Sometimes you know entertainment history is being made in an instant: Jolson speaks, Garbo laughs, the Beatles Want to Hold Your Hand on The Ed Sullivan Show. But mostly what makes a moment memorable is the head-smacking realization — the next day or year or decade — that you can't picture life without Satchmo and Ralph Kramden and Toto, too. You can't imagine a world without fears from Stephen King and yo!s from Rocky Balboa and yum!s from Cookie Monster. In honor of the 100th issue of Entertainment Weekly, here are the 100 moments that make us who we are today.
1913
CALIFORNIA, HERE THEY COME
Movie lovers, you'll never know how close you came to hearing a
song called ''Hooray for Flagstaff.'' At the dawn of the film business,
Cecil B. DeMille was sent to that Arizona town to shoot a Western
called The Squaw Man. A few weeks later, his partners in New York,
Samuel Goldfish (later Goldwyn) and Jesse Lasky, received the
following telegram from DeMille: FLAGSTAFF NO GOOD FOR OUR PURPOSE.
HAVE PROCEEDED TO CALIFORNIA. WANT AUTHORITY TO RENT BARN IN PLACE
CALLED HOLLYWOOD FOR $75 A MONTH. Rents have increased somewhat
since.
1914
THE TRAMP
When an unsung British music-hall performer stepped before a
movie camera in Making a Living, one reviewer noted that ''the clever
player who takes the role of the nervy and very nifty sharper is a
comedian of the first water.'' Good call. Within a few years, Charles
Chaplin's perfectly timed slapstick had made him the most famous
person on the planet, and when he began to invest his Little Tramp
with a delicate humanity, it was one of the first signs that a movie
could be Art. The character remains so universally beloved that IBM
uses Chaplin's image to sell computers 14 years after his death.
1925
YOUNG MAN WITH A HORN
On Nov. 12, in a small Chicago studio, jazz's greatest artist
made his best records ever. Louis Armstrong's Hot Five featured
Satchmo's trumpet, Kid Ory's trombone, Johnny Dodds' clarinet, wife
Lil Armstrong's piano, and Johnny St. Cyr's banjo. The Hot Five never
played outside the studio, yet the handful of records they made are
studied, dissected, and enjoyed 65 years later.
1925
ON THE DIAL, A DO-SI-DO
It began under the name ''Barn Dance,'' a country-music radio
concert broadcast on Saturday nights on WSM, Nashville. Announcer
George Hay gave it its new name in '27. Mocking the fact that the
show followed the NBC Symphony Orchestra on the air, he urged his
listeners, ''Now get down to earth with the Grand Ole Opry!'' Powered
by a strong radio signal and its concentration on hard-core country,
the Opry turned singer-fiddler Roy Acuff and comedian Minnie Pearl into household names, and became country's showcase for new and established performers.
1925
''THE RICH ARE DIFFERENT''
''Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that
year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no
matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther...And
one fine morning — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back
ceaselessly into the past.'' With those lines, F. Scott Fitzgerald
closed the book on The Great Gatsby. ''This book will be a consciously
artistic achievement,'' he promised. Many have tried since the Jazz
Age, but no writer has better expressed the yearning for the
unattainable that marks American romanticism.
