Les Jones

East Tennessee > Sam Orleans Film Tribute

Went to the East Tennessee Historical Society tonight to see Bradley Reeves' tribute to Knoxville filmmaker Sam Orleans. I had never heard of Orleans until I read Jack Neely's excellent piece in last week's MetroPulse.

He quit TVA to do his part for the war effort, working for a time for the Wartime Newsreel Pool in Canada, making documentaries like “Train Busters” and “Target Berlin.” He shot a documentary about the “Nuclear Ship Savannah,” and returned to newsreel work to shadow Thomas Dewey’s doomed 1944 campaign for the presidency. After the war, for reasons of his own, Sam Orleans returned to Knoxville. He made a film about the Manhattan Project with an ambiguous title: “The Beginning Or the End: The Story of the Atomic Bomb and Oak Ridge.”

Of the films screened, my favorite was "Today’s News, Tomorrow’s Men," a 1946 newspaper boy recruitment and training film made for the Knoxville News-Sentinel. At the beginning Billy (or whatever his name was) sees his friend's new bike that be bought with money from his newspaper route. Billy decides he wants to be a newspaper boy, too, and we see all the things newspaper boys buy with their dollars: tennis rackets, football uniforms, and fishing reels.

Then he shows how the News-Sentinel is produced, which is how papers were made for the next four decades: teletypes, Linotype typesetting, and stereotype presses. Note to Michael Silence: the News-Sentinel had really dumpy offices back then with no AC (the windows were open and everyone was wearing short-sleeved dress shirts).

The film goes on to show a Goofus- and Gallant- style comparison of good and bad newspaper boys. Bad newspaper boys look like they just rolled out of bad, show up too late to get their papers, toss wrappers and string into the street, ride their bikes across people's property, and throw the paper in the bushes. When he turns into a good paper boy he brushes his hair, put the paper wherever the customer asks, and sells that paper to non-subscribers. His sales pitch got a big cheer from the audience.