Word: payola
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Those men were not martyrs. Alan Freed "co-wrote" a lot of Chuck Berry's first hits, in other words he got a cut of the artist's royalties for playing the record. Worse still, he was ultimately indicted and convicted for receiving payola, gifts from the record companies for playing their tunes...
...short, Alan Freed was not the angel with a damaged wing that American Hot Wax shows us. The payola affair is mentioned briefly in one scene, but Freed's relationship to it is fudged. The movie ends with an ominous subtitle epilogue which informs us that Freed was indicted and died "penniless" shortly thereafter. This is a truth which is distorted by its context. The real Freed was indeed a Messiah of rock and roll, but not for its own sake alone. He had lots to gain. The treatment of Freed points up the main feature of this movie...
There are many other rich stories that American Hot Wax shortchanges. Though the movie indicates that rock brought kids of all races and classes together, it never makes dramatic capital out of this crucial aspect of the music's social impact. Freed's susceptibility to payola, which ultimately proved his undoing, is mentioned only in passing and is then blithely excused. Kaye chooses to dwell instead on a tired subplot about a starry-eyed teen-age songwriter (Laraine Newman, of NBC's Saturday Night Live) who feuds with her disapproving folks...
...call upon friendly congressional aides to pry out private reports on people from the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency. He will pay an employee of Ma Bell as much as $250 for an unlisted phone number, but notes that the payola has inflated from $25 before passage in 1974 of the Privacy Act, designed to shield citizens from at least some invasions of privacy by the Government. Since then, Beltrante gripes, some of his phone company sources have dried up, although the law does not directly threaten them...
...freehanded Korean businessman had fled, the party-giving Oriental beauty was testifying to a federal grand jury, and a bipartisan clutch of Congressmen were nervous about Washington's latest payola scandal...