Flicklives

Last Summary Update: 02-03-2008

Movie Mill Scene
Airdate: Thursday - October 24, 1963

WOR Show
Original Airing

audio

(NOTE ABOUT TIME REFERENCES: Since there are many different copies of shows out there from different sources, all time references are from the beginning of one single recorded copy, since various copies, depending on when the recordee started recording, had news at the beginning or shortened themes. The times would vary from copy to copy.)

First Spoken Line After Theme Ends

Oh, it's very exciting. . .

Show Description

[ Courtesy: GROK Summary - - ]   
  This monologue (WOR, October 24, 1963) begins with the sense that the world is "heating up" and quickly becomes a long, vivid pitch for an unsentimental movie about American industrial life, framed by digressions on absurdity, media images, and the gap between romanticized "proletarian" art and actual working-class reality.

Opening absurdities
Shepherd notes an ad for a $1,000 sterling-silver "Groundbreaker Shovel" from Bailey Banks & Biddle and invites inscriptions for a gift to Robert Moses. He sings a fragment of "Dear Emily," offers a tongue-in-cheek bulletproof Bible commercial, and plugs Mandarin House restaurants (with a side joke about a bronze dragon that has a bullet hole).

Army censor and love letters
A news item about an Italian soldier who tore up other soldiers' love letters because his own girlfriend jilted him reminds him of an army censor lieutenant. Bored after reading thousands of letters, the officer begins writing to the girlfriends himself, producing a tangled mess. Shepherd outlines it as a potential TV episode with Rip Torn as the sensitive, poetry-writing lieutenant, complete with cross-cuts between the men's inflated fantasies and the actual women receiving the letters.

Human nature and cultural images
He argues that American writers too often blame "rotten American culture" for universal human traits. A quick thought experiment (what image comes to mind for "the Swedes," "Chinese communists," "Italians," or "human nature") shows that people default to male figures. He notes the classic paradox: people demand freedom, then immediately list those they want silenced. English plays and films receive automatic prestige; the English are only now "discovering" the grimy working class that American movies treated in the 1930s, and it is hailed as a new wave.

The steel-mill movie pitch
The centerpiece is a detailed, cinematic outline for a realistic film set at Inland Steel in East Chicago / Indiana Harbor. Key scenes include:
- Montage of blast furnaces, the fourteen-inch mill, dirty ground, and welding, with titles punching in over the roar.
- Dressing room where thousands of dirty long johns hang from ceiling cables.
- Steve, the acetylene-torch operator, washing with harsh "Slug" soap, then climbing into his '57 Mercury (dragon decal, "Steve" on the door, torn plaid seat covers, satin jacket).
- Drive-in in the rain with Stella, Chinese egg rolls and shrimp, Steve McQueen on the screen.
- Saturday softball game in satin uniforms, horns honking, fire trucks racing past the petroleum mills, and a brawl that starts when Steve is thrown out.
- Saturday night in an electric-blue graduation suit that has been let out, tie clip worn the wrong way, credit jewelry and credit furniture (dragon-head lamp, 1933 Chicago World's Fair style).

Shepherd stresses that Steve is not sensitive or oppressed; he likes war and violence and is part of the "great animal herd." Art-house audiences will pay to watch English proletarian dramas (safe because distant) and discuss "the plight of man in the automated society," but would be disturbed by the same material set in Gary or Toledo - diners, Legion Hall, ordinary Sunday dinners, and the actual attitudes of the people living those lives. American "proletarian" movies usually romanticize or update an outdated Odets image and give the worker a heart of gold.

Overall tone and point: Excited, digressive, and sharply observational. Shepherd uses the shovel ad, the army censor, and especially the extended steel-mill movie pitch to illustrate the gap between cultural fantasies (English art films, Hollywood working-class dramas) and the unsentimental, often unromantic reality of ordinary American industrial life. The monologue treats that gap as both comic and revealing.      
  