Back in the early days of the medium, respectable stations hardly ever played records. Singers and bands most often performed live, and if someone wanted a copy of the music they just heard on the air, then they would go out and buy the recording. Two of the people who changed this practice were two of the earliest "disc jockeys" - Martin Block and Al Jarvis. New Yorker Block got his first job in radio after moving to the West Coast. He went to work for popular on-air host Jarvis, who by 1932 was already spinning discs on air during a segment of his show he called "The World's Biggest Make-Believe Ballroom." During this segment, Jarvis would play the records and describe for listeners the "scene" of the ballroom where a big band was supposedly playing.
When Block returned to New York after his brief stint in Los Angeles, he got a job at WNEW radio. In 1935 the station was offering coverage of the trial of Bruno Hauptmann for the kidnapping and murder of the infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh. The station was able to carry only on-the-spot bulletins, and audience interest was so high, WNEW managers didn't want to schedule regular programming during the trial and miss reporting the latest developments. So Block came up with the idea of spinning records between bulletins. Station managers agreed, if Block could buy some records (WNEW owned none at the time) and find a sponsor (because no company was interested in paying for time to air records). The persistent Block purchased the necessary recordings, found his own sponsor (Retardo weight-loss pills), and response was enthusiastic. Block appropriated part of Jarvis's show's name, and within a few years "The Make-Believe Ballroom" had captured a fourth of the radio audience, a remarkable success that sealed the future of the medium. In fact, Block's program was so popular and influential that he is often credited as the originator of the idea while Jarvis is erroneously relegated to a footnote as an imitator who came along a few years later.
When this movie was released in 1949, however, Jarvis was still a popular and important on-air personality and he's the one who got the money for the film rights, the role of technical director, and screen time as the show host, although Block does appear uncredited as himself. (Block had come out West with much publicity and fanfare to take over the show in 1947, but Californians did not like his personality, and within a year he had returned to New York.) The storyline of Make Believe Ballroom follows two eager carhops (Jerome Courtland and Jarvis) as they compete for a $5000 prize in a name-that-song contest proposed to Jarvis by his fast-talking press agent Liza Lee (Ruth Warrick, who portrayed matriarch Phoebe Tyler on the TV soap opera All My Children from 1971 until her death in 2005). The two are friendly rivals until slick college professor Leslie Todd comes between them and frames Jerome for cheating.
Make Believe Ballroom features a number of top recording artists and radio stars of the day as themselves, including Nat King Cole, vocalists Frankie Laine and Kay Starr, and band leaders Charlie Barnet, Jimmy Dorsey, Jan Garber, and Gene Krupa. Barnet composed the first original theme of the show, titled "Make-Believe Ballroom," but Block later replaced it on the New York show with "It's Make-Believe Ballroom Time," a song composed by Glenn Miller with lyrics by Block himself. Although the Los Angeles show did not last much longer, the New York version lasted for decades under a string of hosts. Block was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1988, more than 20 years after his death.
Director Joseph Santley's only truly notable credit in his 30-year career, which was mostly in B movies, is The Cocoanuts (1929), the Marx Brothers' feature film debut. Early in his movie career he directed several short films featuring musical performances by such popular radio, concert and nightclub stars as Ruth Etting, Eddie Cantor, and Lillian Roth.
Director: Joseph Santley
Producer: Ted Richmond
Screenplay: Albert Duffy, Karen DeWolf
Cinematography: Henry Freulich
Editing: Jerome Thoms
Art Direction: Paul Palmentola
Cast: Jerome Courtland (Gene Thomas), Ruth Warrick (Liza Lee), Ron Randell (Leslie Todd), Virginia Welles (Josie Marlow).
BW-110m. Closed captioning
by Rob Nixon
