microphones for the cast, one for any necessary manually-produced sound effects, one for the musicians, and a turntable truck for recorded sound effects -- which, by the 1940s, were the majority of sound effects used. Most radio dramas had no live audience, but variety and comedy programs usually did, and while they might have a banner at the rear of the stage advertising the sponsor's products, there was usually nothing else on the stage but a row of chairs for the performers to use while they weren't at the microphone.

The "row of mics" technique seen today, in which all the actors face the audience was not used until the 1970s. In the Era, a single double-faced microphone was usually used by all the actors, which encouraged face-to-face interaction between performers, and heightened the realism of the conversations. Fades were largely accomplished by the actors themselves moving away from the mic, and not by the engineer. Some performers, notably Fred Allen, would perform with their backs to the audience so as to focus their performance on the listeners at home and to avoid the pitfall of hamming it up for the live audience.

Some programs, most notably the various comedy serials popular during the 1930s, were performed with the performers seated at a table, following the technique established by Correll and Gosden in "Amos 'n' Andy." The most sophisticated use of this technique was in "Easy Aces," which was performed with the actors seated around an old bridge table with a microphone mounted below the tabletop so that only the face projected up. This allowed the performers to converse while forgetting the microphone was even there.

 

[MikeKardec]

The big difference between radio in the Era and modern audio drama is that the latter is a boutique item, and the former was a ground-out, mass-produced product. There was neither the time, nor the money, for elaborate production technique, and much of it was extremely simple, especially by modern standards.

The average radio drama in the Era was performed with one or two microphones for the cast, one for any necessary manually-produced sound effects, one for the musicians, and a turntable truck for recorded sound effects -- which, by the 1940s, were the majority of sound effects used. Most radio dramas had no live audience, but variety and comedy programs usually did, and while they might have a banner at the rear of the stage advertising the sponsor's products, there was usually nothing else on the stage but a row of chairs for the performers to use while they weren't at the microphone.

The "row of mics" technique seen today, in which all the actors face the audience was not used until the 1970s. In the Era, a single double-faced microphone was usually used by all the actors, which encouraged face-to-face interaction between performers, and heightened the realism of the conversations. Fades were largely accomplished by the actors themselves moving away from the mic, and not by the engineer. Some performers, notably Fred Allen, would perform with their backs to the audience so as to focus their performance on the listeners at home and to avoid the pitfall of hamming it up for the live audience.

It's very hard to do good drama with actors and mics facing an audience. I did a couple of staged readings of shows already in the can and never liked the results. It seems like you can have a performance for the audience or the mic, but not both.

I remember those huge RCA figure 8 ribbon mics. In the studio you could work both sides if you had the space for it. But you couldn't really work close to it if that was the effect you wanted.

I might have mentioned somewhere that I did a show, using two stacked figure 8s (not RCAs) in a "Blumlein Pair" stereo configuration. Like a period radio drama and the whole cast worked 360 degrees around the single mic position. The actors not only moved in and out to simulate distance, but left and right to create the stereo space ... on one side of the mic array Left to Right is the mirror image of the other so those actors had to learn all the spots to say their lines in reverse! There were "null zones" at either extreme of the left right space that we used for things that were supposed to sound really distant. We had to do the show "live-ish" in three full length takes.

I thought I was going to lose my mind it was so complicated. With a single mic the only movement you have is who is on mic and are they near of far. We eventually had one of the producers sitting at the base of the mic stand to silently pick up the script pages as the actors dropped them and we had another tiptoeing around behind the actors doing the same thing. If we hadn't there would have been too much stepping on paper noise as everyone moved around.

After that I pretty much abandoned experimenting with old style techniques and just got the work done in the best manner possible. I think the BBC did a couple of experimental projects in Blumlein stereo but, of course, at the time of its invention there was no way to broadcast stereo. The man, Alan Blumlein (sp?) was seriously ahead of his time.

Overly optimistic, I once wanted to do a show like that live in the out doors. However, I could never find a quiet enough place, too many aircraft, cars etc. The only time we could have pulled that off would have been the two days after September 11th when all the planes were grounded!

 

[BlueTrain]

I believe they had a lot of trouble with sound when talkies first came out, mainly with the noise the camera itself made. In a few outdoor shots that were not exactly professionally produced for the screen, the wind was making an awful noise blowing against the mic. The particular one I'm thinking of was at Al Jolson's funeral.

There was a recreated (but fictional) radio drama production that was (again, fictional) produced on location on an episode of the Ellery Queen TV series with Jim Hutton. It was interesting but probably unrealistic. The story was set in the 1940s.

I also recall an Abbot & Costello radio show in which they had just finished some joke and Costello says to Abbot, "And another thing, Abbot, what page are you on?" It got a laugh but it's really hard to visualize people just standing on the stage reading lines.

 

[LizzieMaine]

It's very hard to do good drama with actors and mics facing an audience. I did a couple of staged readings of shows already in the can and never liked the results. It seems like you can have a performance for the audience or the mic, but not both.

I remember those huge RCA figure 8 ribbon mics. In the studio you could work both sides if you had the space for it. But you couldn't really work close to it if that was the effect you wanted.

You can work an RCA 44 really close if you angle your approach a bit. Some actors would hold up a pencil in front of their mouths to break up the airflow and avoid pops. RCA 77s, the pill-shaped mics associated with TV talk show hosts and such, weren't as good for this. But the 44 was ideal, and remained in use in radio studios well into the DJ era.

Correll and Gosden favored the RCA 4-A, a condenser mic introduced in the late 1920s, which they continued to use for several years after ribbon mics became popular. It had one live face, mounted in the side of a cast metal box that contained a three-tube amplifier, and they'd put it on a table between them. Gosden, as Amos, would lean back and speak in a loud, high voice, and Correll, as Andy, would lean in very close and rumble out his lines, and the mic took care of the balance without a lot of fiddling in the booth. When they converted to doing a live-audience show on a stage in the 1940s, they never became comfortable with the shift in technique this required, and their performances became much more exaggerated as a result.

This was also the type of mic the Easy Aces used, mounted into the top of the bridge table, and they were still using it in the mid-1940s, probably the last people at NBC to insist on what was considered a long-obsolete mic by that time.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I believe they had a lot of trouble with sound when talkies first came out, mainly with the noise the camera itself made. In a few outdoor shots that were not exactly professionally produced for the screen, the wind was making an awful noise blowing against the mic. The particular one I'm thinking of was at Al Jolson's funeral.

They solved the camera noise problem by putting the camera in a large wooden booth with a plate-glass window. This booth was on wheels, so theoretically it could move, but it was very heavy and creaky -- so they usually left it where it was. That's why so many early talkies look so flat and leaden compared to the dynamic camera movement of late silents. Later they came up with the idea of enclosing the camera in a large padded casing called a "blimp," which became the standard for the rest of the Era.

That wind noise is the reason most newsreel footage was shot silent, even after the sound era began, and sound effects would be dubbed in later. Live sound was used only when absolutely necessary, and you could always tell when they cut to it because of the contrast in quality.

People today are used to seeing World War II footage of raids and attacks with lots of loud explosions and such, but none of that sound is real. All that footage was shot silent, and all the sound effects were dubbed in after the fact.

 

[BlueTrain]

At one time, everything motion picture producers did was innovative. It is interesting that motion pictures actually preceded commercial radio by a couple of decades and radio was followed by television another 20 years after that. Of course, someone had to open a station and you had to have a receiving set first before that meant anything.

 

[MikeKardec]

You can work an RCA 44 really close if you angle your approach a bit. Some actors would hold up a pencil in front of their mouths to break up the airflow and avoid pops. RCA 77s, the pill-shaped mics associated with TV talk show hosts and such, weren't as good for this. But the 44 was ideal, and remained in use in radio studios well into the DJ era.

I've always wanted to work with a 44 but, to tell the truth, I've never seen one outside of photographs. I'm a pop screen fanatic, always searching for the best. So far I'm happiest with Paulys but if I was to ever do a show again I'd experiment some more.

I believe they had a lot of trouble with sound when talkies first came out, mainly with the noise the camera itself made. In a few outdoor shots that were not exactly professionally produced for the screen, the wind was making an awful noise blowing against the mic. The particular one I'm thinking of was at Al Jolson's funeral.

The long term leader in the blimped cameras Lizzie's probably talking about was Mitchell BNC. It was so good (though still not quiet enough in many cases) that it wasn't replaced until the Panavision cameras of the '60s and '70s. The Panavision stuff was world class, never beaten because I don't believe they ever sold cameras, only rented ... they were continuously upgrading their stock to be the best possible motion picture cameras in existence. The digital revolution dealt them a blow but they are still in the game. The Arriflex (Europe's grand old camera) Alexa is the digital weapon of choice, though there is lots of competition.

Most of the time in films (even today) the Location Mixer and boom person only try to record the dialog, almost everything else is added back in during post production. Even dialog is difficult to capture cleanly under many conditions and the actors will "loop" or replace their lines after the scene is shot. Typically the worst way to do this is in post ... the best practice is to do the dialog replacement as soon as possible after the scene while the actor remembers their performance. It's very important that the same microphone be used and that it should be placed at the same distance and angle. A good sound man or boom op will carry a small still camera to note the set up in case something needs to be replaced after they have left the show.

Getting good location sound is very microphone dependent and the right mic is selected almost like the right lens would be selected.

Occasionally, if a disagreeable sound is consistent and is not echoing around the location, an additional mic can be set up to record the unwanted sound and then the electrical polarity of this second recording is flipped so that its "sound waves" cancel out the unwanted sound. It works like those "negative noise" headphones you used to see marketed for people on planes and in other high noise environments.

 

[BlueTrain]

I think you are correct in that the microphones now are set up to record only dialogue and that other sounds are added later. Sometimes the sound is obviously wrong, mainly for vehicle and engine noises, but otherwise, it works well enough. Jacques Titi, on the other hand, frequently emphasized (or over-emphasized) sounds for the comic effect in his films, and they are almost certain to have been added later.

My son actually works in the motion picture industry and has credits but boom operator is not something that he's done, as far as I know. Mostly it's electrical work and general production assistant. When he calls, we talk about movies all the time but never about actually making movies. We talk politics and history even more.

 

[MikeKardec]

I think you are correct in that the microphones now are set up to record only dialogue and that other sounds are added later. Sometimes the sound is obviously wrong, mainly for vehicle and engine noises, but otherwise, it works well enough.

If you watch Bates Motel, the sound of Norma's Mercedes 280se is always that of a Mercedes diesel. I believe that is a choice to make it sound "old." In Post you generally try to use effects that are more emotionally correct than "real." It's part of the interpretive aspect to film making. Many times you could never capture all the detail of the way it feels to, say, fire a machine gun by simply recording it or even hearing it. Firing the gun you experience all sorts of mechanical sensations that are not present in the sound itself.

I've taken a stab at that effect several times and usually we recorded a low volume pass to get the crack of the shot (sometimes with hand loaded sub sonic ammo to avoid the sonic boom of the bullet), then a high volume pass to get the more delicate sounds of the shell ejecting, links falling and trailing echoes. Then we'd record a manual cycling of the action without firing. That would be sped up and layered in so you could "feel" the bottoming of the bolt in the receiver and the the bolt stripping out another cartridge. Down range we'd record the specially loaded sub sonic bullets going by and then long range hits on things like frozen and thawed turkeys, sand bags, dirt, ricochets off of rock and metal.

Personal trick from my final days of doing that sort of stuff: I like shooting asymmetrical pebbles out of a wrist-rocket to get the sound of bullet and shrapnel fly bys. It sounds great because it's moving slowly so you can pick up a lot of detail and it is a LOT safer. All the precautions for both personnel and microphones take a long time when doing this sort of work and you have to choose a very remote spot that environmentally sounds right (the hardest part)!

Those grip and electric guys like your son are HARD workers!

 

[Stanley Doble]

I think it was Fred Allen who started the idea that radio audiences were composed of morons or 'yucks'. It caught on and was a popular opinon.

Alexander Woolcot said the opposite. He wrote for newspapers, magazines, and published several books and he said radio audiences were the smartest. Based on the fact that if he made a mistake on the air, no matter how obscure the subject, someone would be sure to supply the correct information in minutes. For example French author Honore de Balzac drank 40 cups of coffee a day when writing. Alex couldn't remember if it was coffee or tea so he said tea, and the phone rang off the hook. Such experiences were common.

Possibly the difference is that Allen's program appealed to a less intellectual segment of the population than Woolcot's.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Allen was speaking of *studio* audiences, not listeners at home. In his experience, the class of people who showed up at Radio City to see programs performed live tended not to particularly care which program they were seeing, and tended to be more interested in gaping at celebrities than in paying attention to the broadcast. Mr. Woollcott was fortunate in that his broadcasts were rarely given before studio audiences.

As for the intellectuals, they were pretty much universally fans of Allen's various programs, including Woollcott himself.

 

[tonyb]

You're talking about an industry I've been around in one way or another, on and off, since I was five years old. So I can speak from personal experience about what I've seen, and what I'm seeing now.

The number one difference between then and now is that filmgoing in the pre-modern era was less about the actual film, and less, even, about the "theatre experience," as it was about the idea of sharing in a communal experience. People in the Era went to the movies because it was a part of community life -- theatres were where you met your friends, shared an experience with your friends, and came away with the feeling that you were part of something more important than yourself. The movie was incidental -- millions of people went to the movies once or twice a week because it was the thing to do, not because they desperately wanted to see some Grade Z Universal potboiler with Lyle Talbot, Linda Darnell and Baby Sandy. It didn't matter what was on the screen. The shared community experience was the real product being sold.

Exhibition today is a far different thing -- there is no longer any mass audience, and there are no more time-filling Grade Z potboilers anymore that people will go to see regardless of how good, bad, or pointless they are. Movie entertainment today is focus-groupped and psychologically marketed to appeal to finely-aimed niche audiences, and theatre exhibition is just a small part of the total deal -- the secondary market is now far more important to Hollywood than the primary, and that secondary market is increasingly a solo thing.

The only place where you'll still find a hint of what movies used to be is your local independent theatre. This is also a niche audience -- generally made up of middle-class white people in their forties or older, and a scattering of "indie" kids -- but it tends to view the experience the way all audiences did in the Era. They come to the show regardless of what's on the screen because it's a chance to mingle with at least a small slice of the community. The appeal is primarily a social one rather than an aesthetic one -- it's people reaching out to try and nullify, at least for a couple of hours, the soul-crushing isolation of the modern world.

I fear for the future of the movie-exhibiting business.

The "niche" industry will survive, I believe, in much the way that printed-on-paper news media survive (although most news as relayed through the written word has gone electronic; people focused on their tablets and smartphones while riding the bus or light rail aren't necessarily so different from their predecessors with faces buried in the daily papers).

I'm often reminded of a conversation I had over lunch back around the year 2000 with a former employer, a newspaper publisher who had been in the business since the late 1940s.

"Whaddya think the Internet bodes for our business, Jerry?" I asked.

"Don't worry about it," he replied. "Radio was supposed to put us out of business. And so was television. Didn't happen. We've never printed more pages, never sold more ads. I'm not concerned about it."

Jerry, who was quite elderly when we had that conversation, but still quite vital, passed away a couple years back. His business, a chain of papers and specialty magazines, as well as his printing plant, is but a shadow of its former self. Most of the papers are now defunct. I believe the press still produces advertising mailers and newspaper inserts, but that business is going the way of the dodo as well.

 

[Fading Fast]

To build on Tonyb's insights on the parallels between the movie industry and newspapers, I've been reading the WSJ since I got a college subscription. When you read a paper daily, you develop an intimate understanding of where things are, the things you want to read, the writers you like, the places to never miss checking and on and on. Online, some of that happens, but not all of it.

Because the online site is fluid - being updated throughout the day and constantly being tweaked (as opposed to the newspaper which changed formats, maybe, once a decade) - there is no real beginning or end, you just jump into the stream and read. I have noticed that things I read in, for example, the "Technology" section might be there for days, or gone quickly, or moved. And since articles are constantly updated, even what you've read changes when you go back to it. And it is a waste of time to overly "learn" a site, as it is always changing.

There are many good things about online - the easy link to similar articles, the archives, being (usually) always available and those might outweigh the negatives, but my relationship with the paper has changed and is less connected as I feel the loss of the "beginning and end" of the daily paper and the consistency of knowing where things will be and when. It might sound silly, but I don't "feel" connected to the online site the way I did the physical paper.

The same has happened I think to movies. I haven't been in a movie theater in many years as we now just watch them at home. Because of that we watch more, but engage less. While I think directors are shooting and editing movies with at least a nod to the fact that many of their viewers will never see the movie in the theater, I know - most of the time - I am not experiencing the movie as intended. Also, like the on-line paper, I'll quickly disengage as I didn't buy a ticket, commute to the theater, buy my soda, etc. - if I don't like it early on and don't have a reason to believe I will, I'll move on.

Like with the on-line paper, my relationship with a streaming movie is less intimate and less connected. Any maybe that is everyone's reality as I constantly read that we are so bombarded with information, etc., that we "surf" through things versus getting deeply involved. All just thoughts and observations that seemed connected with Tonyb's.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^
Because it's so easy to jump around online, people tend to jump around. So yeah, I concur: reading on paper more deeply engages me than does reading on a glowing screen.

I'm tempted to go back and re-read those books and scholarly articles I was compelled to read when I was a communications major. Maybe Marshall McLuhan wasn't so loopy after all. And maybe he was.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The problem with a lot of the online archival material you find is that it's simply hard to read. A lot of broadcasting-industry trade publications from the Era are available online, and are very valuable for my writing work -- but very often the actual scans are so bad that all they're good for is helping me locate dates of issues in which articles appear, especially articles published in the agate sections. If I really want to read the article, I find that my best bet is still tracking down an actual hard copy of the publication in question.