TV REVIEW : ‘KTLA at 45’ Serves Feast for L.A. Nostalgia Buffs

The image of Los Angeles in the ‘40s is endlessly fascinating, but the ‘50s--unfairly labeled the do-nothing decade--has always been something of a cultural blank, even to people who lived here. Well, if you’re an L.A. nostalgia buff or a local broadcast history maven, you may feast tonight on a knockout of a TV retrospective: “KTLA at 45: A Salute to Los Angeles Television” (Channel 5, 8 p.m., to be repeated Sunday at 8 p.m.).

Sure, the show is self-congratulatory, and KTLA appears to be at the front of every disaster that ever happened. But very often, particularly in the ‘40s and ‘50s, the station did cover spot and live news quicker and remained on the scene longer than anyone else. Also, this celebration is comparatively unselfish, showering considerable attention on the pioneering shows of the competition, and the result is an anniversary present to the public that is quaint and charming as L.A. social history and irresistible as a portrait of the birth and evolution of L.A. television.

The first two hours, covering the ‘40s through the ‘60s and hosted, in order, by Stan Chambers, Steve Allen and Tom Snyder, is the substance of the show. The local ‘70s and ‘80s chronicle, hosted by Hal Fishman and Stephanie Edwards, is almost expendable but at least it’s brief.

The production’s opening scene is spellbinding: It’s a warm, sky-blue L.A., Jan. 22, 1947, and you see Sunset Boulevard on color film. Trundling past the Graumann’s Chinese is an old Red Car (as in streetcar), “It’s a Wonderful Life” is on the marquees, Sophie Tucker is at Ciro’s, Les Brown is playing the Palladium and Earl Carroll’s “Vanities” and Ken Murray’s “Blackouts” dominate the rest of Hollywood night life.

Also on that day, we see television history unfolding on a soundstage at Paramount Pictures where Bob Hope, Jerry Colonna and other studio stars usher KTLA onto the air as the first licensed commercial station west of the Mississippi.

What did the Hollywood trades think about this “half-radio, half-movie” experiment? Chambers has fun at the expense of Daily Variety, which we see burying the announcement at the bottom of a deep inside page. And the next day, as the print headlines swirl at us, both trade papers pooh-poohed the history-making event, with the Hollywood Reporter wondering “who would buy a video receiver?”

People who grew up on early Los Angeles TV will be transfixed. Parading across the screen is that mystical Indian organist who never said a word in the course of 900 shows, Korla Pandit. But, finally, Korla Pandit speaks (!), in a brief ironic reminiscence and still in his turban and still looking good.

KTLA pioneer Klaus Landsberg, who brought television to L.A. in 1939 as Paramount Pictures experimental station W6XYZ, set the television pace, taking TV cameras, for example, to the sites of public entertainments. Beach lovers will melt over the shots of Lick Pier and Spade Cooley in Santa Monica and of Harry Owens and Hilo Hattie at the Aragon Ballroom at Ocean Park.

We also catch Fred Astaire’s first TV appearance, on Channel 13’s “Oscar Levant Show,” and there’s a scrawny kid named Johnny Carson on then-KNXT Channel 2, stuffing a turkey in drag on “Carson’s Cellar,” in 1952. On the news front, we see the late Bill Stout questioning Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev on the Fox set of “Can-Can” in 1959 and, later, in a hilarious clip, getting doused by a crushing wave while covering a storm at the beach.

But the show’s piece de resistance is a riotous kinescope of the 1957 Golden Globes ceremony, carried by Channel 11, featuring a breathtaking Jayne Mansfield in a low-cut outfit giving an award to a hyperventilating Mickey Rooney as Mansfield buries his head in her chest. It’s a classic.

Most dramatic and important, and the one event that established TV as a news medium here, was coverage of the Kathy Fiscus tragedy. A 3 1/2-year-old girl fell and disappeared deep into a well on a muddy lot in San Marino on April 9, 1949. For 27 uninterrupted hours during the ultimately failed rescue attempt, TV was there--bringing, for the first time, a whole city together. For those who lived nearby and watched the tragedy unfold (as this writer did), the return of Chambers to the site today on what is now the athletic field at San Marino High School is a reminder of the glorious days when live TV was a given.

As Chambers wryly says at the end of the program, as he stands next to the burned-out Pan Pacific Auditorium near Fairfax Avenue and Beverly Boulevard, an area once at the heart of TV’s live entertainment: “These days the Pan Pacific and live television still have something in common--there’s not much left of either.”