Invisible Themepark

Category: 1960s

Cutaways from the 1960s (1960 to 1969).

  • YouTube’s Video Discovery System is Creepy

    YouTube’s Video Discovery System is Creepy

    As if we needed another example of how technology is creeping into our brains, how about this one: YouTube’s Video Discovery System? It’s one thing for Google and YouTube to follow closely behind your interests; we’re all accustomed to that. But now they want to match you step-for-step and even go ahead of you, predicting your future interests.

    In one sense, YouTube has long done this. If you look for a a video under the keyword “painting a bathroom,” you’ll get a choice of videos and you watch one. But then YouTube tries to push you out to further interests that are roughly related but not ranging too far outward. In the bathroom painting case, YouTube will push you to other home-related videos.

    But the YouTube Discovery System is creepier because it creates a sense of interest where there is no interest. And it shows in your general Google search results. How’s this for trivial:

    1. I search for Virginia Gregg, an actress born in 1916, died in 1986, and mainly active in the 1940s to 1960s.
    2. I see that her mother’s name was Mrs. Dewey Alphaleta. Unusual name, so I click on it.
    3. Voila, in the results I see an entire YouTube channel devoted to Dewey Alphaleta. Thinking that it must be tied to my Google account, I search again, using Incognito Mode. Same results.
    4. Dewey Alphaleta’s YouTube Channel: zero subscribers, but I could be the first one!

     

  • Before Borderline Bar & Grill Was Charley Brown’s Restaurant, Thousand Oaks

    The Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks, California, site of the November 7, 2018 shooting of 12 people, has been around for a long time in various iterations. In Thousand Oaks, a bedroom community 40 miles from Los Angeles, where everything is torn down and rebuilt on a regular basis, it is virtually unheard of for a restaurant or the building it is housed in to continue for decades. Yet Borderline Bar & Grill’s building, with its exterior look and interior dimensions, are the same as it had been three decades ago in the form of a restaurant called Charley Brown’s.

    Charley Brown’s: Dark Steakhouse

    The Charley Brown’s Restaurant, located at 99 Rolling Oaks Drive in Thousand Oaks, was a vast, single-room hall with a high open ceiling. Like the other Southern California Charley Brown’s Restaurants, it was a dimly lit steakhouse that revolved around a ponderous Olde English theme, heavy on the wood and brass. At one end of every Charley Brown’s, in large letters: “Work is the curse of the drinking classes,” a quote attributed to Oscar Wilde.

    Charley Brown’s Menu
    Charley Brown’s Menu 1976

    Food was equally heavy. A May 6, 1976 article describes

    langostinos marina, $4.95, and the filet tips Stroganoff, $5.25. They were gourmet all the way, prepared to individual order in the spotless exhibition kitchen. The langostinos were tiny baby lobster tails prepared with butter, onions, fresh mushroom slices and green peppers, tipped with rich bearnaise sauce.

    In a 1996 article about the closing of the Woodland Hills Charley Brown’s, restaurant industry analyst Janet Lowder said, “They’ve been on a downhill course for quite some time. They’re a dark steakhouse. They didn’t change with the times.”

    Charley Brown’s Advertisement
    Former Charley Brown’s, Motto at End Once Said, “Work Is the Curse of the Drinking Classes”
    Charley Brown’s Restaurant, Marina Del Rey 1960s

    One of the earliest Charley Brown’s (above) located in Marina Del Rey gives a good indication of the “vast hall” style of these restaurants’ architecture.

     

  • Capping San Francisco’s Panhandle Freeway: a Plan That Never Happened

    The plan made a lot of sense. If you were going to have a freeway running right through San Francisco’s Panhandle, which itself connects to the eastern end of Golden Gate Park, why not partially cap it off?

    Edmund G. Burger, principal at Burger & Coplans, wasn’t the bad guy here, not by any stretch of the imagination. Burger, born in 1930, was a renaissance man, an innovator who seemed to excel at every thing he tried: basketball scholarship, founder of the Grow Homes movement preceded Habitat for Humanity, and architect for the American Pavilion at the 1992 Olympic Games, in Barcelona, among many achievements. Yet to freeway-sensitive San Franciscans, anything related to a freeway, even a sensible mitigating device such as this, was a no-go.

    Burger’s defense of the high cost of capping the Panhandle Freeway was that freeways running through difficult topography in open areas often incur extra costs to bypass, remove, or ram though those obstacles. Burger felt that dealing with a city’s topography and the related costs shouldn’t be viewed much differently.

    San Francisco Panhandle Freeway Cap, Aerial View, 1967

    The cap would have run along a four-block section at the end of the Panhandle, partially covering a recessed freeway. Cantilevered concrete walls 60 feet high would have slanted inward 24 feet on each side over this freeway. These walls would actually be the backs of three story apartments for moderate-income residents. While the walls would have been concrete, the apartments were designed to be constructed of wood.

    San Francisco Panhandle Freeway Cap, Fell or Oak Streets, 1967

    The 90 foot-wide slot above the freeway would have given drivers light and air, and would have allowed exhaust fumes to escape. The walls and ground-level garages were estimated to cost $1 million per block.

    San Francisco Panhandle Freeway Cap, Inside, 1967

    San Francisco and freeways don’t mix. The Panhandle Freeway and Burger’s cap would politically go down in the Freeway Revolts of the 1960s. That eyesore, the Embarcadero Freeway, literally came down during the 1992 San Francisco earthquake.

    Panhandle, 1938

    San Francisco Panhandle 1938, Showing Road

    The idea of a Panhandle Freeway wasn’t so far-fetched. While not quite a freeway, there was a road running through the Panhandle, as shown in this 1938 photo, above.

    San Francisco Panhandle, 2018 Above View

  • Bars, Nightclubs, and Casinos from Ocean’s 11 (1960)

    How bad can a movie be yet look fantastic? Ocean’s 11 (1960) is a heist film famous for its slick Rat Pack, mid-century modern trappings, but altogether a heaping, floppy mess. It’s a movie you want to like but can’t. It has no real highs, no lows, no drama, little humor. Interminable parts of the movie happen at Spyros Acebo’s Ladera Drive house in Beverly Hills, where the boys just talk and talk forever. Even one hour into the movie, they have only talked about the heist. The only real spark of life is with Cesar Romero, as Peter Lawford’s father-in-law-to-be, an unspecified Las Vegas fixer-gangster who wises up to the boys’ heist and exposes it.

    Yet the movie has a great look, as the boys progress from casino to casino: Flamingo, Sands, Desert Inn, Riviera, and Sahara. This slavish progression through the five hotels not once, but twice (first casing the joints, then later on, robbing them) is a huge drag on the movie’s storyline, but it’s a great crosscut of 1960s Las Vegas.

    Flamingo Bar

    Flamingo Hotel and Casino Bar from Ocean’s 11 (1960)

    Sands Cashier/Guard Stand

    Sands Cashier/Guard Stand from Oceans 11 (1960)

    Sands Hotel and Casino Phone Area

    Sands Hotel and Casino Phone Area from Oceans 11 (1960)

    Sands Hotel and Casino Coffee Shop

    Sands Hotel and Casino Coffee Shop from Oceans 11 (1960)

    Sahara Casino Nightclub

    Sahara Casino Nightclub from Oceans 11 (1960)

    Flamingo Hotel and Casino Entrance

    Flamingo Hotel and Casino Entrance from Oceans 11 (1960)

  • Edward Andrews: Great Character Actor Who Took Imperious to a New Level

    Many character actors might bristle at the idea of being branded a character actor. Because, after all, who wants to be branded as a type? If in your last ten movies you played that type, are you destined to play that type again and again? On the other hand, if you’re good enough, it means steady work.

    Edward Andrews was spot-on perfect in mid-20th century movies and television as a character actor who got tons of steady work because he perfectly hit a certain character role target. In his horn-rimmed glasses, Andrews embodied the imperious, officious, smug, and stuffy role better than any other actor working at that time. So perfectly did he play the part that I have a hard time believing that there was a real person behind the roles.

    In the early years of his career, Andrews was rarely, if ever, cast in a purely sympathetic, heart-warming role. He was always a mayor, military brass, banker, doctor, school principal, or religious leader. Only in the last few years of his career did he receive more benign roles.

    In 1964’s Send Me No Flowers, with Rock Hudson and Doris Day, Andrews delivered one of his more neutral and least unsympathetic characters as Hudson’s doctor, lacing the role with humor and only a few traces of the characteristic Andrews smugness.

    Andrews as the sinister authority figure Carling from The Twilight Zone’s “Third From the Sun,” dancing on the fine edge between practiced courtesy and quiet menace:

    Andrews’ most quietly disturbing man-next-door role, though, was as Oliver Pope in The Twilight Zone’s “You Drive.” Is Oliver Pope evil for evading the law after running over and killing a young boy? Maybe. What makes Andrews’ role so mesmerizing it that he could be one of us.

     

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