32: The Newsreel
The nature of spoof and parody demands that first and foremost the end product be funny. If one were to decide to make a spoof of a zombie horror movie and created a movie with zombies but no laughs, it is in no way a spoof of a zombie horror movie, it is simply a zombie horror movie, and if one also doesn’t pay attention to the gore and the scares and the suspense, it probably would also be a bad zombie horror movie. The easiest way in general to make a parody funny is to exaggerate its characteristics into the point of absurdity. Spoofing an action/suspense movie? Take note of how the hero is always unusually sweaty in the climactic scene and lampshade it by having your hero look like a bucket of water is being poured on his head in the climactic scene.
Want to make a parody of a grunge song? Take note of how difficult it is to understand the lyrics and literally sing a couple of bars of your grunge parody song with actual marbles in your mouth.
Making a pastiche of American political cartoons? Take note of the over the top jingoism present and make sure your cartoons all include lady liberty weeping, either with joy and pride or with sadness and disappointment, but always crying.
Sometimes though, the thing being parodied is already so broad, so big, so absurd that it defies the very idea of exaggeration. Neil Gaiman is one of the most talented living writers in the English language, and in his novel American Gods, his characters visit the western Wisconsin tourist trap The House on the Rock. The way he describes The House on the Rock makes it sound like a profoundly weird and eerie place, but what is truly impressive about his writing it is the fact that the actual House on the Rock is a much weirder and eerier place than the way Gaiman describes it. If Gaiman had described it accurately, it would sound like parody, because sometimes the real thing is so profoundly off the rails that no exaggeration is required to make it seem ridiculous. This is how a completely in-character depiction of a newsreel in The Hudsucker Proxy can feel like parody, which it is, because it completely accurately nails the ridiculous tone and feel of the real thing.
The scene immediately following the montage where the Hula Hoop is developed and catches on is a newsreel, and it is silly. Presented by “Tidbits of Time” (very likely a spoof on the name of “The March of Time”, a newsreel company that ran from 1935 – 1951), a cheery and upbeat strings number plays as the narrator* tells of the unexpected success of the young president of Hudsucker Industries by way of his creation: the Hula Hoop, which has “won the hearts and hips of every youngster in America”. The reel splices in real b-roll footage of children in the 1950s playing with the Hula Hoop with gimmicky staged footage of a woman vacuuming while hooping, a man reading the paper while smoking a pipe and hooping, a fancy black tie cocktail party with hoops, and a bride and groom getting married “in the swing of things”, amongst cameos by the President of the United States of America and a Nazi. It is over the top and silly. The narrator over editorializes, the music is absurdly saccharine, and the antics presented in its footage seems to exist as a mockery of the idea of journalism. It clearly would exist as a parody of the feel-good 1950s the decade when we glossed over serious problems in the nation to present itself as the era when a chicken went into every pot and every household was an analogue of Leave It To Beaver. It would exist as that parody but for the fact that newsreels in their actuality were in fact this silly. There is nothing exaggerated about it.
In the early days of cinema, going to the movies had a lot less scheduling as an event. A film was playing, and so one would simply purchase a ticket and walk in at whatever point the film happened to be at at that moment, a practice which persisted until the release of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). An early example of spoiler culture, Hitchcock didn’t want it revealed that Janet Leigh —who had been heavily advertised as the film’s star— portrayed a character who dies in the first act. As a result, patrons for the first time were not allowed in the theater once the film had started, and the culture of moviegoing began to shift, making it a point to arrive at the theater as the film started or just before. Films in those early days advertised their lengths with how many reels it contained, with, say, the latest Chaplin film describing itself as “6 reels of joy”
A “reel” of course is the unit of film. A reel consists of 1000 feet of 35mm film, the amount that can be comfortably handled by the average person and can be mounted on a projector, each one providing about 11 minutes of run time in a talking feature. In some old films whose home releases have been mastered from commercial prints, you can see the black oval marks that occur when the reel changeovers should happen, famously lampshaded in the 1999 film Fight Club.
The early film projectors could only hold one reel at a time, so the projectionist would watch for these marks. The first one would tell them to start the second projector and get it up to speed, and the second mark would be the signal that the reel was ending and to switch to the second projector. In this way your Chaplin film could arrive in six different packages but still be presented as one coherent film. In order to put some buffer between showings of your films so that people who wanted to bother watching the whole thing start to finish in one go, theaters would provide a few single-reel featurettes for this buffer time, such as a short comedy film, a cartoon, a travelogue, or a newsreel.
Newsreels were the earliest form of setting current events to motion pictures. In the earliest part of the 20th century in the days of both the beginnings of moviehouses and the height of yellow journalism, it can only be expected that this new form of newsmaking would be as dramatic and over-the-top as its print analog. One of the first and longest lasting companies to produce newsreels was the Hearst company. The same newsman that convinced America it needed to annex Cuba and Puerto Rico by putting newspaper headlines in 60 point type saying “WE HAVE GOT TO FIGHT. MUST DECLARE FOR WAR” and “CRISIS AT HAND! SPANISH TREACHERY!” was now producing news in the even more striking and visceral format of motion pictures.
As newspapers slowly became more sedate and sober however as the century progressed, the Newsreel format only became more over-the-top. By the 1930s as sound became more and more prevalent in motion pictures, Newsreels picked up on this by adding music and continuous narration. The music in newsreels was often stirring and intense. It had big bombastic strings and horns for stories of the glory of our boys abroad and the looming dangers of international communism, or comically upbeat oompah numbers for stories of triumph in sports and commerce.
The very nature of the format and the fact that recording primary source sound was much more difficult than recording primary source video meant that the narrator had to continually talk over the reel. Given that this meant that primary sources could often not speak for themselves, the newsreel company did a good deal of the speaking for them, a practice which continued even as portable sound recording equipment got better, simply because it was the established format of what a newsreel looked and sounded like. This in turn meant that newsreels did a good deal of editorializing, both between the emotional content of the music, and the fact that copywriters for the newsreel narration (whether they intended to or not) often had a take on the news being presented and had no real reason to hold back from it, as with this reel on post war worries over communism stating “though most americans today clearly recognize the danger and critical foreign situation, many find it hard to understand all the points and issues of conflict”. The narrator doesn’t even feign objectivity and neutrality about the Soviet Union, instead seeking to stoke the fires of its demonization.
This editorializing further extended beyond subjects of any real import. In slice-of-life and human interest stories the newsreel narrator continued to need to speak over anything happening that had no soundtrack of its own. This leads to a kind of color commentary on the events depicted, often with stale observations and corny jokes, as a newsreel about president Franklin D Roosevelt carving a turkey for a banquet of children observes “it’s a good plan to get the speeches over first, then you can get down to the real business of the day which is of course to make short work of the bird” over footage of children eating turkey. God forbid that the reel simply lets the footage of children eating turkey exist without commentary. Similarly a newsreel about a treadmill for dogs cannot stop itself from a barrage of Fred-Willard-in-Best-In-Show style commentary, opening with “very often it's the owner what leads a dog's life, so the inventor of this little gadget deserves to be hailed as a benefactor of the human race” and not stopping for a solid minute as he breathlessly describes the dogs’ activity.
An (unintended?) consequence of this perpetual editorializing is that any news in the world of commerce often became an unintentional commercial for the thing being spoken of, as the narrator needed to fill the time in the newsreel somehow, and thus speaking of pricing and features became commonplace, as in a reel on an international auto show in Britain in 1948 describing the economy of the Ford Anglia and the sleek new appearance of a Jaguar convertible, and a luxury model by Alvis sporting a cocktail set in a compartment in the driver’s side door, so that one could mix a martini just before hitting the road.
And so we have the Hudsucker Newsreel: a cheery and upbeat strings number plays as the narrator tells of the unexpected success of the young president of Hudsucker Industries by way of his creation, the Hula Hoop which has “won the hearts and hips of every youngster in America”. The reel splices in real b-roll footage of children in the 1950s playing with the Hula Hoop with gimmicky staged footage of a woman vacuuming while hooping, a man reading the paper while smoking a pipe and hooping, a fancy black tie cocktail party with hoops, and a bride and groom getting married “in the swing of things”, amongst cameos by the President of the United States of America and a Nazi. The newsreel is over the top and ridiculous, but not very much more ridiculous than the real thing. Sometimes reality is its own parody.
* The newsreel is narrated by frequent Coens collaborator John Goodman, but for some reason is credited in the credits to Karl Mundt, the name of the serial killer the anti-semitic policemen think is the real identity of Barton Fink’s neighbor Charlie Meadows (also played by Goodman) in 1991’s Barton Fink. Why the credit is so listed is unclear, but then again the Coens also credited a dead body in Fargo as being played by
(the Minnesotan funk / pop / rock legend Prince Rogers Nelson’s legal name at the time) and credited the editing of their films to a nonexistent person named Roderick Jaynes, so clearly credits shenanigans are their own reward for the Coens.