Those Weren’t the Days: The 1950s Revival of the 1970s
Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were — Marcel Proust
By the end of the 1970s, everyone liked Ike again.
Anyone unhappy with the disco scene and too scared of the punks had a third option: to relive the era 20 years past. Poodle skirts, DA haircuts, old 45s playing; in many ways, it had been for the dedicated as though the ’60s and ’70s had never happened — and were never going to happen.
Which explained the nostalgia movement, and the repercussions that came therefrom.
The longing for the 1950s started almost as soon as the ’70s began. In 1971, Jerry Osborne, under the name Dan Coffey, introduced an “oldies” format to KOOL-FM in Phoenix, Arizona; by year’s end, the station became one of the first to go all-oldies, which was soon emulated in other markets, such as New York’s WCBS-FM by July of 1972.
At the same time in the New York market, 1972 also saw the release of Grease on Broadway , a musical that took place in 1959, with music and lyrics by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey that channeled much of the music from the time onstage. While original, songs from the show like “We Go Together” and “Beauty School Dropout” clearly would have felt right at home had they come out in those days.
The full-bore pursuit of the ’50s that soon took off from there can be blamed for the most part on one man: George Lucas. One of the “movie brats” that started their career in the late 1960s, Lucas had been mentored by the more established Francis Ford Coppola, with whom he founded the indie studio American Zoetrope in 1969. Under the AZ banner, Lucas made his first feature film, THX-1138, which was not embraced by the audience.
During the production of that film, Coppola (probably realizing that his protégé and friend was making a challenging film) expressed his concerns to Lucas, and asked him if he was able to come up with a film that could appeal to a wider, mainstream audience. Lucas considered the request, then turned his days growing up in Modesto, California, into a treatment that ultimately became American Graffiti. While set in 1962, the era owed more of its feel and attitude (as well as music) to the decade before, and its release in August of 1973 started the wave of interest in the era the film was set.
(Ironically, during the same time he was inspiring Lucas, Coppola was preparing to make his own movie set in the 1950s. Released a year earlier, The Godfather likewise proved influential, though not as a piece of evocative nostalgia.)
The owners of Universal Studios, MCA, were anxious to monetize the film as expeditiously as possible and set about to release through MCA Records an accompanying soundtrack album. The release, 41 Original Hits from the Soundtrack of American Graffiti, reintroduced the public at large to such artists as Bill Halley, Chuck Berry, and Buddy Holly; the double album went triple platinum and encouraged two further compilations of music from the era.
The desire for revisiting the decade proved to be infectious as TV started to look for ways to follow the film’s lead. In 1971, Garry Marshall offered a pilot to ABC, New Family in Town, which the network passed on. It did, however, suggest that it be reworked into a segment for the then-airing Love, American Style, under the title “Love and the Happy Days” in 1972. After American Graffiti took off, ABC came back to Marshall and asked him to rework the old pilot once again into a new stand-alone series, Happy Days, featuring one of the stars of the film, Ron Howard, in the series.
The show was a moderate success out of the gate, averaging 16th place overall in the Nielsens in its first season in 1974 as a one-camera, on-set shoot; however, when the series re-tooled to become a three-camera shoot in front of a studio audience and focus shifted from Howard’s Richie Cunningham to breakout character Henry Winkler’s Fonzie, the series averaged eighth overall in the Nielsens the rest of the decade. It was so successful, it spawned another ’50s-set sitcom, Laverne & Shirley (which featured fellow American Graffiti alum Cindy Williams), which averaged third overall for the season in the Nielsens during its initial season. (Along the way, the series also spawned a successful ’70s sitcom set in the modern era, Mork & Mindy.)
With American Graffiti and Happy Days making the ’50s cool, there was an explosion of exploitation that followed. Nineteen seventy-four saw the release of Steven F. Verona’s The Lords of Flatbush, with at-the-time-in-a-supporting-role on Happy Days Winkler alongside up-and-comer Sylvester Stallone as 1958 Brooklyn greasers. On TV in 1977, the variety show Sha Na Na, named after the group that appeared in many ’50s-based presentations throughout the decade (after they had their first big break at, of all places, Woodstock), started a four-season run in syndication, combining artists from the ’50s and ’70s with music from the ’50s.
The high water mark for reliving the ’50s came in 1978 with two major theatrical releases. The bigger one, the one that went for the spirit of the decade, was Randal Kleiser’s Grease, the John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John star vehicle via Robert Stigwood (taking on his first project right after presenting Saturday Night Fever) that was supposed to be an adaptation of the musical; however, the success of the movie forced changes in all revivals of the musical staged after the film came out to accommodate an audience that came to the piece through the film first.
The smaller one, the one that tried to capture actual pieces of the time, was Floyd Mutrux’s American Hot Wax, a biopic on Alan Freed centered around a show at the Brooklyn Paramount. In addition to featuring a number of actors with futures, such as Fran Drescher, Laraine Newman and Jay Leno, the film’s main highlights are of performers with solid pasts, playing themselves on stage at the Paramount. Among the notables who were filmed performing were Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Screaming Jaw Hawkins, and Frankie Ford.
The fact that that year audiences preferred John Travolta to Chuck Berry needs to be remembered as we move on…
By 1979, the nostalgia wave appeared to have crested. That season, Happy Days came in 17th overall in the Nielsens, with Laverne & Shirley not breaking the top 30. That year also saw the release in theaters of Philip Kaufman’s The Wanderers, concerning a group of greaser thugs set in 1963 wherein the characters (including Ken Wahl in his first role) see their lives disrupted by the rise of folk, the assassination of Kennedy, and the looming Vietnam War. Above all else, this picture best signaled the end of ’50s nostalgia in popular culture, though the oldies format would keep the music from the era on the air for at least another decade before aging out.
The question left behind is: what was it that made Americans run towards the 1950s?
A better way to understand the phenomenon would be to ask: what made Americans run away from the 1970s?
Having just finished a decade that started with talk of the New Frontier and went from there into the vast myriad sections of the Counterculture, in the midst of a seemingly un-winnable conflict that had claimed over 54,000 casualties by the end of 1970, there appeared to be a need by a vast section of the population for comfort — a comfort that came from hitting the reset button. Evidence that there was this desire to do over the last 10 years can be found in the success of the Southern strategy, Richard Nixon’s efforts to swing the solid South to the GOP’s side by building off resentment of Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1964.
From there, every highlight in nostalgia noted above was accompanied by strong inducements to want to go back. The premiere of American Graffiti came within a few month of Nixon’s firing Archibald Cox, as the Saturday Night Massacre turned Watergate from a political drama into a Constitutional crisis. The sight of big cars cruising the streets of Modesto as the audience felt the shocks of the 1973 OPEC embargo may well have made many in the audience wish for the good old days. The premiere of Happy Days coming as the first Watergate indictments started to be issued, less than a year since the last US combat troops left South Vietnam, gave further impetus to move backwards. By 1978, having witnessed the fall of both Nixon and Saigon, and with rising dissatisfaction with the Carter presidency, and fear of both stagflation in the recent past and the Jonestown massacre in the close present, looking for a time machine seemed like an ideal pursuit.
Mind you, the past as recalled in the 1970s was nothing like the actual era. Going to before we lost Vietnam would have taken us to a place where we didn’t so much “win” Korea as we put it on hold for a few decades. People who thought they could avoid thinking about racial issues back then may not have been aware of Brown v. Board of Education, or how Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to insure that the Little Rock Nine could attend high school. People looking for economic relief might have felt bushwhacked had they come back in time for the Recession of 1958.
And in the reliving of the decade, a few things were conveniently ignored, such as the fear of the bomb and the McCarthy-led Red Scare. The former could be ignored by audiences who had memories of October of 1962 and learned after that to “love the bomb,” but the later thrived in the same silences that enabled it to take hold in the past. Of all the flicks set in that decade, only one, Martin Ritt’s The Front, actually dwelled on the subject. The fact that the film’s cast and crew included six members on the blacklist, including director Ritt and writer Walter Bernstein along with four actors who shared the screen with Woody Allen and Danny Aiello, made the film serve more as an indictment of the age than a homage.
In considering this film among others looking at that era, a curious phenomenon comes up: in the midst of the 1950s nostalgia at the time, many performers from the era were being rediscovered. One of them was an actor, the host of the anthology TV series General Electric Theater which per force made him also the pitchman for GE, which obligated him to make appearances around the country on behalf of the company.
When he was seen again making appearances around the country in the 1970s, however, Ronald Reagan wasn’t talking about appliances…
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George L