Upon Reflection,
High-School Movies
Really Were Bizarre
* * *
Educational Film Collector
Finds Gold in the Oldies;
Teens Still Hate Them
By Andrew B. Cohen
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
Phil has a problem. He can't seem to make friends at his new school. He is a "shy guy," so he tinkers with radios alone in his basement. His father tells him to "pick out the most popular boys and girls and keep an eye on them." Following Dad's advice, Phil becomes a good listener, helpful and polite. By the next class mixer, Phil is Mr. Popularity. And guess what? Seems the gang at school is interested in radios, too!
Thank Richard Prelinger for preserving "Shy Guy," a 1947 educational film that starred Dick York, later Darrin on the television series "Bewitched." Mr. Prelinger, a film collector and media archeologist, estimates that nearly 600,000 such short films--most shorter than 10 minutes--were produced for schools and business between 1920 and 1980, when videotape took over.
Mr. Prelinger, 36 years old, began acquiring these films in 1982 after realizing that no one else was preserving them. He now has more than 20,000. Most came from bankrupt production companies and film labs eager to give them to anyone willing to cart them away.
NO IRONING NEEDED
His library now ranges from camp curios like "Dating: Do's and Don'ts" (1949) and "The Wonderful World of Wash and Wear" (1958) to graver, government-made films like "Sucking Wounds of the Chest" (1952) and "What You Should Know About Biological Warfare" (1951). A few deliver Manichean lessons--such as "We Drivers" (1936, remade in '49, '55 and '62), a Chevrolet-sponsored cartoon in which Sensible Sam and Reckless Rudolph battle in a "Rocky"-style prizefight for the soul of a motorist.
Mr. Prelinger calls these works "ephemeral films," because they have outlived their original purpose, whether it was helping teen-agers overcome shyness or using silent comedy to show Frigidaire dealers that good service puts "Sand on the Slippery Sidewalks of Sales" (1927).
But, he adds, they are also ciphers to "everyday history," to the mores and values of American society. "I'm interested in finding films that show the conflicts and contradictions of their time," Mr. Prelinger says.
One favorite is a teen-guidance film called "A Date With Your Family" (1950). Ostensibly a lesson in dinner-table etiquette, it asserts that meal-time should be treated as if it were a social event of one's choosing. But under a veneer of prandial pleasantries lies what Mr. Prelinger calls a "really creepy" portrayal of suburban family life.
"These boys greet their dad as though they are genuinely glad to see him, as though they had really missed being away from him during the day and are anxious to talk to him," says the narrator of this unintentional film noir. "The women of this family seem to feel that they owe it to the men of the family to look relaxed, rested and attractive at dinner time."
The narrator advises "pleasant, unemotional conversation" for the family gathering and subtly warns the viewer to "Tell Mother how good the food is. Maybe Sis rates a compliment,too. It makes them want to continue pleasing you."
Another Prelinger favorite is "From Dawn to Sunset" (1937), a big-budget documentary that depicts a day in the life of workers at a dozen General Motors facilities around the country. To the rhythm of martial music, masses of stone-faced workers march through factory gates, where men and machinery unite in productive harmony. Later, at home, the workers use their well-earned GM dollars to buy goods for their families, enriching the community in the process.
Mr. Prelinger notes that GM was fighting unionism at the time, hence the company's stirring appeal to worker loyalty.
Mr. Prelinger's firm, Prelinger Associates, sells the use of footage from his collection for up to $90 a second. He sold "From Dawn to Sunset" footage to Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc. for use in "Drexel Helps America," a film promoting junk bonds, as well as to Michael Moore,whose new film, "Roger and Me," blames GM's restructuring for the economic woes of Flint, Mich., the auto maker's birthplace.
Recently, Mr. Prelinger contracted to market his collection through another stock footage house, Petrified Films Inc. He is at work on other projects: producing segments for "Buzz," MTV's new "magazine" program, helping HBO find appropriately ironic footage for its new Comedy Channel and assembling a videodisk for scholars of "original visual research material" on the history of suburbia.
Some of his best clips are available on two home-video samplers from Voyager Co. of Santa Monica, Calif. Other volumes to come have such themes as car culture, gender roles and educational "misinformation."
The material for these categories is rich and ridiculous. Car culture alone spawned a particularly melodramatic genre: high-school safety films. As Mr. Prelinger puts it, "With safety films, you're always rooting for the accident to happen."
"The Last Date" (1950) is a "scared" film classic. Pretty Joanne could date any boy on the football team, but she ignores warnings that Nick (Dick York again) is a "teenicide" waiting to happen. "It would have been better if I'd died in the hospital rather than look the way I do. I couldn't even go to Nick's funeral," she sobs, her face teasingly hidden from the camera. "I've had my last date."
NEW AND IMPROVED DO'S AND DON'TS
Makers of educational films say that "The Last Date" would no longer play in Peoria. The genre is now all but extinct, and the few driver's ed films still available are notable for a lack of gore and grief.
These days the emphasis is on bolstering "self-worth and teaching positive values," according to Joe Elliot, president of Chicago-based Encyclopaedia Britannica Educational Corp., the film-making unit of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. "A lot of what the films are doing is helping kids cope with very complicated lives. The pressures these kids face are a lot different from what we experienced."
Evidence of these changes can be seen in the latest Britannica catalog, where films for high-schoolers address up-to-the-second concerns in films like "Steroids: Shortcut to Make-Believe Muscles," "When Romance Turns to Rape" and "Coping With That Thing Called...Stress!"
Whether these films have ever made a shy guy popular or kept a kid from trying drugs is debateable. What's not is how many teens respond to them.
Jennifer Gravitz, a 17-year-old senior at Sachem High School (one of the nation's largest) in Lake Ronkonkoma, N.Y., undoubtedly speaks for millions of her peers, past and present, when she gives a big "thumbs down" to most educational films.
She cites one health film, "Natural Highs and How to Get Them," as one "really stupid" example, typified by platitudinous advice on staying sober. "You think, this is boring, and you just block it out," she says. The films "try to prove a point, buy they treat you so stupidly. Students will fall asleep no matter what."
But time and nostalgia work wonders. Mr. Prelinger has screened his films at museums, universities, and film festivals from San Diego to the Hague, usually to enthusiastic sell-out crowds. Though some of his audience derives from what he calls the '80s "camp and kitsch boom," he declares himself firmly anti-nostalgia and avers that others are ready to view ephemeral films seriously.
"What's really neat is to know how to look at media from some critical way," he says. "On the other hand, I don't think that watching films will change the world."
This article first appeared in The Wall Street Journal of Jan. 3, 1990, page A1
