06: New Years Eve, December 58th, 1958
A central tenet of these essays is that if Hudsucker has a fatal flaw, it is that it attempts to do too much in a single film. Too many things happen over the course of its run time for the average filmgoer to give adequate attention to. This “too many things in a short period of time” aspect even bleeds into the reality of the film as there appears to be a kind of time warp causing more things to happen than are physically possible. The entirety of the events of the film take place in one calendar month: December, 1958, specifically, but also they can’t possibly take place over the course of merely one month. Let us break down to the best of our ability the events of the film.
Monday, December 1: Norville Barnes is hired at Hudsucker Industries, walking in as the clock strikes 12:00 Noon as Waring Hudsucker jumps out the boardroom window. Before the end of the day he is promoted to President. Upon being promoted, a montage starts during which several newspaper headlines flash on screen and he is fitted for a new suit by Luigi the tailor. We will assume he has purchased a ready to wear suit that requires minor alterations, taking about 1 week. Buzz builds around Hudsucker’s new “idea man”
Monday, December 8: Norville meets Amy Archer at lunch, hiring her as his secretary. Assuming she can get back to the offices of the Manhattan Argus and can write the story that afternoon (which given her typing speed I’ll buy), her story “IMBECILE HEADS HUDSUCKER: Not a Brain in his Head” is filed the next day.
Norville Barnes’s sole appointment 1 week into his term as President of Hudsucker
Tuesday, December 9: Amy returns to Hudsucker Industries, is accidentally grossly insulted by Norville, and that evening has a chat with Old Moses, learning of the board’s scheme to devalue Hudsucker’s stock. She writes a new story, either late that evening or the subsequent morning.
Wednesday, December 10: Amy’s story is rejected. Some time after her story is rejected is the Hudsucker Christmas Fancy Dress Ball. We will assume they happen on the same day for the sake of plausibility, even though it is already completely dark outside when Amy’s story is rejected. Sunset in New York on December 10 typically falls at around 4:30 PM. It would take another hour at least to be completely dark out. Assuming the Manhattan Argus’s offices is located in Midtown near the Times and the Wall St Journal’s offices and that her apartment is indeed in Greenwich village near the Gaslight Café stand-in Ann’s 440*, it would take 20 minutes to take the train home in ideal circumstances. We do not know where the fancy dress ball is, but it is definitely fancy, so we’ll assume it’s at the Waldorf Astoria, which would take a half hour to get to from the Village. If the fancy dress ball is at 8:00 and she leaves the Argus offices at 6:00, this would leave her about 1 hour to change and do her hair and makeup, a heroic task for even the incredibly competent Amy Archer.
going from this
to this in under an hour.
Thursday, December 11: Norville pitches the Hula Hoop to the Hudsucker board. The product immediately enters a production cycle. How long a product takes to go from prototype to mass production will depend on a host of factors, but we can gather some ballpark figures. The most well funded project (and thus the one with the most resources to spend on a speedy product delivery) in the “For Kids” category on Kickstarter is the Cubetto from Primo Toys, which was funded on April 7 2016 and delivered on November 1 that year, however the Cubetto is a multi-layered toy with many moving pieces and Primo Toys’s manufacturing apparatus needed to be built from scratch to deliver the product to market. A comparatively simpler toy is the game Twister. The Milton Bradley corporation filed patent 3,454,279 A: “Apparatus for playing a game wherein the players constitute the game pieces” on April 14, 1966, so the game was at the very least approved for production by that point (never mind that it probably took at least 2 weeks to write the patent claim) and debuted on the Tonight Show on May 3 of that year as Johnny Carson and Eva Gabor played it on air. Twister of course is not going to present much in the way of difficulty in manufacturing due to the fact that it consists of one printed vinyl mat, but even it took two and a half weeks to get to market.
During the hoop design montage we have some idea that time is passing, but it’s difficult to say exactly how much. One concrete thing is that over the course of a series of shots of the creative bullpen in their attempts to name “Codename Extruded Plastic Dingus” we see their secretary read the entirety of the Tolstoy novel War And Peace and read roughly half of the same author’s Anna Karenina. The average adult’s reading speed according to a University of Chicago paper on speed reading is 250 words per minute. War And Peace is 587,287 words; Anna Karenina is 349,736 words. Assuming that she did nothing else during her workday but read 19th century Russian literature, it would take around 51 hours, or 6.3 workdays to read that much Tolstoy. If the last thing that needed to be done to release the Hula Hoop was to finalize the name (taking the rest of that 7th workday to print and distribute promotional material upon finalizing the name), the hoop would be released to the public on the 8th business day after it was approved.
do not forget the rigorous quality control procedure
Tuesday, December 23: The hula hoop is released to market where it initially performs poorly. The montage shows us a toy store where the hoop is being sold with a poster on the door, initially selling for $1.79. Over the course of several beats the price is dropped, first to $1.49, then $1.39, then $1.29, then in rapid-fire succession: $1.19, $0.99, $0.89, $0.79, $0.69, $0.59, $0.49, $0.39, “Two for $0.25”, and ultimately landing on “Free with any purchase” before a group of them is thrown out into the street. Many new products take a bit of time before they gain traction, so it is unlikely that these stickers were all applied on the day of release. While I have encountered retail establishment ownership who get frustrated with slow moving products, I have never encountered one that would change the price on an item multiple times in a single day. We can thus assume that the slow selling start of the hula hoop lasts at least 14 days. We can assume that the toy store was closed on Christmas day, so given that the hoop’s release date was the 23rd, that last discount would be applied 15 days later.
Wednesday, December 38: Fed up with its poor sales, the toy store owner throws at least some of his stock of hula hoops into the street. He happens to do so just as a local elementary school gets out (I would ask why the school isn’t on winter break but we’ve clearly left standard time here). As the screaming throng of emancipated children are running through the streets they encounter another child who has encountered a discarded hoop and is expertly using it**. The hoop looks so intensely fun that the throng of children mob the very same toy store that has been unable to move a single hula hoop. The same discount signs are ripped off in haste, and a beat later we see a new sticker go over the $1.79 price, bumping it up to $3.59. While the store being mobbed and the hoop going back to its original MSRP I could see happening in a day, I do not imagine that even this toy store owner would go in for price gouging, doubling the price of the hula hoop on the same day as he sold his first hoop. This success turnaround in this one store would then seem to take at least one day.
the December 38 that changed everything
Thursday, December 39: After this the mimeograph in Norville’s office springs to life and apparently has good news according to the expression on Amy’s face, suggesting a large turnaround in hula hoop sales. It’s clear from the poor initial sales and the subsequent rapid turnaround that the hula hoop was poorly marketed by Hudsucker Industries (very probably on purpose so that Sidney Mussburger could then point to Norville’s failure with the hula hoop as a means of depreciating Hudsucker’s stock). Its success then is due to real people seeing other real people hooping, deciding that’s something they want to do and doing it themselves. It’s tough to track how fast this kind of word-of-mouth success would take, but it certainly would happen no faster in 1958 than it does in the modern internet-connected age. As I write this, the most recent massive viral hit in American commerce was the Popeye’s Chicken Sandwich. Popeye’s released the sandwich on August 12, 2019. By August 19 it was the top trending item on Twitter, and within days after this there were reports of hours long lines for chicken at Popeyes stores. I would posit then that without a successful and massive marketing campaign, it would take at least one week for the hula hoop to become a newsworthy nationwide phenomenon via word of mouth (or rather sight of hips) alone.
Thursday, December 46: The Hula Hoop is a nationwide success, to the point where President Eisenhower calls Norville to wish him well. He’s proud of him. Mrs. Eisenhower is proud of him. The American people are proud of him.
Friday, December 47: Over the course of the coming scenes, Norville speaks with the press multiple times about the success of the Hula Hoop and Hudsucker Industries’ massive turnaround. In the first of these press conferences, Norville is sheepish and modest about his accomplishments, literally ending one conference with a bashful “aww come on guys”. By the last one he is arrogant and boastful, stating without a trace of irony that he single handedly saved the company and thus deserves a big fat raise. Again, this kind of transformation doesn’t happen over the course of an afternoon. Neither would the multiple news stories run on him, quickly turning from a tone of the great successes of the “Idea Man” to wondering if his well had run dry. How quickly an industrialist loses all sense of perspective and the press turns on them is going to vary from person to person. It took decades after his death for the American public to realize that Thomas Edison’s attempts to electrify America on low voltage DC power was perhaps more about padding his own ego than about doing what was best for America’s needs. More recently, it took a couple of months in 2018 for Elon Musk to go from visionary renegade Tesla CEO to nearly being forced out of his own company, between cavalierly referring to a diver who saved a Thai boy’s soccer team’s lives as a “pedo guy” in July, and inadvertently committing securities fraud by tweeting that he was going to turn Tesla into a private company, selling each share at $420 in August of that year. We do not have months however for the press to lose faith in Norville as he increasingly thinks highly of himself, so we’ll say this turnaround took one week.
Friday, December 54: Amy tenders her resignation from Hudsucker (at this point she has been holding down two full time jobs somehow for over 6 weeks, an impressive feat). That afternoon, Aloysius the sign painter shows Sidney that Amy Smith the receptionist is also Amy Archer the reporter. After a nap in his office, Norville wakes up and fires Buzz the elevator operator.
Monday, December 57: The next business day after a game of golf (in December, in New York, at night for some reason), Norville is informed that he is in trouble with the Hudsucker board for hiring Amy. The same night Amy fights with Smitty about his story about Norville being a fraud for stealing the Hula Hoop from Buzz the elevator operator and resigns from the Manhattan Argus.
Wednesday, December 58, New Years Eve: Norville meets with Dr. Bromfenbrenner. As the board decides to fire him that evening, Norville hits the town and goes on a bender in despair. He let President Eisenhower down. He let Mrs. Eisenhower down. He let the American People down. He ultimately returns to Hudsucker HQ, falls off the top of the building, is saved by Old Moses and the ghost of Waring Hudsucker, reads the blue letter, and realizes he’s saved. He kisses Amy, and in the subsequent year invents the Frisbee. Credits.
Even at a rush, the events of Hudsucker cannot possibly take place within a calendar month, and yet it does. There is literally at least 58 days worth of material covered in 30 days in the film’s universe. It is silly and ridiculous and over the top and it is delightful.
*which appears to be named after historic lesbian bar Mona’s 440, which begs a question to be explored later about Amy’s sexuality.
** this always raises two questions for me. How is this child so good at hula hooping despite never having encountered one before in his life? And secondly: why is this child not in the very same school that just let out?