Driver’s Education : TBS DOCUMENTARY TAKES THE HIGH ROAD ON CARS: THEIR INFLUENCE ON OUR LIVES

To help tell the history of the automobile, the producers of the TBS documentary “Driving Passion” went to the obvious spots: the freeways of Los Angeles, the factories of Detroit and the noisy streets of Manhattan.

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.

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. (For modern-day races, ABC on Sunday airs the Indy 500.)

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.”

And Earl came up with the idea of the year-to-year model. Drain recalls an uncle who was a “chrome fiend,” and was transfixed on buying the latest model of a Buick, even though he didn’t need a new car.

“There was sort of this raw anticipation for the next model,” Drain says.

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.”

As “Driving Passion” shows, the youth were among the most transfixed by the auto. Even back in the 1920s, teen-agers hung out less on the front porch and went cruising.

“It sort of came as a surprise to me,” Drain says. “Kids really adapted very quickly. You could imagine what freedom it offered them.”

Producers went to Illinois’ Oregon to capture this wonderment and, if nothing else, to find people old enough to remember what it was like when the auto first came to town. Several women in their 90s responded to producers’ ads in the local newspaper and shared their anecdotes, family photos and home movies.

“I never will forget it,” one woman says in the documentary of her first ride in an auto. “It was just beautiful.”

The idea to go to Oregon came from “Mobility and the Small Town,” a book that chronicled the auto’s impact on the community. Main Street lost some businesses, as residents shopped elsewhere.

“But it was almost unanimous that they wanted the auto, to get a world that would allow them to go places, and allow people to come to their town,” says Norman Moline, who wrote the book in 1971.

In one segment, Helen Jones recalls how close Rockford, Ill., became once she was able to zoom over in a car. Her dates moved off the front porch. When her boyfriend took her there on a date, it rained real hard, stranding them overnight. But 25 miles away, it had only sprinkled in Oregon. “I’ll tell you, we had a real hard time explaining that to our folks,” Jones says.

The documentary interviews, Savage says, are “a touchstone for today, so viewers can get back to now. The women are talking about themselves personally, but they are also talking about America. We now can’t conceive of life without a car.”

At the end, Jones and her friend, Hazel McCourt, ride in the back of a convertible through Oregon.

Too old to drive, McCourt keeps talking about the trouble she is having getting rides.

“Oh, do I ever miss my car.”

“Driving Passion” airs Tuesday and Wednesday at 5:05 p.m. (repeating each night at 7:05 p.m.) on TBS.