Follow Up: Jerry Lewis and Video Assist

A few days ago, I posted a photo of Lewis with a Dumont Electronicam and told some of the story of his work in developing video assist for movies. Here is the whole story from an article I wrote a while back complete with some interesting photos with details on the picture pages.

In a way, he really is ‘The Nutty Professor’. After the Martin & Lewis breakup, Jerry began to get more involved in movie making and television and his first TV directing experience was on an episode of ‘Ben Casey, MD’ that he also appered in. In 1960, he wrote directed and starred in ‘The Bell Boy’ and that’s where the video assist process started. Jerry had console built to house a couple of audio tape recorders, a turntable and a Sony video tape recorder. Along the same lines as the Dumont Electrocam from the 50’s, Lewis mounted a video camera on the film camera and the rest, as they say is history.

Source