The Oscars may be synonymous with Hollywood — but it wasn't always that way.
During the first televised Academy Awards show in 1953, cameras switched between two stages, one in Hollywood and the second in New York City. While Bob Hope hosted the main ceremony at the Pantages Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, former Academy president Conrad Nagel and actor Fredric March handed out statuettes at the soon-to-be-demolished NBC International Theater in Columbus Circle.
"Bob, we're trying to do as great a Hollywood premiere in New York here as possible," Nagel said in a brief appearance on camera. "Columbus Circle is lined with searchlights. There are thousands of people out there.
"Incidentally," he added, "we have California weather here too — it's pouring rain."
What the Big Apple lacked in sunshine, it compensated for with talent: award nominees starring in Broadway shows were invited to slip into empty seats among the New York City audience after their curtains fell.
The Oscars' bicoastal broadcast experiment lasted through 1957, when actress Celeste Holm hosted in New York City and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences realized that all the fresh, young faces had already migrated to L.A.
Here's photographic evidence that it actually happened:
A photo of Audrey Hepburn waiting with baited breath among the New York audience in 1954
She ended up winning an Oscar for her performance as the leading actress in "Roman Holiday."
You can see Hepburn receiving her Best Actress award on the large TV screen in Hollywood's Pantages Theatre in the photograph above.
She posed affectionately with the statuette in more than one snapshot. The Oscar was her first.
