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133 6 Right Here in Mason City: The Music Man and Small-Town Nostalgia LINDA A. ROBINSON It was just as if the movie had come to life, as if they were actually experiencing the thrill Professor Harold Hill sang about when “Gilmore, Liberatti, Pat Conway, the Great Creatore, W. C. Handy, and John Philip Sousa all came to town on the same historic day!”1 This sunny Tuesday was the high point, some might say, of the town’s entire history. Visitors had begun arriving on Monday, or even earlier, during the weekend: high school students and their chaperones; Warner Bros. representatives; members of the press from all over the country; and most exciting of all, movie stars, real movie stars! All told, an estimated seventy-five thousand people descended on Mason City, Iowa, in June 1962 to watch or participate in The Music Man National Marching Band Competition—the annual North Iowa Marching Band Competition expanded into a national competition for this single year—and to celebrate the press premiere of Warner Bros.’s film version of the successful Broadway musical. That Warner Bros. had chosen to hold the film’s press premiere in Mason City, a north central Iowa town with a population of thirty thousand, was due to its author’s good sense in having been born there. And by far the most revered guest at the festivities was Meredith Willson, Mason City’s favorite son, who had spent his boyhood there and then honored the town by memorializing it as The Music Man’s fictional River City—first in his Broadway hit and now, forever captured on film, in the Warner Bros. movie. Throughout the postwar era, the American small town at the turn of the last century had been an object of nostalgic affection: in published memoirs such as Roderick Turnbill’s Maple Hill Stories;2 in films such as On Moonlight Bay (1951) and Pollyanna (1960); and—in concrete form—in Disneyland’s Main Street, USA, first opened to the public in 1955. This nostalgia positioned the turn-of-the-century small town as offering the utopian solutions, in Richard Dyer’s terms, of energy (in the form of pastoral return) for modern-day exhaustion, transparency (honest 134 | LINDA A. ROBINSON communications and relationships) for modern-day manipulation, and perhaps most of all, community for fragmentation.3 A long-anticipated film based on a Broadway hit whose music had been in widespread circulation since 1957, The Music Man was the epicenter of this 1950s to early 1960s nostalgia for America’s moment of lost innocence, and that nostalgia, in fact, was the experience Warner Bros. sold to 1962 audiences. In turn, it was Warner Bros.’s turning The Music Man into a national event that made the film a feasible and attractive hook for Mason City’s self-promotion in the twenty-first century. The forging in popular imagination of a tie between a particular place or locale and a particular film is a phenomenon that occurs with some regularity, reflecting perhaps a desire to bring a piece of cinema’s fictional world into our own, such as when travelers to Madison County, Iowa, seek out the covered bridge from Bridges of Madison County (1995). The on-location film premiere, while probably designed primarily to generate excitement about the film’s release, can also serve as an opportunity to emphasize such a relationship between place and film, as in the 1939 premiere of Gone with the Wind in Atlanta, Georgia, home to the novel’s author, Margaret Mitchell. In the case of Mason City and Warner Bros.’s 1962 film The Music Man, this connection was forged, with the full force of the Hollywood publicity machine behind it, to such a degree that the blurring of identities between Mason City and River City has become a confusing circular dance: today, Mason City promotes itself by adopting the identity of its fictional counterpart, River City, which is, in turn, a fictional version of Mason City itself. Nonetheless, the effect of Mason City’s twenty-first-century attempt to market The Music Man and its 1912 setting differs significantly from Warner Bros.’s efforts in 1962, and not simply because of the great discrepancy in resources and visibility. In 2011, the sights and sounds of turn-of-the-century America are no longer in popular circulation, and neither, for the most part, is The Music Man itself. Thus Mason City’s effort seems to have...

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