New York 1951 Bright Lights, Brilliant Minds: A Tale of Three Cities

In the middle of the 20th century,

a city in the New World arrived on the global stage.

It quickly became the most influential

and exciting place on the planet...

..a place with more energy and originality

than everywhere else put together.

Its name, of course, was New York.

New York is the Babylon of the 20th century,

a towering testament to human resilience,

ingenuity and, above all, hope.

This city did more than any other to create our culture,

the culture we live in today,

and I think it all got started in one remarkable year, 1951.

This was the year when the city's irrepressible creative spirit

exploded into life,

when the world's greatest jazz musicians pioneered modern music...

When you think about the incredible wealth of genius...

..when Jack Kerouac gave the Beat Generation

a voice and Marlon Brando redefined modern cinema...

Hey, Stella!

..when an English maverick changed the course of advertising

with one inspired campaign,

and when television began to take over the world.

Oh, boy! Look at that! Wow!

Think the world changed in the 1960s?

Think again.

It all happened here - in New York, in 1951.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, much of Europe was in ruins.

Their great cities were battered and beaten.

The hopes of the world now shifted

westward across the Atlantic to the United States,

and in particular, to a city on its eastern coast.

'This is New York, a fascinating city, an incredible city.'

For those arriving across the Atlantic, the famous skyline

of New York shimmered on the horizon like the promise of a better future.

By 1951, New York was the largest and richest city in the world.

But it was also a youthful city,

infused with the ambition and energy of an unruly teenager.

This, after all, was the New World, and none of the old rules applied.

If any one thing confirmed New York's place

at the top of the global pecking order in 1951,

it was a huge building taking shape on the banks of the East River -

the United Nations Headquarters.

The United Nations itself was a utopian dream,

a dream that if every nation could come together,

they could put an end to the wars

and bloodshed that had devastated the world for half a century.

The United Nations could have gone anywhere.

In fact, many cities battled with each other ferociously

to become its permanent home.

Paris, Geneva, San Francisco, Chicago were all in the running.

There was even talk of building an entirely new city,

a world capital, in order to host it.

But in the end, only one place seemed truly commensurate

with its grand ambitions, and that place, of course, was New York.

'These are the most important buildings in the world,

'for they are the centre of man's hope for peace and a better life.

'This is the place where the nations of the world will work together

'to make that hope a reality.'

A team of star international architects,

including Oscar Niemeyer and Le Corbusier,

collaborated on the vast building project.

Here in the Security Council Chamber, the 15 member states meet

to discuss threats to world peace.

It looks just as it did when the very first resolution was tabled.

You can feel the spirit of that founding optimism in the '50s decor,

with its primary colours and clean, modern lines.

The mural by the Norwegian painter Per Krohg

shows a phoenix rising from the ashes of war and oppression -

a vision of a better, more hopeful future.

The arrival of the United Nations was a real turning point

in the history of New York, because it made this city the place

where the world, the whole world, every single country, came together.

And it's important to remember that though the United Nations

is in New York, it is not actually in the United States.

The whole complex is international territory,

and for me, that symbolised the moment when New York ceased to be

simply an American city and became instead a global city.

By 1951, New York had arrived.

The city - indeed the whole of America - was booming.

Confidence and affluence rippled through society,

and a distinctly American culture began to emerge -

consumer culture.

Why don't you switch to the snow-fresh coolness...?

# You'll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth... #

There is another handy way to get around and have fun doing it.

# Be sharp and listen, Mister

# How are you fixed for blades...? #

Consumerism brought with it an exhilarating new art form,

an art form that would come to define our age

and our aspirations like few others -

advertising.

Got the message?

And if advertising had a spiritual home,

it was in New York, on a street called Madison Avenue.

Madison Avenue did for advertising what Savile Row did for the suit,

and in the 1950s, this street was crawling with sharp-suited ad men,

but one of them stood out from the crowd.

He was an eccentric Brit called David Ogilvy,

who even had this documentary made

about his unusual journey to Madison Avenue.

So I started my career in advertising at the age of 39, which is very old.

I'd bummed around the world as a kind of rolling stone,

had a lot of bizarre adventures,

and then finally, at the age of 39, I came into advertising. Why?

Do you know why you do the job that you do?

The film demonstrated Ogilvy's talent for self-promotion.

Where everyone else on Madison Avenue wore dark suits,

David Ogilvy sported tweeds and sometimes a kilt.

Why do I wear a kilt? Well, why shouldn't I?

Ogilvy was the original Englishman in New York,

and in the competitive world of Madison Avenue,

he used that difference to his advantage.

After all, if you can't advertise yourself,

what hope have you of being able to advertise anything else?

In 1951, Ogilvy's ad agency was only three years old

and still struggling to make a splash,

but this was the year that one small contract

transformed his company - and advertising - for good.

Some time in 1951, an unknown shirt-maker from Maine

turned up at Ogilvy's office.

He had a company called Hathaway, and Hathaway wasn't doing very well,

so he asked if Ogilvy could help turn his company's fortunes around.

But his budget was pitifully small.

I said, "How much money have you got to spend?"

He said, "30,000."

I almost burst into tears because 15% commission on 30,000

wouldn't keep anybody alive very long.

Ogilvy was on the verge of saying no

when the shirt-maker said something that changed his mind.

Ogilvy would have complete freedom to advertise Hathaway shirts

exactly as he wanted, and Ogilvy couldn't resist.

Ogilvy decided his principal task

was to make the brand more glamorous,

so he hired a handsome silver-haired man to star in the ad.

The shoot started conventionally enough,

but Ogilvy thought something was missing,

and what he suggested surprised everyone.

Ogilvy whipped out one of these - an eye patch.

Apparently, he'd bought it at a drugstore on the way to the shoot,

and then he said to the Hathaway man, "Look, just for a bit of fun,

"why don't you try this on, just for a few shots?"

The Hathaway man agreed...

and the rest, as they say, is history.

Ogilvy's ad first appeared in the New Yorker magazine

on 22nd September 1951,

and it was an instant sensation.

Ogilvy's eye-patch was a masterstroke.

And the reason it worked was this -

as soon as you see the eye-patch, you're intrigued.

You want to know who the Hathaway man is,

and what happened to his eye.

The mystery creates a desire.

You want to be part of the Hathaway secret.

And the only way to do that - short of cutting your own eye out -

is to buy a Hathaway shirt.

Ogilvy's idea was mad, but it worked.

Within a week, every Hathaway shirt in existence had been sold,

and the ad ran for nearly two decades.

The campaign has been very successful,

a rather unimportant way to get famous, isn't it?

But it made me famous, and more to the point,

it made our clients famous.

So what made Ogilvy so special?

Copywriter Jane Maas was the inspiration

for Peggy Olsen from Mad Men,

and Ogilvy was her Don Draper.

What was Madison Avenue like in the 1950s?

Oh, Madison Avenue was a passionately wonderful place to work.

It was so exciting.

We were creating a whole new kind of advertising

and we loved doing it, we loved each other, we loved our clients,

they loved us, and it was magical.

And then, there was in the middle of it, David Ogilvy,

who was his own school of advertising.

Unique and unto himself.

What kind of a man was David Ogilvy?

Oh! What kind of a man was David?!

He was enchanting, he was magical,

he was extremely sexy, I just worshipped him.

What was the secret of his appeal?

Well, he was... If he hadn't been an advertising man,

I think he would have been an actor.

I mean, he was dashing, and he knew it, of course.

What he would wear to the office is a very British tweedy suit,

but he'd wear a black cape with a scarlet lining.

He would appear like Heathcliff coming out of the moors.

So he was very, very much a consummate showman.

Ogvily went on to become the Michelangelo of Madison Avenue.

Those remarkable little bubbles...

And he helped pioneer the sleek,

slick art of advertising that continues to seduce us all.

But the boom in consumer culture was a double-edged sword.

By encouraging millions of Americans to buy the same products,

it also encouraged them to become the same people.

Some car, ah, folks?

Isn't it beautiful?

By 1951, the pressure to conform was immense,

and only strengthened by the tensions of the Cold War.

In a society increasingly permeated by paranoia and suspicion,

everyone wanted to fit in.

To be different was to be un-American.

If I had my way about it, they'd all be sent back to Russia.

And yet New York - the consumer capital of the world -

was also home to the biggest rebellion against '50s conformity.

This city, after all, is almost two cities - uptown and downtown.

And while uptown was the mecca of consumer conformity,

downtown couldn't have been more different.

Now this is a New York City street map dating back to 1951.

You can see the whole of Manhattan with Central Park at the top,

but the one thing you notice, almost immediately, with this map

is the famous New York grid system.

Now, that dates back to 1811, when the planners of the city tried to

make New York rational, ordered and convenient.

But if you look closely, you'll notice there's one part of the city

that doesn't conform, where the streets are, frankly,

all over the place, and that area is known as The Village.

The unruly street plan of The Village is revealing,

because this cheap, raggedy neighbourhood

was waging its own war against 1950s conformity.

The dungarees...the long beards and the short hair,

for them, the answer - opportunity or just understanding

may be found in Greenwich Village.

By 1951, The Village had become a magnet for all who didn't believe

in the increasingly conventional values of America.

And this was where New York's other great cultural force emerged -

the counterculture.

To learn more about it, I've come to meet David Amram, musician,

composer and all-round hepcat.

So, David, what was The Village like in 1951?

It was kind of an oasis from what Henry Miller

described in his classic book as the air-conditioned nightmare.

This was different from the house with the white picket fence,

where everything was sort of comfortable,

but everything was the same.

30 years on the job, a gold watch, pick out your cemetery plot,

thank you very much, next!

Here was a place full of people who also felt the same way, and it was

almost as if, what they eventually called the Beat Generation

or the bohemia of that time,

was really like a giant 12-step programme

for all of us to console one another in pursuing our hopeless dreams.

We were spectacularly unfashionable,

which is always a good thing to be as much as possible,

cos then you don't have to worry about creating the greatest crime

in American culture, which is falling out of fashion.

That's worse than being a murderer or arsonist!

They used to have the loft parties that the painters would give.

They had the most space at the lowest cost.

They would put their paintings about ten feet up, so no-one would

burn a hole in it with a cigarette butt or pour a drink on it.

As a party, we were one another's entertainment.

It was terrific.

In 1951, David was 21 years old and pioneering improvisation on

the French horn, a suitably offbeat occupation for The Village.

We were just a whole bunch of different individualistic people,

all of whom were united by the desire to have some place in the society

to do what we loved to do with the hopes that we would give pleasure

to other people, and, more importantly,

to foster creativity in them.

Greenwich Village became the spiritual home

of the so-called Beat Generation,

and in 1951, one of its residents

would go on to write their manifesto.

His name was Jack Kerouac.

At the time, Kerouac was 29 years old.

He had served in the Marine Navy during World War II, but he was

now trying to establish himself as a serious writer in New York.

For years, Kerouac had been planning a book based on his road trips

across the United States.

He hoped it would be a great American novel - one that captured

the restless spirit of his generation.

But his every attempt to write it had ended in failure.

However, in the spring of 1951, Kerouac concluded that the only way

to write his book was quickly, in one virtually uninterrupted sitting.

And he hit upon a novel way to ensure that happened.

Teletype paper!

Now, this was really designed to be used by electric teleprinters

to send numerical data, to send morse code, to send news wires,

but Kerouac thought it would be absolutely perfect

for his new brand of uninterrupted writing.

After all, with a roll this long,

he'd hardly ever have to change the paper.

Kerouac loaded up his special paper and on 2nd April 1951, he began.

Fuelled by coffee, Benzedrine and countless cigarettes,

Kerouac typed and typed and typed 100 words a minute, day after day.

Kerouac said that he wrote in a semi-trance.

It was the most intense writing session of his life.

And then, finally, it was finished.

On 22nd April, three long, hard weeks after starting,

Kerouac stared down at a single paragraph

that was over 120 feet long.

Now that paragraph would end up being

one of the great American novels,

and Kerouac would call it On The Road.

On The Road may have taken only three weeks to write up,

but it took another six years to get published.

It became a huge bestseller,

and to his surprise, Kerouac become something of a celebrity.

So here he is - Jack Kerouac.

This is Kerouac on the Steve Allen Show,

reflecting on his work, and then giving a rare reading

of his distinctive musical prose.

"A lot of people have asked me why did I write that book or any book.

"All the stories I wrote were true. Because I believed in what I saw.

"I was travelling west one time at the junction of the state line

"of Colorado, its arid western one,

"and the state line of poor Utah,

"I saw in the clouds huge and massed above the fiery golden desert

"of eveningfall the great image of God with forefinger

"pointed straight at me.

"Through halos and rolls and gold folds that were like the existence of the gleaming spear

"in his right hand, would sayeth, 'Come on, boy, go thou across the ground! Go moan for man.

"'Go moan. Go groan.'"

On The Road is a spiritual epic -

a quest for what really matters in life.

It is a breathless, stoned, lyrical love letter to an America

Kerouac was afraid was dying -

an America of open spaces and freedom and spontaneity.

The book is a fictionalised - in fact, mythologised -

account of his travels across the continent,

and a celebration of the hoboes, the drunks,

the prostitute and labourers who make up the company of the road,

the people who were being written out

of an increasingly affluent America.

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad

"to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything

"at the same time, the ones who never yawn

"or say a commonplace thing,

"but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding

"like spiders across the stars."

What a great piece of writing,

and I think it gets to the heart of what On The Road is all about.

It's an attack on 1950s conformity,

it's an attack on people who live their lives according to

the rules, people who get married at the right time, have children

at the right time, move to the right suburbs, have the right careers.

It's an attack on all those values that Kerouac believed

was ripping the heart and the soul out of America,

and it's a celebration of the individuality

and the eccentricity that made that country great in the first place.

Kerouac's novel went on to become a bible for the Beat Generation,

a handbook for all those who wished to rebel against American authority.

And, in my opinion,

it remains a masterpiece of modern literature.

Joyce Johnson was Kerouac's girlfriend

when On The Road was finally published in 1957.

Do you think it was an optimistic book?

I think it was,

cos Jack did begin the book in the belief that these

people who were not approved members of society

had the capacity to lead the world to a much better future.

And there was also a sense that,

um, your rebellious lifestyle actually meant something,

that everything you did, all your choices, had a certain intensity.

-That you could remake the world, almost?

-That you could remake the world, yes. Yes.

I look upon the whole Beat Generation thing and the furore over it

as an idea that sort of got away from the man who had originated it.

It became something quite different to Jack being beatnik,

being poor, pure and inward.

It didn't mean party, party, party all the time, you know,

get the bongo drums.

And very soon, it was very much promoted as a kind of

hedonistic, white, middle-class lifestyle choice,

whereas the original beats, as Jack saw them,

had been anything but

middle-class people, and in fact, he believed that the whole movement

would be black beboppers.

In 1951, bebop was certainly the soundtrack

to the counterculture.

The glorious result of black jazz musicians'

own New York City rebellion.

Tired of playing swing music for white audiences to dance to,

they had in bebop created a radical new form of jazz.

One that prized virtuosity and innovation above all else,

and in the smoky, dingy basement clubs of The Village

throughout 1951 were some of the greatest figures in jazz history -

Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane,

Miles Davis - all of them were doing the rounds.

But the high priest of bebop was actually a monk -

Thelonious Monk.

Monk had come to New York with his family

when he was five and started playing the piano soon after.

By the age of 13, he had won the weekly amateur contest

at the Apollo Theater so many times that he was barred from entering.

At 19, Monk joined the house band at a Harlem jazz club,

and it was there that he developed an eccentric rhythmic playing style

that set him apart from his contempories.

Hitting the keys with a curious flat-handed technique,

Monk's phrasing was as original as his dress sense.

Monk was exploring uncharted musical territory

throughout the '40s and '50s, producing inventive,

intricate eccentric music

that amazed and perplexed everyone who heard it.

But on a muggy day on 23rd July 1951,

he recorded what many consider to be his masterpiece.

Straight No Chaser broke new harmonic ground.

It was an audacious distillation of bebop, each repetition of the

motif landing differently within the bar, every shift creating depth.

Monk's composition influenced everyone around him

and it helped kick start the next wave of jazz.

Straight No Chaser is, as Monk loved to call it,

emphatically modern music.

It didn't sound like anything anyone had heard before and even today,

over 60 years later, it sounds just as original.

Monk's son, Thelonious Junior, grew up surrounded by musical innovation

and, perhaps inevitably, became a musician himself.

When you think about the incredible,

absolutely incredible wealth of genius

that was in one geographical location on the planet Earth,

I don't think there has ever been another time like that in history.

Bebop was very brief. Very, very brief.

Bebop was only about seven years.

It was like bubbling, it was bubbling and it was getting bigger,

it was getting hotter and it just exploded in the '50s

and you have Thelonious Monk and you have modern jazz.

That's why I tell people

that Thelonious was the high priest of bebop,

yes, he was, but Thelonious was the father of modern jazz, because it was

what Thelonious did melodically and harmonically that just cracked open

people like John Coltrane and Miles Davis, cracked them open like eggs.

Everything was just new.

Everyone was trying to find new vocabularies

and new ways of looking at things,

new ways of turning the kaleidoscope and getting a new picture.

You grew up in the middle of this! How exciting!

I grew up in the middle of all this, and a lot of these people I met,

but I didn't know who they were, they were just Daddy's friends.

Look, Miles Davis and these cats were coming to the house every day.

I didn't even know his last name was Davis. I just knew him as Miles.

It's Miles. That's all I knew.

I was looking through a book, right, and I see this photograph,

and it's my father standing there, looking like Thelonious as usual,

and there's this white guy who looks a little bit younger, but

he's looking at Thelonious like he's looking up at Mount Olympus, right?

And I look at the caption, and the young guy was Allen Ginsberg.

All of these people knew each other

and were finding ways to hang out with each other.

That's the amazing thing about New York in the period, isn't it?

The abstract expressionists, the Beat Generation, the bebop,

the jazz, everything, coming together.

The music supplied an atmosphere for intellectuals of every stripe,

and I think, collectively, they changed the world.

In a country that was still racially segregated, the jazz clubs

of New York were havens of liberty, equality and self-expression.

But the jazz scene was fuelled by more than just freedom.

Heroin took a staggering toll.

In 1951, many of Monk's friends were hooked.

Billie Holliday was barely upright,

Miles Davis recorded virtually nothing at all

and Charlie Parker was only a few years away from an early grave.

On Wednesday 9th August, only a few weeks after recording

Straight No Chaser, Monk too found himself

on the wrong side of the law.

Monk was in a car talking to a friend

when two narcotics policemen rapped on the window.

Now, Monk didn't take heroin - not at the time, anyway -

but his friend did, and it wasn't long before the officers found

a bag of the stuff in the car.

Within minutes, Monk and his friend were handcuffed

and in a squad car on the way to Central Booking.

Monk was charged with possession and spent two months in jail.

His remarkable year had proved that though New York was a city

of opportunity, it was also a city of sin.

It had the power to make and break people's lives.

And if the career of any one man demonstrates this,

it was that of a volatile painter called Jackson Pollock.

My home is in Springs, East Hampton, Long Island.

I was born in Cody, Wyoming, 39 years ago.

Pollock had exiled himself from New York

in a last-ditch attempt to stop drinking.

He moved here, a couple of hours outside the city,

in Long Island.

Jackson Pollock was one part Picasso, one part Marlboro Man,

because while he was a modernist painter

in the European mould, he was also a denim-wearing,

cigarette-smoking, bourbon-drinking man's man.

He did, after all, come from cowboy country, and for many,

he was proof that the Wild West could also produce artistic genius.

In 1951, Jackson Pollock was at the peak of his fame.

He had made his name in New York's vibrant art world in the late 1940s.

And many were now convinced he was the world's greatest artist.

I don't work from drawings or colour sketches.

My painting is direct.

Pollock created his paintings

with a typically American no-nonsense technique.

I usually paint on the floor.

Sometimes I use a brush, but often prefer using a stick.

Sometimes I pour the paint straight out of the can.

I also use sand, broken glass, pebbles, string,

nails or other foreign matter.

A method of painting is a natural growth out of a need.

I want to express my feelings, rather than illustrate them.

So this is where the magic happened,

and it was a kind of magic by all accounts.

People who saw Pollock at work said that

when he was making a painting, he entered a kind of trance.

He put the canvas down on the floor

and then he would encircle it like a kind of shaman's dance.

Spattering, flinging, spilling, dribbling and dripping -

completely oblivious to those who were watching him,

completely oblivious to the outside world,

completely oblivious to time itself.

And what I find really exciting about this place is the floor.

No-one really knew this floor was here.

In '53 it was covered up with MDF, and then 30 years later,

when this barn was being renovated, they stripped it away

and they revealed this, a great fossilised relic of his work.

And this is like a kind of crime scene,

and the paint is the incriminating evidence.

And, you know, this room, this is a room that produced

some of the great paintings of the 20th century.

By the early 1950s,

a sober Jackson Pollock was making the best work of his career.

His vast and original paintings were taking New York by storm.

But not everyone was impressed.

"Chaos. Absolute lack of harmony.

"Complete lack of structural organisation.

"Total absence of technique, however rudimentary. Once again, chaos."

That's what one critic wrote about Pollock's work.

That's what some people still think, but they couldn't be more wrong,

because I think this painting is a breathtaking accomplishment.

After all, it's almost five metres wide.

It's bigger than a lot of New York apartments.

And yet, and yet the whole thing holds together.

It's balanced, it's harmonious, it's structured.

And do you know what I love so much about this painting?

It is so exciting to look at.

You can go to almost any single point on the canvas and find something truly enthralling.

Take that point, for instance.

We've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven different colours,

one on top of the other, creating this vibrating space.

You can't tell what's background and what's foreground.

And all these different kinds of gestures -

delicate little spatters, shooting stars, big zigzags,

all one on top of the other.

For me, this painting captures the American dream, this whole canvass

is the great American wilderness, and the gestures on top of it.

These are acts of individuality, of defiance, of freedom.

This is a great big widescreen movie of a picture.

And it's the kind of picture

that could never have been produced in Europe.

One: Number 31, 1950

is the product of an artist at the peak of his powers,

and at the time, it must have seemed that Pollock was only going to

get better, but by 1951, his vices had returned to haunt him,

and his golden period came to an abrupt end.

It all started one afternoon in November.

Pollock had been sober for two years,

but on that day he did something that would eventually prove fatal.

He poured himself a glass of whiskey.

Now, Pollock and his wife had actually invited friends here for dinner that evening,

but by the time they sat down to eat, he was completely drunk.

He lost his temper, upended the whole dining room table,

and sent 12 turkey dinners flying through the air.

There was a stunned silence,

and then his wife said, very calmly,

"Coffee will be served in the living room."

Pollock's sabotage of his own polite dinner party had a kind of symbolic value.

For like others in New York, Pollock was fighting to be free,

to find his own dissonant voice within '50s conformity.

But 1951 was the beginning of the end for Jackson Pollock.

His drinking increased. He never produced great work again.

And within five years, he was dead,

killed in a car crash while driving drunk.

Kerouac, Monk, Pollock -

New York had patented a new kind of American artist -

brilliantly talented, but impulsive and flawed,

and in 1951, it inspired a new generation who would bring

that idea to the world. In early September,

a young man arrived in New York on a Greyhound Bus from California.

He had been on the road for five days, had hardly any money

and knew no-one in the city.

The young man was so confused and homesick

that he spent the majority of his first few weeks

in New York hiding in movie theatres,

watching three or four films a day.

But the young man had actually come to the city

to make his name as an actor,

and he certainly succeeded,

because his name was James Dean.

Dean soon auditioned and was admitted to an organisation

whose headquarters was

a converted church in the Hell's Kitchen area of New York.

It was called the Actors' Studio.

The Actors' Studio may not look very much,

but in 1951, it was already a cultural powerhouse.

And over the years, it produced some - hell, virtually all -

of America's great modern actors -

Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Marilyn Monroe,

Marlon Brando - all of them trained here.

The secret of the Actors' Studio was a new approach to acting itself.

Its formidable director Lee Strasberg, who took over

the organisation in 1951, rejected conventional acting training.

No more enunciation classes or singing and dancing lessons.

He proposed something very different,

and he called it method acting.

Method acting was all about drawing on what was within.

Strasberg wanted his actors not to play their roles

but to take them over - to bring all the pain, suffering,

longing, humiliation of their own lives

and bring it to their characters.

"Here there is no acting", Strasberg famously declared.

What he was after was reality.

A kind of aggressive instinct, an instinct of wanting to kill something

because as we've found here, there is a much greater degree of expression

in private than most people think there is.

Part psychoanalyst,

part tyrant, part shaman, Strasberg worked on what

he called an actor's "affective memories", urging them to dig deep

into themselves to find the suffering and frustration at their core.

The path to this emotional truth could be painful.

James Dean, newly arrived at the Actors' Studio,

was working on one of his own affective memories

when something unforgettable happened.

Dean picked up a knife and started to cut himself with it.

Now, one actress in the room was so horrified by what was happening

that she leapt forward to stop him.

Strasberg was furious. "You idiot!" he cried,

because for Strasberg, that was Dean's chance, that was his gateway

to the emotions he needed to unlock if he was to become a great actor.

Even once an actor had found success,

they would return to Strasberg to work on the method.

Oscar-winning actress Lee Grant joined the Actors' Studio in 1951

and saw first-hand the devotion Strasberg inspired.

Now, in 1951, Lee Strasberg took over the Actors' Studio.

What kind of man was he?

Lee was a magnet.

Lee was God. Lee had the word.

If you see pictures of actors in the Actors' Studio,

in that ring around him, they're all like... That's the...

Glued to him?

Yeah, they're all leaning forward, and they're all... you know, it's like...

and they had their recorders going,

so that no word that he said would be missed.

And he was judgmental about who really knew the method, you know,

and it wasn't Stanislovski or Gabrovski,

or any other -ski, it was Strasberg.

Did all the actors respect him, then, hugely,

-or were they scared of him?

-Both.

You can't have that kind of respect without fear.

His criticisms were very interesting, very to the point,

and very valuable to the person.

I remember somebody telling me, I wasn't there,

that he had Geraldine Page, who was an exquisite actress,

who moved too much, he had her tie on to a post at the studio,

and refused to let her use her body or her arms,

so that she was forced to find her truth

and speak her lines, without the mannerisms.

What are you trying to accomplish?

Well, I got a little confused about what I was trying to accomplish.

I was trying to figure out what things she would do that I wouldn't,

what things would she wear that I would not necessarily want to wear.

Smocks.

Well, except that it's a little too early yet to become concerned

with those details,

even though sometimes those details do stir the actor's imagination

and help 'em to work. It seemed to me, in this particular scene,

that you did, or rather, in this particular improvisation that you did,

I got you doing very well, a little bit more authority,

not quite tied to your own mannerisms, that's true,

but, er, the element of character was left out.

I mean, it was an actor's home.

It was where you went to work out your problems.

If you were given a movie that you had a problem with, you brought it

to the studio and worked on the parts of it that you couldn't get through.

So it was like going to work, but it was also like going home,

it was also like going to therapy, I guess?

Yes, very much, it was like going to therapy.

Strasberg's methods were controversial.

Some claimed his actors were more interested in playing themselves

than their characters.

But it certainly produced some momentous performances.

And 1951 was the year that method acting

got its biggest platform to date.

In September, the film of Tennessee Williams'

A Streetcar Named Desire opened.

At its heart was a violent but passionate antihero called Stanley,

who was played by a young, unknown actor called Marlon Brando.

Don't you ever talk that way to me! Disgusting, vulgar, greasy!

Who do you think you are - couple of queens or something?

In the film's most famous scene, Stanley has just beaten

his pregnant wife Stella,

who's taken refuge upstairs with a neighbour.

Hey, Stella!

And now he tries to win her back.

-Why are my clothes down here?

-You shut up!

You're going to get the law on you!

-Hey, Stella!

-She ain't gonna come!

THEY BOTH SHOUT AT ONCE

Why are my clothes down here?!

DOOR SLAMS

Hey, Stella!

Wow!

What a performance!

You know, it's electrifying still today,

but back in 1951, few people had ever seen anything like this.

They were used to elegant, poised, even restrained performances.

But Brando, Brando is an uncontrollable force of nature here,

with his T-shirt torn, his back muscles rippling,

his whole body soaked in water - it's almost like he's come out of a primordial swamp, not acting school.

And that moment, that famous moment when he shouts...

Hey, Stella!

..it is explosive.

And this is raw, pure method acting.

But in one way it's not really acting at all, because Brando

wasn't actually performing - what he was doing was drawing

on a huge reservoir of emotional energy that lay deep within him.

Brando's powerhouse performance kick-started his own remarkable career.

And he, together with James Dean and others from the Actors' Studio,

pioneered a new kind of acting.

But it was more than that.

In 1951, a new kind of American hero was born,

one who captured the restlessness in American society itself.

Brando and Dean, like Pollock, Kerouac and Monk,

all brought with them a jolt of dangerous

and untameable electricity to American culture.

You could, I suppose, call all of them rebels without a cause.

But the thing is, they did have a cause.

All of them were rebelling against the conservative

and complacent society that America was becoming,

and all of them were looking for something different - for reality,

for authenticity.

Cinema brought the principles of New York' counterculture to the masses,

but in 1951, the silver screen was just beginning to be overtaken

by a dynamic new medium that was being pioneered

in the very heart of Manhattan.

Television.

Tonight on the screen in your home,

one of the most exciting parts of New York,

the most exciting city in the world,

comes to the new medium of television tonight.

By 1951, there were 16 million television sets in America,

with 100,000 more sold every week.

It was fast becoming a national obsession,

and that year would turn out to be a crucial one

in the story of television,

thanks to two new kinds of programme that continue to this day.

The first was live television,

and the most memorable of these early broadcasts

came on 3rd October 1951 with a famous New York sporting event.

Out of the subway, into the polo grounds

swarm the fans by the thousands, for

the sudden death game in the play-off between the Dodgers...

It was a crucial baseball game between two of

the city's fiercest rivals -

the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers.

And it would turn out to be - in the words of John Steinbeck, no less -

the greatest ball game ever played.

The winner of that game would take the coveted Champion's Pennant,

and the Dodgers were the favourites to win.

Around the country, millions of people tuned in.

The Dodgers dominated from the get-go.

After eight innings, they had taken a seemingly insurmountable 4-1 lead.

Only one innings was left for the Giants to turn the game around.

It was surely impossible.

And then the Giants' outfielder, Bobby Thomson,

stepped up to the batter's box.

Facing him was the Dodgers' pitcher, Ralph Branca.

The pressure on both men was unbelievable.

Everything depended on them.

If Branca pitched well, he would secure victory for the Dodgers.

But if Thomson somehow managed to hit a home run,

he would pull off a miracle for the Giants.

The stadium, and a spellbound TV audience, held its breath.

Branca nervously toyed with the ball.

Thomson, his mouth dry with fear, gripped his bat.

And then the miracle happened.

The Giants win the pennant!

The Giants win the pennant!

The Giants win the pennant!

The Giants win the pennant!

Bobby Thomson hits into the lower deck of the left-field stands!

The Giants win the pennant and they're goin' crazy!

Bobby Thompson's dramatic strike became known as

"the shot heard round the world".

It marked the beginning of a new era in television,

where millions watched live events simultaneously,

and so helped secure the medium's position

at the centre of national life.

Oh, boy, look at that! Wow!

But live broadcasting was not the only form of television

to take a huge leap forward in 1951.

Just 12 days after "the shot heard round the world",

another seminal broadcast appeared on American screens.

At nine in the evening on Monday 15th October 1951,

the American people sat down to watch a brand-new show.

It would go on to become the most popular series of the entire decade,

and in the process, it would usher in the modern television age.

It was called I Love Lucy.

I Love Lucy was the first great sitcom.

In it, Lucille Ball played Lucy,

a lovable housewife, opposite her real-life husband Desi Arnaz.

-Look, honey, you're not serious about this, are you?

-I am, too!

Here I am with all this talent bottled up inside me,

and you're always sitting on the cork!

Every week, she would pursue her dream

of breaking into showbiz like her husband.

Now, look, Lucy, you know how I feel about this.

-I don't want my wife in showbusiness!

-Why?

-Why?!

-I asked you first.

Ah, honey, we've been over this 10,000 times.

I want a wife who's just a wife!

Now, look, all you've got to do is clean the house for me,

hand me my pipe when I come home at night,

cook for me and be the mama for my children.

You don't smoke a pipe.

It doesn't matter! Just do the others.

Lucy's hilarious attempts to escape the conformity of family life

touched on a more serious paradox in American culture in 1951 -

that the dream home might also be a gilded cage.

Who's under the table?

There's nobody here but us dogs!

Either way, audiences loved I Love Lucy.

Within a year, it was being watched by 11 million American families every single week.

It dominated the ratings throughout the 1950s,

and its reruns continue to be broadcast today.

The show may not have met with

the approval of Pollock, Kerouac and the other New York rebels,

but I Love Lucy was just as revolutionary,

even in the way it was made.

I Love Lucy was the first major programme

to be filmed by multiple cameras in front of a live studio audience,

and that became the way that all the great American sitcoms,

from Friends and Frasier to Cheers and Seinfeld, were made.

And if the sitcom was the great American cultural export,

I Love Lucy was its defining prototype.

1951 gave America a taste of the future of television,

and it was arguably the first step in the medium's triumph over all of our lives.

But New York had transformed more than just television.

Its restless and anarchic spirit brought a wave of change.

New York in 1951 gave birth to

a slick, clever and witty mass culture.

But born at the very same time was its unruly sibling,

the counterculture, with its glamorous and violent rebels.

Together, these two strands came to define American life for decades,

and they continue to shape the art, the films, the books,

the music, and even the clothes, we consume today.

New York did so much to create our culture.

But so too did the other cities in this series.

They were crucibles of creativity,

And they all helped define the 20th century.

Vienna in 1908 opened the Pandora's box of human emotions,

and eventually helped drag the world into war.

Paris in 1928 rebuilt Europe's faith in the imagination

and taught it to dream of a better future.

And without New York in 1951,

modern life would be very different indeed.