TV REVIEW : Stay Tuned for ‘The Men Who Made Radio’

Most Americans are probably too young to recall that television began as the tip of radio’s iceberg. Or that, once upon a time, our imaginations were not shaped by pictures coming from a small screen but were expanded through the limitless panorama of sound.

Writer Norman Corwin says it well tonight in a new PBS documentary from Ken Burns:

“Sound itself attracts--ask any eavesdropper. Sound is the first stirring of the infant. He hears sounds, he puts them together, they cohere. Sounds have a romance. The sound of a cricket at night to establish a mood in a radio drama: a very simple effect. The sound of thunder. The sound of rain. There is no sound on the moon because it takes air to support it; the vibrations of air create the sound. And radio was a medium which employed that magic. . . .”

The magic sprinkles across “Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio,” which airs tonight at 7 on KVCR Channel 24, at 8 on KCET Channel 28 and at 8 on KPBS Channel 15.

Although Burns had a glittering pedigree before “The Civil War,” it’s that masterpiece against which he probably will be measured forever more--unfairly. “Empire of the Air” is not nearly as ambitious, nor is it intended to approach the scope of the comprehensive baseball biography that Burns is working on for PBS. Yet “Empire of the Air” is superior, artfully expressed filmmaking.

Even better, though, is Burns’ scintillating 1982 documentary about the building of “Brooklyn Bridge,” which is being shown tonight at 8 on KPBS Channel 15 and at 10 on KCET Channel 28. Just as the 14-year construction of the bridge was an extraordinary technical feat driven by greed, ego, vision and genius, so also was the development of radio, although in a vastly different way and with much greater consequences.

Burns and his collaborators, Morgan Wesson and Tom Lewis (on whose book tonight’s film is based), tell the story by interweaving the lives of the three flawed men most responsible for the growth of radio in the first half of the 20th Century.

To most of us, Lee De Forest and Edwin Howard Armstrong (called “the strange gifted men whose inventions made it all possible”) are as much abstractions as the radio waves they employed. However, the third man, brilliant industrialist David Sarnoff, became famous by ruthlessly harvesting the genius of others as the head of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA).

The three men knew and battled one another.

Spanning 1906 to 1955, “Empire of the Air” achieves the seemingly impossible in making technology (“This new wave was them amplified several thousand times”) interesting. However, it’s the human stories that are most compelling here and that give “Empire of the Air” its texture.

The film is deliciously nostalgic to its core. Garrison Keillor recalls as a young boy sitting on his uncle’s lap and putting his head next to his so that the radio headphones extended across both of their heads. The sounds he heard were bands dreamily coming from afar.

In one especially well-edited sequence featuring old footage, probably from the 1930s, the program cuts back and forth between a young boy transfixed by a radio Western and a studio where sound effects and actors in their civvies are creating the mental images that fill the boy’s imagination.

In the United States, it was not until 1939 that “radio sight” was added to sound, resulting in TV. For better or, in some cases, for worse.

Corwin tonight tells the story of a boy who says he likes radio better than television. When his father asks him why, the boy replies: “Because the pictures are better.”