Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, May 27, 1995 TAG: 9506020007
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TED JOHNSON SPECIAL TO THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: HOLLYWOOD LENGTH: Long
And they also spent a week in Oregon, Ill., population 4,760, a small corner of America that still has no interstate, no urban sprawl, no Wal-Mart. But even the small town of Oregon was changed by the motor age.
``We wouldn't stay in the house like we used to,'' says one woman, now in her 90s. ``We could go to Dixon.''
Mixing anecdotes, archival footage and interviews, ``Driving Passion'' shows how the automobile gained a foothold in American society - and has influenced it ever since.
``You can't think of anything that has happened in the past 100 years that has nothing to do with the automobile,'' says John Savage (``Moonshot''), TBS' supervising producer of the four-hour documentary airing Tuesday and Wednesday at 8:05 p.m.
Roadside diners and motels? Trace that to the Depression, when families took to the transcontinental highways in search of cheap trips. The teen rebel movement? You got drag racing in the 1950s. Even slasher flicks have the automobile as a point of origin. One of the first in the genre, ``The Texas Chainsaw Massacre'' (1974), features a group of teens stranded in a cannibalistic small town where there's no gas because of the energy crisis.
``There are so many different ways that the automobile affected people's lives,'' says executive producer Margaret Drain. ``I didn't know how much it affected women. They got the opportunity to learn to drive, to get away from home, to explore, to be independent. Before then, it was not really kosher to go out by themselves.''
The documentary, narrated by Richard Crenna, bypasses many mechanical innovations, such as the introduction of the automatic starter or fuel injection. Nor does it go into great detail about infamous autos, like the Edsel. In fact, the documentary skips the invention of the automobile altogether.
``We were very interested in the social history of the automobile, not a car buff's history,'' says Drain, who is also senior producer of PBS' ``The American Experience.'' ``I know that there are going to be a lot of people writing me letters like, `Why didn't you do more collectors in Hershey, Pa.? They're all there.' But you have to do one or the other. You can't do both.''
To be sure, ``Driving Passion'' does feature such industry titans as Henry Ford, whose Model T brought the car to the masses, and Yutaka Katayama, who beat Detroit's stronghold on the industry with small, fuel-efficient Nissan cars during the 1970s energy crisis.
``The idea is that you use characters to tell history,'' Drain says.
The documentary also takes note of lesser-known ``characters'' who helped get America hooked on wheels. There's Willie K. Vanderbilt, who in 1902 became the fastest man on Earth by driving 73 mph. Vanderbilt, heir to the family fortune, was so fascinated by speed that he started a series of races through the streets of New York.
Vanderbilt was ``a patriotic American who hated the fact that America had all these dinky little horses,'' Savage says. ``He was one of the big ones who got America to see the auto as thrilling, state-of-the-art machinery.''
A clip of a Vanderbilt race shows spectators anxiously running into the streets of New York, dodging each car as it races by. ``They would get 250,000 people to watch,'' Savage says. ``The next time that many people got together was the launch of Apollo 11.''
Large crowds also showed up in San Francisco's Market Street in 1909 to watch Alice Ramsey, the first woman to drive cross-country. The trek took her 59 days, given that few roads were paved. Her sponsor, the Maxwell Motor Co., started advertising its cars as ``gentle enough for a well-brought up lady to drive and rugged enough to conquer a continent.''
As the documentary points out, it was that kind of promotion that tantalized consumers. The Ford Motor Co. promoted paved roads through a series of silent films in the 1910s. One offered the message: ``Good Roads Make for Better Homes and Better Schools for Happier and Contented Children.'' Soon, every town waged campaigns to be part of the Lincoln Highway, the first paved, transcontinental road.
Harley Earl was especially adept at marketing. In the 1920s, he manufactured custom autos with slick designs and bright colors, an alternative to the bland Model T. His customers: Hollywood stars, including Fatty Arbuckle, who wanted an extra-large convertible so he would appear smaller while driving. When Earl brought his design style to General Motors in the late 1920s, the manufacturer overtook Ford.
``Earl was truly a significant figure,'' Savage says. ``GM started making elegant cars. He had the idea to make the car like a grand wagon, something to drive downtown in and be the king of the road.''
As an early teen, Drain says she had almost mythical beliefs of their family's 1959 Chevy. On a cross-country trip, they got caught in bad weather in Kansas, and her dad fled an oncoming tornado in Kansas. The car had gigantic horizontal tail fins - an Earl design.
``We were going 85 miles per hour,'' Drain says. ``My teen-age brother swore that the back end of the car lifted off the ground. I believed it.''
by CNB