I never know what I'm going to find when I'm exploring story ideas for Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about the stuff people make, buy, and sell. My name's Jason Toon, and when I started digging into one of my retro pop-culture obsessions, I had no idea the weird, dark turn things would take, or how many random celebrities would pop up along the way… If you love kitschy vintage style and/or '60s pop music, you love Scopitones, even if you don't know it yet. They were music videos before music videos. But their naive low-tech visuals, vintage grain and color, and Europe-a-go-go vibes give them a totally different feel from anything that was ever on MTV. Originally created in France to be shown in a coin-operated cabinet called a Scopitone machine, they featured the biggest and most innovative French pop artists of the day, one franc at a time.
The great Françoise Hardy, the only singer who could make bumper cars feel melancholy. But when Scopitone came to America in 1964, it fell into the hands of an organization more interested in money laundering than musical expression: the Mafia. And when their operation went down, it took the potential of this art form down with it. Vive les films musicaux Scopitone wasn't the first attempt at a motion-picture jukebox. In 1940, the Panoram debuted in the United States with a library of "Soundies", three-minute 16mm film clips of popular songs. The resource crunch of World War II would bring the Panoram to a premature end. But the Soundies remain a treat for music lovers and an invaluable resource for music historians, capturing some of the only footage of many key artists. After the war, Cameca, a French company that manufactured movie projectors, built on the Panoram's technology. Where the old machine showed only black-and-white clips, the Scopitone was in color. Instead of lo-fi optical sound, the Scopitone had hi-fi magnetic sound. Most crucially, unlike the Panoram, the Scopitone let the customer select specific clips rather than just playing the next one on the reel. It was enough of a hit in Europe that Cameca set its sights on the big prize: America.
Like the TikTok of its day, except good. They licensed it to a company based in Chicago whose main business, up until then, had been making those molded plastic signs with lights inside, the kind you used to see hanging in front of bars or on store window displays. Tel-A-Sign seemed like the kind of stodgy, competent firm that could reliably manufacture Scopitone machines and set up a distribution network like they already had for their signs. Alas, the company was more than it seemed. The gang's all here It's not surprising that the Mob would be circling around Scopitones. Vending machines of all kinds have a long and dishonorable connection to organized crime. Most obviously, as an all-cash business, they're ideal for money laundering. In some cases, they also served as outlets for stolen or smuggled products like cigarettes. Maybe most potently, they get a Mafia foot in the door of legitimate businesses. Every diner with a cigarette machine, gumball machine, or jukebox had to work with the Mob, and from there it's a short step to working for the Mob. And there's no doubt that by this time, the once-legitimate Tel-A-Sign had become a Mob front. The tangled web of associates is too much for me to lay on you here. Suffice it to say that the leading stockholders included figures like Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo, business partner of mob icon Meyer Lansky; Joe “the Wop” Cataldo, who owned the Mafia hangout Camelot Supper Club in New York; and Gerardo Catena, a big wheel in the Genovese crime family. The intriguing figure who seems to have put the Scopitones deal together is one Alvin Malnik, then a young attorney. Some stories I've seen suggest that Tel-A-Sign was quietly taken over by the Genoveses some time in 1964. But as early as 1962, a major shareholder in Tel-A-Sign was none other than the notorious Roy Cohn, prosecutor-turned-consigliere to some of the more, er, colorful residents of New York. Maaaybe the future defender of John Gotti and Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno was totally clean at the time and it's all just a big coincidence. Anything's possible. I guess. Anyway, for whatever reason, Cohn and heavyweight champ Floyd Patterson got out of their investments in Tel-A-Sign just as the Scopitone deal was happening - all of those things were announced in the same 1964 Miami Herald article. There's probably a story there that we'll never know.
Going so soon, guys? But Alo, Malnik, and the rest of the Tel-A-Sign gang were just getting started. By 1966, some 1,000 Scopitones machines were installed in locations around the country, with announced plans for 10,000 more. Tel-A-Sign predicted they'd quintuple their yearly revenue. Their stock duly shot up to $7 a share. Nice art form you got here… be a shame if anything happened to it OK, so the Mafia controlled Scopitones in the United States. Does that necessarily mean the art form couldn't have thrived? The Mob dominated the jukebox and live-music industries during those decades, too, when so much of the greatest American music was being made. Why couldn't Scopitones have enjoyed a similar flowering, even with the Mob siphoning off a chunk of the profits? Two reasons. First, the content for jukeboxes and theaters was already there before the Mafia got involved, and so were the audiences. They controlled some of the outlets for those "products", but they didn't have to worry about where the products themselves were coming from, or about nurturing a market for them. Not so with Scopitones. Record labels didn't see the advantage in producing lots of expensive film clips that would only ever be seen in one proprietary vending machine. If Tel-A-Sign wanted clips for its machines, it would have to have them made. And who exactly would see them? In Europe, teenagers were the audience. But that meant keeping up with the fickle twists and turns of teenage taste. Also, the Mafia was more interested in getting their hooks into adult venues where alcohol was served and cash takings were higher, the better to launder dirty money. Why mess around with a bunch of penny-ante malt shoppes? So Scopitones in the USA were made as cheaply and chintzily as possible. The selections weren't updated often. And the tepid, middle-of-the-road music choices completely missed the thrills happening all around them. We're talking about 1966! The year of Revolver and "Paint It Black" and "Reach Out, I'll Be There"! Revolution was in the airwaves!
Debbie and friends hamming it up all over this land. So American Scopitones videos were pretty lame (the occasional exception aside) and there weren't enough of them. Who cares when the point is laundering money, right? Did it really matter if any actual person ever dropped a quarter into a Scopitone machine? But if nobody was particularly interested in the creative aspect of Scopitones, a few people were taking an interest in the business aspect. People with subpoena powers and teams of investigators. And that's the second big reason Scopitones didn't thrive under the Mafia: the Mafia got busted. Fin The Justice Department had been tipped off to organized crime involvement in the Scopitones/Tel-A-Sign deal, launching a secret grand jury investigation in 1965. The following year, it was made public by the Wall Street Journal, and the Securities and Exchange Commission launched their own probe. The news sent Tel-A-Sign stock plummeting. Legitimate distributors and vendors cut ties with the company, leery of getting mixed up with Mafiosi. The company went into bankruptcy in 1967 and trading of its stock was banned. Almost all the orphaned Scopitone machines in America were just thrown on the junk heap. "Jimmy Blue Eyes" Alo and Alvin Malnik were eventually indicted. While Alo served three years for obstruction of justice, Malnik skipped free when a judge found that the FBI had illegally wiretapped him. He made an estimated $2 million from the Scopitones deal. Of course, Malnik - unbelievably, still alive today, at age 91 - has always denied any connection to organized crime. But in a strange coincidence, one Richard Schwartz, the stepson of Meyer Lansky, was arrested in 1977 for shooting someone at Malnik's restaurant, the Forge, in front of several witnesses. Schwartz, in turn, was shot to death himself a few months later. Darn the luck! And X-Men and Rush Hour (as well as upcoming Melania Trump documentary) movie director Brett Ratner told an interviewer that Malnik "raised me… Al is really my father." Of course, that was before Ratner was, at least temporarily, drummed out of the movie biz after allegations of sexual assault by at least six people including Olivia Munn, Natasha Henstridge, and Elliott Page. Always lots of colorful characters in Alvin Malnik's orbit, it seems. But not on the Scopitones screen. It faded in Europe by the early '70s, too. It would be another decade before cable TV and the mind of Monkee Mike Nesmith would make music videos an enduring commercial concern, and a medium for artistic exploration (foreshadowing for a future Shoddy Goods issue?). There's one public Scopitone still in operation, at Jack White's Third Man Records in Detroit, but it only plays recent clips by acts signed to the label. The machines pop up on eBay once in a while. And although she rarely talked about it, Debbie Reynolds would forever rue the day she was dragged into the Scopitone production deal. She summed up the misfire with her usual tart wit in her 1988 memoir, Debbie: My Life: “The Scopitone machine was so far ahead of its time, no one bought it.”
Heidi Bruhl twists to "Wenn Du Ich Warst". And to think, we were once afraid of Germany. I always wondered where music videos got their start, especially when you see those ones that pre-date MTV, but I didn’t anticipate the mafia being so involved. What are your favorite nostalgic music videos? Let us know in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat! —Dave (and the rest of Meh) We made you some articles you can't refuse:
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