Who's W. C. Fields?

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it. — W. C. Fields

Y'know, I'm really not sure why this bothers me. Indeed, it bothers me that it bothers me. And the last thing I want this blog to become is some Andy-Rooney-esque "decline of civilization" whine combined with a verse and chorus or two of "What's the Matter with Kids" (am I Dick Van Dyke or Paul Lynde?). 

It started Xmas eve, or rather the afternoon of. I took a walk down to to take advantage of their annual "complimentary coffee and tea" deal, and while I was there, I picked up a couple of boxes of filters. The boxes are rectangular, and as I was waiting for the Sweet Young Thing (early-mid 20s, my guess) behind the counter to get my coffee and ring me up, I started playing with them, and I commented out loud to her that it felt like cigar-box juggling.

Realizing that she may not know what that was, I asked her if she'd ever heard of it, and she hadn't. I tried to describe it, suggested that she could probably find some on YouTube, and then mentioned that it was invented by W. C. Fields*. I was surprised — more than just surprised — when she asked me who he was. So I told her, and chucklingly suggested she rent a couple of movies. 

Then I started thinking about it (always dangerous). A few days later I was at a Starbucks in Pleasanton (maybe it was Dublin — it's sometimes it's hard to tell), and I decided to ask the 20-something guy at the counter if he'd heard of cigar-box juggling — he hadn't, but I hadn't expected him to — and then asked him if he knew who W. C. Fields was. He didn't. I took in that datum and, as I turned to leave, I asked the touch more mature woman next in line, (40ish, I guessed), if she knew who W. C. Fields was. A seriously dirty look (who was this weirdo?) accompanied a negative. That shook me up; she wasn't my age, but she wasn't a kid either ("kid", for our current purposes, being defined as under 30). 

I've since asked a few other young people, and one or two "kind of" knew who he was, only one has seen any of his films. (None had heard of cigar-box juggling, but I stopped caring about that.) 

Now, what seems to be bothering me about this isn't about the kids per se, that I'm disparaging or complaining about their education or something like that. Knowing who W. C. Fields was doesn't seem to me to be a question of education, in the usual sense. It's not like I was asking something one would had to have paid attention in High School to know, like logarithms, or the difference between the Odyssey and the Iliad, or which Bronte sister wrote Jane Eyre (Charlotte, and yes, I had to look it up). Nobody taught me about W. C. Fields, I just grew up knowing about him — he was just part of the general culture, like Elvis or Sinatra. He was, quite literally, a cultural icon; the poster of him was as common in dorm rooms and similar habitats as Bogart's or Farrah's or any of them.  

If I decide to continue my little informal survey, I might add John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe. Not sure how I'll react when someone comes up blank on her. 

I blame cable. One of the unintended consequences of the emergence of cable and satellite service has been the demise of the late-night movie. Used to be, back when even the largest market in the country had a grand total of seven TV stations, most TV stations ran old movies after the late news or after whatever they showed after the late news. They tended to be inexpensive to acquire, and attracted an adequate audience, one comprised of graveyard shifters and insomniacs, as well as the occasional pre-teen eager to stay up late when the opportunity presented. (Indeed, the reason David Letterman's and Craig Ferguson's late-night CBS shows are called, respectively, "The Late Show" and "The Late Late Show," is that the CBS flagship station in New York called their late night movie programs that during the 50s, 60s and 70s.) 

Of course, on weekend nights, the just-barely-pubescent crowd was particularly targeted, with "Chiller Theater"-type shows and the emergence of local stars like Vampira and Zacherley, and "classic comedy" featuring films with, e.g., the Marx Brothers and, yes, W. C. Fields. There were also the after-school and Saturday morning shows, before the dominance of mass-produced animation, that introduced us to "shorts" stars such as Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges. 

But those are gone now. Yeah, you'll find the occasional local TV station trying to do something along those lines (KOFY is a good example), but that's almost always in the context of "classic TV". If you were born after about 1975, these references have no meaning for you. Your after-school and Saturday morning viewing would have been dominated by Speed Racer, Scooby-Doo, Josie & the Pussycats, Space Ghost… A couple of Saturday-night horror-movie hosts did emerge, Elvira being best-known; Channel 9 in NYC even wheeled Zacherley out for awhile. For the most part, today the overnight slots — even on many cable channels — have been taken over by the real Faustian price for cable, the half-hour infomercial. 

By 1985 Ted Turner had essentially invented the "specialized" cable channel with CNN and, more to the point, Turner Classic Movies. Cable was pretty much ubiquitous by then, and Turner wasted no time acquiring huge libraries from Warner, Fox and other studios. Now there are a half-dozen or more "classic movie" channels, including IFC, Fox Movies, etc.  

On top of all that was the emergence of home video. One of the things it killed off was the "dirty movie theater", allowing many large — and not so large — cities to remake their down towns. The price for that, however, was the disappearance of the "rep house", like the UC Theater in Berkeley, that specialized in, well, classic movies. No longer did you have to wait for the UC to have their W. C. Fields festival, you didn't even have to wait for the movie to show up on TCM, you could go rent it, and watch it at your own convenience. 

But you had to seek it out. You didn't bump into it on TV while you were doing your homework, or after Carson when you were up late, or really early Sunday morning after you and your friends spent Saturday night partying (and since you were still kinda high, the movie really had an impact). And the sense of community diminished; you didn't go to a theater and watch it with a couple of hundred like-minded fans, you watched at home with maybe three or four.

Ironically, this is exacerbated by the literally hundreds of channels available on a modern cable or satellite system. Yeah, most of those are PPV, or premium channels, or east-west duplicates, or shopping channels, but you're still left with an overwhelming variety; it's worse than trying to choose toilet paper, or tampons. And finding short films in particular can actually be something of a challenge. YouTube can be valuable, but not exactly a quality viewing experience (even on an "Internet-capable" TV), and again, you have to more or less know what you're looking for. 

So that's what I mean. I'm not denigrating "kids today" or viewing with alarm their lack of culture or some such condescending baloney. Indeed, I continue to assert that the upcoming batch of "young people" are the smartest, most sophisticated, and best-looking that I can recall. I'm sort of circling around the conclusion that it's not much more than a "times change" thing — not really "generational", not about a particular age cohort. Just that our cultural memories fade over the decades, and some fade more quickly than others, and it takes awhile for people to come to appreciate things like old movies. I wouldn't be quite so disappointed if my Sweet Young Thing at Peet's didn't recognize Harold Lloyd or Jean Harlow, for example (Charlie Chaplin, maybe). But I do hope she looks up some old movies.

*Fields didn't actually invent cigar-box juggling, but he was an early practitioner of it in the late 1800s, and is arguably the most significant popularizer.