1960s Pop Culture
Entering the optimistic first few years of the 19650s, television was beginning to find its legs as a medium of entertainment. As more people had access to the ‘picture box’ than ever before with the widespread prosperity brought on by the post-war boom by the Nixon years, the old conglomeration of variety shows and broad based targeting soon gave way to a larger sampling – different shows to suit the individual moods of the audience. Dramas, comedies, action-adventure. Though the Federal Government set strict rules about what could be shown on air, hastily put together sets and effects quickly changed as high demand brought in near film level production values.
Political campaigns and the news media would soon swoop in to claim the new medium of broadcast, given its effectiveness. The record-breaking Nixon-Johnson debate of 1960 broke new ground in political campaigning. Whole swaths of advertising gurus ended up pitching their professional tents in politics at the brutal effectiveness of John F. Kennedy’s ‘Daisy’ ad on President Nelson Rockefeller during the Happy Scandal. Walter Cronkite’s riveting television reports during the Birmingham Riots gave birth to the mass media era, where governments now had to be clear monitors of the immediate broadcasts.
As George Wallace famously said of the CBS reporting of the Birmingham Riots, “I could kiss Walther Cronkite, the magnificent bastard. He gave me middle America.”
By the end of the decade, television had established itself as an equal pillar of media and a more potent weapon than any platform before it since the printing press was during the War for Independence.
Drawing from the optimism that so characterized the popular mood of the time – embodied by the affable Eisenhower and the youthful national figures such as President Nixon and Senator Kennedy – the culture of the early sixties remained bright and joyful, spiced in with epic tales of action and inspiration such as
The Alamo, Lawrence of Arabia, and
A Day of Heroes (a blockbuster hit about the D-Day landings told from the Allied and German perspective, released to commemorate the 18th anniversary of Operation Overlord).
Americans flocked to the theater, movie screens, or their living rooms to escape the day’s labor or the stresses of news abroad to enjoy the musical theatrics of
The Sound of Music, spectacles of ancient Rome in
Cleopatra, and the delightful variety hosted by Ronald Reagan in
General Electric Theater.
The virtual embodiment of the national mood at the dawn of the decade was
I Love Lucy. Already the first true silver screen hit, the telegenic couple of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were often said to have carried TV on their backs from an advanced technomarvel to part of the national fabric.
Lasting a total of eleven seasons, the half an hour comedy was praised by critics and beloved by audiences across America. The original cast remained together the whole of its run, joined in the ninth season by
General Electric Theater host Ronald Reagan (playing a wealthy widower with a daughter the same age as Lucy and Ricky’s boy moving next door to their house in CT).
Starting in the fourth season, a vast coterie of guest stars took to the silver screen in high profile cameo appearances – at the end, even President Nixon got into the act:
-transcript from “Lucy Visits the White House,” Season 11, aired Oct 5th, 1961-
Lucy: [lost her tour group and fixing her broken shoe] Darn this thing! [struggles to fix]
Unidentified man: Excuse me ma’am. [strides forward but camera only shows his back and legs]. Do you need any help?
Lucy: No, I’ve got this, but I kind of lost my husband and friends with the tour group. This place is quite winding. [laughs]
Man: [chuckles] Yeah, that happened to me the first time I got here too.
Lucy: [Stands] Can you give me directions to the Red Room?
Man: Of course. [gives directions]
Lucy: Thank you so much!
[camera changes angle to reveal the man as Richard Nixon]
President Nixon: It was no trouble at all Ma’am. Give my best to your companions.
[Lucy nods and walks several paces before her eyes bug out, realizing who she just talked to]
In an interview in 1981, former First Lady Pat Nixon would state that her husband considered the cameo appearance (shot in the White House) was his personal favorite moment in the three years as President.
While some critics decades after would lament the fact the show tackled none of the major issues plaguing American society, the show’s airy and chipper plotline proved enduring even to the present day.
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John F. Kennedy was the perfect President to represent the optimism and indefatigable spirit of the fifties and early sixties. Handsome, charismatic, and eloquent, the cultural output in the first year of his presidency reflected that: the winner of the 37th Academy Awards being
Mary Poppins, the Walt Disney musical. Great emphasis was placed on American military triumphs (the third season of the
Andy Griffith Show spinoff comedy
Gomer Pyle: USMC, even being set in Vietnam) as well as a sudden interest in the inner workings of the Soviet Union – reflecting the influence of the Third Red Scare following the assassination of President Nixon. The blockbuster
Dr. Zhivago, winner of the 1966 Oscar for Best Picture, led the pack with an in depth storyline regarding the formation of Communist Party rule in the USSR.
However, as social conditions deteriorated with the rise of the counterculture and racial unrest, the tone of the media culture changed as the years went by. Hit shows such as
Bonanza and the
Andy Griffith Show morphed into more sullen programs such as
Objective: Impossible and
All in the Family which spotlighted the social and foreign policy problems of the times.
On film, nothing captured the public mood’s decent into the abyss more than that of world-famous starlet Norma Jean Mortenson – known by far under her stage name Marilyn Monroe. An international sex symbol since the early fifties (rumors, denied by the parties involved, persisted of an affair between her and then-Senator John F. Kennedy), her starring roles in the sunny romances and comedies that so characterized the times elevated her to one of Hollywood’s leading ladies.
Just as the sixties began to take a turn for the worse, her personal life deteriorated in a similar way. Her still short marriage to playwright Arthur Miller began to fall apart in 1962 – the couple finally divorcing three years later – and she began to abuse prescription barbiturates. A hushed up overdose at the time dramatically changed the increasingly depressed Monroe, her happy air fading.
Chain smoking, Monroe began to seek out darker and more cerebral roles, a dramatic change of venue for the actress that turned many heads in Hollywood. Ironically, the new roles were often well received by both the public and the critical elite as the taste for both evolved with the changes in American society.
Monroe’s shining moment came in 1968 with her starring role in Stanly Kubrick’s science fiction space opera
2001: A Space Odyssey. Hitting on fears of destructive technology and the innate fallibility of the human race, what was considered a niche film ended up breaking box office records – aided by perfect timing by coordinating its premier for three weeks before the scheduled launch of the
Prometheus Ten lunar mission. The film, along with Monroe and male co-star Keir Dullea, was nominated for seven Academy Awards.
Sadly, months before the awards were announced Monroe was found dead in her home in Los Angeles. Chronically depressed, the investigation determined that she had been self-medicating with heroin and suffered an overdose. In her honor, the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role was bequeathed posthumously to her.
The tragic death of a national icon hit the nation hard, especially considering the deteriorating national psyche due to the escalating war in Vietnam, fear of the new Soviet militarism, the counterculture, racial tensions, and the spiking crime rate. Calls for elected officials on the state and national level to deal with the developing epidemic of illegal drugs reached a fever pitch, ultimately culminating in the Controlled Substances Act signed into law by President Wallace – it established the Narcotics Control Agency (NCA) as a branch of the Department of Justice, directing it and the FBI to investigate and prosecute the traffickers of illegal drugs specified in the language.
At the state level, reactions following Marilyn Monroe’s death ultimately resulted in the adoption of the ‘Kennedy-Reagan Plan.’ Dubbed after Governors Ronald Reagan of California and Bobby Kennedy of New York – who despite their political differences had ended up close friends – the plan drafted by them and their staffs (though descended from legislation sponsored by Kennedy’s predecessor, Malcolm Wilson) to focus criminal penalties on the traffickers and suppliers of illegal drugs while users and addicts were relegated to treatment programs and rehabilitation sentences.
Such was a large overlap of the ‘Root Cause Doctrine’ between the Progressive Liberal and Liberty Conservative factions of the respective parties. Certain criminal actions were seen by both as not that of a depraved mind, but directly caused by societal decay and poverty (while both disagreed about how to address poverty and its elimination). Politics made strange bedfellows, but as a result of such policies the War on Drugs made slow but extensive strides in reducing the scourge of illegal drugs – until the cocaine epidemic a decade later.
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One aspect of the culture that remained unchanged since the late fifties was America’s fascination with space. Since
Sputnik and Eisenhower’s “Secure the Moon” Speech, science-fiction had slowly blossomed from a niche category of rather cheap productions into the sphere of public media.
After the 1965 release of the Charles Bronson/Vanessa Redgrave sleeper hit
Queen of Mars (based off of an obscure 1920s Soviet movie where two American explorers try to heed off a Communist takeover of a hypothetical Martian civilization), senior executives at NBC decided to get in on the science fiction bandwagon to head of other networks. In a contract with production mogul Desi Arnaz’s Desilu Productions, NBC teamed up with a then obscure writer named Gene Roddenberry to create a groundbreaking new sci-fi series –
Star Trek.
The unchanging nature of science fiction through the social upheaval of the sixties could be seen in their use as an allegory of the world and human nature.
Star Trek was the perfect example. Mostly a cast of relatively unknown actors such as William Shatner, George Takei, and Leonard Nimoy, the series resolved around the starship
USS Enterprise and its crew commanded by Captain James T. Kirk (Shatner) and alien First Officer Spock (Nimoy). It was set in the 23nd Century, where the Earth was part of a NATO-like alliance of several worlds formed after the defeat of the Romulan Empire in an interstellar war a century previously (an allegory for Nazi Germany and WWII). In a cold war with the alien Klingon Empire (standing in for the USSR), the Federation had dispatched the
Enterprise on a mission to deep space to explore and form alliances with new worlds before the Klingons could.
In short, it was an action adventure set in an outer space world not dissimilar to the real world. Audience reaction in the first season was… mixed to say the least.
While some NBC executives wanted to scrap the series, the majority decided to double down and teamed Roddenberry with director/producer Francis Ford Coppola (and a team of filmmakers that would include George Lucas, Stephan Spielberg, and James Cameron). Rejuvenating the series with more dramatic plotlines, revolutionary special effects, and new antagonists such as a senior Klingon admiral (George C. Scott) and the return of one episode villain Ricardo Montalban as the superhuman Khan (reimagined as a space terrorist, an allegory to the various communist terror cells sprouting in Western Europe). One NBC executive remarked that the project would either “be an unmitigated success or drive NBC out of business.”
Lasting nine seasons and ending in a four movie franchise (directed by George Lucas focusing on the cold war between the Federation and Klingons going hot) and a sequel series in the 1980s-1990s, the former proved to be overwhelmingly true. Considered the father of both contemporary science fiction and digital special effects, the show launched the careers of all the parties involved, many finding employment with further productions of the show’s producers – for example, William Shatner given the key role of Tom Hagen in Coppola’s 1971 hit
The Godfather.
