Two things happen every New Year’s Day at Pasadena, California – the celebrated Parade of Roses in the morning, and the East-West football game at the Rose Bowl in the afternoon.
The Rose Parade is a two-hour procession of festive floats (you’ve seen ‘em in the newsreels) while the football game brings together the champions of the Pacific Coast Conference and (theoretically) the most outstanding winning team of the years, coming from east of the Continental Divide.
It was somewhere between Christmas and New Year’s, when the Los Angeles representatives of the big five – Hearst-Metrotone, Fox Movietone, Paramount News, Universal Newsreel and Pathé News – presented themselves, as annually, at the Rose Bowl football headquarters for their usual quota of working-passes, badges and whatnot. Imagine their feelings when they learned that the rights to film the big game had been gobbled up by some local focal firm!
“But,” solaced the football committeeman, “here are your passes, with one proviso. You can make pictures, but you can only use as much as one hundred feet. Agreed?”
Agreed? Where did he get this stuff? However the boys took the passes, said nothing more, and bowed politely out of the office.
Once outside, they ran to the nearest bar and went into a huddle. Three Pasadena fruit punches later, they had their own solution. They marched in a parade of their own and called on the parade committee. The boys forthwith told that august body that insofar as they couldn’t have camera carte blanche at the game, well – they’d just have to forget photographing the parade.
Dynamite in December! The old year was dying, and the parade promoters look as if they too had dates with the undertaker! Judging by the color of their faces, it looked as if Pasadena was about to have its first white New Year’s. They fussed, they fretted, they fumed, they pleaded – but the five photogs were adamant.
Then the parade committee went off on that bromidic “Am I my brother’s keeper?” tack. Oh, come now, cajoled the Pasadenans, surely you wouldn’t do this to us after all the plans we’ve made, because of what the football crowd does?
Wouldn’t we, though? Well, we’ll show you, was the seed the five cinemen planted. And they left, feigning a first-class huff.
As soon as the movie makers had gone, the parade people got into a huddle. They finally concluded with cocksurety that come New Year’s morning, so also would come the newsreel cameramen.
They lived to be very wrong.
The parade wasn’t photographed. Neither was the afternoon game. However, the boys used the passes and watch the game like regular people.
The following December, the rose impresarios sent a love gift of forget-me-nots to each of the five newsreelers. Tucked into the baskets were promises that what had happened the year before would never, never happen again…and oh yes, they also sent along a couple of choice extra tickets for the lensers’ friends.
In the teens and early 1920s before news cameramen unionized and they were kicked out until the 1960s, even women were hired to turn the cranks of cameras and chase the news.
“Go to hell if you must — but bring back pictures of it!” was the credo newsreel photographer Norman Alley voiced and lived by.
