The Butcher who Minted Millions

In those days we were called "butchers,'" J. C. Hall explained to me as he took me on a guided tour of his Kansas City factory.

“There were 'news butchers' and 'candy butchers.' I was a 'postcard butcher,'" he continued. "We were traveling salesmen who rode the trains from St. Louis to Kansas City and back, walking up and down the aisles, selling our wares. My business was very good; I sold postcards for a penny each. At the turn of the century, that was good money; a man could support his family. My business boomed until one day my supplier handed me a box of several hundred postcards of a new kind. They were made in France. They had pictures of women in corsets, bustles, petticoats - you could see their ankles and their legs! Pretty racy for the early 1900s."

As Hall and I strolled about his Hallmark greeting card plant, I saw giant machines spinning out greeting cards by the countless thousands, coming off the presses like sheets of money rolling out of the mint. It is a mint, I told myself, these Hallmark cards are money in the bank.

“The so-called dirty French postcards killed my business," Hall continued. "Husbands took them home and their wives raised the devil, refusing to allow them in the house. Then the men got mad at me for selling them, which finally put me out of the 'postcard butcher' business altogether. It turned out to be a blessing. Thanks to that experience, I went into the greeting-card business. Hallmark now sells more greeting cards than all the other greeting-card companies in the world combined."

“So you're minting money," I responded, indicating the presses.

“Yes, thanks to the 'dirty' French postcards, we're minting money and I learned a lesson that has guided me all of my life."

In the mid-'50s, I was producing and directing CBS Radio's Hallmark Hall of Fame, sponsored by J.C. Hall and his company. When I took over, I drastically changed the format of the long-running series from historical drama to contemporary stories, luring the very shy, then-Major Chuck Yaeger to narrate the story of his breaking the sound barrier, convincing Ira Gershwin to narrate the story of his brother's untimely death, getting Joe DiMaggio to narrate the story of former Yankee manager Miller Huggins, having General Dean tell us of his capture and imprisonment during the Korean War. Every week we did segments from the lives of contemporary heroes narrated by either themselves or someone who knew them. The ratings soared and we quickly became the top-rated drama in those days of waning live-radio drama. For the moment, I was my sponsor's fair-haired boy. Hence my invitation to come to Kansas City to meet J. C. Hall and be shown the fountain from which the millions flowed.

“My ad agency," J.C. Hall confided, "wants me to stop sponsoring Shakespeare on TV and buy a cops-and-robbers show instead. I refused and they're furious with me. They have market surveys proving my approach is all wrong. They may be right, but I'm going my own way, and nobody can talk me out of it.

“My life as a postcard butcher taught me that the road to success is won by appealing to the highest level of our culture, not by pandering to the lowest common denominator. Sure, Shakespeare earned us only a five rating, or maybe even less. I don't care. That meant maybe five million people were watching my show, and they were really interested in Shakespeare. I'd rather have five million people who are seriously interested in my program than 25 million who watch it just to kill time. Besides, I really like Shakespeare.

“That's why we came up with our slogan," Hall continued, "When you care enough to send the very best.' Hallmark is going to stand for class, first and foremost, as long as I'm alive. I will not put my name on trash."

J.C. Hall steadfastly refused to follow the mob. He bought Sunday night prime-time on network TV for quality drama. The ratings were poor, but he didn't care. No amount of urging by his ad agency or the networks could convince him to sponsor anything less than the highest quality programming he could buy. He refused to follow the herd. He built an empire by ignoring the advice of all the experts. No wonder I took an immediate liking to him.

“Did you know," he asked rhetorically, "that more people go to see Shakespeare's plays than attend baseball games? And more people attend concerts and symphonies than sports events?"

The network saw to it that Hall's heretical views were stamped out abruptly. When he refused to change to popular, formulaic programming, they kicked him off the air! The networks claimed his high-mindedness was hurting their entire week's ratings. They not only took away his time period, they refused to allow him to sponsor any other regular prime-time period.

Today, decades later, Hall's heirs are having the last laugh - their greeting-card business is the mightiest enterprise of its kind in the world. And they still sponsor quality television programming with Hallmark specials three or four evenings a year. (Now the network welcomes their business . . . in prime time!) And Hallmark still holds to their founder's principle of putting on the highest quality programs, ratings-be-damned.

H.L. Menken reportedly said, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public." Certainly Hollywood and the networks have thrived following that credo. But J.C. Hall followed the opposite path and made his own mint. When he and I completed our tour of his factory and returned to his office he said, "My friends who are CEOs of the really big American companies tell me privately that they hate the junk their companies sponsor. In fact, they won't let their kids watch most of it. Me, I get up every morning, look in the mirror as I shave, and I'm proud of what I'm doing. Do you know how good that feels?"

Of course, that was a long time ago, before the current flood of vomit and excrement movies and a long time before television took over the world's screens. It was an era when people felt a genuine desire to be proud of their work.

Today, all that has changed. We now have filmmakers who are proud of how much money they're paid to put crap on the world's screens. (Privately, most of them cynically admit it's crap.) The newspeak of the '90s is expletives, occasionally sprinkled with lame jokes, as heroes splatter their victims' brains on shattered windshields while cars crash at high speed to the sound of ear-splitting "music." Audiences watch with glee as heroes, while cracking jokes, riddle their fellow humans with bullets. Seeing this mayhem and grand scale slaughter, audiences are led to believe that countless maimed bodies bathed in buckets of blood is funny.

We have become dehumanized and anesthetized to vulgarity, violence, and obscenity. "You don't understand," a major director who is also my close friend carefully explained to me, "it's all comedy." I guess I need a laugh track to remind me. All too often, today's movies and television are a disgrace to the human spirit.

But what the hell, if you can make a few million bucks degrading human dignity, why not? It's a free country, and the First Amendment protects you from everybody but yourself.

Yet ask yourselves, why write garbage you won't allow your own children to see? Or write screenplays that you laughingly apologize to your friends for writing, while bragging about the millions they paid you? It's Hollywood's biggest in-joke. Your bank account and your self-ridicule won't let you off the hook. I know many screenwriters and directors who, while they boast about their paychecks, feel shame inside. Like J.C. Hall, they, too, have to look in the mirror when they shave. What are they seeing?

“Eternal vigilance is not only the price of liberty; eternal vigilance is the price of human decency."

— Aldous Huxley (from his introduction to the CBS Radio broadcast of my production and adaptation of his Brave New World, 1965).

(Guest article: Excerpts from William Froug's new book, Zen and the Art of Screenwriting. Reprinted with permission. William Froug was chair of the Caucus in 1979 and producer/writer of memorable television programs including Bewitched, The Twilight Zone, Playhouse 90, etc.)