[78-L] Phonograph records in the movies

[David Lennick]

Hmm..blue labels, grey labels, one with a gold label, a couple with white 
labels with blue print, MAYBE a red label if there was a special Columbia 
Record Club Freebee edition. Authentic shmauthentic. And that medical examiner 
may have been smoking funny cigarettes and having a flash forward.

We just dug out "The Way We Were" which we hadn't watched in years. A few 
scenes take place in a New York radio studio in 1945..if I'm not mistaken, 
everything in that set is authentic, from the mikes to the big monitor speaker 
to the cabinet full of transcriptions in the control booth. A Columbia 78 album 
I'm trying to remember is visible in one scene at Redford and Streisand's 
Hollywood home (for some reason I think it's the Stokowski "Masquerade Suite"). 
And then they had to have "Papa Loves Mambo" (1954 hit) playing at a garden 
party in 1948. (And what looked like a Corning Ware mixing bowl that wouldn't 
exist for another ten years.)

dl

DAVID BURNHAM wrote:
> I don't know if I've seen the whole string or not, but I was reading some of the submissions about records in the movies.  (I do wish the forum would come back!)
> 
> Years ago when I was a kid, I saw a movie which I've never seen since called "The Blue Gardenia".  The only thing I remember about it was a close-up of a Victor 78 playing on a Gramophone.  It was probably about 3 seconds long but in my memory it was the feature scene of the whole movie.  Obviously, like everyone else, I've seen situations where an actor has played a record on an acoustic machine which has produced sound of the highest fidelity, if not stereo.  One more modern movie which had a "record" situation was "32 short movies about Glenn Gould", or whatever it was called.  In that movie, Glenn Gould hands a copy of his latest record to a cleaning woman for her to listen to.  It has a red label and I don't think a Glenn Gould record was ever produced with a red label, although I may be wrong.  With the proliferation of Glen Gould recordings around, surely it's a no-brainer to use an actual GG recording.
> 
> Another situation which isn't a movie but a TV series is the excellent series "The Murdoch Mysteries".  In this series which depicts 1895 Toronto, the medical examiner has an Edison disc player which looks identical to my own, which was purchased in December of 1917.
> 
> db