Edge of the Future: Bell Labs, 1/21/93

On Inauguration Day 1993, I headed to Washington, hoping to score a few lucrative corporate sponsorship deals for our AFI film festivals. The American Film Institute had a new board member, Al Checchi, chairman of Northwest Airlines, so my ride was, in Variety-ese, “cuffo”—on the cuff, i.e. free. The plane had live TV and while we waited on the tarmac, we watched Bill Clinton’s inauguration. No airline satellite TV back then; just plain old KABC channel 7, as we took off, leveled out, turned east, and traveled a surprisingly long time before losing Los Angeles’s local television signal. By then, Clinton’s swearing-in ceremony was over, and the VIPs were heading into lunch while we west coasters had a second breakfast flying over Arizona.

We were over mountains in West Virginia, not all that far from DC, in clear sunny skies when winds tossed us all over the place, the wildest, most severe turbulence I ever rode through. When we landed at DC’s close-in National Airport, I was one of the last ones off the plane. A cabin attendant smiled sympathetically and asked, “So, what did you think of that?” I had to laugh. “Well, I’m sure that to you, that was just another day in the office, but for us it was quite a thrill”. She smiled again, thoughtful. She said, “Would it make you feel any better about it if I told you that was just about the worst I’ve ever ridden through?” I nodded, appreciating the candor. “Yes, it does, thanks.”

Washington hadn’t inaugurated a Democrat in 16 years, and understandably the political classes of the town were giddy, thrilled, eager to get back to the Roosevelt-era New Deal. Everywhere I went that day and evening, the city’s Metro was packed with partygoers.

I reached the first of my meetings. The AFI trustee who was hosting it had a jeweled saxophone lapel pin, symbol of a new regime insider. (Clinton’s “Saxophone Club” were his biggest 1992 donors.) Although Hollywood, then as now, leaned left, “leaning left” meant nothing as severe as it does now. AFI president Charlton Heston had connections to Democrats—he could hardly have avoided them after his then-35 years in show business—but he was the unofficial Capo di tutti Capo of Hollywood conservatives.

The next morning, I left my hotel before dawn. It was freezing. My ride to the train station took me past the still-intact White House viewing stand for the Inaugural parade the day before.

I was with my east coast counterpart and pal, the boss of our DC classic movies theater. We took a commuter train to Holmdel, New Jersey, there to be driven to Bell Laboratories, crown jewel of AT&T after the gigantic Bell Breakup. Bell Labs has a storied history, and in early 1993 it was at its height.

One of the projects we’d managed to fund through AT&T was an upcoming event that was a few months away, the April 1993 25^th anniversary of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Arthur C. Clarke would send a recorded message through another of the night’s sponsors, Intelsat, the international communications satellite agency. At our Bell Labs meeting, AT&T agreed to an in-person appearance by Dr. Arno Penzias, Nobel prize winner in communications theory. Good stuff, really good stuff.

At a meeting break I needed to call the office, back at AFI in L.A., and had my (AT&T; I was no fool) phone charge card out to run through the office phone card reader slot. My host waved it off with a laugh; come on, man, have you forgotten where you are? Go ahead and call anywhere in the world, for free. It was one of those pleasant but strange feelings: so this is what it’s like at the top. This glimpse of it was a stunt, but from a PR point of view, a shrewd one. Nonchalantly making no-cost phone calls all over the globe was undeniably futuristic. Speaking as a Cold War-era boomer, it was especially amazing to be able to call, potentially at least, any phone number in the former USSR. A breathtaking change.

Many of the advances in media technology that we came to know over the next twenty years were already available in prototype form that day, January 21, 1993. Our Bell Labs hosts showed us a few new videophone designs that used a 56K landline connection to give a reasonable small screen, grandma-and-grandpa accompaniment to a phone call. Just plug it into any wall socket, with no extra line charge for a loveable but hazy face to face picture. That was great. But it didn’t really happen, never reaching launch speed in the landline era. It was cheap enough. But it wasn’t good enough. Something more was needed.

After having lunch among earnest crowds of nearly anonymous brainiacs of every conceivable and inconceivable type, in what struck me then and now as the world’s most egalitarian elite corporate lunchroom, we were admitted to the Inner Chambers to see what we’d really come here for: high definition movies sent to the home over an ordinary phone wire. Cable quality, without the need for a separate coaxial cable. Bell Labs had worked on DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) technology for five years.

I sat in a semi-darkened room in front of a large screen and watched the famous opening credits of 2001. Unlike digital video downloads, this one started playing immediately; it streamed. This was how the phone companies would fight for a share of what was then called the information superhighway.

In the late 1920s, telephone and radio interests became heavily involved in Hollywood’s transition to sound movies; it looked like, once again, tech and its money were about to hit Tinsel Town full force. We weren’t wrong.

AT&T signed our sponsorship deal, and in a few hours I was back in Washington. The General Motors pavilion at both of New York’s world’s fairs (1939-’40 and 1964-’65) gave visitors a lapel button that read, “I Have Seen the Future”. Truly that day I had.