“The Andy Griffith Show” Receives Scholarly Attention

Pérez Firmat’s A Cuban in Mayberry creatively combines memoir with the intense study of a single television show.

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Gustavo Pérez Firmat, A Cuban in Mayberry: Looking Back at America’s Hometown, University of Texas Press, 2014, 194 pp.

Living in America as an exile in the forties, Theodor Adorno wrote: “Every intellectual in emigration is, without exception, mutilated and does well to acknowledge it to himself…He lives in an environment that must remain incomprehensible to him…he is always astray” (Minima Moralia, 33). Cuban exile, and Professor of Literature at Columbia University, Gustavo Pérez Firmat echoes something of this sentiment in his book A Cuban in Mayberry, as he describes how the émigré suffers a “strictly irreplaceable” loss of “intimacy between person and place” (12). Attempting to comprehend the ‘incomprehensible,’ Adorno turned his sharp, critical eye on American popular culture which infamously did not fair well. It fairs far better under Pérez Firmat’s analytical gaze. Pérez Firmat posits that the analysis of U.S. pop culture goes some way to alleviating his feeling of displacement. Indeed, he takes refuge in the complex, fictional TV town of Mayberry where its residents – the characters of The Andy Griffith Show (TAGS) – “have never lost their place” (10). Pérez Firmat states: “watching TAGS, I developed a sense of what it must be like to enjoy such intimacy, to feel rooted in the ground under your feet and to know that you live among people who are similarly rooted”(11). Creatively combining memoir with the intense study of a single television show, Pérez Firmat’s book astutely and gracefully analyzes how TAGS, one of the most popular sitcoms in U.S. television history, has managed to turn “millions of Americans and at least one Cuban into Mayberrians” (15). Needless to write, Adorno with his justified suspicion of such cultural hegemony would have hated TAGS. Continue reading

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Archival Research on Virginia Van Upp

Despite asserting a historically rare degree of control for a woman working within Hollywood’s studio system of the 1930s and 40s, producer-screenwriter Virginia Van Upp (1902 -1970) has received little scholarly attention from film historians.

My research project entitled “The Rise of Virginia Van Upp” examines the filmmaker’s varied and impressive forty-five year career in Hollywood. Beginning as a child actor during the silent era, Van Upp went on to perform a wide range of jobs in the industry from screenwriting for Paramount, to executive producing such classics as Gilda and The Impatient Years at Columbia, and lastly working in ‘the wilderness’ attempting to launch several independent projects. Not unlike Van Upp, the ambitious female characters in her movies often use the media to curate images of themselves that boost their success. I suggest that through talent and media savvy, Van Upp established a unique auteurist authority for translating her vision from page to screen.

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In addition to the close analysis of Van Upp’s movies, my research takes me on a tour of the studio archives, interviews with family members, and working through the hundreds of national, trade, and fan paper entries that address Van Upp’s career.

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Something Horrifying For The Kids

I’m currently curating a playlist of promotional telecommunication films for the Library of Congress.

Here are some stills from the terrifying film Adventure in Telezonia (1950) that traumatized generations of Americans while teaching them how to use the telephone. In the movie a young boy travels to the seemingly post-apocalyptic world of Telezonia so that he can learn how to use the telephone, so that he can find his lost dog, so that he can get the hell out of Telezonia!

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And, cut to shot of female switchboard operators…

Bell Telephone sponsored films (1935 – 1960)
For many more of the same see Caroline Martel’s superb Le fantôme de l’opératrice (2004)

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Library of Congress: Sponsored Films Project

Stills from the stunning film Land of White Alice (1959) about daily life in Alaska, directed by Willard Van Dyke and written by poet Norman Rosten. I want to make the follow-up! Writing about this film and others as part of a digital project for the Library of Congress.

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