It's the Pictures That Got Small: Hollywood Film Stars on 1950s Television (review)

It's the Pictures That Got Small, an original, well-written, and comprehensively researched book, sketches a vivid portrait of risk, fluidity, and formal experimentation as early television moved toward codification of performance. How and why did certain performers and personae fit into the new medium? Becker tackles such questions with both methodical precision and intellectual vigor. This book shows how, far from a peripheral concern, stardom was at the very heart of how the new medium conceptualized its industrial, financial, and formal prospects.

What were the factors driving early television's interest in studio-honed talent, and why did stars (principally, but not always, midlevel and downwardly mobile ones) seek out opportunities in the new medium? Industry incentives included a talent vacuum in the years before indigenous stars emerged and a need to mitigate the commercialism of the form through the invocation of prestige (Adolphe Menjou served this function in his hosting of Favorite Story [NBC, 1953-1955]). For performers, television might represent an opportunity to break type, to showcase talents that had lost value (such as singing and dancing) in 1950s Hollywood, to bid for artistic substance (as in the case of Tab Hunter or Mickey Rooney), or to put to use their business acumen (as with Dick Powell, who assiduously built up Four Star Playhouse [CBS, 1952-1956]). In a general way it might be said that the knownness of stars was particularly valuable in counteracting the unknownness of television in the medium's first decade.

Becker illustrates how a versatility that might have been detrimental to a star's coherence in studio-era Hollywood was converted to an asset for some performers in early television, especially in anthology formats. In contrast, as she notes, it was sometimes the case that dependable character actors and secondary featured players unlikely to achieve top-tier film stardom could thrive in continuing character series like the sitcom, a genre that "refuses forward narrative progression and relies on the predictable recurrence of readily identifiable character constancy."¹ Notably, the career transits of performers were not always one way; appearances on television by no means curtailed film work for many stars, and in some cases television work reinvigorated a waning star who then went back to film. What can be gleaned from all this is a recognition that the hierarchies of value in play in the relationship between the two media were not nearly as stable or predictable as is commonly supposed.

One of the book's richest case studies charts Faye Emerson's largely forgotten success in the earliest years of television; Becker here shows that intensely misogynist dismissals of women's viewing interests emerged quite early in television history. Another examines the rarely studied television work of Ida Lupino on Four Star Playhouse; The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959-1964); and most notably, Mr. Adams and Eve (CBS, 1957-1958), an extraordinary one-season series starring Lupino and husband Howard Duff playing barely disguised versions of themselves as a Hollywood "power couple." Not only did the series foreground the privileged class position of its central couple; it also manifested surprising commentary on female creative and professional agency. As Becker shrewdly observes, Mr. Adams and Eve (whose title alone invites attention to patriarchal inequality) also reversed the terms of the standard denouement of series like I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951-1957) by having its female star "rescued from typical domesticity but cemented into typical femininity."² Perhaps most significant, the series's "metatextuality was profoundly indicative of the ways in which star images were beginning to fragment, the sites of authority on film stardom were splintering, and public discussions of these developments were flowering in media discourse."³

It is useful to note that the history Becker recounts is in many ways a study of failure, a subject which received some scrutiny last year in the "TV Failure" theme week of the Media...