Right Here on Our Stage Tonight!: Ed Sullivan's America

1. Auflage 2009
ISBN: 978-0-520-26801-2
Verlag: UNIV OF CALIFORNIA PR

Buch, Englisch, 466 Seiten, Trade Paperback, Format (B × H): 148 mm x 221 mm, Gewicht: 653 g

Before the advent of cable and its hundreds of channels, before iPods and the Internet, three television networks ruled America's evenings. And for twenty-three years, Ed Sullivan, the Broadway gossip columnist turned awkward emcee, ruled Sunday nights. It was Sullivan's genius to take a worn-out stage genre-vaudeville-and transform it into the TV variety show, a format that was to dominate for decades. Right Here on Our Stage Tonight! tells the complete saga of The Ed Sullivan Show and, through the voices of some 60 stars interviewed for the book, brings to life the most beloved, diverse, multi-cultural, and influential variety hour ever to air. Gerald Nachman takes us through those years, from the earliest dog acts and jugglers to Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and beyond. Sullivan was the first TV impresario to feature black performers on a regular basis-including Nat King Cole, Pearl Bailey, James Brown, and Richard Pryor-challenging his conservative audience and his own traditional tastes, and changing the face of American popular culture along the way. No other TV show ever cut such a broad swath through our national life or cast such a long shadow, nor has there ever been another show like it. Nachman's compulsively readable history, illustrated with classic photographs and chocked with colorful anecdotes, reanimates The Ed Sullivan Show for a new generation.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Nachman, Gerald

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften Fernsehen & Rundfunk

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: Theme Music

Part One. No-Talent Host Tames the One-Eyed Beast

1. Out of the Paley-ozoic Ooze

2. Battle of the Videoville Titans-Berle, Godfrey, and Sullivan

3. A Live Broadway Column Every Sunday Night

4. The $375 Extravaganza

5. Very Critical Condition

6. The Magic of Sullivision

Part Two. How to Succeed in Show Business without Really Talking

7. From Small-Town Sportswriter to Manhattan Sport

8. He's Just an Ink-Stained Broadway Baby

9. Toast of the Nation

10. It's the World, on Line One

11. Sacred Sunday Rite

12. Not Quite All in the Family

13. Extended Family

Part Three. Inside the Star-Making Machine

14. Herding Comedians

15. Backstage Life (and Death)

16. Give My Regards to La Scala

17. Elvis Has Entered the Building

18. Newspaper Wads at Fifty Paces-a Few Off-Camera Feuds

19. Embracing Blacks, Caving In to McCarthyism

Part Four. Rescued by Rock 'n' Roll

20. The Son-in-Law Also Rises

21. “And Now-the Beatles!”

22. The Showman without a Country

23. Echoes and Afterimages

Bibliography

Interviews

Acknowledgments

Index

Photographs follow page

Über Autor(innen)

Gerald Nachman is the author of Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 60s, Out on a Whim: Some Very Close Brushes with Life, The Fragile Bachelor, Playing House and Raised on Radio. He is also a contributor to Esquire, Newsweek, GQ, Cosmopolitan, and the New York Times.