Consumers of entertainment media and sports opted for television over Hollywood movies. New York challenged Los Angeles for status as America’s media capital. As a result, the moviemaking business suffered while commercial television followed an upward trajectory of viewership. When not spending their leisure hours in front of a screen, Californians - and tourists from throughout the nation and the world - could visit the state’s amusement parks.
Though cinema’s golden era had passed, only one major Hollywood studio, Radio-Keith-Orpheum, closed in the 1950s. With important exceptions like Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf? (1966), studios favored movies about disaffected youth. Seemingly, the more the American Dream of home ownership and living a middle-class lifestyle of consumerism amid relative suburban security became accessible, the more movie audiences were drawn to films about individualistic, rebellious youth. Fascination with motorcycle gang violence, played out against the backdrop of a small and quiet town in middle-class America, brought people into theaters to see a surly Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953). Thereafter, adolescent males in increasing numbers bought black leather jackets and rode motorcycles. Rebel Without a Cause (1955) captured the as yet unfocused anger of youth, catapulting James Dean and Natalie Wood into stardom. West Side Story (1961), again, played to a younger audience, with the added attraction of Technicolor. The movie featured Natalie Wood, Rita Moreno, and other notables. Budgeted for an estimated $6 million, it grossed $43,656,822 at the box office and won ten Academy Awards. By the late 1960s some filmmakers dared to put America’s entire suburban-based, consumption - and business-driven value system on cinematic trial. The Graduate (1967) depicted youthful disillusionment with corporate
Culture and the perceived phoniness of upper-middle-class suburbanites obsessed with keeping up appearances of propriety beneath which lurked unsatisfying marriages, and secret addictions to alcohol and illicit sex. Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, and Katherine Ross starred in this box office bonanza that featured scenes of the stunning Big Sur coastline. The Mike Nichols-directed film won four Academy Awards and earned $104,397,102 in profits.
Commercial television transitioned from 1950s programming that kept viewers within their comfort zone to 1960s and 1970s shows that at times dealt with serious social issues in the news, often satirically. Fifties sitcoms, like I Love Lucy (aired 1951-7) and The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet (aired 1952-66), projected middle-class, intact, two-parent, white families whose predicaments sparked laughter but rarely treated a chronic social issue. Two sitcoms of the late 1960s and early 1970s, on the other hand, were among the first to take on social issues: All in the Family (aired 1971-9) and MASH (aired 1972-83). Issues of war, race, class, sexual behavior, and gender became fodder in each episode of All in the Family, an Emmy Award-winning program. Ostensibly, the setting for MASH, directed by Robert Altman, was the Korean War being waged on the other side of the Pacific but little audience imagination was required to see that the sometimes humorous inanities portrayed in fighting that war applied to the ongoing Vietnam conflict, covered extensively and wrenchingly on nightly television news.
Through television, professional and collegiate sporting events entered California homes. The Los Angeles Rams professional football team had many of its games televised, as did the Los Angeles Dodgers professional baseball team, newly relocated from Brooklyn in 1958. In 1961 the professional Los Angeles Angels (later moving to Anaheim), now a Major League expansion team, played their first game. In 1960 the Lakers professional basketball team relocated to Los Angeles from Minneapolis. San Francisco became the new home of the former New York Giants professional baseball team in 1958. In professional football San Francisco featured the cerebrally endowed 49ers, many of whose players had graduated from UC Berkeley, Stanford, and the University of Santa Clara. During the 1960s the San Diego Chargers had a home field and won four division professional football championships. In 1969 San Diego retained the name of the Padres for its major league professional baseball team. The college football scene was enlivened by the “Big Game” between crossBay rivals Cal and Stanford, and the annual gridiron contest in Los Angeles between UCLA and USC. Of all the West Coast teams playing in the coveted Rose Bowl game, televised nationwide, USC holds the record for number of appearances and wins. In college basketball, UCLA, coached by the legendary John Wooden, became America’s dominant team, winning an unprecedented 10 national championships between 1964 and 1975.
California’s Squaw Valley Winter Olympics in 1960 was the first to be televised nationwide, and to be held in the western United States. The largest competition of its kind, 34 nations had entrants, and nearly half a million spectators watched the sports spectacle involving 1,000 premier athletes from all over the globe.
For all of California’s achievements on fields, courts, and slopes, arguably no sport defined it more readily for Americans than surfing. With the possible exception of Hawai’i, no other state could match the surfing cachet of California, though Hawai’i’s and Mexico’s beaches, and later Australia’s, were part of a Pacific surfing circuit centered on the Golden
State’s coast. From Santa Cruz in the north to San Diego in the south, California had the beaches, the waves, the weather, the bronzed wave riders, the competitions, the music, the films, the boards, and the attire that branded it the Mecca of surfing - and its offspring, wind surfing - worldwide.
Films, magazines, and music did much to popularize California surfing. The Hollywood teen romance movie Gidget (1959), according to cultural historian Kirse Granat May, “provided international exposure to the state’s surfing scene for the first time.” Filmmaker John Severson, meanwhile, pioneered a new genre of movies that were short on romance and long on the thrills of the sport, including Surf Safari, Surf Fever, Big Wednesday, and Pacific Vibrations. In 1960 Severson founded Surfer magazine, which circulated far beyond the state. Another filmmaker, Greg MacGillivray of Laguna Beach, co-created the iconic surf film, Five Summer Stories (1972). Surf films featured the music of Dick Dale and the Del-Tones, the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, and other vocal/instrumental groups.
Middle-class Californians during this period had discretionary income to spend at the Southland’s booming amusement parks. Disneyland in Anaheim, a creation of Walt Disney, opened amid much fanfare in 1955. Much like the image of the Golden State itself, it was America’s Magic Kingdom, affording visitors a romantic, sanitized version of America’s past in Frontierland, an idealized portrayal of Main Street, USA, and a glimpse into the wonders of the Space Age in Tomorrowland. Nearby Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park, founded by Walter and Cordelia Knott in 1920, upgraded its 160-acre site to compete with Disneyland. At Knott’s children could pan for gold in an artificial stream, drink sarsaparilla (a root beer-like soft beverage) in a faux saloon, tour Constitution Hall, and go home with souvenirs to remind them of how the West had been won by intrepid, self-sufficient American pioneers. For an ocean-minded clientele, Marineland opened in 1954 in Palos Verdes, providing ticketholders sitting in outdoor bleachers with dolphin, whale, and seal performances in huge tanks situated atop a headland looking out on the Pacific. It became the prototype for similar aquatic parks nationwide. To see terrestrial creatures, the San Diego Zoo offered visitors the world’s largest wild animal collection.
World History
