so, what I did on Tuesday

Several years ago, I came across a library copy of a book on industrial musicals, a genre previously unknown to me, and I read it with full curiosity. In the heyday of US capitalism, say 1940s-70s, when the companies had money to burn, they'd entertain their sales conventions and other gatherings with elaborate shows about their products and services, some of which were professional-quality productions. The idea was both to inform the salesfolk about the products they'd be selling and to send them out enthusiastically to do it.

And sometimes the companies would press small runs of souvenir recordings of the shows, and it was in used record bins that the authors of the book found them and learned about the phenomenon.

But there were also movies, not cinescopes of the stage shows, but short films made to be shown at the same conventions. These are even rarer than the records, most of them surviving only in the basements of the people who made them. Some of these were collected in a documentary called Bathtubs Over Broadway, which I haven't seen and didn't know about.

But I did learn that Steve Young, co-author of the book,* has been going around giving an illustrated talk with film clips. He came to San Francisco on Tuesday, so I decided to go. It was at a tiny independent movie house in the outer Richmond, which required long bus rides to get there (I try not to drive in the City, and park at a transit station just outside its limits). I was early and had plenty of time to study the schedule posted outside. On Dec. 25 they're showing Die Hard, which I guess reveals which side of the burning "Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?" controversy they're on. The seats were old and creaky and gave me leg cramps, so I spent most of the show standing in the back.

Young explained that he used to write for David Letterman - it fits: he sounds like a cross between Letterman and Robert Downey Jr., and rather looks like that too - and his job included scouring used record bins to find weird things for Dave to make fun of on the show. But Young became captivated by the industrial musicals he'd found and eventually he made collecting and reproducing them his main occupation. He befriended many of the surviving creators and cast members - who often could barely remember doing this; you learn your part, you perform it once, you forget it and go on to the next thing - and it was from some of them that he got these movies.

The show consisted of two hours of Young standing in front of the screen introducing the clips, and then moving out of the way while they were shown. They were, as promised, goofy and weirdly captivating. One was a saga of a man who falls in love with a woman whose charms evidently symbolize the virtues of GE silicone products. One featured a Roman goddess named Femma who introduces women to exotic new bathroom fixtures - including, get this, a faucet that senses your approach and automatically turns on. Ordinary enough today, but cutting-edge in 1960-odd. But the strangest was the sales film for the 1959 Edsel. This was the year after the Edsel had become the laughing-stock of the auto industry but the year before Ford pulled the plug on it. The film featured a frantic man who tugged his necktie loose and shed his jacket while bellowing "Sell the car! Sell the car!"

It was a weird but enlightening evening out.

*This being San Francisco, he felt obliged to mention that he was not the football player of that name. "I can't do what he does, and he can't do what I do."