About dkompare
I’m currently an Assistant Professor in the Division of Cinema-Television in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University, where I teach courses on television history and criticism, cultural studies, media globalization, film and television genres, and new media platforms. My research covers a fair amount of ground, but the Big Picture is an overall interest in how media institutions, forms, genres, and aesthetics develop in particular historical periods. Broadly, I consider myself an historian. That said, I am very much engaged with the ongoing changes in media. The present and future (and the ways in which we express them) have significant connections with the past, and I’d like to continue probing those connections.
I have written several articles and one book (Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television (Routledge 2005)) on topics ranging from the history of off-network syndication to the documentary legacy of contemporary reality television. I’m currently catching up on as much media scholarship as possible (largely around authorship and fan studies), researching and writing about the production of television authorship, and writing a book on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation for Blackwell Press (due out in fall 2009).
Hey there! I am a junior at your alma matter, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and I am a Film/Television major. Since you’re such a hero here to the Communications department, I found your blog here online after I read numerous articles from your book Rerun Nation. I’m conducting a research presentation about syndication next week. I was hoping that you could write me an e-mail and I could e-mail you back some questions. It would mean a lot to me but I understand if you don’t want to participate.
–Matthew
I found your blog only recently and as it seemed very interesting, so I added the feed to my Google Reader.
Just a small wish: could you consider changing the RSS feed from partial to full?
Thanks.
OlliS: I just changed the setting, so it’ll be full from now on. And soon to come: an actual blog entry! Yay! I’ll just say that February was not a fun month…
A 19 year old NYU film student moved onto my floor and I have been mentoring him through certain classes. In one on TV he asked me for a suggestion about a term paper and I suggested doing something about the relation between early TV and cinema. I thought in terms of comparing the films made from TV plays (Marty, Requiem for a Heavyweight etc.) but he turned it into a more sophisticated analyses (good for the kids today, I say). However it was 180 degrees wrong. He showed me your book, Rerun Nation, and where he had quoted directly from you.
I am a 60 year old man who has been watching TV since 1948 and while I can actually remember friends of my parents coming over to the house on Tuesday evenings to watch Milton Berle, my oldest verifiable dateable memory would be 1949 because I used to watch Boy’s Railroad Club which was broadcast for only 6 weeks and which, in retrospect, was a virtual 15 minute commercial for Gilbert’s American Flyer Trains. (In truth, a check on the internet reveals a dispute as to when these were made varying from 1949 to1951. I use the 1949 date because I associate the TV program with a particular place I was living in, how I annoyed my poor parents and how they coped by giving me wind up trains instead).
Anyway as regards the relationship between Hollywood and early TV you are absolutely wrong. Now I have nothing against you. I’ve always liked you and been interested in your point-of-view when I’ve seen you on TV . I don’t blame you but I have been suspicious of the academic process of rendering history. “Facts” which are not facts get repeated (rerun?) until they become facts. You must have learned your facts somewhere. The NYU professor is Korean and must have gotten his facts while picking up a Phd in American Studies in a Korean University. His teaching assistant is Turkish. I have no academic credentials but I was there and have this (a curse?) phenomenal memory (I torture friends my age by bringing up details and whole TV series that they had thankfully forgotten from their childhoods) and I have to tell you, that ain’t the way it was.
Once, when researching a film in northern Finnland, I heard the story of the death of Antti Rannanyarvi (misspelled, I’m sure) and after hearing the whole story suddenly there was a voice saying that wasn’t the way it happened. A 99 year old woman, bent and twisted with arthritis, hobbled down a staircase to tell be the actual story. She was an eyewitness. And that was the story, not the heroic legend that had become famous in song and poetry, that I used.
If you’re ever in New York maybe we can have a few beers and go for pizza or Vietnamese food in Chinatown and I can tell you how it really was.
Marc Furstenberg
Hi Marc,
I’m honored to join the ranks of historians whose accounts have been challenged! I feel like one of the big kids now.
I’m not sure what part of RN’s treatment of early TV was “180 degrees wrong.” The chapter on the 40s and 50s is about thirty pages long, and covers a lot of ground. Could you be more specific? Moreover, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention (as I do in the book) that many of the “facts” from that period came from William Boddy’s seminal history Fifties Television (published in 1990). Incidentally, he lives in New York, and teaches at Baruch College, so maybe you could treat him to pizza and memories in my stead!
As for where I got my primary research, I focused primarily on contemporaneous press accounts (mainstream and trade) and corporate records and correspondence, just as I was trained to do. This entailed trolling through the entire run of Broadcasting magazine (from 1931 to the present), as well as substantial chunks of Variety, Television Digest, Advertising Age, and other relevant periodicals over the same time period.
The larger point of your comment is a big one indeed: what’s the relationship between history and memory? That’s certainly a question any decent historian has considered, and I hope I did a bit of that in the book. I’ve even put together a course on Television and Memory that tackled much of this area (including matters like your pre-school-age train obsession), though I haven’t taught it in a few years. I’d recommend Rosenzweig and Thelen’s The Presence of the Past (1998) for an excellent treatment of this topic.
That said, you’ll forgive me if I find your particular memories of the late 1940s and early 1950s a bit sketchy to hang a history on. I was born in 1969, and while I certainly recall bits and pieces of TV in my early childhood (I thought Laugh-In’s Dick Martin was my uncle because they sounded alike; I remember Nixon’s resignation because I thought the TV was broken, since the same thing was on every channel), I would hardly cite my own account of these shows and events as “being there” in any but the most personal sense. You’ve almost certainly got much crisper memories of those events, just as an 80-year old would have over you in regards to Uncle Miltie.
Hey, you should hear what I’ve discovered about Marco Polo talking about the variance between history and actual documentation. I’m going to look up William Boddy but I was just trying to be modest about the memories. In truth they are astoundingly clear. I’m afraid I’m a bit of a freak. No, I’m a total freak as I’m able to recount episodes of some shows exactly from fifty years ago. Two hints if I didn’t mention them before 1. WALK EAST ON BEACON an anti-communist film from MGM is interesting because they avoid using the word Television even though it is the major plot point in the film, and 2. Warner Brothers, which was the first to jump into TV production in the middle/late 50s lead by Warner son-in-law William T. Orr, had a standing rule in the early 50s that no set in a Warner film could be dressed with a TV set.
I know there was a tremendous delay in this reply. I didn’t realize you had answered but only found this when I Googled my name. So I’m not an ego manic because its been a couple of years.