April-May 1965: Super 8

Eastman Kodak Co. introduces its Super 8 film format, with press releases in April followed by a public debut on May 1 at the International Photography Exposition in New York. One of the main selling points: the plastic cartridge that made loading the film much easier. (Around the same time, Fuji Photo Film Co. was launching a similar system known as Single 8.)

     -- Advertisement from Life magazine, August 6, 1965 (linked below)

* "Super 8 mm Film History" (Kodak): @
* www.super8data.com (database): @
* "Instamatic Technique Goes to the Movies" (J. Walter Thompson Company News, April 30, 1965, from Duke University Libraries): @

* "Bigger Format for Movie Fans" (United Press International, April 11, 1965): @
* Advertisements in Life magazine, June 11 and August 6, 1965: @ and @

* "Kodak's Revolution in Home Movies" (Popular Science, June 1965): @

* "War of the Photo Systems" (Popular Science, July 1965): @ 

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Wednesday-Thursday, October 28-29, 1964: 'T.A.M.I. Show'

Filmed over two days at the Santa Monica (Calif.) Civic Auditorium, "The T.A.M.I. Show" (short for  Teenage Awards Music International or Teen Age Music International) featured some of the biggest stars in rock and pop music, including The Rolling Stones, James Brown and the Flames, The Supremes, The Beach Boys and Lesley Gore. It was released in theaters in December 1964.

* Movie trailer: @

* Summary from New York Times: @

* "14 Things You Didn't Know About Epic Rock Doc The T.A.M.I. Show" (Esquire magazine, 2014): @

* "The Rock Concert That Captured an Era" (Smithsonian magazine, 2010): @

* "The T.A.M.I. Show: A Groundbreaking '60s Concert" (NPR, 2010): @

* "DVD Review: The T.A.M.I. Show" (PopDose, 2010): @

* "The TAMI Show Remembered on Its 40th Anniversary" (Stephen Rosen, Indiewire, 2004): @

* "TAMI, Electronovision's Latest, Gets N.Y. Showing" (Billboard magazine, November 21, 1964): @

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September 1964: "Notes on 'Camp'"

New York critic and intellectual Susan Sontag (1933-2004) made her name as essayist with the collection "Against Interpretation," a series of writings on contemporary culture and art (twentieth century, and postwar mainly), with which she provided an alternative for the then prevailing modes of interpretation New Criticism, and Modernism. Calling attention to challenges to the canon of high art, Sontag wrote passionately about popular culture (movies, theatre, literature, fashion, arguing for it to be taken seriously as high art. Her political activism penetrated her writings, giving them a pressing topicality, and demonstrating how popular culture embodies its times' ethos. "Notes on 'Camp' " is an attempt to tackle a very visible but nevertheless ignored fascination for forms of art that by all standards would be considered failures (sometimes close to achievement but never quite), but are nevertheless championed by patrons. Sontag claims that camp is an aesthetic sensibility that is characterized by a high degree of, and attention for stylization, artifice, travesty, double entendre, extravagance and unintentional badness. According to Sontag, we find this sensibility especially towards types of art that are closely associated with popular culture, like movies, fashion, design, or television. Sontag claims that in the twentieth century (since Oscar Wilde, she says) the appraisal of camp has taken the form of a cult, of a dedication that aims to challenge the distinctions between good and bad taste. Camp is "good because it's awful." Because, as Sontag writes, "camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation -- not judgment" it can put itself in an outsider position. As such it can be the flea in the fur of proper taste -- a form of buffery, dandyism, or snobbery free from responsibility. Camp is not limited to political and cultural boundaries -- in fact it challenges these by pretending to be about pure aesthetics only. What distinguishes camp from true art is that it fails in its achievement on enlightenment (an argument similar to that of Benjamin). But instead it manages to hold up a mirror to the pretensions and prejudices of the art establishment. And in that sense it is very political.

     -- From "The Cult Film Reader" (2008)

Note: Sontag's essay appeared in the Fall 1964 edition of Partisan Review. While the exact date of publication is uncertain, the edition contains an advertisement of upcoming classical music concerts at New York's Carnegie Hall. The earliest date listed on the ad is September 28, so I'm assuming Partisan Review was published earlier that month.

* Partisan Review, Fall 1964 (Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University): @

* "Against Interpetation: And Other Essays" (Sontag, 1966): @

* Entry on camp (The Chicago School of Media Theory): @

* Susan Sontag Foundation: @

* "Susan Sontag: A Biography" (David Schreiber, 2014): @

* Review of biography (Brain Pickings): @

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Thursday, September 17, 1964: 'Goldfinger'

The third and most memorable of the James Bond movies premieres in London. It marked any number of firsts in the Bond canon:

     * First Bond movie to win an Academy Award (Best Sound Effects Editing).

     * First movie in which Bond himself orders a martini, "shaken, not stirred."

     * First Bond movie to include a pre-mission briefing from gadget master Q (who says, "Now pay attention, please.")

     * First in which Bond drives a heavily modified Aston Martin DB5 (including a passenger ejector seat).

     * First movie to feature the Ford Mustang, which had just debuted in April.

* Entry from www.mi6-hq.com: @

* Entry from BFI Screenonline: @

* Entry from Turner Classic Movies: @

* www.007.com: @
* Film locations, movie stills and production notes (from mitteleuropa): @

* Trailer: @

* "The Making of 'Goldfinger'" (2000 documentary): @
* The Telegraph (UK) review: @

* The Guardian (UK) review: @
* New York Times review: @

* Roger Ebert review (1999): @
* Life magazine cover story (November 6, 1964): @ 

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Friday, August 28, 1964: Spaghetti Westerns

Directed by Sergio Leone and starring Clint Eastwood as The Man With No Name, "Per un pugno di dollari" ("A Fistful of Dollars") opens in Florence, Italy. The movie, shot in Spain, was influential in the genre that came to be known as the "Spaghetti Western." From the Spaghetti Western Database:

The spaghetti western was born in the first half of the sixties and lasted until the second half of the seventies. It got its name from the fact that most of them were directed and produced by Italians, often in collaboration with other European countries, especially Spain and Germany. The name "spaghetti western" originally was a depreciative term, given by foreign critics to these films because they thought they were inferior to American westerns. Most of the films were made with low budgets, but several still managed to be innovative and artistic, although at the time they didn't get much recognition, even in Europe. In the eighties the reputation of the genre grew and today the term is no longer used disparingly, although some Italians still prefer to call the films western all'italiana (westerns Italian style). In Japan they are called macaroni westerns, in Germany Italowestern.

Notes:

* The movie's early success led to its opening in Rome on September 12, but it was not released in the United States until 1967.

* The Sergio Leone biography linked below quotes him as saying the film opened on August 27. However, he goes on to talk about the film's poor attendance on Friday (August 28) and Saturday; also, most Italian websites list the date as August 28.

* "A Fistful of Dollars" entry from Turner Classic Movies: @

* "Westerns ... All'Italiana!" (blog): @

* "Spaghetti Westerns: The Good, the Bad and the Violent" (Thomas Weisser, 1992): @

* "Once Upon A Time in the Italian West: The Filmgoers' Guide to Spaghetti Westerns" (Howard Hughes, 2004): @
* "Sergio Leone: Something to Do with Death" (Christopher Frayling, 2000): @

* "The Films of Sergio Leone" (Robert C. Cumbow, 2008): @
* www.fistful-of-leone.com: @ 

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Thursday, August 27, 1964: 'Mary Poppins'

Adapted by Walt Disney Productions from the books by P.L. Travers, "Mary Poppins" premieres in Los Angeles. The movie was a financial and critical success -- No. 1 at the box office for the year and nominated for 13 Academy Awards (winning five, including best actress for Julie Andrews and best song for "Chim Chim Cher-ee").

* Movie trailer: @

* Footage from premiere: @

* Review (Life magazine, September 25, 1964): @

* "At last Hollywood 'discovers' the toast of Broadway" (Life, November 13, 1964): @

* ' 'Mary Poppins' Lifts Disney to New Heights" (Associated Press, June 1965): @

* Official film site: @

* Entry from Turner Classic Movies: @

* Entry from "Movies of the '60s" (2004): @

* "Becoming Mary Poppins" (The New Yorker magazine, December 2005): @

* "How we made Mary Poppins" (The Guardian, December 2013): @

* "Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P.L. Travers" (Valerie Lawson, 2013): @

* "Myth, Symbol and Meaning in 'Mary Poppins': The Governess as Provocateur" (Giorgia Grilli, 2007): @ 

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August 1964: Looney Tunes

"Señorella and the Glass Huarache" is the last "Looney Tunes" cartoon short released by Warner Brothers' animation division, which had closed as the classic theatrical cartoons gave way to less expensive fare for moviehouses and TV.

* Watch the cartoon: @

* Entry from The Big Cartoon Database: @

* "That WASN'T All, Folks: Warner Bros. Cartoons 1964-1969" (from looney.goldenagecartoons.com): @

* "Looney Tunes & Merrie Melodies" (from The Cartoon Scrapbook): @

* "Warner Bros. Animation Chronology" (from hughlevin.com): @

* "Reading the Rabbit: Explorations in Warner Bros. Animation" (edited by Kevin S. Sandler, 1998): @ 

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Thursday, July 23, 1964: Civil Rights Act arrests

GREENWOOD, Miss., July 24 -- The FBI has made its first arrests under the public accommodations sections of the new Civil Rights Act yesterday.

     Agents of the bureau charged three Greenwood white men with a conspiracy designed to keep a Negro from going to a movie theater. ...

     The FBI charged the three with "unlawfully conspiring to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate" Silas McGhee, 21, of Greenwood, "in the free exercise of his right to full and equal enjoyment of a motion picture picture house, the Leflore Theatre."

     On July 16, Mr. McGhee staggered into the Greenwood FBI office, bleeding from head wounds and suffering from shock.

     Mr. McGhee, a staff worker with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committe, said the three, in a pickup truck, forced him at the point of a gun to accompany them.

     He said they asked him if he had been to the movie the previous night, When he replied yes, he said, he was beaten with a pipe and a board.

     -- Associated Press (full story: @)

     -- Photo of Leflore Theatre in the 1940s; from www.aboutgreenwood.ms.com (link: @)

Note: The men were indicted, tried and found innocent.

     * "Federal Jury Indicts Three" (United Press International, January 1965): @

     * "Find Mississippians Innocent in Beating" (UPI, October 1966): @

More about the incident and the McGhee family

* "Freedom Summer Incident Summary by City or County" (Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive; scroll down to Greenwood): @

* "Miss. Woman Arrested After Punching Cop In Nose" (Jet magazine, September 1964): @

* "The McGhees: If You Don't Fight For It, You Don't Need It" (from "I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle," Charles M. Payne, 1995): @

* McGhee and his family are mentioned in several passages in "Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years" (Taylor Branch, 1997; search for "McGhee"): @

* Passage from "The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement," Bob Zellner, 2008): @

* "The Shooting of Silas McGhee" (Linda Wetmore Halpern, 2010): @

* Passage from "Student Activism and Civil Rights in Mississippi: Protest Politics and the Struggle for Racial Justice, 1960-1965," James P. Marshall, 2013): @

* "Freedom Summer, 1964: Did It Really Change Mississippi?" (Nikole Hannah-Jones, The Atlantic magazine, July 2014): @

Other resources

* "Saturday, July 6, 1963: Greenwood, Mississippi" (earlier blog post; I'm fairly sure, though not absolutely certain, that the event featuring Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan took place on the McGhee family farm): @

* "Greenwood Theatre Torn Down By City" (Jackson Daily News, January 1969): @ 

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Monday, June 22, 1964: 'I know it when I see it'

As part of his concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio -- ruling that the French film "Les Amants" ("The Lovers") was not obscene and thus the state of Ohio could not ban its showing or prosecute a theater owner for having done so -- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart wrote what would become a well-known phrase, if not a strict legal definition.

I have reached the conclusion ... that under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, criminal laws in this area are constitutionally limited to hard-core pornography. I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

* Summary (from ACLU of Ohio): @

* Transcript of ruling (from Legal Information Institute, Cornell University): @

* Oral arguments (from www.oyez.org): @

* "Fifty Years of "I know it when I see it' " (from www.concurringopinions.com): @

* "On 'I Know It When I See It' " (Paul Gewirtz, Yale Law Journal, 1996): @

* "Movie Day at the Supreme Court or 'I Know It When I See It': A History of the Definition of Pornography" (from corporate.findlaw.com): @ 

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Wednesday, January 29, 1964: 'Dr. Strangelove'

Stanley Kubrick's satire of the Cold War and nuclear doomsday opens in theaters, having been delayed from December 1963 because of the assassination of President Kennedy. The movie's full title: "Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb."

* Entry from AMC Filmsite: @

* Entry from Turner Classic Movies: @

* Review (Bosley Crowther, The New York Times): @

* Review (Robert H. Estabrook, The Washington Post): @

* Review (Andrew Sarris, The Village Voice): @

* Review (Fernand Fauber, The Toledo Blade): @

* Review (Roger Ebert, 1999): @

* "Almost Everything in 'Dr. Strangelove' Was True" (Eric Schlosser, The New Yorker, 2014): @
* "Doctor's Orders: How a dead serious novel became the nightmare satire of 'Strangelove' " (Bilge Ebiri, Museum of the Moving Image, 2009): @

* "A Teaching Guide to Stanley Kubrick's 'Dr. Strangelove' " (Dan Lindley, University of Notre Dame): @

* " 'Dr. Strangelove at 40: The Continuing Relevance of a Cold War Icon" (Paul S. Boyer, Arms Control Association): @

* "Dr. Strangelove's America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age" (Margot A. Henriksen, 1997): @ 

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What didn't happen on November 22, 1963

President Kennedy

     * Speech at Dallas Trade Mart: @ (text) and @ (materials from JFK Library)

     * Speech in Austin: @ (text) and @ (materials from JFK Library)

     * President's schedule for the day: @

Music

     -- Symphony orchestras in Boston and Chicago, performing in the afternoon as the news of Kennedy's death spread, changed their programs and played the funeral march from Beethoven's Third Symphony.

     * Account from Boston (from time.com): @

     * Original introduction from Boston (from WGBH): @

     * Boston Symphony Orchestra program for 1963-64 season (revised program for November 22 is on Page 9): @

     * Account from Chicago (from orchestra archives): @

     -- On the same day that the album "With the Beatles" was released in the United Kingdom, the band was featured on "The CBS Morning News." The segment was to have been shown on "The CBS Evening News" that night. It eventually aired on December 10.

     * Watch the segment: @

     * "How Walter Cronkite jump-started Beatlemania in America" (from BeatlesNews.com): @

     * "Hello Goodbye: Why the Great Mike Wallace Instantly Forgot His Beatles TV Exclusive" (from The Huffington Post): @

     -- "The Dick Clark Caravan of Stars" was to have performed in Dallas on November 22. The show was canceled.

     * "Dick Clark on the Day America Lost JFK" (John Burke Jovich): @

     * Lineup (from A Rock n' Roll Historian blog): @

     * "Clark Show Off to Big Openers" (Billboard magazine, November 23): @

Television

     From the New York Times, November 23:

     TOKYO -- The first live American television transmission across the Pacific by means of the communication satellite relay was received clearly here today. Pictures transmitted by the Mohave ground station in California and received at the new Space Communications Laboratory in Ibaraki Prefecture, north of Tokyo, were clean and distinct. The sound transmission was excellent. The transmission was received live from 5:16 a.m. to 5:46 a.m. Viewers here saw and heard taped messages from Ryuji Takeuchi, Japanese Ambassador to Washington, and James E. Webb, director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. A message of greeting from President Kennedy to the Japanese people, which was to have been the highlight of the program, was deleted when news of the President's death was received shortly before the transmission. In place of the taped two-and-a-half-minute appearance of the President, viewers saw brief panoramic views of the Mohave transmitting station and the surrounding desert area. The American Broadcasting Company and the National Broadcasting Company shared in producing the program.'

     From The Associated Press, November 22:
     The nation's three major television and radio networks scrapped all commercials and entertainment programs out of respect for the death today of President Kennedy. The National Broadcasting Co., American Broadcasting Co., and Columbia Broadcasting system all said they would devote their entire radio and television programs to news of the assassination and all allied incidents. The Mutual Broadcasting System said it would ban commercials and entertainment features on its radio network until after the President's funeral. ABC said its commercial and entertainment ban would remain in effect indefinitely. NBC said it would observe the commercial and entertainment blackout until "sometime tomorrow night." CBS said it would not return commercials or entertainment programs to its network until after the President's burial. All networks said they would continue broadcasts on radio and TV through the night.
* TV listings for November 22 (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; go to Page 19): @

"Dr. Strangelove"

     A New York screening for critics was canceled, and changes to Stanley Kubrick's new movie were made in light of Kennedy's death (detailed below). The film's premiere was delayed; the movie did not open until January 1964.

     * From "Stanley Kubrick: A Biography" (Vincent LoBrutto, 1999): @

     * From Time.com: @

     * From Los Angeles Times: @

Frank Sinatra Jr. kidnapping

    Three men who were planning to kidnap the entertainer intended to do so on November 22 in Los Angeles, but it was delayed until December 8 in Lake Tahoe, Nevada.

     * From MentalFloss.com: @

     * From TruTV.com: @

     * From Jan & Dean website (The band's Dean Torrence had loaned money to one of the kidnappers, a friend of his): @

     * Newsreel: @

Other

     * "The most famous magazine cover that never was" *(Washington Post): @

     * Kiplinger Washington Letter planned for November 23: @ and @

     * Where We Were" (People magazine, November 1988): @ 

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