In this book, author Rosalie Schwartz uses the 1933 RKO–Radio 
Pictures production Flying Down to Rio to examine the interplay of 
technology and popular culture that shaped a distinctive 
twentieth-century sensibility. The musical comedy connected 
airplanes, movies, and tourism, ending spectacularly with chorus 
girls dancing on the wings of airplanes high above Rio de Janeiro, 
Brazil.

    The Hollywood fantasy capped three decades during which 
airplanes and movies engendered new expectations and redefined 
people's sense of well-being, their personal satisfactions, and 
their interpersonal relations. Wilbur and Orville Wright flew their 
airplane in 1903, at the same time that filmmakers began to project 
edited, filmed stories onto large screens. Spectators found 
entertainment value in both airplane competitions and motion 
pictures, and movie producers brought the thrill of aviators' antics 
to a rapidly expanding audience. Meanwhile, air shows and 
competitions attracted large crowds of tourists. Mass tourism grew 
as a leisure-time activity, stimulated in part by travelogues and 
feature films. By 1930, the businessmen who envisioned transporting 
tourists to their destinations by airplane struggled to overcome the 
movie-exaggerated association of flight with danger.

    Schwartz weaves these threads into a story of human daring 
and persistence, political intrigue, and international competition. 
From Wilbur and Orville to Fred and Ginger, Schwartz's narrative 
follows the fortunes of aviation and movie pioneers and the 
foundations and growth of Pan American Airways and RKO–Radio 
Pictures, the two companies that came together in Flying Down to 
Rio.

    By the end of the twentieth century, aviation, movies, and mass
tourism had become powerful global industries, contributing to an 
internationally connected, entertainment-oriented culture. What 
was once unthinkable had now become expected.

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ROSALIE SCHWARTZ lives and writes in San Diego, California. Two of 
her previous books, Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba 
and Lawless Liberators: Political Banditry and Cuban Independence, 
have won the Hubert Herring Award for best publications on Latin 
American history. 


Number Ten: Centennial of Flight Series


What people are saying about this book

". . . as richly textured a journey as is its namesake film . . . it 
reflects great enthusiasm and intellectual creativity and will appeal 
to both popular and scholarly audiences."—HAHR, February 2007

". . . a wonderful tapestry of technology, war, popular culture, and 
social change . . . It sets a new standard that places aviation 
history within a very insightful context and ties together a whole 
range of elements from tourism, popular culture, social change,
and evolving appreciation for the potential of aviation, politics, etc."
—Colin M. MacLachlan, Tulane University

". . . written in an engaging, narrative style that should be 
accessible to experts and nonexperts."—Emily S. Rosenberg, 
author, A Day Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American 
Memory