The Long Tail End of the Golden Age

Watched the tribute to the late Debbie Reynolds on ABC's 20/20 this evening. Among the interviewees was Robert Osbourne, long the host of Turner Classic Movies. Osbourne said something that I could have said word for word, namely that Reynolds was essentially the last big star from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

For the last decade, as the last of the great names died off, the ones who had come up through the studio systems of the 1930s and 1940s, I would always remember: "Debbie Reynolds is still alive."

The Golden Age of Hollywood was terminated was several factors, among them was the 1948 U.S. Supreme Court decision that all-but dismantled the existing studio production chain.

It's not a coincidence that the Golden Age of Hollywood ended around the time that the Establishment began, namely in the late 1940s. The biggest factor was the advent of broadcast television networks in the United States. This destroyed movie studios, but it created the Establishment as much as anything else.

What an odd twist, among all the celebrity deaths this year, that the ultimate one would be one the last surviving members of old Hollywood. What a turning of the ages we are experiencing.

Note we still have Doris Day, who had her first #1 hit two weeks before FDR died, while the Battle of Okinawa was raging in the Pacific.

Doris Day at the Aquarium Jazz Club, New York (1946) (source)