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  • Pittsburgh (1959)“Equilibriums of Paradox” and the Bicentennial City of Tomorrow
  • Sean P. Kilcoyne (bio)

I’m glad that it was never released in the day. It was too weird. It makes Pittsburgh look bad.

Overheard at a Bus stop outside of the Harris Theatre in June 2009, Following a Free public Screening ofPittsburghas part of the Annual three River Arts Festival [End Page 70]

Pittsburgh (1959), alternately known as the Bicentennial Film, is a 35mm documentary short commissioned by the Pittsburgh Bicentennial Association in an effort to reposition the pollution- and blight-infested Steel City as a hypermodern, nuclear-powered metropolis on the occasion of its two-hundredth birthday.1 Made by New Jersey–based On Film Inc., Pittsburgh was originally scheduled to premiere Thanksgiving evening 1958, marking the beginning of the city’s yearlong Bicentennial Celebration.2 Themed events were held throughout that winter, with Point State Park serving as the location for a land-and-water Gateway Festival beginning May 30, 1959, and running until mid-September of that year.3 Notable attractions included a 26-foot-high walk-through model of a Westinghouse atomic reactor; The Golden Crucible, a musical drama chronicling Pittsburgh’s historic trajectory as [End Page 71] experienced through the “eyes of a steel worker”; the Riverboat Sprague, also known as “Big Mama,” a 315-foot sternwheeler that doubled as a floating musical theater and river museum; an Indian stockade and frontier town peopled by “authentic” Seneca Indians and the Western stars of TV; and the Pan-American Geodesic Sphere, a 52-foot inflatable globe equipped with the capacity to project motion pictures. The sponsors hoped that this latter structure would accommodate exhibition of the Bicentennial Film during June 1959, although they were also looking toward clubs, institutions of learning, and ultimately, the television market.4

The Pittsburgh Bicentennial Association was a coalition of approximately fifty business, civic, and educational elites responsible for planning all aspects of the celebration. Their headquarters in room 776 of the newly built One Gateway Center in the Golden Triangle area of Pittsburgh afforded them a symbolic and tactical vantage point over the adjacent Gateway Festival. Mellon Bank executive Alexander B. Adams served as vice president of the Bicentennial Association and chairman of the Film Committee. The association requested a film that would celebrate past industrial accomplishments while looking to the future by helping to sell the city’s urban renaissance, which had been under way since 1946. Although Pittsburgh ultimately transmits this agenda with remarkable clarity, its potential to influence festival attendees went unfulfilled in the banner year of 1959—or so the story goes.

As it turns out, Pittsburgh was screened only once, privately, to sponsors, who were so unhappy with the final version that the film was shelved for decades.5 Much later, when storage bills at a New York warehouse went unpaid, Theodore L. Hazlett Jr., president of the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust Foundation, and former member of the Pittsburgh Bicentennial Committee, was offered twenty drums of film elements, which he promptly repatriated to Pittsburgh.6 After overseeing the custody of this material for an additional seven years, Hazlett donated it to Pittsburgh Filmmakers, a local media arts organization.7 Robert A. Haller, director of Filmmakers in 1979 at the time of its rediscovery, had Pittsburgh’s sound re-recorded and struck at least two 16mm reduction prints. Although Hazlett and Haller recognized the film’s historic significance and intervened accordingly, assorted comments made by Ed Blank, drama editor of the Pittsburgh Press, suggest a rather dismissive attitude toward its artistic merits.8 Stan Brakhage, rumored to be one of the film’s several successive “directors,” commented, “It’s weirdly interesting, but a monstrosity”; Blank wrote, “Nothing in the movie is nearly so remarkable as its belated reappearance.”9

But notoriety in one era can translate into noteworthiness in another. The critical and archival attention directed toward orphan films in recent years has helped [End Page 72] to recalibrate audience sensibilities toward an appreciation of works that, for one reason or another, exceeded their own historical contexts. In this sense, and most others, Pittsburgh is indeed quite remarkable. Rick...

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